Conclusion

Abstract

No playwright intent on capturing a large and diverse audience can ignore social expectations. Stereotypes are tempting because characters must be recognizable, their actions comprehensible. But stereotypes are procrustean beds, squeezing the humanity out of characterizations. The idealized “Vertuous Widdow” and her caricature antithesis, the “Ordinary Widdow,” are predictably absent from Shakespeare’s greatest comedies and tragedies. (The lugubrious queens of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Hortensio’s Widow in Shrew, and Cymbeline’s queen are perhaps the closest approximation to widow stereotypes in Shakespeare.) Would chaste, silent, and obedient characters hold the stage? Typically, virtuous widow characters have their faults, for example, Abbess Aemilia is bossy, the Countess of Rossillion meddles. By the same token, if only for a moment, the nastiest widows are apt to invite forbearance as they aspire to security, hoping, like Tamora, that “all is safe, the anchor in the port” (Tit. 4.4.38). A common denominator is insecurity; Mistress Overdone echoes King John’s Constance and Richard II’s Queen Elizabeth when she asks the poignant question: “What shall become of me?” (1.2.105).¹