Sam Lien asked Andrew Dickson:

In your opinions, how are family relationships portrayed differently in King Lear and Hamlet? Thank you!

Andrew Dickson It's a big question as they're very different plays. I guess you could say Hamlet is told more from the perspective of the younger generation -- Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes -- whereas Lear seems to focus on parents, chiefly Lear and Gloucester, and a world which seems to be leaving them behind. But of course in both plays those themes are interlinked, as the families are broken yet interlinked: Hamlet is struggling to escape the ghost of his father (literally), while Lear and Gloucester both experience enormous suffering because of their children. I always find Shakespeare's mothers interesting, because they're so often absent -- we don't even know the name of Lear's wife (we presume she's long dead), while Hamlet has an enormously complicated relationship with his "aunt-mother", Gertrude. There's a very good (if somewhat Freud-heavy) book by the American critic Janet Adelman on the latter issue: it's called Suffocating Mothers, if you want to check it out.

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