Oliver Ford Davies is an actor of the stage and screen; an author of several works on Shakespeare and of King Cromwell: A Play (2005); and a historian and university lecturer. His gift for writing about dramatic characters and their dramatic effect on a play, its audience, and its actors is deeply ingrained in his artistic and academic credentials. In Shakespeare’s Fathers and Daughters, he studies the relationship between fathers and daughters through his many years of experience acting in Shakespeare’s plays but also within the frame of the Renaissance period and the sources Shakespeare used. He locates Shakespeare’s interest in this relationship in his education in the Roman dramatists Plautus, Seneca, Menander, and Terence. The relationship is central to a majority of the plays, he suggests, primarily because the potential for conflict between what he calls the senex iratus and filia astuta offers limitless opportunities for dramatic tension and resolution. While it covers ground known to specialists, as Davies points out, students and nonspecialists will find it a lively and charming discussion of Shakespeare’s various and specific treatments of fathers and daughters.

The book is organized into seven chapters and an introduction, the first half of which covers “Early Plays,” “Comedies,” Tragedies and Tragicomedies,” and “Late Plays.” The second half of the book looks more closely at the relationships, including Shakespeare’s relationship with his own daughters, historical treatments of the role of father and daughter in the time period, and the relation of Shakespeare’s plays to those of other playwrights of the period.

The book’s strengths are in its second half, especially in the chapter on “Fathers and Daughters in Drama 1585–1620.” The chapter on “Shakespeare and his Daughters” is speculative, as Davies admits, but covers legal records available from both daughters’ marriages and Shakespeare’s will. The chapter on “Fathers and Daughters in Contemporary Society” examines documents, such as those written by Robert Cleaver, William Whatley, Edmund Tilney, Juan Luis Vives, and Barnaby Rich, among many others who wrote extensively on the nature of women within religious and political discourses. While this material is familiar to historians and literary scholars interested in the querelle des femmes, the chapter offers an excellent overview of the period’s fascination with and narratives about the nature of women.

But best of all, especially for those who know little about the drama of the period outside of Shakespeare, is Davies’s chapter on the drama leading up to, during, and after Shakespeare’s career. In addition, it is a useful reminder for those of us who are specialists of the many wonderful plays of the period. The influence on Shakespeare of earlier playwrights and his influence on those who came after are closely traced. Situating Shakespeare’s work within a body of plays and a cohort of playwrights all writing during this exceptional time in the history of the English theater, Davies expands the frame in which Shakespeare’s works ought to be seen and read. What comes through strongly and importantly is that he was one playwright among many; his work was not only influential to work that came after, but also indebted to work that came before his, and the many other playwrights of the time deserve more attention in classrooms and on stages than they often receive.

Shakespeare’s Fathers and Daughters will be of interest to the many theater lovers who have enjoyed performances of Shakespeare’s plays or Davies’s earlier work, as well as to those who are drawn to studying the work and reception of Shakespearean drama. Davies is well versed in source study, performance history, and questions of attribution—all of which are at the center of many studies today—and he offers an energetic and appealing study interested in the multiple and diverse representations of the complex relationships between fathers and daughters in the drama of the period.