Shakespeare's feuding families

Peaceful families rarely make for interesting literature, and no-one knew this better than my all-time fave William Shakespeare. Dysfunctional family ties appear in a lot of the Bard's works as a source of dramatic tension, and boy does he ramp up the drama! Here are the families that I'd least like to sit down to dinner with (note: spoilers to follow, but these are 400-year-old plays, so...):

The Minolas (The Taming of the Shrew)

Let's begin with the least deadly family on the list, the Minolas. The father, Baptista, is trying very unsuccessfully to single-parent his two daughters, Katherina and Bianca. Kate in particular is notorious for being a troublemaker, terrorising her sister and committing assaults by lute, and Baptista's insistence that Kate must be married before the mild-mannered Bianca further exacerbates the sisterly tensions. Of course, despite her reputation for being a long-suffering angel, Bianca shows herself capable of a pretty mean streak too, which only riles Kate up even more. How charming!

The Dukes of Arden (As You Like It)

We're still in the comedies here, so still no actual murdering, but the threat level is getting higher now. The play opens with the current duke, Frederick, having usurped and banished his older brother, the rightful Duke Senior. This leaves him with the guardianship of his niece Rosalind as well as his own daughter, Celia. Things seem happy at first, with Rosalind and Celia happy and devoted to each other, but Duke Frederick starts to show the inevitable paranoia of a usurper and finds himself distrusting his niece. The girls hear word that Frederick is plotting an attempt on Rosalind's life, and so they decide to flee to the forest to try and find Rosalind's father, who is living there in exile. As a bonus family feud, one of the secondary plot lines involves the hunky young Orlando running to the forest as well to escape the murderous envy of his older brother Oliver. Everything does end happily ever after for all involved, thanks to some pretty sudden redemption arcs and the power of love, but it's a rocky road getting there.

The Royal Family of Sicily (The Winter's Tale)

The troubles in Sicily all stem from the mad jealousy of the king, Leontes. He grows to believe, wrongly, that his wife Queen Hermione is having an affair with his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia. After failing to murder Polixenes, who sensibly rushes off home, Leontes publicly accuses Hermione of infidelity and her unborn child of being Polixenes' bastard. The court is shocked by this, especially when the heavily pregnant queen is thrown into prison. Leontes, however, is firm in his belief, and sends for confirmation from the Oracle of Delphi to prove his claims. Hermione gives birth to a daughter while in prison, but Leontes orders for the child to be abandoned in the wilderness (she is fortunately rescued and raised by a kindly shepherd). It's not until after the baby has been sent away that a response from the Oracle arrives, thoroughly disproving everything Leontes had claimed and cursing him to have no heir until his daughter is returned. Leontes' young son is then reported to have died from an illness brought on by his mother's mistreatment, at which news Hermione herself collapses and is declared dead. For sixteen years, Leontes repents for the actions which lost him his entire family, and eventually his penance is rewarded by the return of his daughter and his wife, whose death had been somewhat exaggerated.

The Royal Family of Denmark (Hamlet)

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and it is definitely the royal house. Hamlet is perhaps Shakespeare's most famous tragedy, and its body count due to family drama is truly impressive. First, Claudius murders his brother King Hamlet, allowing him to seize both the throne and the queen for himself (as far as the titular Prince Hamlet is concerned, the latter is the greater sin). Then, once the young Hamlet (Claudius' nephew) verifies that his uncle is a murderer, he tries to murder him back—but ends up stabbing the wrong guy. Claudius flies into a panic at this, and sends Hamlet off to England to be murdered there—but Hamlet figures out the game and escapes during a pirate raid. Eventually, both Hamlet and Claudius end up dead, but in the process of trying to murder each other they also cause the deaths of Hamlet's mother, two of his childhood friends, and his girlfriend and her entire family.

The (ancient) Royal Family of England (King Lear)

Of course, the juiciest dramas often come close to home, and this is no different in Shakespeare's works. The mythical house of Lear is renowned for dripping with familial dysfunction (and, by the end of the play, rather a lot of blood too). The problems start when King Lear, reaching old age, decides that a) dividing his kingdom between his three daughters/their husbands is a good idea, and b) the best way to frame this is with a rigged game of "who loves Daddy the most". These are both terrible ideas, as Lear finds out when his youngest and favourite daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play ball. Lear flies into a rage and disowns her, instead splitting her share between his older daughters, Goneril and Regan. His plan is to retire and live off his remaining daughters for the rest of his days, but Goneril and Regan are both very unenthusiastic about catering to Lear and his large, raucous retinue and decide to teach him a lesson. By the close of the play, Lear has gone mad and died, Cordelia has lost a war with her sisters and been executed, Goneril has murdered Regan over a guy and then committed suicide over that same guy, and the country is in shambles.

The ((other) ancient) Royal Family of England (Cymbeline)

Lear is not the only legendary king of England to make it into Shakespeare's plays; less well known but no less troubled is Cymbeline, who was very loosely based on a real Celtic king in pre-Roman Britain. This time, though, it is not the king who causes all the problems, but the queen. This queen, who is not given a name in the play, has wed King Cymbeline in what appears to be a second marriage for both of them, as they each have a child already: Imogen is Cymbeline's daughter, and Cloten the queen's son. Despite Imogen being in love with (and secretly married to) a member of her father's court, the evil queen plots to have her married off to Cloten so that he might become king after Mummy murders Cymbeline and Imogen. Due to an entirely separate murder plot, Imogen flees from the court in disguise as a boy, seeking refuge with a pair of young men who turn out to be her long-lost brothers, stolen away years ago as babies (but they don't learn this until the end of the play). Cloten follows Imogen's flight with malicious intent, but gets into a fight with one of her unknowing brothers and is beheaded. The queen is greatly troubled by her son's mysterious disappearance, dying possibly of grief. She confesses to her plotting and attempted murder on her deathbed, but Cymbeline doesn't have time to care about any of this as he is immediately reunited with all three of his children.

The Plantagenets, a.k.a. the real Royal Family of England (just about every history play)

This may be cheating, because a very large portion of the dramas of the Plantagenet family that Shakespeare records actually come from history. The Plantagenets ruled England from 1154 until 1485, and those three centuries held a lot of extremely dysfunctional relationships between family members. Here are just a few of the highlights from the various plays Shakespeare wrote about them:

• King John and his nephew Arthur fight over the throne of England, which ends in Arthur's suspicious death—in the play King John, John's subordinates torture the poor kid and throw him out a tower window! (In reality, the probable murder was much less dramatic... and less public.)
• A rift forms between King Richard II and his first cousin Henry Bolingbroke due to Richard's tyrannical tendencies, which escalates to Bolingbroke staging a coup and overthrowing Richard (and quite possibly having him quietly murdered). This conflict provides the plot for Richard II, and sows the seeds of future trouble to come...
• Bolingbroke, having now become King Henry IV, has a rocky relationship with his son, also named Henry but familiarly called Hal by his reprobate friends; Hal's carefree hedonism keeps his disapproving father on the verge of an aneurysm for both parts of the Henry IV duology. (It should be noted that there is no historical indication that Hal was the young rebel that Shakespeare portrays, but the fictional tension between father and son is excellent.)
• Once Hal ascends the throne as King Henry V, things start to look up, but then he goes and dies in France when his son, Henry VI, is less than a year old. That's when the problems start to really escalate, as told through the three parts of Henry VI. Throughout the new king's early life, his royal authority is viciously fought over by a number of uncles who wanted to rule the roost, which is exactly not what the country needs when the French are seizing back the lands that Henry's father had conquered.
  The chaos does not subside when Henry enters adulthood, as he remains just as gentle and easily led as he was when he was a child. The man is, in short, a totally useless king. Henry has a cousin, though, who thinks that he would be a much better ruler: the Duke of York. Furthermore, York has a claim to the throne which, due to the fallout of Heny IV's coup against Richard II, may even be stronger than the current king's. York's bid for power blossoms into civil war, which Shakespeare mostly focuses on in Henry VI Part 3. The Duke of York himself dies in the attempt, as well as one of his sons, but his oldest son Edward ultimately proves victorious, defeating (and killing) King Henry VI and the Prince of Wales.
• King Edward IV's problems don't stop once he secures the throne: one of his brothers, the Duke of Clarence, plots against Edward and must be executed for it, while his in-laws (the Woodvilles) are creating tensions all through the court. In Shakespeare's play Richard III, a lot of this trouble is attributed to Edward's youngest brother Richard, who has Clarence murdered to move himself one step closer to the throne. It's this same ruthless ambition that is given as the cause for Richard's most contentious actions: after King Edward's sudden death, Richard has his nephews, one of whom is supposed to be the king now, declared bastards and sent to the Tower, taking the throne for himself. The play also shows Richard plotting the murder of these two innocent boys, painting him as the most evil of men. Richard III is perhaps more influenced by the propaganda of the Tudor dynasty, which began with Richard's overthrow, than any of the other plays in the series, but in terms of dangerously dysfunctional family dynamics it cannot be beat.