Playing “the mother's part”

In sonnet 143, “Lo as a careful housewife,” Shakespeare's speaker characterizes himself as a neglected infant, and urges his beloved to “play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind” (12). ¹ Shakespeare's engagement with “the mother's part” at various moments throughout the sonnet sequence may be read in relation to codes of maternity that marked the early modern period. In a variety of early modern texts, mothers offer the potential for both nurture and rejection, sustenance and destruction. Maternity was associated with a doubleness of identity that only partially coincides with the doubleness commonly associated with femininity at the time. Whereas women in general were directed to be chaste, silent, and obedient in order to counteract the perceived power of their sexuality, mothers in particular emerged as figures who combined the sexuality required for procreation with considerable authority over their offspring, male as well as female. In the enormously popular genre of mothers' advice books, for instance, represented by such examples as The Northren Mother's Blessing (1597), Elizabeth Giymeston's Miscelanea, Meditations, Memoratives (1604), Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing (1616), and Elizabeth Joceline's The Mothers Legacie (1624), women emphasize the dignity and strength that they bring to their roles as mothers, allowing them to direct their children with confidence.