Both the father’s in this study try to control who their daughter marries.
Portia resents this control as she says:
‘thus is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father’.
The repetition of the word ‘will’ shows a double meaning, Portia’s will to marry who she wants is curbed by her dead father’s actual will. The word ‘curbed’ means that Portia’s will to do what she wants is being redirected by her father’s will, so she is restrained by it.
Juliet is a bit more rebellious than Portia. In the beginning, Juliet is more obedient. When she first finds out she will be marrying a man called Paris, and is asked if she will accept Paris’s love, she says:
‘I'll look to like if looking liking move.
But no more deep will I endart mine eye
Than your consent gives strength to make it fly’.
This shows that Juliet is willing to do anything to make her family happy by saying she will try to like him, and won’t fall for him any more than her family allows her. The first line ‘I’ll look to like if looking liking move’ means that Juliet will look at Paris and try to like him, but only if what she sees is likeable in her eyes. This is the obedient Juliet because this is when she said she would go along with what her parents wanted.
But as Romeo and Juliet wore on, Juliet became more and more rebellious. An example of this is when she decides to marry Romeo, even though he is from the ‘enemy’ family, the Montagues. Juliet becomes more rebellious because she feels that she doesn’t want to do what her parent’s want her to, as long as Romeo is in her life. I think that Juliet feels as though she has to make a choice between her love for Romeo and her love for her family, as she says:
‘My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathèd enemy’
This quote backs up my point because it means that she has realised that the man she loves, is her enemy, and that she thinks love is a monster for making her fall in love with her worst enemy. So she thinks that it is either her family or Romeo.
The way Juliet goes against her fathers will in Romeo and Juliet is a way some girl’s can connect with. Some girl’s in the 21st century end up in the same situation as Juliet does; their family doesn’t like the man that the girl has fell in love with and make her feel as though she must choose between her family and her love. Sometimes the girl ends up rebelling against her family, like Juliet, and runs off with her ‘Romeo’.
In other cases, the girl is forced into an arranged marriage with someone who is a stranger to her; just like Juliet was with Paris. In this situation, the girl would probably feel like Juliet did when she fell in love with Romeo but had to marry Paris. So then the girl could do what Juliet did – go against all her family’s wishes and marry her true love.
The father/daughter relationships throughout Romeo and Juliet and Merchant of Venice keep the audience interested because the audience can sometimes connect with the characters in the books, and make them feel for the characters because they may understand how the character is feeling from experience. The relationships make the books appeal to a modern audience because of the fact that the relationships happen in the 21st century, and so people can begin to understand what others could be going through, then and now.
