ANZSA conference, Sydney 6.2010 1 14.6.10 Aged fathers and daughters A couple of years ago I gave a paper in Perth on the number of aged and widowed fathers in Shakespeare’s plays, and what relevance this was to the upbringing of daughters. I suggested the issue may have been one of a generation gap, and that old fathers represented outdated views on the education of girls. I looked at the doddery old Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, the elderly statesman Brabantio in Othello and the aged and gullible Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing to show that each of them adhered to a view of appropriate behaviour for daughters which could be traced back to medieval religious concepts of education for girls in convents. Influenced by such core values as chastity, silence and obedience these loving but misguided fathers were directly responsible for the inability of their daughters to survive in post Reformation society. At that time I was following a line of research for Much Ado About Nothing which linked it to the most popular conduct book for girls in England: The Instruction of a Christian Woman by the Spanish, Catholic humanist Juan Luis Vives, dedicated in 1523 to Catherine of Aragon and which was republished twice in the 1590s. It seemed to me that by exaggerating age in these fathers Shakespeare was drawing attention to outdated but residual concepts of education; that, however, did not explain why this would interest his audience. The other possibility was that rather than assuming Vives’ influence was on the wane, maybe the opposite was happening: were his theories re-emerging in Puritan circles? If so, this would have topical relevance for his audience. Now, a couple of years down the line, this seems the more likely explanation for all those elderly fathers overreacting to perceived lapses of virtue in their daughters, and there is indeed some evidence of growing support within Puritan circles for Vives’ pedagogical theories. i Today’s paper will look at what was perhaps the most significant issue for Vives when it came to the education of daughters, the preservation of chastity, and how this presented a real quandary to parents, and fathers in particular, in the early 1600s. There are two strands to this paper; the first will look at changing attitudes to celibacy and virginity with references to Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure, the