This study explores a positive father in Shakespeare's plays through Julia Kristeva's concept of the imaginary father, which she takes from Freud. Although my reading reconfigures Kristeva's theories when applied to Shakespeare's plays, the notion of a preoedipal father prior to representation and within childhood prehistory challenges traditional readings that posit binary constructs of a symbolic father or a preoedipal mother. This study contextualizes psycholinguistic and rhetorical processes within a historical framework. Early modern writers were fascinated by the nature of fiction and its ability to act in the world. Imaginary fictions were less bound by nature or the law: they not only possessed a mysterious capacity to move both passion and spirit, but also to reconfigure agency and authority, private and public beliefs. Although current studies investigate Shakespeare's craft as rhetorical fictions embodied within discursive practices of his day, most converge on the symbolic father. Exploring a positive father in Shakespeare offers a new perspective through which to consider his plays and to rethink the creative process itself. Bringing the maternal body back into language enables subjectivity to be explored as a metaphorical process shaped through movement and alterity that enriches and disturbs social constructs of power.;Unlike Lacan, who defines the imaginary as a narcissistic dual enclosure, Kristeva reads primary narcissism as a triadic dimension, offering an alternative narrative -- a `third space' -- to rethink natural, psychic, and social borders. In contrast to the oedipal agon which founds the cultural subject, Kristeva considers Narcissus "the obliged creator of the world," whose failure to realize his image as both semiotic and symbolic needs re-evaluation. Like Shakespeare, Krisreva explores the crafting of psychic space, its childlike labors and attractions. Because Shakespeare exposes rather than defends cultural concerns, his fictions dramatize the individual's relationship to the family and state, the dialogic interplay of power with the choric and more personal voice. This project explores the positive father through the following plays, Hamlet, As You Like It, 1 & 2 Henryy IV, The Tempest and The Winters Tale..
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