SOURCE: Jordan, Constance. “‘Eating the Mother’: Property and Propriety in Pericles.” In Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Green, edited by David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne Rebhorn, pp. 331-53. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992.

[In the following essay, Jordan argues that the incestuous relation of Antiochus and his daughter in Pericles constitutes a metaphoric representation of political tyranny, and that Antiochus represents Pericles's desire for absolute rule.]

Bot yit it is a wonder thing,
Whan that a riche worthi king …
Wol axe and cleyme proprete
In thing to which he hath no riht,
Bot onliche of his grete miht.

(Confessio amantis III)

This essay begins with a question: Is there any basis for reading Shakespeare's last plays—focused as they are on monarchs caught up in familial strife, often expressed as inter-generational rivalry between males—in light of the contemporary debate on the proper form of government and specifically of the monarchy? In some measure we already have an answer. As the perceptive criticism of such scholars as David Bergeron and Leonard Tennenhouse has demonstrated, these plays refer allusively and sometimes directly to political or social conditions that obtained during the reign of James I. Topics at issue include the politics of royal marriages, the status of wards, the disposition of inherited property, and the circumstances in which particular families are ennobled.¹ My own investigation here is similarly focused. Read in the figured language of Jacobean political discourse, Shakespeare's Pericles, 1605—a dramatization of the relations between a royal father, daughter, and mother—acquires meaning as political theater. I am not suggesting that this meaning render sentimental our response to the representation of familial reconciliation and regeneration that for many audiences has given this play its chief appeal. But I will claim that to Shakespeare such actions were understood to affect political as well as personal life, and that he saw some point in representing them as thus doubly charged in this and his other romances. To Jacobean audiences particularly, mindful as they were of the analogy between the governments of the family and the state that was so frequently a feature of their political discourse, the bizarre conflict opening the action of Pericles would have presented a special interpretive challenge.

As P. Goolden has observed, the answer Pericles gives to Antiochus' riddle—incest—seems logically too easy; at the very least, it asks us to wonder why earlier suitors failed to discover it.² More pointedly, what it implies about Antiochus—that he is lawlessly lustful—also indicates a suitor's double jeopardy. He who answers the riddle correctly is just as doomed as he who does not. And finally, incest in and of itself appears to have little to do with the action that follows. If, therefore, this riddling incoherence is not to be attributed to an authorial blunder, it needs a subtle analysis, in fact the kind of analysis for which Jacobean audiences were well-prepared. When the image of incest is understood by reference to the language describing the nature of political rule, both domestic and civil—specifically one in which the monarch is to behave as a father to his children, the subjects, and as a husband to his wife, the commonwealth—it provides a basis for understanding the play's continuous appeal to ideas of legitimate government.

I

When James VI of Scotland acceded to the English throne in 1603, his new subjects would already have received sufficient indication that his conception of the monarchy was one they had not yet themselves experienced in practice. It had been succinctly set forth five years earlier in James's True Law of Free Monarchies, 1598, a short treatise addressed to his fellow Scots (although perhaps also with the neighboring English in mind) and it represented the reciprocal duties of the king and his subjects in hereditary (as opposed to elective) monarchies. Anyone acquainted with the elements of English law would instantly have recognized that James's True Law—resting as it did on the feudal presumption that all property was ultimately held of the king, a presumption which to James entailed the further claim that all property was finally the possession of the king—was grossly inconsistent with English legal practice and the kind of monarchy it had sustained during the previous decades of the sixteenth century. And the more astute might well have imagined that James's reign would be vexed by conflicts over property: the monarch's right to appropriate his subject's private property in the form of “impositions” or taxes, and also his right to administer, develop and control the property vested in the commonwealth without regard to the needs or desires of the people as a whole.

James I and his absolutist supporters regarded both kinds of monarchic rights as very largely unqualified. In 1603 Thomas Bilson, for example, insisted that “God hath allowed [monarchs] power over the goodes, lands, bodies and lives of their subjects: and what private men may not touch without Theft and Murder that Princes may lawfully dispose as Gods Ministers. …”³ Constitutionalists, who had had the larger voice in the Tudor debate, took an opposing view. They spoke of the royal prerogative as controlled by the countervailing rights of the people: first, to determine when and how they, as individuals, should be taxed; and second, to be sustained and encouraged, as a whole, in their productive activities which included manufacture and trade—in short, the monarch was to increase the commonwealth for its sake not his own. For the monarch to exercise his power in the manner described by Bilson amounted to tyranny; John Ponet, writing his influential Short Treatise of Politike Power in 1556, had characterized tyranny as monarchic theft of the property of the people.⁴ The constitutionalist case was supported in the first instance by the authority of the respected Sir John Fortescue, whose Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England, in print in 1567, revealed that it was only outside England that “the princes pleasure standeth in force of a lawe. … [They] burden their subjectes withe chargeis: and also when they lust, do determine controversies of sueters as pleaseth them.” In England, by contrast, “al kingely power muste been applyed to the wealthe of his kyngdome”; indeed, a king's own position is threatened if he does not respect his subjects' property:

On the other syde that kynge is free and of myghte that is hable to defende his subjectes as well agaynste straungers as agaynste his owne people and also theire goods and possessions not onely from the violente and unlawefull invasions of their owne countrey menne and neighbours butte also from his own oppression and extortion thoughe such wilful lusts and necessities doe move him to the contrarie. For who can be more mighty or more free then he that is hable to conquere and subdue not onely others but also himselfe?⁵

The moralism in Fortescue receives a more specifically practical formulation in Ponet, who claims that “Princes are ordained to doo good, not to doo evil,” and that an element in this “good” is the procurement of “wealthe and benefite [for] their subjectes” (26). This obligation is not discharged by monarchs who “will have all that their subjectes have common to themselves … no, not so muche as paie for those thinges, that in wordes they pretende to buie of their subjectes” (80). In a similar vein, the writer of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, 1579, asserts that while the king is the “proprietor” of his “personal inheritance,” he “is in no sense the proprietor of the royal patrimony or the public treasure, which is common known as the domain.”⁶ Only a tyrant asserts proprietorship of the commonwealth. And Nicholas Fuller, writing a year or two after Pericles was performed, simply declares that the “liberty of the [English] subject,” established by the Magna Carta, guarantees that he cannot be deprived of his goods except by “some Act of Parliament.” Like Sir Edward Coke, Fuller goes on to refer to the law that so protects the subject as his “inheritance”: “the lawes of England are the high inheritance of the Realme by which both the King and the subjects are directed.” This “inheritance” guarantees the actual inheritance of property: “the law admeasureth the kings prerogative so as it shall not extend to hurt the inheritance of the subjectes.”⁷

These opposing positions on the monarch's relation to the property of the subject and the commonwealth were also inscribed in political debate in the figurative languages of the body politic and the monarch as patriarch. In his Picture of a Perfit Common wealth, 1600, Thomas Floyd states: the “commonwealth is a living body compact of sundry estates and degrees of men” and the king is its “soule.” It is also the “mother of us all”; the king is a “Father over his children” who are his subjects; and by extension (as James himself had declared), the king is the husband of the commonwealth.⁸ The king's position as both soul and patriarch allowed many commentators to play suggestively with the idea of monarchic “lust,” “will,” or “pleasure.” As Fortescue had maintained, a monarch's “lust” drives him to act outside the law; hence lustfulness characterizes the behavior of the tyrant. In 1594 Robert Parsons could insist that a “Prince ruling by law is more than a man, or a man deifyed, and a Prince ruling by affections is lesse then a man or a man brutified.”⁹ Naturally, he ceases to be a king according to any way of conceptualizing the office. And Edward Forset, warning that the monarch, who is both head and heart of the body politic, is subject to “naturall fralities,” associates these “sensuall and irrational mocions, rising out of the infectious mudd of flesh and bloud” with tyranny: such a monarch is prevented “from either attayning unto or retayning firmely the precise points of perfect Justice.”¹⁰ Parsons links royal “pleasure” specifically with the illicit appropriation of property: for a king to dispose of “mens goodes, bodies and lives” at his “pleasure” means that he is under “no law or accompt-giving whatsoever” (sig. D7). Here he follows Ponet who had declared that monarchs who are above the law have “absolute power,” which is a “fulness of power, or prerogative to doo what they lust, and none may gaynesaye them.” The exercise of this power is principally in relation to property: absolute monarchs “use their subjectes as they doo their beastes … getting their goodes from them by hoke or crooke … and spending it to the destruction of their subjects” (26). In sum, whether imagined in absolutist or constitutionalist terms, a monarch is obliged to rule rationally and without giving way to affections. For constitutionalists in particular, a monarch who abuses property rights is described in ways that define him as passionate (“lustful”) rather than reasonable, self-indulgent (“sensuall”) rather than disciplined, and governed by desire for “goodes” rather than a commitment to the good of his people.

The figurative languages of the body politic and patriarchy also allowed for a further degree of allusiveness. In the ordinary relations of economic and legal life, the concept of property and the manner in which it was held were complex; goods and land were obviously properties, but so in other senses were children and wives. Their status as kinds of possession referred not only to such institutions as the entail and the dowry by which property was transferred from one person to another, but also to hierarchical relations of power in which one party was subservient to another. Hence it was possible to see in allusions to the monarch as father and husband references to relations that went beyond those determined by kin and in fact extended to those characterizing government, perceived, as government so often was, in its relations to property. Hence, too, the relative density of these figurative languages: familial experience is here actually informing political meaning, as kinship relations are made to construct precise arguments on the nature of monarchic government. It is to familial experience that refinements in the terms of political discourse are indebted.

To the patriarch, both children and wife were possessions or properties. That they were not wholly at the disposal of their owner is suggested by a contemporary play of language now largely impossible. For Shakespeare and his audiences “property” meant both that which was owned and also that which was fitting or suitable. So Shakespeare writes in “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” 1601, that “Property was thus appalled,” meaning that propriety has not been observed, and in Othello, 1604, that to be “proper” is to be decorous.¹¹ This ambiguity is not simply gratuitous but actually inheres in the complex manner in which the concept of property was regarded at law during this period. I think it reflects actual differences in the ways in which property holders were considered to possess the property they claimed was theirs.

Objects were often considered to be owned outright; in such cases, an owner could claim a “full dominion” (dominium plenum) over them and do what he pleased with them. Land was more frequently owned by more than one party and in more than one sense; notably, it could be possessed as by a tenant, and be owned as by a landlord. In this case, the “dominion” of both tenant and landlord was qualified; the tenant's ownership was merely “of use” (dominium utile), and the landlord's right to dispose of the land at will was circumscribed by his tenant's right to its use. Both landlord and tenant had possessory rights, and each could claim a right of possession against the other. A comparable although not precisely similar reciprocity also characterized a father's possession of his child and a husband's of his wife. In the case of a child, paternal rights of ownership (effectively very extensive in the case of a noble daughter) extended to the right to dispose of the child at will but they were also legally circumscribed by the child's right to protection and nurturance. Originally a feature of Roman law, a child's right or ius against a parent was later incorporated into a broad notion of natural rights. The character of the father-child relationship, although in essence one between owner and property, did not entail classifying its weaker member as a mere object: to put it another way, here property entailed propriety. Husbands also had proprietary rights over wives but these, too, were subject to qualification. A husband could “use” a wife sexually and he could make use of whatever of her dowry was real property to generate more property for the sake of their common good and that of their heirs. But in her person she was not subject to his governance as was a child; she could not be placed or disposed of as a child could. Her husband had to regard her as his spiritual equal; he was encouraged to regard her as a companion in life.¹²

To discriminate patriarchal rights of dominium is therefore to recognize in them an absence of dominium plenum altogether. A child is a possession that cannot be “used”; patriarchal governance in placing the child, or disposing of it in society, although virtually absolute, is not to be based on paternal interest. A wife, on the other hand, is controlled by a virtual dominium utile: she is property to be used, to be enjoyed, to be made generative and profitable, but by her claim to adult status, she cannot be placed or disposed of. Among the many striking features of incest is the way in which it conflates these distinctly different kinds of dominium and as a practical consequence transforms the right of the patriarch (both father and husband) to a dominium plenum. A woman who is both a child and a wife cannot claim unequivocally either a liberty from use or restrictions in governance. As a relation of property, incest signals the violation of fundamental proprieties. It follows that where incest is monarchic and monarchs are charged to observe property rights, incest becomes a figure of absolutist pretentions—or tyranny—as perceived from the point of view of a constitutionalist politics.

The significant elements of the image of monarchic incest are already apparent in both Ponet and the Vindiciae. Ponet, outlining the conditions of a constitutional monarchy, sees that its power is a “gift of God,” analogous to that conferred on the husband in matrimony. The task of both monarch and husband is not only to “use” his wife but to be her “gracious Benefactor.” That is, he is to use her to make her (and the couple) generative (42). And inasmuch as a monarch is a father to his subjects, his power is also limited. He is merely an “executor” of God's law. In any case, he cannot do what he “lusteth”: for otherwise it might be said “that God allowed their [i.e., monarchs'] tyranie, robbery of their subjects, killing them without law, and so God [becomes] thautor of evil …” (43). Thus the offices of monarch and father allow for latitude in administering the law but not for license in using (and hence abusing) those subject to that law. The author of the Vindiciae extends the analogy between the wife and the commonwealth to a consideration of her “dowry” as the property of the commonwealth which is not to be compromised. In it, the Vindiciae claims, the people have a “proprietary right”: “if the public patrimony or domain is truly called the ‘dowry of the commonwealth,’ and if the dissolution or waste of that dowry means that the commonwealth, the kingdom, and at last the king himself are lost, is there any legal principle imaginable that could make alienation of that dowry permissible?” (174-75).

The possibility that the riddle Pericles confronts as he discovers the spectacle of Antiochus married to his Daughter can be read as political metaphor is now I trust sufficiently attractive to be worth considering in some detail. (As a verbal statement, this riddle is further complicated by an apparent anomaly: the daughter is said to be a mother to her father. The meaning of this relationship is unclear until the end of the play.) The audience is asked to see the royal couple in three perspectives. In the relation of father and child is represented the relations of a monarch and his subject, or collectively his people. The question it asks is the nature of the rule of the father-king over his child-subject. In the relation of husband and wife, at issue is the extent of the husband-king's rights over his wife-commonwealth. And finally, the conflation of the roles of father and husband in incest asks the audience to recognize an image of violated rights of property and propriety—rights that, understood in the figured languages of the body politic and patriarchy, were established as a virtual guarantee of freedom from tyranny. In the view of constitutionalists such as Ponet, figurative and political incest is as illicit as its domestic counterpart. A monarch as father can administer to what he has proprietary rights over—his children and subjects—but they retain the right to the protection and the use of their property, including the property they have in their own person. Correspondingly, a monarch as husband can use his wife or the commonwealth—that is, the whole of the body politic of which he is the soul—in the interest of generation, to increase the wealth of the nation as a whole. Such use is comprehended in the monarch's prerogative, especially his right to regulate trade.¹³ But it does not include absolute government. The commonwealth, the “mother” to whom the monarch is married, retains a degree of independence which is typically associated with the representatives of the people in Parliament and expressed as the right of that “body” to determine when the monarch can tax the people and by how much. In effect, this husbandry indicates a dominium utile; in the first instance, it is the people who own the property of the commonwealth. The actual language of the riddle used by the Daughter further clarifies the fate of the mother in incest. By “feeding on mother's flesh,” the Daughter likens herself to the offspring of a viper, who was said to eat its way out of its mother, and so alludes to her appropriation of flesh that is properly her mother's, that is, her father's body (I.i.65-66). Read a second time, however, the image points to a second referent; now incest indicates the sterility of a kingdom in which the commonwealth, in this case the absent mother, is consumed by the illicit couple. The image refashions an earlier and more obviously political one in 1 Henry VI: “Civil dissension is a viperous worm / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth” (III.i.71-72). The Daughter, an abused and abusing subject, is an agent in this consumption, an action that thwarts and so finally reverses the process of generation.

The most impressive and memorable authority upon which Shakespeare's Jacobean audience would have depended for these speculations was, of course, James I himself, and especially James I as a reader of Scripture. The biblical passage upon which both sides of the political debate frequently focused was that describing the advent of the monarch to the society of the Israelites in 1 Samuel. There, the prophet's picture of a monarch portrays him as a tyrant: like Antiochus, he treats his subjects as objects for his service and pleasure, and he regards their property as his. Constitutionalists, quite obviously, interpreted the biblical text as an argument against absolutism, as the prophet's warning to the people about the dangers of royal power. For James, however, 1 Samuel had to mean something else. In his True Law, tyrannical action on the part of the monarch, although recognized as “breaking” points of “equitie and justice,” is justified because James interprets the prophet's words not as monitory but rather as hortatory.¹⁴ The people are not to reject the monarchy on the grounds that it threatens tyranny but rather to steel themselves to bear the monarchy because it is divinely instituted.

To James royal power is both paternalistic and confers dominium plenum with no countervailing iura. As the True Law declares, a king is “naturall Father to all his Lieges. … As the Father, of his fatherly dutie, is bound to care for the nourishing, education, and vertuous government of his children, even so is the king bound to care for all his subjects” (55-56). Against the judgments and wishes of this father his children have no recourse: “can any pretence of wickenes or rigor on his part be a just excuse for his children to put hand to him?” (65). Reading 1 Samuel, James denies them all rights. Paraphrasing the prophet, he writes: “the best and noblest of your blood shall be compelled in slavish and servile offices to serve him [the king]: and not content of his owne patrimonie, [the king] will make up a rent to his owne use of your best lands, vineyards, orchards, and store of cattell: So as inverting the Law of nature, and office of a King, your persons and persons of your posteritie, together with your lands, and all that ye possesse shall serve his private use, and inordinate appetite” (58, my emphasis). James terms the monarch's right to steal an “allowable vertue”; in any case, his subjects or children are better off if their “mother,” the “Commonwealth,” is ruled by a tyrant than not ruled at all; better to be impoverished by the king's prerogative than to live lawlessly (66).¹⁵ James rests his claim to absolute monarchy in Scotland on the “fact” of the legendary conquest of that country by the mythical King Fergus, from whose monarchic descendants all property in Scotland was subsequently held in a feudal manner. According to James, he and all later kings retained dominium plenum over the kingdom; their subjects depended for their use on his will: “the King is Dominus omnium bonorum, and Dominus directus totius Dominii, whose subjects being but his vassals, and from him holding all their lands as their over-lord who … chaungeth their holdings … without advice or authoritie of either Parliament or any other subalterin judiciall seate” (62). He means, of course, that the vassals of the king have effectively no proprietary rights at all, since there is no law, no “judiciall seate,” by which they may be claimed.

In England such a sweeping view of the prerogative may well have been regarded as excessive even by absolutists, accustomed as the English people were to a different concept of property, and particularly in land. Most real property in England was held by a conveyance known as a “use.” Functioning as a kind of trust, a use split the ownership of a property into two complementary types of possession: nominal and custodial, and actual and profitable. It signified a form of possession that entitled the possessor, who was called the cestuy que use, to enjoy or profit from his possession of a property; and it also signified the nature of the trust the possessor or cestuy que use placed in the nominal owner of that property, in whose name it was recorded and who was termed the feoffee to a use. The feoffee exercised a discretionary and executive governance over the property; the cestuy que use enjoyed its benefits. Uses were established for the purpose of evading the duties holders of property owed the crown; the feoffee was not liable because he was not in possession of the property, the cestuy que use (who was sometimes the original feoffor, but more often his heir to whose use the property had been entailed) was not liable because he did not own the property. Henry VIII declared uses invalid (for obvious reasons) but they gradually reappeared in the second half of the sixteenth century. The idea of a use seems to have acquired political meaning because it could be reconciled with general principles supporting a constitutionalist as opposed to an absolutist form of monarchy. What it suggested in the way of the distribution of rights between a feoffee and a cestuy que use was what constitutionalists claimed had existed from time immemorial between monarch and people, namely that the English commonwealth—the land and the property of its people—was originally the property of the people who had subsequently entrusted it to the monarch to hold for their benefit. They retained proprietary rights to its use; and the fruits of that use could be alienated from them only with their consent.¹⁶ Their power in the form of rights was thus double. As subjects and children they could claim the monarch's paternal protection without allowing him to “use” their property; and as uxorial members of the body politic, they could claim a share in their own governance.

II

The incest of Antiochus can therefore be understood to represent what to Jacobean audiences versed in political argument was the typical form in which a tyranny was manifest—an abuse of proprietary rights. Gerard A. Barker suggests that Pericles confronts in Antiochus' incest his own ambition; Pericles, a prospective tyrant, desires to use his daughter and dispose of his wife, to organize political relations so that his pleasures end in the consumption rather than the generation of the commonwealth.¹⁷ In the words of the Chorus, Gower, the play is a “restorative,” a means to cure a disease. Since law was often referred to as the “physick” of the state, and magistrates were figured as “physicians,” we may infer here that the state and the monarchy we are about to see on stage are ill (illegally governed) and in need of medication.¹⁸ In other words, Gower has introduced a play in which the practices of proprietorship need reform; his language also implies that the reform will not be innovative but rather a return to, a restoration of, former practices. The illness in question—dramatized as incest and implied to be tyranny—is one affecting the generativity of a nation and its people; insofar as Pericles himself is a victim of disease, the play allows him a restorative. His education in the art of government is dramatized throughout the length of the play in continuous allusions to his responsibilities as husband and father—richly conceived figurations of aspects of royal government. Events at each stage of his journey represent a phase in his acquisition of royal discipline.

At Antioch, the Daughter of Antiochus, “clothed like a bride,” appears to promise Pericles “nothing but curious pleasures” (I.i.6; 6). Pericles' description of his prospective union as a taste of the fruit of “yon celestial tree,” a tree by definition reserved for immortals (I.i.21), suggests that this inference is presumptuous. To seek incestuous relations, and so to confound and ignore generation, is, of course, only the privilege of immortals. For mortals will, inevitably, “die in the adventure” (I.i.22). Helicanus' counsel to Pericles places him more directly in the position of guilty monarch. He hints at Pericles' complicity in Antiochus' sin when he claims he offers Pericles “reproof, obedient and in order”: this “fits kings as they are men, for they may err” (I.ii.43, 44). The content of Helicanus' reproof is undeclared but in constitutionalist discourse, monarchic error was to be checked by the positive law to which they were as subject as their subjects were—always excepting legitimate uses of the prerogative.¹⁹ And when Pericles later names Antiochus “tyrannous,” Helicanus responds by suggesting that Antiochus may not be the only monarch guilty of this perversion: “Antiochus you fear / And justly too, I think, you fear the tyrant” (I.ii.84, 102, 103; my emphasis). Merely by paying suit to Antiochus, Pericles is, of course, inviting death: if he fails to answer the riddle, he is beheaded; if he succeeds, he will be similarly treated. The first result conveys the power of the tyrant, Antiochus; the second seems also to allude to the Platonic theory of knowledge as recognition. Pericles “knows” monarchic incest because he has already encountered it, presumably as an image of his own desire for absolute rule.

At Tharsus, Pericles contends with the economic consequences of Antioch; he learns there not of an incestuous child eating a mother, consuming a commonwealth, but conversely of mothers ready to eat children, a present generation consuming its future (I.iv.42-44). But if Tharsus, like Antioch, evokes a political problem, Pericles shows that he knows at least part of its solution. He feeds the people of Tharsus freely with grain he imports to them on his ship; in effect, he behaves as if the grain is theirs, not his. This action is politically significant (and unmotivated in other respects); I think it is meant to indicate a step in Pericles' reform of the tyrant latent within him. Apart from its magnificence, an aspect of monarchy that is represented later at Pentapolis by the government of his prospective father-in-law, King Simonides, Pericles' action recalls a feature of constitutional monarchies whose advocates argued that if the ship of state is piloted by the monarch, its owners are the people and its cargo is the commonwealth.²⁰ By dispensing food to a starving populace in this manner, Pericles demonstrates his respect for the concept of limited dominium; his proprietary rights are employed in the interest of subjects who need nourishment. Paradoxically, it is by such restraint that he achieves a degree of power that is typically reserved for an absolute monarch: at Tharsus, his word is taken as Scripture (and, by implication, divine law). As Gower says, “each man / Thinks all is writ he [Pericles] speken can” (II.Chorus, 11-12).

At Pentapolis, Pericles begins to work out what a proper relationship to a wife and child would be. He discovers in Thaisa a bride who, by “wishing him [and not her father] my meat,” rectifies the incest at Antioch (II.iii.32). More important (since Thaisa is subject to the paternal dominium of Simonides), her wishes are respected in the matter of marriage. Despite a good deal of playful dissembling, Simonides receives her letter declaring her love for Pericles by rejoicing that her choice agrees with his, and adds, as if acknowledging her right to that choice: “Nay how absolute she's in't / Not minding whether I dislike or no!” (II.v.19-20; my emphasis). His restraint on this score is matched by his sense of the responsibilities of his office which extend to royal largess:

Princes in this should live like gods above
Who freely give to every one that come
To honor them …

(III.iii.59-61; cf. Pericles at Tharsus)

Winning Thaisa, Pericles benefits from her father's generosity and self-control; the wedding night ends with the beginning of a new generation: “by the loss of maidenhead, / A babe is moulded” (III.Chorus, 10, 11).

It is nevertheless also the case that at Pentapolis Pericles is not free of tendencies associated with tyranny. Returning to Tyre to deal with a threat to his life, he comes to Pentapolis shipwrecked, an image widely recognized as signifying political chaos and often implicating the monarch as a tyrant who will be destroyed as a consequence. A classic example is the reference of Shakespeare's Ulysses to waters lifting themselves above shores when degree is lost (Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.110-13). The fullest Shakespearean exposition is perhaps that of Suffolk and his co-conspirators, who accuse Gloucester of turning “peers” into “bondmen to [his] sovereignty,” “racking” the commons, and “costing” the “public treasure”—actions which together explain why “The commonwealth hath daily run to wrack” (2 Henry VI, I.iii.124-31; my emphasis). Purely political indications include those of Coke to injustice as a “raging sea” that “drowns up” the “humble” lowlands in a “recureless wracke” while the “Hills and Mountains stand safe,”²¹ and of Floyd, who pictures the tyrant, by definition unjust, as himself a victim of his own willful machinations:

Like as a battered or crazed ship by letting in of water not only drowneth herselfe but all that are in her: so a king or a vitious tyrant, by using detestable enormities, destroyeth not himselfe alone but all others beside that are under his government.

(sig. C12v)

Parsons notes merely that a “Prince” given to his own “will” is sure to “come to shipwreck” (sig. D). Pericles is able to approach Simonides and win Thaisa—that is, overcome the consequences of shipwreck—only by fortunate means: his wreck becomes “no ill” when fishermen plying their nets on the shore recover his father's armor with which he can compete for and win Thaisa: “Thanks, Fortune, yet, that, after all thy crosses, / Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself!” he exclaims (II.i.133; 121-22). And here a force yet more decisive is linked to Fortune: Time. While Fortune is variable, Time is inexorable in its laws, bringing forth generation after generation, denying mortals any other form of immortality. As Pericles observes of his own royal status before he marries Thaisa: “Time's the king of men; / He's both their parent, and he is their grave” (II.iii.45-46). Both references allude to powers beyond human control and effectively introduce to the play a second level of political discourse that will circumscribe its critique of absolutism as tyranny and reveal a basis upon which to construct an apology for absolutism as conducive to a stable political order. Such a revision proceeds by way of an emphasis on anarchy.

In sixteenth-century political thought, anarchic possibilities are almost always perceived to originate in the disaffection of the people, and democracy is often identified as mob rule. In a monarchy, a root cause of anarchy is the retirement of the monarch; hence anarchy is logically opposed to tyranny. In Pericles, the threat of anarchy is expressed initially in the exchange between the shipwrecked Pericles and the fishermen who provide his armor. They praise Simonides' “peaceable reign and good government,” but they also complain of scarcity and injustice. Men on land, one claims, live as fish in the sea: “The great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful” (II.i.29-32; 103). The comparison of societies on land and in the sea, perhaps proverbial, recalls Ponet's description of anarchy, a society without “politike power and autoritie,” in which the “riche wold appresse the poore, and the poore seke the destruction of the riche … as … the great fishe eate up the small, and the weak seke revenge on the mightie; and so one seking the others destruction, all at leyngth should be undone and come to destruction” (10). The fishermen's conversation would seem intended to remind Pericles of the political chaos that lawlessness creates. If so, it either goes unheeded or is misunderstood; these fishermen ask Pericles not to forget them (and presumably also what they have said) but he does precisely this in Act III when he retires from public view. Apparently avoiding the excesses of tyranny, he forgets the rights of the subject to protection and the commonwealth to governance, and in effect invites anarchy. Attempting again to return to Tyre, Pericles encounters a second storm and shipwreck, gives up his wife, Thaisa, for dead, and abandons his daughter, Marina.

The scenes then taking place at Tharsus and Ephesus further reveal the dangers of anarchy as well as the redemptive effects of law now associated with an image new to the play, that of divinity working in and through time. In Ephesus, Thaisa is revived by the medicine of the physician, Cerimon, and secretly preserved in Diana's temple, actions that recall the critical role of the law and divine providence in securing the future of the commonwealth. In effect, Cerimon stands in for Pericles. As Forset remarks, law is the state's “physick,” and the monarch is the “principall Phisicion for the redressing or remedying the maladies of the bodie politique” (sig. L; see also Floyd, sig. B, E7v). In Tharsus, Pericles naively counts on the “charity” of Cleon and Dionyza, its king and queen: Cleon has declared that the “common body” of his people will force him to do his duty, that is, to nourish Marina because Pericles has earlier nourished them (III.iii.21, 22). But the people prove to be both ignorant and powerless when confronted with Dionyza's “monster, Envy,” and her henchman, Leonine, agrees to murder Marina (IV. Chorus, 12-14). Marina's abuse culminates in her being seized by pirates and sold to pimps in Mytilene: hence she is to be made the object of a common use. What is decisive in the fate of both wife and daughter is the nonfeasance of their respective husband and father. This is further realized as a kind of abdication. After Pericles hears of Marina's “death,” he ceases to exercise any kind of dominium.

The prostitution with which Marina is threatened in the bawdy “house” at Mytilene parodically inverts the royal incest at Antioch and signifies its opposite politically. Here the royal daughter is up for sale; in other words, what she stands for—the subject's right to protection of his person and property—is left to be abused by persons who lack a proper sense of value, who evaluate everything including human beings in purely monetary terms. Pander complains that he and his associates “have lost too much money this mart by being too wenchless”: and when Bawd observes that their “creatures” are “with continual action … even as good as rotten,” he replies that what they need is a woman they can sell dearly: “Our credit comes not in like the commodity. … If in our youths we could pick up some pretty estate, 'twere not amiss to keep our door hatched” (IV.ii.4, 5; 8, 9; 30-33). Pander's intention is clearly to ruin estates, both in the sense of land and of rank. Marina's own resolve to “keep her virgin knot untied” [not undone, tied up] prevents her abuse. It is important that she does so not because she has the protection of the law—Pericles' officers do not arrive to rescue her—but because she speaks divine law (IV.ii.147; IV.v.4). It is at this point, also, that her identity as daughter acquires a broader and to some extent an ambiguous political meaning. She comes to stand not only for the subject in the sense of the governed as well as for his property but also, inasmuch as she is herself royalty, for the monarch who sustains the good order of society overall.

Her additional symbolic significance depends upon the recognition that at this point she embodies a political contradiction. Since women were categorically the political subordinates of men, a woman could be made generally to signify the politically subordinate. But royal women such as Marina who had, or might inherit, political authority, were in this respect anomalous—they represented both governor and governed. This anomaly explains Marina's role in Mytilene, where she confronts its governor, Lysimachus, who intends to use her sexually, and its pimps, Pander and Bawd, who intend to sell her. Each of her adversaries incarnates some aspect of anarchy: the governor abdicates his role as moral example (recalling by contrast Simonides, a “model which heaven makes like itself” [II.ii.11]), and the pimps clearly act as the greedy rabble. But Marina rejects them and their interests, her inferior and womanly status notwithstanding.

That Shakespeare shows a figure representing the politically subordinate resisting anarchy and even what might be termed class war by the only forms of resistance—prayer and “preaching”—admitted as lawful by absolutists, such as James I, in cases of tyranny indicates how complex a political scene he illustrates by the family relations of the play.²² From Act III on, Shakespeare avoids entertaining notions that might seem further to challenge—or to pursue criticism of—the absolutist position that was so clearly under attack in the first two acts of the play. Not only is the political threat to be avoided in Acts III and IV that of mob rule rather than tyranny; it is overcome by a figure who is identified, whatever the qualifications, as a subordinate who appeals (and can appeal) only to heaven for justice. Recourse to divinity was the only form of resistance absolutists permitted.

The effects of Marina's “divine preaching” on the men who intend to use her distinguish differences in social rank. Her “gentlemen” suitors respond to her by espousing virtue. As one declares: “I'll do anything now that is virtuous, but I am out of the road of rutting for ever” (IV.v.8, 9). The governor of Mytilene, Lysimachus, is moved by Marina's appeal to his honor—“if you were born to honor, show it now”—and instantly becomes authoritative in a manner suitable to his office (IV.vi.92). No longer misled by his “corrupted mind,” he damns Boult, the pimp's doorkeeper, and condemns his “house”: “Your house, but for this virgin that doth prop it, / Would sink, and overwhelm you. Away” (IV.vi.119-20). And Boult is persuaded to reform because Marina introduces him to a new concept of authority and of wealth. Like any subordinate confronted with authority, Boult is wary of the power of his master. Asked to imagine who his worst (that is, his most feared) enemy might be, he answers “my master, or rather my mistress,” and he implies that he cannot leave his profitable doorkeeping: “What would you have me do? go to the wars, would you? where a man may serve seven years for the loss of a leg, and have not money enough in the end to buy him a wooden one?” (IV.vi.159-60; 170-74). His question recasts the fishermen's complaint. Poor persons whose rights of property are not protected by a just monarch suffer from the anarchy they cannot help but create. Marina reminds Boult that he could “do anything” but what he does to earn a living, and, as if to indicate the propriety of her advice, she vows she will earn her living by teaching womanly arts and virtues, a promise later realized when we learn that, as Gower says: “pupils lacks she none … / … and her gain / She gives the cursed bawd” (V.Ch. 9-11). On persons of all ranks and offices, therefore, Marina's virtue, divinely inspired, has the effect of law. It brings about legally the reform of society. Thus she exercises what Ponet defines as a “politike power,” for symbolically her “autoritie” is over “goodes, lands, possessiones, and all suche things as might bried controversies and discordes, and so hyndre and let, that he [God] might not be served” (8). Remarkably, she does not reform the characters of Pander and Bawd; she merely makes them stop using her illegally. Pericles later perceives her as “Modest as Justice … a palace / For the crowned truth to dwell in” (V.i.121-22; my emphasis).

To conform to the conventions of political theater, the play must conclude with the rehabilitation of its governing monarch. If we can say that Pericles successfully rejected tyranny by confronting Antiochus' riddle and winning Thaisa, so he must also reject the temptation to anarchy implicit in his retirement. Marina, summoned by the reformed and now her betrothed Lysimachus to cure this visiting king of his speechlessness with her speech (a “sacred physic” for which she will be paid), accuses him obliquely of forgetting his paternal duties:

My derivation was from ancestors
Who stood equivalent with mighty kings;
But time hath rooted out my parentage,
And to the world and awkward casualties
Bound me in servitude. …

(V.i.90-94)

Pericles comes to realize who Marina is, and so who he is, by understanding paradoxes that address the real ambiguity in the concept of monarchic property and propriety. In each case, he is asked to tolerate what appear to be irresolvable enigmas. He sees that Marina is like his wife and also like what his daughter would have been; that is, she doubles for the wife and yet is, with respect to their relationship, the inverse of the wife. Moreover, like the daughter that she is—to whom he must minister but whom he may not abuse—Marina “feeds” but also “starves” him with her riddling speech (V.i.112-13). He guesses that her story will make her like a man; his griefs are, by contrast, those suffered by a girl; because in his eyes hers is anticipated as the more heroic life, they symbolically exchange genders and generations (V.i.136-37). And finally they exchange roles of parent and child. Marina begets Pericles; to him, she is “Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” (V.i.195).

There is a sense, however, in which Pericles' dominium over these women is still further qualified. After Marina and Thaisa reenter his life, he is not only actually, once again, a father and a husband; he also speaks of himself metaphorically as a son, a son of his daughter. This relationship has already been alluded to in Antiochus' riddle, in which the Daughter describes her incestuous state as a conflation of all three relationships—“He's father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child”—and it seems puzzling here to have it reappear (I.i.68-69). But in the political terms in which the incest riddle makes sense, Antiochus' being a son is, like his being a father and a husband, a corruption of relationship that independently is valid. According to constitutionalists, all monarchs must acknowledge the condition in which they, like their subjects, are under the laws of the commonwealth, nurtured and protected by them equally. The familial relationship describing this condition is that between brothers, the children of a single mother. It is, of course, this subservience of the monarch to a mother who is positive law and Parliament that absolutists decline to accept (cf. Ponet, 44); an aspect of the abuse that Antiochus inflicts upon the Daughter is comprehended in her capacity to figure his obligation to respect the terms of his sonship. For Pericles especially, Marina's “motherhood” reflects a more particular significance. In the last act, she is described as the image of Justice, as the image of Patience “smiling extremitie out of act,” and as one who “sings like one immortal” (V.i.121, 138-39; V.Ch. 3). She is constantly identified with virtue; insofar as she is the agent of the restoration of her parents, she seems to be a heavenly virtue that both inspires mortals and is preserved in and by their goodness:

In Pericles, his queen and daughter, seen,
Although assail'd with fortune fierce and keen,
Virtue [preserved] from fell destruction's blast,
Led on by heaven, and crown'd with joy at last.

(V.iii.87-90)

For Pericles to be her son is not, therefore, merely a matter of his acknowledging his place under the law, although such an acknowledgement is certainly implied. It is also, and preeminently, a matter of being under divine law, of being the child of a mother who is Justice and Patience personified.

To conclude: given the full scope and development of its political argument, Pericles represents a concept of the monarchy predictably within the limits of what would have been judged acceptable doctrine to absolutists such as James. To require that the monarch be beholden to divine law and behave virtuously—conditions of rule Pericles at last understands and accepts—presents no real threat to his prerogative. The repeated invocations to Patience in the last act, recalling Helicanus' advice to Pericles after he fled from Antioch, would have reminded the audience of absolutist prohibitions against active resistance. If the play opens by characterizing as abusive a monarch's appropriation of the property of his subjects and of the commonwealth in terms that suggest an endorsement of constitutionalism and a restricted use of the prerogative, it also signally fails to pursue these concerns in a manner critical of their specifically political importance. In the play's last acts, Shakespeare rather chooses to portray the monarch as restored to strength and to a proper relation to his people, to the commonwealth, and to law by a moral enlightenment, a position that forces the monarch to see in the very images of desire and power the signs of a necessary and concomitant frustration and weakness.

Shakespeare's representation of obedience is, moreover, conceptually bound up with an article of faith that had little representation in the resistance theories of constitutional monarchists—the notion that time is restorative, and, by implication, that history is providential—but that is implicit in theories of divine right and often a feature of absolutist apology. (The virtuous Marina is both the dramatic manifestation of the chaste Thaisa, who, for the period of Marina's divine preaching, is hidden in Diana's temple, and also the condition, in the sense of the manner as well as the means, of Thaisa's return to the secular world.) In 1605 this representation of what is in essence a political mystery would have appealed to many audiences. There was reason then to imagine that legitimacy had been restored to the English monarchy after a period of uncertainty during Elizabeth's last years. In its depiction of the dangers of anarchy and of time as restorative, therefore, the play also celebrates legitimacy. But however impressive its reliance on the concept of moral and providential forces in history, Pericles also ends with an image undoing monarchic incest. Given the language of kinship as political metaphor, this conclusion must be understood as a reminder to Jacobean audiences that the king who was both husband and father could claim, by these very identities, no more than a limited dominium.

Notes

1. See David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1985); Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display (New York: Methuen, 1986). This essay is part of my longer study of political thought in Shakespeare's last plays.

2. P. Goolden, “Antiochus' Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 6.23 (1955): 245-51. For a lucid study of incest and the English monarchy see Bruce Boehrer, Incest and Monarchy, forthcoming from the Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

3. Thomas Bilson, A Sermon preached at Westminster before the King and Queenes Majesties at their Coronations on Saint James his day (London, 1603), sig. B4v. In quoting from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions I have normalized letters but not spelling or punctuation. For arguments on the question of monarchic rule, see i.a. J. C. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London: Longmans, 1986). For a history of the notion of constitutionalism in England, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). For a study of tyranny in Elizabethan and Stuart drama, see Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990). I am generally indebted to Gordon Schochet and the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought for introducing me to the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political philosophy.

4. Ponet qualifies the authority of the monarch as father: he is merely an “executor” of God's power and not exempt from his laws. Were this not the case, it might be said that “God allowed their tyranie, robbery of their subjectes, killing them without lawe. …” A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (London, 1556), ed. Winthrop S. Hudson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942), 43. Subsequent references to this work will appear in my text.

5. Sir John Fortescue, A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England (London, 1567), sig. K6v, K7, L8v, M1.

6. Vindiciae contra tyrannos, trans. and ed. Julian H. Franklin, in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1969), 174-75.

7. Nicholas Fuller, The Argument in the Case of Thomas Lad and Richard Maunsell (London, 1607), sig. A3, A3v, B3v. See also The Fift Part of the Reports of Sr. Edward Coke, Knight (London, 1607), sig. A6. The work of Fuller and Forset (see below) appeared within a year or two of Pericles; I am assuming that they drew on a commonly shared, figurative language to describe political relations.

8. Thomas Floyd, The Picture of a Perfit Common wealth (London, 1600), sig. B, Bv, C6v. For James, see p. 15.

9. [Robert Parsons], A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (London, 1594), sig. C8v.

10. Edward Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (London, 1606), sig. C4v.

11. “Phoenix,” line 37; Othello, V.ii.196. For Shakespeare's works I use The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).

12. Concepts of property are very complicated during this period. For an overview of questions on real property, see G. E. Aylmer, “The Meaning and the Definition of ‘Property’ in Seventeenth-century England,” Past and Present 86 (1980): 87-97, and the reply by Andrew Reeve, 139-43. For an analysis of dominium in relation to ius, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 5-31. Christopher Hill points out that Renaissance concepts of “freedom” in contrast to “servility”—i.e., the condition of being a “freeman” as opposed to a “servant”—refer to the self as “property” that the former condition guarantees and the latter abrogates. To have a “property in one's own person and labour” is to be free politically and economically: to have lost that property is to be a wage-earner, a servant, a pauper. See Hill, “Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth, ed. C. H. Feinstein (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 338-50. For the meaning of property in political thought, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Authority and Property: the Question of Liberal Origins,” in After the Reformation: Essays in honour of J. H. Hexter, ed. William J. Bouwsma and Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 331-54. On woman and property in the Renaissance see my Renaissance Feminism (Ithaca, Cornell Univ. Press, 1990); and also Mary London Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought,” Western Political Quarterly 32 (1979): 79-91.

13. On the monarch's duty to foster trade see Forset, sig. C3, and especially Willaim Fulbecke, The Pandectes of the Law of Nations (London, 1602), sig. S4-T4v on subsidies and royal “impositions” on imports and exports.

14. James I, The True Law of Free Monarchies in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), 58.

15. James quite specifically links the monarch's right to his subject's property with the availability of nubile women. Property not bequeathed to heirs, he claims, is the property of the king: “If a person, inheritour of any lands or goods, dye without any sort of heires, all his landes and goods returne to the king. And if a bastard die unrehabled without heires of his bodie (which rehabling onely lyes in the kings hands) all that hee hath likewise returnes to the king. And as ye see it manifest, that the King is over-Lord of the whole land: so is he Master over every person that inhabiteth the same, having power over the life and death of every one of them” (63).

16. The law on “uses,” in effect primitive trusts, is, like the laws on property in general, very complicated. For an overview, see Kenelm Edward Digby, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Real Property, 5th ed. (Oxford, 1897), 315-72. For seventeenth-century formulations, see John Cowell, The Interpreter (Cambridge, 1607), sig. Zzz3v.

17. Gerard A. Barker, “Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Pericles,” English Studies 44 (1963): 401-7. My analysis of Pericles as political theater is not intended to represent the play as either political doctrine or religious dogma, or to suggest that Shakespeare was taking a particular side on the question of monarchic authority and power. I do claim that the contestatory nature of drama generally is in the case of this particular play manifest not only in what is obviously in conflict, that is kinship relations, but also in the political references such relations had in the larger context of the language of contemporary political thought. As this play demonstrates, the violence of tyrannical government can be forcefully conveyed by images of marital and paternal abuse. Shakespeare's portrait of Pericles as husband and father identifies in intimate settings those “moods” or states of mind that to Jacobeans were chiefly indicators of political attitudes as well as practices; cf. esp. Forset.

18. Floyd, sig. E7v; Forset, sig. L-L2.

19. This limitation is crucial; see i.a. Fortescue, Learned Commendation, sig. L5v; Fuller, Argument, sig. A2-A3v; Parsons, A Conference, sig. C3v-C8v.

20. Vindiciae, 124; cf. the action of the Duke of Gloucester, reported in 2 Henry VI, III.i.115-18.

21. The Lord Coke his Speech and Charge: with a Discoverie of the Abuses and Corruption of Officers (London, 1607), sig. C8.

22. James claims that only God can punish an evil monarch: “Neither is it ever heard that any king forgets himselfe twoards God … but God with the greatnesse of the plague revengeth the greatnes of his ingratitude (70). See also Bilson on monarchs: “must wee not reject their yoke with violence but rather endure their swordes with patience that God may be Judge betweene Prince and People … (sig. B6v); and William Barlow: “it becomes not good subjectes to bee their owne Revengers. Christianity teacheth Patience, not Rebellion.” A Brand, Titio Erepta (London, 1607), sig. F. Even Ponet, although advocating the active resistance of magistrates to unlawful government, admonishes the people: “yet are not the poore people destitute all together of remedy: but God hathe lefte unto them twoo weapones, hable to conquere and destroie the greatest Tirane that ever was: that is, Penaunce and Praier” (124).