[In the following excerpt, McCabe surveys Shakespeare's subtle and varied use of the incest motif in his histories, tragedies, and romances.]

THE CONSCIENCES OF KINGS

‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments’: the nobility of the sentiment survives the bitterness of its context, conjuring up visions of spiritual union transcending all the fleshly ‘impediments’ prevalent throughout the Shakespearean canon. In Much Ado About Nothing the Friar warns Hero and Claudio that should either of them know of ‘any inward impediment’ forbidding them to be ‘conjoined’ they must utter it on peril of their souls (iv.1.11-13). The Tudor marriage service lies behind both passages but provides an inadequate gloss on either. In the world of Shakespearean drama the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘nature’ is not that simple. In Much Ado insistence upon the letter of the law evokes a false impediment whereas Sonnet 116 dispenses with impediment altogether in the interests of an unworthy, fickle lover. In All's Well that Ends Well we learn that ‘all impediments in fancy's course / Are motives of more fancy’ (v.3.213-4), that impediment may provoke rather than prohibit desire.

Shakespeare's acquaintance with Tudor chronicle history can only have served to deepen this dilemma. The Book of Homilies holds it axiomatic that rebellion constitutes an ‘unnatural’ crime of the sort for which incest provides a perfect metaphor.¹ The association is ancient: in Euripides's Andromache mating kin and murdering kin are placed on a par.² Shakespeare's Henry VI watches in dismay as civil war ‘begets’ monsters, much as incest was popularly supposed to do.³ Yet, leading a rebellion against the ‘anointed’ king, the Duke of Richmond marches into ‘the bowels’ of his motherland ‘without impediment’ (v.2.3-4).⁴ Far more is involved than a mere lack of resistance since the whole tenor of the play suggests that Richmond's cause is also ‘without impediment’, that he and England are the ‘true minds’ whose union must not be frustrated by the admission of other kinds of ‘truth’, even that of lineal descent.⁵ ‘What heir of York’, asks Richard III, ‘is there alive but we? / And who is England's King but great York's heir?’ (iv.4.471-2). But the play is not listening. We are given to understand that although the argument be right, the arguer is wrong. All of Richard's personal relationships are shown to be unnatural. He is truly akin not to York (upon whose issue he ‘preys’), but to himself alone: ‘Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I’—a bizarre by-product of the deepening ‘individualism’ of Shakespeare's characterisation (v.3.184).⁶ In his person the victorious House of York conducts a civil war within a civil war, ‘brother to brother, / Blood to blood, self against self’ (ii.4.62-3). As a result, kinship terminology degenerates into cynical pun: ‘cousins indeed! And by their uncle cozen'd’ (iv.4.223). Similarly, all attempts to reinforce familial ‘kindness’ stagger under a series of ancestral recriminations stretching back over three generations to a society ‘kind in hatred’ (iv.4.173), observing ‘no law of God nor man’ (i.2.70). The only ‘natural’ behaviour is unnatural behaviour, and Richard is presented as the ultimate expression of England's unnatural history, the ultimate despiser of the laws of kin. The language of butchery and incest fuse:

What though I kill'd her husband and her father?
The readiest way to make the wench amends
Is to become her husband, and her father.

(i.1.154-6)

Levitical degrees will not impede someone who uses ‘odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ’ to ‘clothe’ his ‘naked villainy’ (i.3.336-7). Having destroyed his brothers and his nephews, Richard plans to wed his niece in violation of centuries of Christian tradition, but not necessarily … of current papal practice.⁷ According to Edward Hall, ‘all men, and the mayden her selfe moost of al, detested and abhorred this unlawfull and in maner unnaturall copulacion’.⁸ Raphael Holinshed concurs, declaring the plan ‘not onlie detestable to be spoken of in the remembrance of man, but much more cruell and abhominable to be put in execution’.⁹ The suspect relationship between Pandarus and Cressida springs to mind. But Richard's defence is powerful: reason of state was one of the major factors facilitating dispensation. Nevertheless, it is the nature of the relationship (as popularly conceived) that renders his interview with Elizabeth so much less satisfying than that with Anne. His brother's wife is being asked to become his ‘mother’—his natural mother having cursed his birth—by pandering to his incestuous relationship with her daughter: ‘What were I best to say?’, she asks, ‘her father's brother / Would be her lord? Or shall I say her uncle?’ (iv.4.337-8). The implications for English history are profound. When Richard asserts ‘I will beget / Mine issue of your blood upon your daughter’ (iv.4.297-8), no less is threatened than the perpetual pollution of the royal line. Henceforth all English monarchs will be the offspring of incest, all that is ‘unnatural’ will be institutionalised within the monarchy and Richard will take a lasting revenge upon ‘dissembling Nature’.¹⁰ As reported by Hall, Richmond's speech before Bosworth Field drew an elaborate parallel between Richard and Nero: ‘for he hath not only murdered his nephewe beyng his kyng and souereigne lorde, bastarded his noble brethern and defamed the wombe of his verteuous and womanly mother, but also compased all the meanes and waies that he coulde invent how to stuprate and carnally know his awne nece under the pretence of a cloked matrimony’.¹¹ Thus the ‘unnatural’ crime of rebellion—that great Tudor insult to its own ideology—is justified as a fortunate fall into unblemished sovereignty:

O now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal House,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together,
And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so,
Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac'd peace.

(v.5.29-33)

Though related through a common ancestor, the distance between the parties is such that their marriage fulfils the Augustinian goal of re-establishing kinship at the very point at which the two houses are set to diverge into estrangement of blood.¹² By contrast, Richard's proposed ‘conjoining’ would compel one branch of the royal house to feed upon itself (‘Myself myself confound’), debilitating the royal blood and calling into question the legitimacy of all future monarchs. The fact that marriage to Elizabeth constitutes a political act for Richmond as much as for Richard is tacitly overlooked. What was denied to the one is allowed to the other: Tudor reason of state ‘dispenses’ with the unnatural crime of rebellion but aggravates its sexual equivalent, the ‘unnatural’ crime of incest. Holinshed's editorial additions to Hall's account propound the official view that ‘although … the right might seeme to remaine in the person of Richard duke of Yorke … it thus well appeared, that the house of Yorke shewed it selfe more bloudie in seeking to obteine the kingdome, than that of Lancaster in usurping it’.¹³ In theory, therefore, Richmond performed Hamlet's task in preventing the ‘royal bed’ of England from becoming ‘a couch for luxury and damned incest’, and in Henry VIII his son is represented as redeeming it a second time in the wake of a papal dispensation almost as foul as that for which Richard had petitioned.¹⁴ That such a dispensation should have been procured by Richmond himself, for reasons of state, is an irony upon which Shakespeare refuses to dwell.¹⁵

With the benefit of hindsight Hall assured his readers that ‘all wyse men in the Realme moche abhorred’ the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon, but Shakespeare's heroine is correct in asserting that few such misgivings were voiced at the time.¹⁶ Henry VII was indeed ‘reputed for / A prince most prudent’, and Ferdinand ‘was reckon'd one / The wisest prince’ that ever ruled in Spain. The ‘wise council’ summoned by both to ‘debate this business’ deemed the marriage ‘lawful’ (ii.4.43-51).¹⁷ Throughout the course of the play the sole motivation Henry allows in promoting his ‘divorce’ is ‘conscience’. The word is used no fewer than twenty-four times but in a bewildering variety of tones and contexts. The matter is complicated by clear intimations of the king's interest in Anne Boleyn (i.2) well before the subject of incest is broached (ii.1). Thus the Lord Chamberlain's declaration that ‘marriage with his brother's wife / Has crept too near his conscience’ evokes Suffolk's sarcastic aside, ‘no, his conscience / Has crept too near another lady’ (ii.2.16-18). Courtly observers ‘cannot blame his conscience’ when they perceive Anne's beauty (iv.1.47). The aristocracy is all but unanimous in blaming the royal ‘scruple’—itself a potentially pejorative and demeaning word first introduced in conjunction with ‘malice’ (ii.1.157-8)—upon Wolsey's political machinations. ‘All that dare / Look into these affairs’, we learn, ‘see this main end, / The French king's sister’ (ii.2.39-41).

But this analysis, though politically plausible, is wrong. Henry's overriding concern, as here presented, is the legitimacy of issue. According to his own account of the matter, his conscience ‘first receiv'd a tenderness / Scruple and prick’ when doubt was raised concerning the legitimacy of Princess Mary.¹⁸ ‘Methought’, he asserts,

I stood not in the smile of heaven, who had
Commanded nature, that my lady's womb,
If it conceiv'd a male-child by me, should
Do no more offices of life to't than
The grave does to th'dead.

(ii.4.184-9)

This is somewhat disingenuous since the relevant Levitical texts speak of childlessness and not specifically the lack of a male heir.¹⁹ Katherine is right in pointing out that the union has been blessed with issue. Sympathy for her cause culminates in the mystical apotheosis of act iv scene 2 which confirms her personal integrity, but within the larger dramatic structure personal considerations are qualified by public ones. Katherine complicates matters by appealing to the Pope whom she regards as the spiritual equivalent of Hermione's Delphic Oracle. By contrast, Anne relies upon the Protestant martyr, Cranmer. Furthermore, the play's many expressions of hostility to Anne are themselves qualified by the aura of epiphany cast over the birth of her daughter Elizabeth, particularly in Cranmer's final prophetic vision (v.4.14-62). It is Anne not Katherine who produces an heir worthy of the English crown (v.4.22-3). Yet such is the complexity of the drama that Elizabeth's sexuality undermines her father's arguments:

KING:
Is the queen deliver'd?
Say ay, and of a boy.
OLD Lady:
Ay, ay my liege,
And of a lovely boy: the God of heaven
Both now and ever bless her: 'tis a girl
Promises boys hereafter.

(v.1.162-6)

The dramatic power of this exchange cannot be overstated. The old lady's reply at first appears to lend providential validation to royal policy when suddenly the illusion shatters. Henry may compel his subjects to ‘say’ whatever he wishes, but he cannot alter reality either spiritual or physical. Cranmer's prophecy of the wonders attendant upon a female heir insulates fate from human interference. Henry has been the pawn, not the grandmaster. Perhaps more than any other history play, Henry VIII is pervaded by a keen sense of proleptic irony. As everyone knew, Anne's sumptuous coronation served merely as the prelude to ignominious execution, and the birth of England's virgin queen promised no boys hereafter but an end to the Tudor dynasty.

The word ‘truth’ is used throughout the text almost twice as often as ‘conscience’ but even more problematically. The prologue asserts the ‘truth’ of its material, referring to it as ‘our chosen truth’ and the adjective rings heavily. Essentially what the play affords is a series of ‘choices’ between apparently conflicting ‘truths’ with no clear indication of how such a decision might be made. The truth of political expediency finds marriage with a brother's widow lawful in the reign of Henry VII but unnatural in the reign of Henry VIII. The truth of historical hindsight necessitates the rejection of Katherine, even as the truth of personal integrity upholds her. ‘Chosen’ truth would seem to depend upon the nature of the chooser. Katherine relies upon the belief that, ‘heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge / That no king can corrupt’ (iii.1.100-1). Commenting upon the prejudices of his Council, Henry remarks that ‘not ever / The justice and the truth o'th'question carries / The due o'th'verdict with it’ (v.1.129-31). In such circumstances ‘'tis well there's one above'em yet’ (v.2.26). The reminiscence of Katherine's words seems deliberate, as does the displacement of God by Henry himself. The king's ‘good opinion’ makes or breaks courtiers. Cranmer's ‘opinion’ on the divorce is found consonant with divine law largely because it facilitates a course of action too far advanced to be abandoned (iii.2.64): Henry weds Anne long before the status of Katherine is determined thereby ‘bastarding’ his daughter as surely as ‘usurping Richard’ had disowned his nephews.

Wolsey is dismissed for making his ‘opinion’ his ‘law’, but Henry does the same only more successfully (iv.2.37). At the outset of the play the king too appeals to Rome as ‘the nurse of judgement’ (ii.2.93), but like his romantic counterpart, Leontes, decides that there is ‘no truth’ in this oracle. He may well be right since papal politics seem just as labyrinthine as his own. In other circumstances Wolsey might himself have become pope and made his opinion ecclesiastical law. ‘Heaven’ expresses no judgement either way; Katherine's apotheosis is a private vision powerless to effect policy. We have reached the point at which royal opinion determines natural law and the mentality of the House of Tudor seems disconcertingly similar to that of its ‘unnatural’ opponents. Man, it would appear, is primarily a political animal and natural law a political concept. Theoretically ‘nature’ sustains hierarchy, but in the real world the autocrat defines nature. ‘Nothing’, comments Montaigne, ‘is more subject unto a continuall agitation, then the lawes. I have since I was borne, seene those of our neighbours the English-men changed and rechanged three or foure times, not only in politike subjects, which is that some will dispense of constancy, but in the most important subject, that possibly can be, that is to say, in religion.’²⁰ The further one proceeds towards an Erastian state the less tenable become traditional distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Constancy may be ‘dispensed’ with in both spheres as may incest—and dispensations from incest. Where royal opinion is law, there is no catching the conscience of the king.

HAMLET: ‘PARAGON OF ANIMALS’

Were one to read the acts and scenes of Hamlet in reverse order, attempting to trace the hero's tragic malady to its root, the investigation would proceed past the Ghost and the first soliloquy to the single line which serves to introduce us to the consciousness of the prince: ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’ (1.2.65).²¹ Various meanings of ‘kind’ are brought into play: natural, affectionate and loving. In the normal course of events, one expects more ‘kindness’ from kin than from strangers, but in so far as ‘kind’ also carries connotations of romantic love the rule is quite contrary: ‘the neerer we are in bloud, the further wee must be from love; and the greater the kindred is, the lesse the kindnes must be’.²² Claudius is Hamlet's closest male relative but, by marrying his mother, he has contrived to overlay consanguinity with affinity thereby becoming ‘a little more than kin’. This ‘little more’ defies conventional classification and results in the unnaturally hybrid concepts of ‘uncle-father’ and ‘aunt-mother’ (ii.2.372). In respect of both civil and canon law the union is incestuous, however the ‘better wisdoms’ of Denmark have ‘freely’ sanctioned the whole questionable ‘affair’ (i.2.15-16).²³ Shakespeare's contemporaries would doubtless recall the Henrician parallel laboured in Der Bestrafte Brudermord where Gertrude claims to have petitioned and received a papal dispensation.²⁴ Hamlet regards the marriage as incestuous long before he meets the Ghost whose own obsession with violated kinship serves to exacerbate an already critical situation: ‘I am thy father's spirit … / ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast … / upon my secure hour thy uncle stole … / let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest … / nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught.’ The same emphases appear in the source material. In Saxo Grammaticus Ambleth accuses Fengo of having ‘defiled his brother's queen with infamous desecration … and crowned fratricide with incest’.²⁵ Belleforest portrays Fengon as ‘charging his conscience with abhominable guilt, and two-fold impietie … incestuous adulterie and parricide murder’.²⁶

The precise nature of the defilement involved depends upon the ‘incorporation’ of husband and wife as ‘one flesh’. By agreeing to wed her ‘sometime’ brother, Gertrude corrupts her former partner's ‘blood’ as surely as does his murderer. As another Shakespearean wife expresses it, in a comedy whose ‘errors’ impinge uneasily upon Hamlet's tragic themes, ‘if we two be one, and thou play false, / I do digest the poison of thy flesh, / Being strumpeted by thy contagion’.²⁷ From this point on there rages a ‘hectic’ in the ‘blood’ and the resulting relationship can never, in theory, be anything more than a sensual parody of that which it supplants (iv.4.69). And as for the family, so for the state. Since it is the ‘royal bed’ of Denmark which has been defiled, Claudius can no more prove father to his people than to Hamlet. The mystical ‘union’ of monarch and state suffers in its corporal counterpart and the incest is, like Macbeth's murder, metaphysical as well as carnal.²⁸ Since Gertrude is ‘th'imperial jointress to this warlike state’, the odour of corrosion and decay, physically centred in Old Hamlet's corpse, is everywhere palpable in the body politic.²⁹ As in Oedipus Tyrannus, ‘nature’ reacts against such violation but far less overtly. In the Greek play the natural order admits of no ambiguity, while here it is very much a matter of human perception, for ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (ii.2.249-50).³⁰ A single word does double duty for ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’. Through the imagery of sickness, weeds and poison, the Theban plague is internalised. The country abounds in ‘sick souls’, its language in sick bodies. The spiritual and intellectual landscape suffers a fall equivalent to that of Eden: ‘'tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely’ (i.2.135-7). The ‘green’ memory of Old Hamlet bristles with thorns, yet Gertrude remains blithely unaware of those ‘that in her bosom lodge / To prick and sting her’ until her son alters her perception (i.5.87-8).

However, if the ‘taint’ of incest provides an ‘objective correlative’ for Hamlet's melancholia, it is a taint apparently experienced by no other member of the court, nor is allusion ever made to any sense of popular revulsion amongst the masses.³¹ It would therefore seem that Hamlet is a man of received ideas fated to operate in a world of received indifference. For this very reason, his has been described as the ‘voice of nature’ in an otherwise unnatural environment, a description that does scant justice to the complexity of his make-up, let alone to that of ‘nature’ itself.³² Apart from the Ghost, which remains self-evidently ‘unnatural’ while simultaneously appealing to ‘nature’, the word ‘incestuous’ is employed by no one except Hamlet, and it remains unclear whether Gertrude has indeed infringed a law of nature, or merely an idealised, subjective conception of nature untenable in the light of actual experience. The status of her relationship with Claudius remains to the end as ‘questionable’ as everything else in the play. Protestant theologians would doubtless have declared it unnatural, Catholic theologians would not—and it is from the Catholic afterworld that the Ghost purports to return, like the spectre of England's own spiritual past.³³ The entire play may not unjustly be seen as an attempt to exorcise that unquiet spirit once and for all.³⁴

Throughout all five acts, appeals to allegedly ‘common’ natural principles falter in the face of apparently autonomous individual ‘complexions’.³⁵ Since ‘nature cannot choose his origin’—any more than Hamlet could choose or reject his parentage—‘particular men’ may not be called to account for ‘some vicious mole of nature in them … wherein they are not guilty’ (i.4.24-6). ‘Natural’ tendencies may actually be vicious tendencies. At times we seem to be operating in an Ockhamist universe of ‘discrete entities sharing no common nature’.³⁶ This being the case, no single voice may be regarded as that of natural order. Rather, each speaker expresses the contradictions of his own particular temperament in a language peculiar to himself. Thus the Ghost appeals to Hamlet's better ‘nature’ in order to instigate murder ‘most foul, as in the best it is’ (i.5.27), whereas in John Pickering's Horestes (1567) Nature opposes all such revenge.³⁷ While boasting of its own ‘natural gifts’ it also confesses to ‘foul crimes’ committed in its ‘days of nature’ thereby severely qualifying, if not negating, Hamlet's retrospective idealisation.

The play's radical scepticism centres in its hero: ‘To be or not to be?’ remains an unanswered, existential question.³⁸ Characteristically, only Polonius is certain of discovering ‘where truth is hid though it were hid indeed within the centre’. For the rest, subjective certainty is no guarantee of objective truth. Each and every mind finds its own emotional ‘correlative’ by interpreting experience in the light of its own temperament, just as each and every spectator finds a personal relevance in the play within the play. In the final analysis, Hamlet's assessment of his mother's fall has less to do with the intricacies of canon law than with his own emotional need to evoke from within himself the profound sense of revulsion which accusations of incest traditionally facilitate. As a result, he acts for much of the play like a man caught between the conflicting dictates of Stoicism and scepticism, the one assertive of natural virtue, the other dismissive of natural law. Both philosophies enjoyed considerable contemporary vogue. While Montaigne was writing his sceptical essays, Justus Lipsius led a revival of Stoicism destined to exercise a powerful, contrary influence over seventeenth-century thought.³⁹ Hamlet's dilemma is meticulously attuned to that of his age.

Introducing the subject of his brother's death, Claudius draws a very provocative distinction between the opposing dictates of prudence and emotion equally applicable to his union with Gertrude. ‘So far hath discretion fought with nature’, he informs us, that ‘remembrance’ of himself qualifies remembrance of the dead. That is to say, reason of state dispenses with natural scruple just as the title of ‘queen’ supersedes the ‘sometime’ title of ‘sister’. Contemporary moralists held that with regard to kinship regulations, ‘we should enquire what Gods Law doth forbid or allow, before we give or withhold our assent. But our affections usually outstep our discretion.’⁴⁰ Hamlet could scarcely be expected to appreciate Claudius's outlook since ‘it is common for the younger sort / To lack discretion’ (ii.1.116-17). On the contrary, he later finds that ‘indiscretion’ often serves us well (v.2.8). Denmark would appear to be a largely Erastian state in which the ‘great command o'ersways the order’ in matrimony as in burial (v.1.221). Ideally, positive law was supposed to act as the social expression of natural law, but the choice of a name for Claudius (alias Fengo or Fengon) argues otherwise. The Emperor Claudius was universally denounced by canon lawyers for having divorced positive law from its natural counterpart in pursuance of incestuous designs upon his niece. The result was a dissociation of worldly ‘discretion’ from natural truth catastrophic to the former.⁴¹ Belleforest provides a wry commentary on the ‘better wisdoms’ which supported Claudius's Danish counterpart: ‘insteed of pursuing him as a parricide and an incestuous person, al the courtyers admired and flattered him … which was the cause that Fengon, boldned and incouraged by such impunitie, durst venture to couple himselfe in marriage with her whom hee used as his concubine during good Horvendiles life.’⁴²

Despite such political cynicism, the paradoxical notion that the monarch might legitimately transcend the law continued to exert a strong influence over leading political theorists. Since political benefit was one of the primary considerations taken into account by the papal court in the matter of dispensation, Claudius may well feel perfectly justified in marrying his sister-in-law—although such a complacent accommodation to incest should lose him the sympathy of a Protestant audience by analogy with the case of Henry VIII.⁴³ Ostensibly, the crime that weighs upon the king's conscience is murder not incest, but the two are actually inextricable even in terminology: Claudius, for example, denies ‘direct’ or ‘collateral’ involvement in Polonius's death (iv.5.203). From the moment he refers to Gertrude as ‘our sometime sister, now our queen, / Th'imperial jointress to this warlike state’ (i.2.8-9), an indissoluble link is forged between ‘my crown, mine own ambition, and my queen’ (iii.3.55) reminiscent of Saxo's Fengo who ‘crowned fratricide with incest’. More subtly, Claudius's self-contempt is conjured up through images of venereal disease: ‘the harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art’ (iii.1.51). Like Cain he has killed his brother, like Cain he has wed his ‘sister’. Gertrude is part and parcel of Claudius's ‘rank’ offence and he is intelligent enough to realise that, although the ‘wicked prize’ frequently ‘buys out the law’ in the ‘corrupted currents of this world’, the matter is different ‘above’: ‘there the action lies / In his true nature’ (iii.3.57-62). At precisely this point in the play the problem of the marriage is kept powerfully to the fore by Hamlet's renewed allusion to the ‘incestuous pleasure’ of the praying Claudius's bed (line 90), an allusion developed at far greater length in the ensuing interview with his mother.

The Old Testament allows marriage with a brother's widow only in the interests of Levirate, the practice of raising up issue to a deceased brother's name.⁴⁴ Such was the defence put forward by the advocates of Catherine of Aragon. In Hamlet, however, the case is quite contrary. Not merely does the old king have issue, but the sources have been altered to allow his son to bear his name thereby leaving Claudius to enact a reversal of Levirate. If possible, he would appropriate his brother's family to himself: ‘But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son … / think of us / As of a father … / our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son … / thy loving father, Hamlet.’ Under normal circumstances the death of a father—the ‘common theme’ of all life—should mark the son's attainment of seniority, in this case both personally and politically. But Claudius's marriage to Gertrude and ascension to the throne reimpose parental subjection upon Hamlet at the very point of liberty. Thus, as is often the case, ‘allusions to incest … exemplify the tension inherent in the power relations between male generations in a patriarchal society’.⁴⁵ In this sense Hamlet is ‘too much in the sun’, but as the play proceeds Claudius attempts to undo the offices of Levirate entirely by depriving his brother of issue through Hamlet's murder. His position vis-à-vis his brother's wife closely resembles that of Marston's cynical Herod Frappatore.⁴⁶ The correspondence is especially close because Claudius too has seduced his brother's wife during her husband's lifetime, just like their common biblical exemplar. Citizen comedy is well invoked in this regard since Gertrude behaves less like the ‘queen’ Hamlet demands she be than a city wife (iii.4.14)—in fact, like those complained of in Michaelmas Term: ‘I knew a widow about Saint Antlings so forgetful of her first husband that she married again within the twelve-month; nay, some, by'rlady, within the month’ (v.1.60-2). ‘Within a month’, remarks Hamlet, ‘she married’ (i.2.153-6). The contrast with the ‘mobled queen’ is staggering. One is reminded of Michel Foucault's assertion that ‘the bourgeoisie's blood was its sex’, a point Hamlet anticipates.⁴⁷ ‘At your age’, he shouts, ‘the heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble, / And waits upon the judgement, and what judgement / Would step from this to this?’ (iii.4.69-71). There is no majesty, no depth, in Gertrude's perception of affairs: the wider implications of ‘our o'er-hasty marriage’ elude her. ‘What have I done’, she can ask in genuine amazement, ‘that thou dar'st wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me?’ (iii.4.39-40). Above all it is this emotional shallowness that infuriates her son. Not Oedipus but Orestes is his mythical prototype.⁴⁸

Hamlet's theory of the player's art is directly relevant to his attitude towards Gertrude and his stepfather. He would have the players ‘hold … the mirror up to nature’, looking beyond appearances to essentials, moral essentials: ‘to show virtue her feature … and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (iii.2.22-4). He would have them, and their audience, employ ‘discretion’ in a sense intended neither by Claudius nor Polonius, ‘with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature’ (lines 18-19). He would not have them ‘out-Herod Herod’, even when performing before a king who has also stolen his brother's wife. Better patterns than the Mystery Plays exist among their audience—indeed their audience is their theme. Unlike those whose hearts must ‘break’ in silence, ‘the players cannot keep counsel: they'll tell all’ (lines 137-8). In a play dealing with incest and murder they perform a play illustrative of the true nature of such deeds. Thus the Player King's opening speech cuts to the heart of the Danish problem in its insistence upon the ‘commutual’ nature of wedlock's ‘sacred bands’ from which arise both consanguinity and affinity. His allusion to thirty years of married life may be intended to recall Hamlet's age since their son has never known a time, until now, when Old Hamlet and Gertrude were not so ‘united’. By insisting upon the sanctity of marriage vows, even after death, the Player Queen relates second marriage to political betrayal: ‘such love must needs be treason in my breast’ (line 173). Since the play is called ‘The Mousetrap’ and Gertrude is Claudius's ‘mouse’ (iii.4.185), the line is presumably intended to elicit some evidence of her complicity in her husband's murder. It is noteworthy, however, that as the action proceeds the Player Queen takes no part in the assassination, and in the dumb show ‘seems harsh awhile’ to the murderer before accepting his love. Adultery is not shown, merely shallowness: ‘but die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead’ (iii.3.210). In this manner the play manages to echo the emphases of the Ghost whose assault upon Claudius is direct, upon Gertrude oblique. It serves as an analogue to the Danish tragedy rather than a reenactment.⁴⁹ While supposedly representing the past it also predicts the future, the murder of an uncle by a nephew. Hamlet has the vicarious satisfaction of killing Claudius in play, but a more substantial satisfaction remains: ‘You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife’ (lines 257-8).

Freudian interpreters have not neglected this line. By coupling it with Hamlet's fear lest ‘the soul of Nero’ enter his ‘firm bosom’ they derive a reading indicative of sexual excitement immediately preceding his interview with Gertrude.⁵⁰ Perhaps at no point in the play, however, is the parallel with Orestes more vital to its explanation, nor less incompatible with the exemplum Hamlet himself chooses: in the anonymous Nero of 1624 the emperor proposes to perform the role of Orestes on stage having ‘done that already, and too truly’.⁵¹ Hamlet's attitude to Gertrude is ambivalent but not in the simplistic sense imagined by Ernest Jones. Rather, he has become, in the words of Victor Hugo, ‘that sinister thing, the possible parricide’.⁵² But implicit in the impulse to destroy is the impulse to reclaim and this can only be by alienating Gertrude from Claudius, by ‘getting the love’ of his uncle's wife. As David Leverenz argues, ‘the destruction of good mothering is the real issue … While acknowledging Hamlet's parricidal and matricidal impulses, we should see these inchoate feelings as responses, not innate drives’.⁵³ Incest is his theme throughout the interview, not his motive: ‘you are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife, / And, would it were not so, you are my mother’ (iii.4.14-15). It is not the adultery per se but the relationships perverted in the adultery that matter. This is not to say that Hamlet remains sexually unaffected by what he does. Quite the contrary, disgust with his mother poisons his affection for Ophelia by rendering kinship itself contemptible.⁵⁴ To propagate the species is to ‘breed’ maggots in a dead dog, to perpetuate the ‘thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’ (iii.1.62-3)—surprisingly the sole use of the word ‘heir’ throughout the play.

At the very moment Hamlet might have broken free of the ‘nuclear’ family, its ‘contagion’ drags him back, forcing him, as Leviticus expresses it, to uncover his mother's ‘nakedness’ and see what he has exposed (18:7). If the ‘mirror’ held up by the Player Queen was comparatively gentle, ‘I shall set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you’ (iii.4.18-19). Since flesh ‘sullies’ soul, the sexual ambivalence of that ‘inmost part’ is unavoidable. Such is the inescapable perversion of the context that verbal intercourse inevitably enacts a sort of semantic incest: ‘Hamlet’, remarks one commentator, ‘talks sense to his sensuous mother verbally raping her with all the resonant imagery of the play.’⁵⁵ One relishes the ambiguity of ‘sense’. Yet, contrary to Ernest Jones's belief that Shakespeare exhumed his imagery from buried infantile fantasies, the corresponding passages in Belleforest are equally gross.⁵⁶ There Ambleth denounces Geruth as ‘a vile wanton adultresse’ who ‘incestuously’ receives her husband's murderer ‘like a mare that yieldeth her bodie to the horse that hath beaten hir companion awaye’.⁵⁷ Underlying both the impulse to destroy and the impulse to reclaim is the impulse to pull free. Yet in attempting to exorcise kinship, Hamlet merely raises the ghost he would lay—literally and metaphorically. His relationship with Gertrude reaches a satisfactory conclusion only in the last words he directs towards her in the play, indeed in the very last word, ‘wretched Queen, adieu’ (v.2.338).⁵⁸ Clearly associated with this pursuit of liberation is the persistent death-wish which haunts him as surely as does the Ghost. Ironically, it too is a form of ‘consummation’, a promiscuous ‘compounding’ of the flesh ‘with dust, whereto 'tis kin’ (iv.2.5). One recalls Charles's query in As You Like It, ‘where is this young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?’ (i.2.188-9). The very structure of the tragic family enforces the sort of sexual intimacy it is designed to restrain.

Both Hamlet and his forerunners employ ancient vituperative techniques whereby moral turpitude is exposed through the relentless exposition of its sexual symptoms. They must ‘be cruel to be kind’—such is the ‘physic’ of satire, the roots of which run deep into the malady of the satirist himself, the wounded surgeon who plies the steel. Yet to some extent at least the outburst proves cathartic. Hamlet will not allow Gertrude to lay to her soul such ‘flattering unction’ as would ‘but skin and film the ulcerous place, / Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen’ (iii.4.146-51). He undertakes what Sir Philip Sidney regarded as the very function of tragedy ‘that openeth the greatest wounds, and sheweth forth the Ulcers that are covered with Tissue’.⁵⁹ Having urged Hamlet not to ‘taint’ his mind against Gertrude—while making it virtually impossible for him to do otherwise—the Ghost now reappears, urging him to ‘step between her and her fighting soul’ (line 113). Yet forgiveness is mingled with cynicism. Since reformation of ‘nature’ requires mutilation of the ‘heart’—‘throw away the worser part of it’ (line 159)—no total recovery seems possible. It is the supreme irony of the ‘closet’ scene that Gertrude, so often condemned for actions ‘that a man might play’, is exhorted to become a player queen, to ‘assume’ a ‘virtue’ she does not possess (line 162). At last, Hamlet seems resigned to his mother's corruption and that of Mother Nature, a fitting prelude to the graveyard episode and to the transformation of the court itself into a graveyard just one scene later.

Throughout acts four and five Gertrude ‘plays’ a dual role, faithful to Hamlet's confidence, loyal to the villain who is its subject, while Claudius himself, having failed to ‘father’ Hamlet, appropriates Laertes instead. Only in her dying moments does the queen finally choose between husband and son to warn Hamlet of the poisoned ‘union’ lurking in the wine, a perfect emblem for her bond with Claudius, as Hamlet recognises:

Here, thou incestuous, murd'rous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?
Follow my mother.

(v.2.330-2)

This is the first and only time the term ‘incestuous’ is publicly applied to either partner of the royal marriage, and it occurs, significantly, only after Gertrude's death. Hamlet betrays her to herself, but not to her subjects. His final farewell to the ‘wretched Queen’ casts her more as victim than as criminal, poisoned like Old Hamlet and the Danish state by the ‘witchcraft’ of her second husband's ‘wit’. A ‘union’ begun in poison ‘dissolves’ in poison amidst a fitful restoration of relationships to some belated norm. Hamlet and Laertes end as ‘brothers’, the kinship they might have shared had marriage with Ophelia proved possible, a significant development in a tragedy founded upon fratricide but greatly diminished by the second ‘fratricide’ that provokes it. In the concluding moments it is important to Hamlet to believe that heaven has proved ‘ordinant’ in all his affairs, that he has not laboured under the curse of some arbitrary fate, but operated with the aid of ‘special providence’, and the benign father behind it, to eradicate ‘this canker of our nature’ before it came ‘in further evil’ (v.2.69-70).⁶⁰ But the ‘accidental judgments’ and ‘casual slaughters’ of which Horatio proposes to speak defy such sublimation, as do ‘the carnal, bloody and unnatural acts’ which constitute the history of the Danish court. The ‘quarry cries on havoc’ not design, and everything in the play seems calculated to give the lie to Laertes's observation that ‘nature is fine in love’ (iv.5.161).⁶¹ Pervaded by images of self-defeat, of engineers hoist with their own petard, of mistaken purposes fallen upon their inventors' heads, of poisons fatally returning (like incestuous offspring) to their point of origin, of moral coil and spiritual recoil, Hamlet is the ultimate tragedy of family bondage, the quintessence of haunted dust.

KING LEAR: ‘NATURE'S BIAS’

According to Proverbs, ‘he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart’ (11:29). Should any biblical text underlie the structure of King Lear it is surely this. Troubler of his own house, Lear inherits a storm he has himself invoked and is served throughout by a ‘fool’ paradoxically wise-of-heart.⁶² Only upon identifying himself as ‘old and foolish’ does he too manifest a belated potential for similar wisdom.

So far as family relationships are concerned, the opening scene is one of the most embarrassing in the Shakespearean canon. Indeed from Cordelia's viewpoint embarrassment is its theme.⁶³ She is the first to speak in an aside, the first to invite sympathy with a mind in perplexity: ‘What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent’ (i.1.62).⁶⁴ Such familiar asides are more often the hallmark of deception than truth—one might rather have expected either or both of her sisters to betray their natures in similar fashion. Yet a sort of deception is, in fact, in progress. By alerting us to her inner conflict, Cordelia tells us more than she tells Lear. We may feel reassured that her love is ‘more ponderous’ than her tongue, he does not.⁶⁵ Nor can he decently expect to. A father cannot hope to be so intimate with his daughter as to ‘hear’ her asides, forcing the patterns of her thought to echo his desires. Love's reticence is arguably as precious as its language, but Lear's insistence upon verbalising family emotions criminalises Cordelia's silence, traditionally regarded (particularly in matters sexual) as woman's proper eloquence: ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most’ (line 51).⁶⁶ By setting his children in overt emotional—or rather verbal—competition, he distorts the very passion he would elicit, creating the unnatural circumstances in which both utterance and silence produce deception. The conspicuous absence of a mother figure centres the king's entire emotional needs, paternal and sexual, upon the three young women who stand before him, and his ‘darker purpose’ may perhaps be darker than he knows.⁶⁷ In the old chronicle play he remarks, ‘how deare my daughters are unto my soule, / None knowes, but he, that knowes my thoghts and secret deeds’.⁶⁸

Since inheritance is their primary goal, neither Goneril nor Regan have the slightest compunction in acceding to Lear's request. The new climate of verbalised emotion suits them perfectly.⁶⁹ Cordelia's belief that filial love transcends words is for Goneril merely a convenient rhetorical device: ‘Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter … A love that makes breath poor and speech unable’ (i.1.55-60). In the event it is her love that proves ‘unable’ to translate itself into action. Despite her careful use of the words ‘child’ and ‘father’, the tenor of her speech is most unfilial and a succession of critics have commented upon its implicit sexual connotations.⁷⁰ But the romantic imagery degenerates as the play proceeds. Goneril loves her father ‘dearer than eye-sight’. ‘Pluck out his eyes’ (iii.7.5), she advises, à propos of his saviour Gloucester whom the old man later mistakes for ‘blind Cupid’ (iv.6.139).

Because Lear has invited competition, Regan's speech provides a revealing gloss upon the erotic potential of her sister's language: ‘In my true heart / I find she names my very deed of love; / Only she comes too short’ (i.1.70-2). If this ‘deed of love’ is not quite the ‘act of darkness’ condemned by Poor Tom, it certainly suggests it. ‘I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are’ observes the Fool, and the scene seems designed to make the audience marvel too (i.4.189). In the chronicle play Gonorill invites the king to ‘commaund what ever you desire’.⁷¹ Few daughters can, in their husbands' presence, express themselves ‘alone felicitate’ in their father's love, but less important than such protestations is their ready acceptance.⁷² By countenancing the exclusivity of his daughters' remarks, Lear effectively relegates his sons-in-law to a poor second place. When he describes Burgundy and France as ‘great rivals in our youngest daughter's love’—the same daughter he loved ‘most’ and upon whose ‘kind nursery’ he had thought to set his ‘rest’—the precise nature of the rivalry is questionable. ‘The implied relationship’, comments Lynda Boose, ‘is unnatural … effecting a newly incestuous proximity to the daughter, from whom the marriage ritual is designed to detach him’.⁷³

This emotional ambiguity lends force to the precision of Cordelia's response in that she seems to be at pains to avoid an equivalent semantic ambiguity. In Holinshed, where Lear's plan is to award the entire kingdom to the daughter who best pleases him, Cordelia asserts that she loves him as her ‘naturall father’.⁷⁴ In the chronicle play, more pointedly, she tells him to expect ‘what love the child doth owe the father’.⁷⁵ In Shakespeare this is preempted by Goneril's ‘as much as child e'er lov'd, or father found’, a remark which ‘comes too short’ for Regan's tastes. Cordelia's traditional reply is thus debased before she has a chance to make it. Her anxiety is therefore intensified—‘what shall Cordelia speak?’—since Lear demands not merely an expression of affection but, by implication, an expression of greater affection than ‘child’ has ever made or ‘father’ ever received. He anticipates such a unique verbal tribute with obvious relish: ‘what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters?’ (i.1.85-6). Only in direct response to this question does Cordelia answer ‘nothing’ and, given the tenor of her sisters' remarks, nothing is all that can decently be said.⁷⁶ At this point, however, the play confronts a peculiarly paradoxical element in male injunctions to female ‘silence’, an enigmatic virtue wisely tendered only to the emotionally self-assured, a category into which few of Shakespeare's tragic heroes may be said to fit. In fact, female silence often proves less tolerable than female garrulity. Cordelia has the worst of both worlds in saying too little and too much. By emphasising the ‘bond’ between parent and child, she reminds Lear of the ‘natural’ limits of filial affection, of the prohibitions as well as the privileges of kinship, ‘no more, no less’:⁷⁷

You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.

(lines 96-8)⁷⁸

The echo of the marriage service is unmistakable in a play of inverted ceremonies and pious frauds, ‘haunted’, as Stephen Greenblatt says, ‘by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out’.⁷⁹ Lear is being told that a daughter cannot be a substitute wife, that filial love, honour and obedience cannot be translated into their erotic equivalents. She will not permit her prospective husband to be usurped like Cornwall and Albany: ‘That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty’ (101-2). It is important to Lear to secure Cordelia's total affection before she vows allegiance to any other: he will not so much as introduce France or Burgundy until this has occurred. ‘Marriage’, observes Lévi-Strauss, ‘is an arbitration between two loves, parental and conjugal … to intercross they must at least momentarily be joined.’⁸⁰ Lear seeks to exploit this moment of intersection by appropriating exclusive personal rights to Cordelia's emotions before the obligatory public ritual of ‘giving her away’.⁸¹ Her response dashes all such hopes: ‘sure I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all’ (103-4).

This is ‘untender’ only in the sense that the primal directive is untender: ‘therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24).⁸² Many Renaissance commentators would regard Cordelia as allowing too much to filial devotion.⁸³ According to William Gouge, for example, ‘the bond of mariage is more ancient, more firme, more neere … what wrong then doe such parents unto their children, as keepe them, even after they are maried, so strait under subjection, as they cannot freely performe such duty as they ought to their husband, or their wife?’⁸⁴ It was generally felt that the union of man and wife necessitated the division of parent and child. By ignoring the need for such separation, Lear contrives unnatural ‘divisions’ of his own ruinously detrimental to family and state alike. ‘Better is a poor and a wise child’, comments Ecclesiastes, ‘than an old and foolish king, who will no more be admonished’ (4:13). By demanding ‘all’, Lear condemns himself to ‘nothing’: ‘Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity and property of blood’ (i.1.113-14). Even the rejection bespeaks possessiveness.

Commenting upon Lear's ‘darker purpose’, S. L. Goldberg detects ‘a sign of some need in him so voracious that it could never be wholly satisfied’.⁸⁵ Such voraciousness is implicit in his choice of language: he has become a ‘dragon’ and henceforth dragon-like men who ‘gorge’ their ‘appetite’ on their own ‘generation’ shall be ‘as well neighbour'd’ to his affections as his ‘sometime daughter’ (i.1.117-20). The thought association is bizarre, yet incestuous sinners were commonly regarded as ‘feeding’ on their own flesh.⁸⁶ As a man ‘more sinned against than sinning’, however, Lear imagines himself beset by ‘pelican daughters’ thereby degrading an ancient symbol of self-sacrifice into a peculiarly disturbing image of parricide. In the old chronicle play Leir asserts himself ‘as kind as is the Pellican, / That kils it selfe, to save her young ones lives’, but Shakespeare's pelican is not prepared to give his blood, preferring to be fed rather than to feed.⁸⁷ Everything is inverted. As France insinuates, the terms in which Cordelia is rejected for upholding the rule of exogamy are those normally reserved for the incestuous: ‘her offence / Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it, or your fore-vouch'd affection / Fall into taint’ (lines 218-21). ‘Taint not thy mind’, warns Old Hamlet's ghost. The appeal in both cases is to nature, but since the setting is now pagan there exists no supreme guarantor of nature's ultimate benignity.

In a celebrated essay John F. Danby argued for two conflicting theories of nature in King Lear, but in fact there are almost as many conceptions of the natural as there are characters to conceive it.⁸⁸ ‘Allow not nature more than nature needs’, argues the destitute Lear, ‘man's life is cheap as beasts’ (ii.4.268-9). In the immediate context this axiom serves him well, but regarded from the viewpoint of kinship to allow nature more than its ‘needs’ is to precipitate a degeneration to bestiality. Animal imagery pervades a play in which man is no longer creation's ‘paragon’, but merely a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ worse off than most (iii.4.110). He should be able to determine natural law through the use of reason becoming ‘a law unto himself’ in the absence of revelation (Romans 2:16), but Calvinist observers thought otherwise.⁸⁹ ‘The disposition of mankind’, ventured Heinrich Bullinger, ‘being flatly corrupted by sin … knoweth not God … but rather is affected with self-love … and seeketh still for its own advantage.’⁹⁰ From this conflict arose a series of paradoxes whereby virtue and depravity are simultaneously natural and unnatural and some characters function to ‘redeem’ nature from what others regard as its natural state. The play defies explication in terms of Danby's neat dichotomy: ‘nature's above art in that respect’ (iv.6.86).

The protracted debate as to whether King Lear is a Christian or a pagan play has tended to centre upon the redemption or otherwise of the central figures.⁹¹ Poetic justice in the present world, however, was never a Christian tenet, yet many commentators have done to Lear by interpretation what Nahum Tate did by adaptation.⁹² During the course of the play virtually every shade of opinion from materialistic atheism to astral determinism is mooted by one character or other but less as professions of ‘doctrine’ than as expressions of mood. Both Edmund and Edgar need their respective outlooks in order to construe their respective experiences. Indeed the one is a product, or a construct, of the other. The ‘good’ which Edmund means to do ‘despite’ his ‘own nature’ illustrates how shallow his conception of that nature really is. Central to the play's concern is man's desperate need to impose some pattern upon the bewildering vicissitudes of contingency, even if it be no other than the embracing of contingency itself: ‘the wheel is come full circle, I am here’ (v.3.174).

The lesson Lear learns in the storm is profound—for a narcissist. While the flattery of daughters inflates his self-esteem, their contempt induces his self-loathing. As the incestuous overtones of the opening scenes give way to a sense of universal kinship with beggars, the revelation is not so much Christian as practical: we are seldom loved as much as we love ourselves and such affection cannot be purchased from other self-lovers—‘thy half o' th' kingdom hast thou not forgot, / Wherein I thee endow'd’ (ii.4.182-3). ‘With all my worldly goods’, says the bridegroom to his bride, ‘I thee endow.’ Once again the language calls the kinship into question. The subsequent outpouring of vicious anti-feminism in madness—an oblique strategy for simultaneously centralising and distancing the deviant—is such that one might suppose Lear the victim of sexual insult. His daughters' ‘ingratitude’ is insistently evoked through the sort of abusive, scatological imagery more appropriate to a cuckolded husband.⁹³ And the relentless onslaught upon female sexuality continues ultimately to that ‘precious square of sense’, to the ‘forfended place’: ‘there is the sulphurous pit—burning, scalding, / Stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!’ (iv.6.130-1). This has little to do with ingratitude. Lear knows nothing of his daughters' private affairs when he denounces an unspecified ‘simular of virtue’ which is actually ‘incestuous’ (iii.2.54-5)—in fact two are ‘contracted’ to the one man, an incestuous motif Edmund completes when he announces that ‘all three / Now marry in an instant’ (v.3.228-9). Lear's preoccupation with adultery and fornication is partly occasioned by a desperate desire to distance himself from the ‘degenerate bastards’ who have betrayed him, but fascination with his daughters' sexuality precedes the storm, indicating a fatal ambivalence in his view of natural propriety. Thus he invokes ‘Nature’ to render Goneril childless, to make barren her sexual relationship with Albany (i.4.287-8). He would ‘anatomise’ Regan, cut her open to ‘see what breeds about her heart’ (iii.6.77-8).⁹⁴ One way or another he will be intimate with his daughters. As the blinded Gloucester stumbles into ken like the outcast Oedipus, every facet of the play recalls the familial violations of ancient tragedy. The presence of an Antigone figure in both plot and subplot bids fair for Colonus, yet the outcome eschews apotheosis through subtle techniques of structural surprise.

In approaching her reconciliation with Lear, Cordelia attempts to dispel the unnatural atmosphere of the preceding scenes, supplanting the confrontational language employed by her relatives with a form of diction expressive of her own peculiar understanding of the familial ‘bond’. As Lear had stripped her of his benediction (literally his ‘good saying’) she now invites him to extend his blessing anew, a ritual highly valued in Jacobean households where ‘reverence’ was commonly regarded as the bulwark of kinship.⁹⁵ By acknowledging her once more as ‘my child Cordelia’, Lear would seem to have regained his sense of propriety were it not that other matters distract him: ‘Am I in France?’ (iv.7.76). Actually, ‘the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took / Our youngest born’ has never been far from his thoughts (ii.4.214-15). Ironically, however, the daughter who seemed to promise least delivers most. Lear is not in France. Rather, Cordelia has effectively abandoned her husband in her father's interest thereby affording him the ‘kind nursery’ he had sought all along. ‘Have I caught thee?’ (v.3.21), he enquires, and ‘caught’ has an ominous ring: ‘A fox, when one has caught her, / And such a daughter, / Should sure to the slaughter’ (i.4.326-8). Lear speaks as though he had finally lured Cordelia into the sort of total commitment demanded in the opening scene. Once she appears to love him ‘all’ his vision of future bliss excludes all thought of France: ‘We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage … / He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven, / And fire us hence like foxes’ (v.3.9-23). A fox and a daughter indeed. But Cordelia's personal attitude remains constant. Once again she asserts that she is not the first ‘who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst’. Typically she makes no comment upon Lear's idyllic vision of intimate incarceration. Later, as he crouches beside her lifeless body, he discovers to his horror that she persists in saying ‘nothing’. A pathetic inevitability informs his final words: ‘Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!’ (lines 310-11).

It shall, perhaps, remain forever unclear whether Edgar's injunction to ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ endorses or condemns Cordelia's determination to insist upon the obligations of her ‘bond’, ‘no more, no less’—as does Shylock in different circumstances. Somehow such obligation seems at odds with feeling although ‘nature’ pertains to both since there are both ‘natural’ emotions and ‘natural’ laws. Ideally they should not conflict, and yet they do. If Cordelia ‘felt’ other than she said, Edgar's words tell against her. If her ‘heart’ went with her words, as she claims, she spoke what she felt despite some unspecified obligation to speak otherwise. But in what circumstances should we speak what we ‘ought’ to say and not what we feel? By speaking what Lear imagines they ought to say, Goneril and Regan secure full independence. By speaking as she herself thinks fit, Cordelia binds herself to him irrevocably.

In seeking the repose of an offspring's ‘kind nursery’ the parent reverts to childhood and makes such demands as only a child can be forgiven for making: ‘all’ or ‘nothing’.⁹⁶ Commenting upon the reconciliation scene, Victor Hugo detected a ‘profound’ subject, ‘maternity of the daughter towards the father … so admirably rendered by the legend of that Roman girl, who in the depths of a prison nurses her old father. The young breast near the white beard.’⁹⁷ Under such extreme circumstances traditional distinctions between the sacred and the profane tend to collapse, for ‘the art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious’ (iii.2.70-1). During the course of the play Shakespeare conducts an anatomy of parental and filial emotions almost as brutal as that to which Lear would submit Regan. But the ‘cause in nature’ that makes for such hard or yielding hearts remains elusive.

THE ROMANCES: ‘RARE INSTINCT’

Whereas tragic incest unleashes the destructive forces of nature, its ‘romantic’ counterpart endeavours resolution through a sublimation of forbidden desire, an assumption of the temporal and profane into the eternal and sacred frequently symbolised by the intervention of some deus ex machina. Henry VIII fits well into this pattern of providentially political drama which develops suggestions merely adumbrated in the concluding act of Hamlet. Like an El Greco canvas, Shakespearean romance sublimates physical distortion into spiritual vision, dispelling the cynical atmosphere of such ‘city’ comedies as Measure for Measure. In a world order in which ‘our natures do pursue / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane / A thirsty evil’, all relationships partake of perversion (i.2.120-2). Thus Isabella can accuse her brother of ‘a kind of incest’ in seeking ‘to take life’ from his sister's sexual ‘shame’ (iii.1.138-9). In the late romances, however, the imagery is reversed: Pericles joyously ‘takes life’ from Marina without the slightest imputation of guilt.⁹⁸

The contrast is particularly striking since the same father-daughter relationship that preoccupies the final plays lies at the root of Isabella's problem. As Marilyn Williamson remarks, ‘with the ruler's authority based in the family, incest is a terrifying spectre, directly raised in Pericles and hinted at in The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline’.⁹⁹ Since Isabella expects Claudio to act in accordance with family honour, the disappointment calls his legitimacy into question thereby undermining all confidence in genealogy. Furthermore, since the male heir represents the father, it is as though the idealised patriarch himself has attempted to ‘seduce’ her. In Cymbeline the same fear of universal illegitimacy proceeds from suspicion of Imogen's faith: ‘We are all bastards’ (ii.4.154)—but no less than the President of the Immortals assures Posthumus that this is not the case. As a result, the potentially dangerous attraction of ‘Fidele’ to her brothers Arviragus and Guiderius is resolved into proper sibling affection through ‘rare instinct’ (v.5.382), Imogen escapes the clutches of her corrupt stepbrother to marry a man virtually raised as her brother, and Cymbeline reconciles himself to his daughter's independence.¹⁰⁰ Where previously doubt reigned, there is now divinely assured certainty, but the certainty of containment rather than that of triumph. Of all Shakespearean plays Measure for Measure and Cymbeline have perhaps the most overtly contrived conclusions, yet their structural ‘tone’ is quite distinct. As Isabella departs to wed a bogus friar to whom she refers throughout the play as her ‘good father’, crucial questions of motivation and intent remain unanswered.¹⁰¹ We never learn whether her mother ‘play'd her father fair’, nor whether her own much-vaunted chastity served merely to keep all but ‘fatherly’ suitors at bay.

Pericles constitutes the most forthright contribution to the drama of father-daughter incest since the medieval Dux Moraud. Whatever the problems of authorship the extant text is structurally and stylistically coherent: the final act is carefully designed as the thematic obverse of the first, and the gradual progress from damnation to redemption is meticulously executed.¹⁰² The source was a dark fable of incestuous lust enormously popular in European literature. Of the many versions Shakespeare might have consulted, however, the Confessio Amantis must count as the foremost owing to the choric role assigned to Gower.¹⁰³ The eighth book of the Confessio introduces the tale of Apollonius of Tyre in relation to the kinship prohibitions governing marriage. Accounts of Amnon, Lot and Caligula immediately precede it. In the early days of the world, we are told, it was ‘no Sinne / The Soster forto take hire brother’, and in succeeding generations cousins were commonly allied. Subsequent prohibitions reflected the increasing complexity of human society and current church laws restricting marriage to the ‘thridde’ degree take due account of social convenience and the irrational character of sexual desire which, left to its own devices, ‘spareth no condicion / Of ken ne yit religion’.¹⁰⁴

According to Gower's version of events Antiochus forced his daughter into an ‘unkind’ relationship which, through the passage of time and force of habit, came to appear ‘no sinne’ to the participants until it eventually provoked divine retribution with ‘thondre and lyhthnynge’. The rest of the story concentrates not on incest, but on providence, tediously contending that true marriages are made in heaven.¹⁰⁵ By transforming this wandering narrative into a continued fable of familial relationships played out across the turbulent sea of human sexuality, the play elevates Pericles to the mythic status of an emotional Everyman proceeding through courtship, marriage and parenthood to bereavement and old age—his persistent shipwrecks recalling the careers of Ulysses, Jonah and St Paul. In this manner the various episodes of an outrageously improbable fable serve as potent analogues for a series of common psychological states.¹⁰⁶ Indeed the episodic nature of the structure, accentuated by its archaic expositor, seems designed to invite thematic interpretation. Such a procedure is not unique to Pericles. Gower's moralistic, gnomic tone closely resembles that of Barnaby Barnes's ‘Guicchiardine’ who plays a similar role in The Devils Charter (1607), a crude attempt to chronicle the incestuous lives and loves of the House of Borgia. But the contrast is more instructive than the superficial similarity. Barnes produces an exploitative piece of anti-papal propaganda, debasing Bronzino's powerful imagery of incestuous love: after ‘Venus and Cupid … kisse together’ upon the ‘gratious mouth’ of the Pope's catamite the language never quite recovers.¹⁰⁷Pericles, however, is essentially explorative and the Antiochus episode is notable for its restraint. The incestuous relationship is characterised not by gross carnality, but by a peculiarly oppressive, stifling atmosphere of decadent eroticism suggestive of sterility and decay. ‘The Civill Law’, remarks Bishop Lake, ‘calleth it a funestation of a mans selfe, and indeed, the persons are dead in sinnes and trespasses that make such a coniunction.’¹⁰⁸

Pericles's adventure in the court of Antiochus is presented as a bizarre perversion of familiar courtship rituals with the traditional paternal guardian incongruously cast as a rival lover. Lurking beneath the surface is a suggestion of similar, suppressed tensions in all such ordeals as the sexual component of parental love struggles with its own possessiveness.¹⁰⁹ The resulting conflict often expresses itself in an obsessive insistence upon choosing a son-in-law after the father's own image, a preoccupation wittily parodied by Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream (i.1.93-4).¹¹⁰ One wonders how many of Shakespeare's audience anticipated in the final benediction of the midsummer fairies the birth of the notoriously ill-fated Hippolytus and with it the incestuous contamination of the house of Theseus?¹¹¹ Antiochus represents an extreme embodiment of the ‘Egeus complex’ and, allowing for differences of era and circumstance, his characterisation is remarkably consistent with the modern psychological profile: insecure, tyrannical, brooding and pathologically jealous.¹¹² As in many well-documented case studies, the daughter's attitude is strangely ambivalent. Whereas she seems to acquiesce in her father's demands there are contrary indications that she might welcome release: ‘of all, 'say'd yet, may'st thou prove prosperous!’ (i.1.60).¹¹³ Notable also is the absence of the mother figure whose role she has supplanted or usurped: ‘I am no viper, yet I feed / On mother's flesh which did me breed’ (lines 65-6). Because father and mother are ‘one flesh’, as Hamlet maintains, the princess becomes ‘an eater of her mother's flesh, / By the defiling of her parent's bed’ (lines 131-2).¹¹⁴ Father-daughter incest commonly occurs in families where the mother is dead, absent or abnormally passive. …¹¹⁵

The intense dramatic economy of the first scene, by contrast with the flaccid exposition of the source material, lends to the entire episode an enigmatic quality that only the language of a riddle can adequately capture. Apparently exclusive social categories coalesce: the princess is ‘daughter’ and ‘bride’ to the one man; the prince who would be ‘son to great Antiochus’ finds himself preempted by his prospective father-in-law (i.1.27). Hyperbolic images of beauty prove upon closer inspection to be images of corruption: plucking the ‘golden fruit’ of the ‘fair Hesperides’ entails a fall equivalent to that in Genesis, where the primary law of kinship was universally held to originate (lines 28-9). This being the case, the dramatist has subtly refused to name either Antiochus's wife or daughter thereby forcing us to refer to them through the very relationships the crime violates. The semantic distortions of the riddle correspond to the emotional distortions of the family. Although the association between riddles and incest is ancient their functions vary considerably.¹¹⁶ In folklore generally, the solving of a riddle secures salvation through the resolution of apparently incomprehensible material into common sense. Thus the riddle may function as a guarantor of providential design.¹¹⁷ In the present instance, however, even this expectation is reversed. Because the family is incestuous, the suitor cannot win the lady in the normal way. Not to solve the riddle entails death, but solving it incurs the same penalty.

What the riddle reveals line by line is not the fact of incest—which is transparent—but its nature. In all other versions of the legend, the ‘I’ of the puzzle refers to the father.¹¹⁸ Its displacement would appear to shift responsibility from the parent to the child—‘I sought a husband, in which labour / I found that kindness in a father’ (i.1.67-8)—but actually succeeds in exposing the resulting ‘kindness’ for the ‘unkind’ abuse that it is.¹¹⁹ Antiochus has perverted his daughter's natural desire for sexual experience by appropriating it to personal use.¹²⁰ There results a chaotic confusion of motives and identities which threatens to confound the entire social order: ‘He's father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child’ (lines 69-70). The effect is all the more disturbing in that the choice of vocabulary evokes parodic reminiscence of the miraculous relationships obtaining within the holy family—‘mild’, for example, is a common epithet of both the Virgin and her son. One medieval lyric celebrates her status as ‘spouse of the great creator, sister, dower and daughter, parent of her father, daughter of her son’. Another rejoices in the ‘marvel’ (‘prodigium’) whereby ‘the Father transforms His daughter into His mother’.¹²¹ The topos continues into Renaissance verse, supplying the invocation to the Virgin in Donne's ‘Annunciation’ as ‘Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother’ (line 12). In the family of Antiochus, marvel (‘prodigium’) has degenerated into monstrosity (‘monstrum’). William Herbert's ‘Orison to the Virgin’ illustrates the spiritual riddle underlying the carnal obscenity:

Thou wommon boute fere,
Thine owne fader bere,
          Gret wonder this was,
That on wommon was moder,
To fader and hire brother,
          So never other nas.(122)

Rosemary Woolf aptly comments that ‘people in the Middle Ages were far more sensitive to the absolute quality of the family hierarchy than we are, and therefore less likely to consider some inversion of it merely grotesque or quaint’.¹²³ The riddle in Pericles constitutes a demonic inversion of a conceit applicable to one sublime family and to that alone. It debases the sacred while distorting the secular.

To modern sensibilities the implied equivalence of son and son-in-law in the riddle seems forced, but the Renaissance view was quite contrary: ‘whereas we call persons fathers-in-Law, mothers-in-Law, and so brothers and sisters, we must not understand it of meere positive Law, but it is a secondarie Law of nature, unalterable, saving onely by God … and affinitie doth in some sort equall consanguinitie, as grafted branches doe those that are naturall.’¹²⁴ Pericles himself understands the point well: ‘you're both a father and a son, / By your uncomely claspings with your child’ (i.1.128-9).¹²⁵ By similar inference the princess has become her father's ‘mother-in-law’. The notion is, of course, absurd but the absurdity is the point.¹²⁶ From ancient times such genealogical topoi have been employed to illustrate the social inanity of incest, the emotional and sexual solipsism of infolding the family upon itself. But as in King Lear, a still darker purpose underlies the confounding of mother, wife and child: a demand that the daughter be a substitute mother as well as a substitute spouse.¹²⁷ The worst form of filial ‘maternity’—a most ‘unkind’ nursery—is demonstrated in the nameless princess, the best in Cordelia and Marina. ‘And yet his child’: the last twist of the problem strikes its most tragic note by suggesting the endurance of basic kinship patterns underlying all the confusion. How such a situation ‘may be’ is never explained; the rest of the play concentrates on how best it may be avoided (through the good offices of Diana) as Pericles progresses from the barren, incestuous house of Antiochus to the hospitable, exogamous house of Simonides.¹²⁸

If the princess has a name that name is incest—the word that ‘resolves’ the riddle, traditionally ‘unspeakable’ and appropriately left unspoken—and in desiring her Pericles unwittingly desires what she symbolises. In retrospect it becomes clear that much of her fascination resides in the mystery that surrounds her. Hers is the sin that dare not speak its name: the severed heads of her former suitors surround her ‘with speechless tongues and semblance pale’ (i.1.37). Pericles's ‘inflam'd desire … / To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree’ (lines 21-2) involves a revelation of evil so corrosive as to contaminate its discoverer. After such knowledge there can be little innocence. A ‘dull-ey'd melancholy’ (i.2.3) settles on Pericles's thoughts, ‘doubting lest he had err'd or sinn'd’ (i.3.21).¹²⁹ Like Hamlet before him, he has discovered incestuous corruption at the very heart of the family, an ‘unweeded garden’ in place of Eden. To the extent that he has loved something horrible and ‘could still’ but for the knowledge of such horror, his desire has polluted him (ii.1.77). Even at this late stage Antiochus must warn him to ‘touch not, upon thy life’ (line 88), an intervention which preserves him from the heavenly fire which ‘shrivels up’ both father and daughter ‘even to loathing’ (ii.4.9-10). ‘You would thinke’, remarks Bishop Lake, ‘that the case of the one were more favourable then the other … The daughter may plead the power which her father had over her … but this is no Plea at Gods barre.’¹³⁰

Marilyn French suggests that ‘the entire movement of the play is a flight from the implications of the first scene’, but the opposite is the case.¹³¹ By persistently focussing upon father-daughter relationships the play repeatedly returns us to the implications of the first scene, relentlessly confronting us with a series of potentially incestuous situations. In Gower, for example, Simonides has a wife whose advice he seeks in arranging his daughter's marriage.¹³² In Pericles the mother figure is excluded in order to reproduce at Pentapolis the familial order obtaining at Antioch. Yet where Antiochus fails Simonides succeeds. Following his recent experience Pericles has every reason to dread ‘the kings subtlety’, particularly as Simonides plays the heavy father in order to protect Thaisa.¹³³ Significantly, however, news of Antiochus's death is interposed between the two courtship scenes at Pentapolis (ii.4), thereby implying that the riddle of Antioch is truly ‘resolved’ here. The ‘pleasure’ Simonides takes in Thaisa is entirely licit. Her marriage, he asserts, ‘pleaseth’ him so well ‘that I will see you wed; / And then, with what haste you can, get you to bed’ (ii.5.91-2).

Simonides's generosity elevates Pericles from the role of son to that of father, from which point onwards the problem of letting go becomes his own.¹³⁴ In Gower, Thaisa is Pericles's daughter not his wife, and the transposition of the name indicates the potential insecurity of the emotion. The romantic plot exacerbates the danger by confronting Pericles with an unknown daughter whose name encodes the ‘riddle’ of her existence, not born ‘of any shores / Yet … mortally brought forth’ (v.1.103-4). Once again the mother figure is marginalised since Thaisa renounces sexuality even as Marina reaches sexual maturity. Although separated from her father for most of the play, Marina's subsequent history reflects upon their relationship.¹³⁵ Pericles establishes this association himself when he declares that his hair shall remain ‘unscissor'd’ ‘till she be married’ (iii.3.27-9). The more ambiguous phrasing supplied by George Wilkins highlights the potential innuendo of the remark: ‘vowing solemnely … his head should grow uncisserd … till he had married his daughter at ripe years’.¹³⁶ Not surprisingly, the listeners are perplexed at ‘so strange a resolve’. When father and daughter finally meet at Mytilene all the conventional conditions for fatal union seem to apply.

During the intervening period, however, Marina has developed an independent moral character. Unlike Antiochus's daughter she cannot be ‘provoked’ into sin because she has already resisted a series of ‘father’ figures including the country's governor (1 Chorus 26). Instead of precipitating incestuous desire her resemblance to Thaisa prompts enquiry into her parentage, and her penchant for plain speaking dispels the studied mystification of the first scene. Thus her simple expression of identity—an act impossible at Antioch—‘resolves’ the central riddle of the plot: ‘My name is Marina’ (v.1.142). In so doing it achieves a complete sublimation of the darker tendencies apparent throughout the play: ‘O, come hither, / Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget’ (lines 194-5).¹³⁷ The paradox is carefully crafted in the light of the earlier riddle to indicate a return from ‘monstrum’ to ‘prodigium’. In The Sarum Missal, for example, the Virgin is exalted as ‘You, who, to the astonishment of nature, did give birth to your holy father.’¹³⁸ If Antiochus's daughter is intended as a parody of the Virgin, Marina serves as her redemptive analogue, a role frequently assigned to virgin daughters in the late plays. Like the nameless princess Marina too is both ‘mother’ and ‘child’, but will never become the ‘wife’ who mediates between them: in the very scene of reunion she is consigned to Lysimachus. Whereas Pericles had abandoned his first love as a ‘fair viol … play'd upon’ before her time (i.1.82-5), he now hears the music of the spheres betokening a re-establishment of traditional order (v.1.230-3). As in The Winter's Tale, the reward for honouring the daughter is rediscovering the wife, presumably implying that paternal self-discipline safeguards marital union. Or, put another way, reconciliation with the wife, and the advancing years reflected in her face, ensures renunciation of the daughter. Whereas the exclusion of a mother figure is a notable feature of tragedies such as King Lear, the heroes of all four late romances either reunite with lost wives (Pericles and The Winter's Tale) or find ‘motherly’ instincts within themselves (Cymbeline and The Tempest): Cymbeline wonders to find himself ‘a mother to the birth of three’ (v.5.370) and Prospero conjures the archetypal matriarchal figures of Juno and Ceres out of his own dark imagination (iv.1.73-117).¹³⁹ The result for Pericles is that the strange ceremony of bondage undertaken at Tharsus can finally be undone: ‘and what this fourteen years no razor touch'd / To grace thy marriage-day I'll beautify’ (v.3.75-6). Gower can justly conclude the play by contrasting the vice of Antiochus with the virtue of Pericles, but their perilous association doubtless lingers in the minds of the audience. Like romance itself, ‘natural’ instinct is a precarious artificial construct. Racial exogamy is itself deemed unnatural in Othello (i.3.60-4), and the fates of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida reflect the manifold perils of ‘marrying out’.

The process of attempted sublimation is clearer still in The Winter's Tale which deftly avoids the incestuous tragedy of its source while at the same time exploring its familial implications.¹⁴⁰ With Perdita cast as an exposed foundling destined to return home in accordance with the Delphic Oracle, reminiscence of the Oedipus legend is inescapable. The taut, interlocking structure of the first three acts, in which Leontes conducts a relentless investigation into the affairs of his own family, seems designed to infuse the structural subtext of Oedipus Tyrannus into that of the Shakespearean play. Because Leontes and Polixenes consider themselves ‘brothers’ rather than merely friends, having been ‘trained together in their childhoods’ (i.1.22), the taint of incest hangs over the drama from the outset.¹⁴¹ As has often been observed, perceived relationships can have deeper psychological implications than actual genealogical ties. Leontes's jealousy is greatly exacerbated by the supposed stigma of fraternal betrayal and the pollution it implies. Thus ‘to mingle friendship far, is mingling bloods’ (i.2.109). The resemblance between Hermione and Katherine of Aragon is far from coincidental. Both queens must defend themselves against allegations of intimacy with their husband's ‘brother’ even though circumstances of state have forced such relationships upon them: ‘How thou lov'st us, show in our brother's welcome’ (line 174). Only at the end of the play does Leontes overcome this Henrician obsession (as Henry reversed his own opinion to legitimise Mary) by acknowledging the innocence of both parties: ‘look upon my brother: both your pardons, / That e'er I put between your holy looks / My ill suspicion’ (v.3.147-9). The overall structure of the play gestures towards that of Oedipus at Colonus.

In Pandosto the returned foundling excites the sexual interest of her father who, ‘being about the age of fifty, had, notwithstanding, young and fresh affections’. ‘Broiling at the heat of unlawful lust’, he even contemplates rape. Upon learning the girl's true identity, however, and realising too late that ‘contrary to the law of nature he had lusted after his own daughter’, he commits suicide thereby ‘closing up the comedy with a tragical stratagem’.¹⁴² Shakespeare's adaptation is far more subtle. Leontes too recognises the resemblance between Perdita and Hermione and even alarms Paulina by jesting of the ensuing attraction (v.1.222-7).¹⁴³ Yet the lesson of earlier acts alerts him to potential danger. In Florizel he sees again his lost ‘brother’ Polixenes and will not perpetrate against the son the very crime of which he had falsely accused the father (lines 125-9). As a result, the Oracle is fulfilled in a manner quite contrary to the Oedipal implications of the fable articulated in the source. Like Pericles, Leontes gives away his daughter almost in the very moment of reunion and is similarly rewarded. The two friends become fathers to each other's offspring not through ‘incest’ or adultery, but through the ‘mingling of bloods’ occasioned by affinity—through the very process of ‘grafting’ which Polixenes defends and Bishop Lake endorses (iv.4.92-7).¹⁴⁴ The confusion of genealogy which bedevils the House of Antiochus is supplanted by a tense comedy of ‘preposterously’ integrated kinship (v.2.139-48).¹⁴⁵

Regarded from the viewpoint of Antiochus and his daughter, Prospero and Miranda represent the apparent transcendence of incestuous desire in circumstances which might well have promoted it. Unlike their counterparts in other plays, they never suffer separation but are rather forced unnaturally together. Apart from Caliban, Prospero is the only man Miranda can remember seeing, and she is the sole companion of his exile. His influence over her is greater than that of any other Shakespearean father and he could, if he so wished, bend her will to his. Instead, he intends her for Ferdinand should her own desires comply. Indicative of his attitude is his opposition to Caliban's animal lust:

                                                                                                    I have us'd thee,
Filth as thou art, with human care; and log'd thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.

(i.2.347-50)

In so far as Caliban represents a central facet of human nature, his restraint denotes a victory over Prospero's personal appetites: ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (v.1.275-6). The line-break is noteworthy: ‘this thing of darkness, I’ is an acknowledgement all human beings must sometimes make.¹⁴⁶ One recalls the description of Antiochus, ‘black as incest’ (i.2.76). It is Prospero who shares a ‘cell’ with Miranda, the ‘nonpareil’ of feminine beauty, and Prospero alone who could attract her.¹⁴⁷ His insistence upon her physical charms coupled with his treatment of Ferdinand evoke disturbing memories of Antioch before resolving into the genial tones of Pentapolis. Nowhere is the ‘arbitration’ between parental and erotic love so finely handled.¹⁴⁸ Thus Prospero can move from speaking of Miranda in exclusive terms as ‘my dear one’ (i.2.17) to the intermediate state of ‘his and mine lov'd darling’ (iii.3.93) and finally to the resignation of ‘she is thine own’ (iv.1.32). This is not to deny that her marriage serves his purposes, but rather to recognise in those purposes a generosity of spirit unusual in one so powerful and so wronged. In this manner The Tempest, amongst many other achievements, provides through an act of generosity the ultimate resolution to the tortured father-daughter relationships dominating King Lear, Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale: ‘Be free, and fare thou well!’ (v.1.318). But freedom is itself so akin to bondage that it remains unclear whether incest is a mere digression in the great romance of the western family or an essential expression of its emotional structure.

The distinctive quality of Shakespeare's use of the incest motif is its restraint and subtlety, its perception of private sexual undertones in the public rhetoric of family and state, its detection of the inevitable compromises exogamy makes with incest and, on a wider scale, ‘natural’ order with all sorts of forbidden desire. In Pericles incest is ‘vile’ but the art of our emotional necessities is strange enough to make vile things ‘precious’. By exploring various configurations of family bonding (father-daughter, brother-sister or mother-son) deftly counterpointed against appropriate mythical subtexts, Shakespeare achieves the release of Renaissance tragedy from filial bondage to its own classical progenitors and prototypes. In the final analysis the paradigms of Oedipus, Orestes, Antigone and the rest are inadequate to the circumstances of Hamlet, Leontes and Cordelia. The tragic Shakespearean family, unlike its ancient analogues, meets its fate in the conflicting forces of its own emotional bonding rather than the operations of hostile gods. Activating the fragile faultlines of those relationships, the recurrent problem of incestuous desire threatens the foundations of the entire social edifice. The comforting didacticism of earlier tragedy is no longer operative since it presumed an agreed definition of, and acquiescence in, ‘natural’ values. The marginal must now be subsumed into the central; some things of darkness must be acknowledged ours.

Notes

1. Certain Sermons Appointed by the Queen's Majesty, edited by G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, 1850), pp. 570-2.

2. Andromache, lines 170-7.

3. 3 Henry VI (ii.5.55-102).

4. All quotations are from King Richard III, edited by Anthony Hammond (London, 1981).

5. Richmond is the spiritual heir foretold by the saintly Henry VI. See 3 Henry VI, iv.6.65-76; Richard III, iv.2.94-7.

6. The reading ‘I and I’ is also possible. See Richard III, edited by Hammond, p. 340. Coriolanus too determines to defy ‘instinct’ and ‘stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin’ (v.3.34-7).

7. See Henry A. Kelly, ‘Canonical Implications of Richard III's Plan to Marry his Niece’, Traditio, 23 (1967), 269-311.

8. The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (London, 1548/50), ‘Richard the Thirde’, fol. xlix^r.

9. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1807-8), iii (1807), p. 429.

10. See The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, edited by M. D. Faber (New York, 1970), pp. 341-2, 350-2.

11. Union of the Two Noble Famelies, ‘Richard the Thirde’, fol. lvi^r.

12. See S. T., iiia (Supp.) 54.4.

13. Holinshed, Chronicles, iii, pp. 447-8.

14. See above, p. 51.

15. Popular moralists such as Thomas Beard regarded the break with Rome as a divine judgement on the dispensation. The Theatre of Gods Iudgements (London, 1597), p. 330.

16. Union of the Two Noble Famelies, ‘Henry the Eyght’, fol. cic^v.

17. All quotations are from King Henry VIII, edited by R. A. Foakes (London, 1968: first pub. 1957). Even those who originally opposed the match accepted the dispensation. See Henry A. Kelly, The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII (Stanford, 1976), p. 30.

18. On Henry's conscience see Holinshed, Chronicles, iii, pp. 736, 738, 766-7.

19. Leviticus 20:21. See Holinshed, Chronicles, iii, p. 738.

20. Essays, translated by John Florio, edited by L. C. Harmer, 3 vols. (London, 1965: first pub. 1910), ii, p. 296.

21. All quotations are from Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins (London, 1982).

22. John Lyly, Mother Bombie (iii.1.20-2).

23. Bertram Joseph, Conscience and the King: A Study of ‘Hamlet’ (London, 1953), pp. 45-9, 93-100; Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 77-82, 162-6.

24. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, edited by Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London, 1957-75), vii (1973), pp. 145-6.

25. Sir Israel Gollancz, The Sources of ‘Hamlet’ with Essay on the Legend (London, 1926), p. 139. Hereafter Gollancz.

26. Ibid., p. 189.

27. The Comedy of Errors, ii.2.142-4. See also iii.2.1-28. In Julius Caesar Portia reminds Brutus of ‘that great vow / Which did incorporate and make us one’ (ii.1.272-3).

28. For the monarch's mystical union with the state see William Camden, Annales or, The History of the most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth, translated by R. Norton (London, 1635), p. 16. Other critics deny a political aspect to the incest. See Naseeb Shaheen, ‘The Incest Theme in Hamlet’, NQ [Notes and Queries] n.s., 32 (1985), 51. See also E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘The Politics in Hamlet and “The World of the Play”’, in ‘Hamlet’, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 5 (1963), pp. 129-47.

29. John Hunt, ‘A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in Hamlet’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 39 (1988), 27-44. For the thematic significance of ‘jointress’ see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987), pp. 119-20.

30. See H. D. F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama: A Study of Six Greek Plays and of ‘Hamlet’ (London, 1964: first pub. 1956), pp. 253-6.

31. See J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (Cambridge, 1935), p. 307.

32. Robert Speaight, Nature in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1955), p. 38.

33. See Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (Cambridge, 1943), pp. 50, 94-107.

34. For theatrical ‘exorcisms’ see Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 1988), pp. 94-128.

35. Calvin made individual conscience the primary guide to natural law. See John T. McNeill, ‘Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers’, The Journal of Religion, 26 (1946), 168-82 (180, 182).

36. Gordon Leff, Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham (London, 1959: first pub. 1958), p. 285.

37. The Interlude of Vice (Horestes) 1567, edited by Daniel Seltzer (Oxford, 1962), sigs. b4^r-c1^r. See Geoffrey Bush, Shakespeare and the Natural Condition (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 113-15.

38. For the sceptical background of the play see John Owen, The Five Great Sceptical Dramas of History (London, 1896), pp. 279-348; Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare's Scepticism (Brighton, 1987), pp. 95-125.

39. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 360-74, 678-84.

40. Bishop Arthur Lake, Sermons with Some Religious Meditations (London, 1629), part 2, p. 13.

41. Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500 to 1800, translated by Ernest Barker, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1934), i, p. xxxviii.

42. Gollancz, p. 189.

43. See above, pp. 52-5.

44. This paragraph is particularly indebted to Jason P. Rosenblatt, ‘Aspects of the Incest Problem in Hamlet’, SQ 29 (1978), 349-64.

45. Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘“The Place of a Brother” in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form’, SQ 32 (1981), 28-54 (37).

46. The Fawn, ii.1.173-83; iv.1.23-89. See above, pp. 144-7.

47. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, 1984: first pub. 1976), p. 124.

48. For Oedipus see Adrian Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (Oxford, 1987), pp. 113-25. For Orestes see Frederick Wertham, ‘The Matricidal Impulse: Critique of Freud's Interpretation of Hamlet’, in Faber, ed., The Design Within, pp. 111-20.

49. See Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London, 1982: first pub. 1964), pp. 110-20.

50. For the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet see The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud, 24 vols. (London, 1953-73), i, pp. 265-6; iv, pp. 261-6; vii, pp. 309-10; Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (London, 1949), pp. 45-100. For more recent developments in post-Freudian psychology see Walter N. King, Hamlet's Search for Meaning (Athens, Georgia, 1982), pp. 100-34. For excellent analyses of the limitations of such theories see F. L. Lucas, Literature and Psychology (London, 1951), pp. 37-53; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (London, 1951), pp. 34-57.

51. ‘Nero’ and Other Plays, edited by Herbert P. Horne et al. (London, 1888), pp. 30. For the political significance of Nero see Martin Butler, ‘Romans in Britain: The Roman Actor and the Early Stuart Classical Play’, in Douglas Howard, ed., Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 139-70 (pp. 146-8).

52. Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, translated by A. Baillot (London, 1864), p. 199.

53. David Leverenz, ‘The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Approaches, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 110-28 (p. 111).

54. See Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (London, 1983: first pub. 1981), pp. 153-8.

55. Joel Fineman, ‘Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles’, in Representing Shakespeare, edited by Schwartz and Kahn, pp. 70-109 (p. 90).

56. Psychological interpretations invariably decline into hypothetical analyses of Shakespeare's own psychology. See Avi Erlich, Hamlet's Absent Father (Princeton, 1977), pp. 13-18.

57. Gollancz, p. 211.

58. Janet Adelman claims that Hamlet ends ‘securely possessed’ of Gertrude as ‘an internal good mother’. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York, 1992), p. 34. My own view is less sanguine.

59. For catharsis see Peter Alexander, Hamlet, Father and Son (Oxford, 1955), pp. 74-6, 82-7, 113. For Sidney see Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), i, p. 177.

60. For the importance of this concept see Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, edited by Philip Edwards (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 56-8.

61. For general and special providence in Hamlet see Joseph, Conscience and the King, pp. 136-60.

62. See Enid Welsford, The Fool (London, 1935), pp. 253-70.

63. See Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 58-68.

64. All quotations are from King Lear, edited by Kenneth Muir (London, 1964: first pub. 1952).

65. See L. C. Knights, ‘King Lear’, in Shakespeare Criticism 1935-1960, edited by Anne Ridler (Oxford, 1963), pp. 255-89 (pp. 264-5, 280).

66. For the female virtue of silence see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985), pp. 179-80; Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 18, 54; Carol Cook, ‘“The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor”: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado About Nothing’, PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] (1986), 186-202 (190-3). John Bayley observes that ‘the off-key note of everything human in Lear comes from the primal violation of family silence’, Shakespeare and Tragedy (London, 1981), p. 27.

67. See Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 33-49; Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of ‘King Lear’ (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 50-65, 132-3, 191-2, 220-1, 273-4, 287-300.

68. King Lear, edited by Muir, p. 221.

69. For the inheritance issue see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (London, 1984), p. 199. Lear's actions contravene conventional Jacobean wisdom. See Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700 (London, 1984), pp. 189-90, 195.

70. Goneril's protestations far exceed filial ‘reverence’ for which see William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), pp. 431-6.

71. King Lear, edited by Muir, p. 222.

72. See Lucas, Literature and Psychology, pp. 63-6.

73. Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare’, PMLA 97 (1982), 325-47 (334).

74. Holinshed, Chronicles, i, p. 447.

75. King Lear, edited by Muir, p. 223.

76. See Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton, 1983), pp. 108-10.

77. For the family ‘bond’ see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London, 1977), p. 183.

78. In The Phoenix, Middleton's heroine seeks to restrain her incestuous uncle by asserting ‘in that love which becomes you best I love you’ (ii.3.46). For competing senses of affection and self-sacrifice in ‘love’ see Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 154.

79. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 119. For inversions of the marriage ritual see Boose, ‘The Father and the Bride’, 332-5; C. L. Barber, ‘The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness’, in Representing Shakespeare, edited by Schwartz and Kahn, pp. 188-202 (pp. 197-8).

80. Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham (Boston, 1969), p. 489.

81. For the father-daughter relationship see Houlbrooke, The English Family, pp. 185-7.

82. The text gained additional authority from triple repetition in the New Testament: Matthew 19:5; Mark 10:7; Ephesians 5:31.

83. See Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 182-3; Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, translated by Richard Southern (Cambridge, 1979), p. 166.

84. Of Domesticall Duties, p. 113.

85. An Essay on ‘King Lear’ (Cambridge, 1974), p. 18.

86. Jack Goody, ed., Kinship (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 68. For the image of the barbarous Scythian see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, p. 69.

87. King Lear, edited by Muir, p. 226.

88. Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, 1961: first pub. 1948), pp. 20-53. See Bush, Shakespeare and the Natural Condition, pp. 17, 75, 95-8, 118.

89. In Troilus and Cressida Hector enunciates the law of nature in respect of marital duty only to act otherwise (ii.2.174-94).

90. The Decades of Henry Bullinger, translated by H. I., 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1849-52), i (1849), pp. 193-209 (p. 194). Bullinger relates the etymology of ‘incest’ to ‘cestus’, the ‘marriage-girdle’, and gives the German equivalent as bloutschand, ‘corrupting or defiling our own blood or kindred’ (p. 417).

91. For the best discussion see William R. Elton, ‘King Lear’ and the Gods (Kentucky, 1988: first pub. 1966). See also Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 116-28.

92. See, for example, Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and its Christian Premises (Bloomington, 1969), pp. 269-302.

93. See Mark Kanzer, ‘Imagery in King Lear’, in Faber, ed., The Design Within, pp. 219-31 (p. 223).

94. For the uses of ‘anatomization’ see Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), p. 10.

95. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, pp. 437-9; Houlbrooke, The English Family, p. 145.

96. See Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford, 1971), pp. 382-415 (p. 388).

97. William Shakespeare, p. 209.

98. See Barbara Melchiori, ‘Still Harping on my Daughter’, English Miscellany, ii (1960), 59-74 (62-3).

99. Marilyn L. Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit, 1986), p. 113.

100. See Judiana Lawrence, ‘Natural Bonds and Artistic Coherence in the Ending of Cymbeline’, SQ 35 (1984), 440-60 (447).

101. See Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: ‘Measure for Measure’, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford, 1988), pp. 139-71.

102. See G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London, 1965: first pub. 1967), pp. 32-3, 74-5; Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1965), pp. 38-9.

103. All quotations are from Pericles, edited by F. D. Hoeniger (London, 1963), pp. xiii-xxiii.

104. The English Works of John Gower, edited by G. C. Macaulay, EETS [Early English Text Society], ES, 81-2, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1900), ii, pp. 388, 390.

105. Works, ii, pp. 395, 413, 440.

106. For a structuralist analysis see Phyllis Gorfain, ‘Puzzle and Artiface: The Riddle as Metapoetry in Pericles’, SS [Shakespeare Survey], 29 (1976), 11-20. See also Roger D. Abrahams, ‘The Literary Study of the Riddle’, TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language], 14 (1972), 179-97.

107. The Divil's Charter: A Tragedie, edited by R. B. McKerrow (London, 1904), p. 35.

108. Sermons, part 2, p. 37.

109. See D. W. Harding, ‘Shakespeare's Final View of Women: Father and Daughter in Shakespeare's Last Plays’, TLS [Times Literary Supplement] (30 November, 1979), pp. 59-61.

110. See Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 180-93; Mark Taylor, Shakespeare's Darker Purpose: A Question of Incest (New York, 1982), pp. 84-119.

111. Louis A. Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, edited by Ferguson et al., pp. 65-87 (p. 77).

112. See Karin C. Meiselman, Incest (London, 1979), pp. 90, 91, 96, 145, 149, 158, 159, 216; Herbert Maisch, Incest, translated by Colin Bearne (London, 1973), p. 61.

113. In George Wilkins's version the princess wants Pericles to succeed. The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, edited by Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, 1953), p. 17.

114. In Gower the father is the cannibal, Works, edited by Macaulay, ii, p. 394. See Goody, Kinship, p. 68.

115. Meiselman, Incest, pp. 108, 116-17. Bishop Lake emphasises the enormity of the crime against the mother, Sermons, part 2, p. 37.

116. See Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore, 1985), p. 35.

117. Gorfain, ‘Puzzle and Artiface’, 17.

118. P. Goolden, ‘Antiochus's Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare’, RES, 5-6 (1954-5), 245-51.

119. Richard Hooker asserts the moral culpability of the father in all such cases. Works, edited by John Keble, seventh edition, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1888), i, p. 238. For contemporary instances see Paul Hair, ed., Before the Bawdy Court (London, 1972), p. 189; F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), p. 37.

120. In Wilkins's version the daughter is raped. The Painfull Adventures, edited by Muir, pp. 10-12.

121. ‘Summi sponsa creatoris, / Soror, dos et filia, / Parens patris, nata prolis.’ For this text and topos see Medieval English Lyrics, edited by R. T. Davies (London, 1963), p. 319; ‘Convertit genitor in matrem filiam’, in The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes, edited by Thomas Wright (London, 1841), p. 192. I am indebted to Professor John Scattergood for calling this material to my attention.

122. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, edited by Carleton Brown, second edition, revised by G. V. Smithers (Oxford, 1952), pp. 18-19.

123. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), p. 133.

124. Bishop Lake, Sermons, part 2, p. 35.

125. Compare Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures, edited by Muir, p. 19.

126. Goolden, ‘Antiochus's Riddle’, p. 245.

127. Meiselman, Incest, pp. 86-7; Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 212-13.

128. See John F. Danby, ‘Pericles, Arcadia, and the Scheme of Romance’, in Shakespeare's Later Comedies, edited by D. J. Palmer (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 175-95 (p. 191).

129. See Knight, Crown of Life, pp. 38, 40. For Pericles's guilt or pollution see also G. A. Barker, ‘Themes and Variations in Pericles’, in Shakespeare's Later Comedies, edited by Palmer, pp. 196-215 (pp. 210-11). For a different perspective see John P. Cutts, ‘Pericles’ “Downright Violence”’, Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 275-93.

130. Sermons, part 2, p. 37.

131. Shakespeare's Division of Experience, p. 294.

132. Works, edited by Macaulay, ii, pp. 404, 407, 411.

133. See Danby in Shakespeare's Later Comedies, edited by Palmer, p. 182.

134. Echoes of King Lear are insistent. See ii.1.1-11, 59-62, 71-7; iii.1.22-7; iii.2.5-6; v.1.35-43, etc.

135. C. L. Barber detects in Dionyza's treatment of Marina ‘the possibility of a mother's destructive jealousy of a daughter’. ‘“Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget”: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter's Tale’, SS, 22 (1969), 59-67 (63).

136. The Painfull Adventures, p. 68.

137. See Boose, ‘The Father and the Bride’, 340.

138. The Sarum Missal, edited by J. Wickham Legg (Oxford, 1916), p. 172. The translation is that of Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, p. 131.

139. See David Sundelson, ‘So Rare a Wonder'd Father: Prospero's Tempest’, in Representing Shakespeare, edited by Schwartz and Kahn, pp. 33-53 (pp. 39-40); Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero's Wife’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, edited by Ferguson et al., pp. 50-64 (pp. 54-5, 61).

140. Taylor, Shakespeare's Darker Purpose, pp. 24-48.

141. For the same detail in Pandosto see The Winter's Tale, edited by J. H. P. Pafford (London, 1966: first pub. 1963), p. 185. All quotations are from this edition. For the theme of brotherhood see Peter B. Erickson, ‘Patriarchal Structures in The Winter's Tale’, PMLA, 97 (1982), 819-29 (823-4).

142. The Winter's Tale, edited by Pafford, p. 225.

143. See Georgiana Ziegler, ‘Parents, Daughters, and “That Rare Italian Master”: A New Source for The Winter's Tale’, SQ 36 (1985), 204-12.

144. Sermons, part 2, p. 35.

145. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 67-9.

146. All quotations are from The Tempest, edited by Frank Kermode (London, 1964: first pub. 1954). See p. xlii. See also Melchiori, ‘Still Harping on my Daughter’, 66-72; Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 157.

147. Taylor, Shakespeare's Darker Purpose, pp. 184-6.

148. Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, p. 489.