Monarchy and incest in Renaissance England

University of Pennsylvania Press

1992

189 p.

New cultural studies

0812231341

Introduction -- Telling Stories About Incest -- Problem -- Reader's Program -- 1. Henry VIII and the Political Uses of Incest Theory -- In the Bedrooms of the Great -- Basic Theory of Incest -- Doctrine of the Henrician Divorce (Part I) -- Doctrine of the Henrician Divorce (Part II) -- Anthropology as Politics -- 2. Incest and Tudor Literary Politics -- Henry's Legacy -- Elizabeth and the Issue of Title -- Three Tudor Plays -- "Ten Times Our Mother": Incest and Feminine Authority in Hamlet -- Cult of Chastity -- 3. James I and the Fabrication of Kinship -- Succession Revisited -- Revenge Tragedy and the Jacobean Social Climber -- Queen and No Queen: Female Inheritance in Beaumont and Fletcher -- Commerce and Incest in Women Beware Women -- Conundrum of Kin(g)ship -- 4. End of Kingship? -- Incest and the English Revolution -- Charles I: The Governor as Family Man -- John Ford's Tremulous Private Heaven -- Cavalier Drama and the Royal Dilemma -- Milton and the Powers That Be -- 5. Conclusions: The Politics of Incest Theory -- Westermarck, Morgan, Nature -- Freud, Feminism, Culture -- "The Libertie of a Subject": Incest and Child Abuse -- Demographics of Incest in Renaissance England -- Properties of Kingship.

In dissolving his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII claimed that Catherine's brief marriage to Henry's deceased brother, Arthur, had rendered the subsequent union incestuous. Henry's next marriage could be called incestuous as well, for Anne Boleyn's sister Mary had been the king's mistress before her. But early rumor hinted at an even darker incestuous connection between Henry and Anne; she was, some charged, not only the king's lover, but his illegitimate daughter. Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England argues that a preoccupation with incest is built into the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry VIII's divorce and succession legislation through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court. Boehrer contends that themes of incest appear irregularly and prominently in the imaginative literature of the period. Some fifty extant plays from 1559 to 1658 deal either explicitly or implicitly with the subject. Incest emerges as a structural motif in texts as diverse as The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, and figures at least implicitly in nondramatic works by Jonson, Chapman, Shakespeare, and others. Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England explores the response to, and modification of cultural anxieties regarding family structure. It is a brilliant and original work that will be of interest to scholars and students of English Renaissance literature and history, as well as of cultural studies.

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