SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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daughter’s identity, he gives her in marriage to Athenagoras—even before they set sail
and he is reunited with his wife, thus preventing any possibility of incestuous desire on
his part. By the end of the play society is set aright—and it is done so through a (male)
king who acts as father to his nation as well as his daughter, trumping the destructive
effects of Antiochus’ incest. In the early modern period, according to Archibald, incest
can represent a “disruption of domestic and social order . . . In the ending the reunion of
the spouses with representatives of both the older and the younger generation, and the
presence of the protagonist’s son [son-in-law] mark the end of the disruption associated
with incest, and a return to the accepted (patriarchal) social norms” (Archibald 59). That
it is a man—specifically, a father, or patriarch—who, at least superficially, restores order
and overcomes disruptive female sexuality signals the ‘rightness’ of patriarchy. These
two small but critical differences in the versions of the tale point the way to a possible
understanding of the anxieties over changing social and class—and gender—structures in
the early modern period.
The double threats to the established patriarchal order of tyranny and female
agency finds expression in other plays as well. First performed a dozen years after
Pericles, Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragicomic A King, and No King depends on its
audience’s fear of incest, whether subliminal or overt, for much of its dramatic power.
Pericles’ concern over tyrannical kings is echoed in the impending tragedy building in A
King, and No King, which reflects concern about the potential tyranny of patriarchy and
absolute monarchy. The plot appears poised to deliver a spectacle of rape, murder, and
suicide, the result of the king’s sexual obsession, loss of self-control and reason, and