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

99
The most malicious of the world, invented
To mad your king.
(III.1.227-51)
Arbaces instinctively and immediately knows that unless he can parry the threat posed by
his longing for this sister he will have no chance of a relationship with her; he chooses
the tactic of denial. By his refusal to see Panthea as his sister and instead to see her as
only a lovely woman, he tries to deny the risk of incest. But this mighty struggle takes its
toll on him. Mardonius is right to wonder when he asks in an aside, “What, is he mad?”
Madness, the ultimate uncertainty and breach of good governance, imperils not
only Arbaces but his people. Like Gower’s King Eolus, who ordered the death of
daughter and grandson in a fit of mad rage, Arbaces would kill the innocent Panthea as
his reason becomes unhinged. He is in danger of losing his reason because of his
unresolvable internal conflict over his desire for his sister. The plot also disallows the
possibility of any good resulting from a female on the throne; through his madness
Arbaces enacts resistance to fears of atavism that plagued the dominant social class of the
early modern age (Whigham 168) by giving thought to the fantasy of rape and death that
is growing within his mind. Too, the dysfunction of the family may symbolize civil war,
or fear of the destruction from within, for civil war and madness certainly threaten the
status quo.
Arbaces’ growing sense of his own madness begins with a feeling of physical
illness. His human reason is in danger of overthrow by the passion which reduces him to
an almost sub-human creature driven solely by a lust that he can no longer keep under
control. It is the same problem that most of Gower’s incestuous characters felt. Panthea