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

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the incestuous king because incest is a form of tyranny, one which actual kings must
avoid for the sake of the nation. Incest abounds in early modern texts, too, building on
earlier fears of tyrannical kings with concerns over the stability of the current social
structure—monarchy and patriarchy. I have briefly sketched an outline of the state of the
English monarchy during the long transition between these ages, and the extent to which
incest regulations—and the overlooking of such regulations—played a part in shaping the
dynamics of kingship. But what else might account for the differences in representations
of incest from the medieval works of Gower and Malory to those found in early modern
drama? An examination of three plays will help to root out some of the concerns of
Elizabethan and Jacobean England as they are expressed through works with an incest
theme.
Shakespeare’s Pericles (c. 1607), Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King, and No King
(1619), and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613) demonstrate the expected attention
to the policies and politics of Elizabeth and James, but other concerns of the dominant
social class can be glimpsed: fear of tyranny, of atavism, of increasing female agency,
and of attack and destruction from below. Reading incest across time periods reveals that
the medieval worries expressed through incest in Gower’s and Malory’s works—the
problem of poor self-governance in individual and in king—continued to cause anxiety
for the next two centuries until they were compounded by the emergence of new
concerns. I argue that incest in early modern plotlines continues to reflect fears over
tyrannical kings, but also begins to reflect a conservative desire to maintain existing
social and class structures, and the need to defend them against erosion from emerging