SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...
SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...
SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...
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90<br />
reputation shifted such that viewers of Shakespeare’s play are guided to her implicit<br />
complicity.<br />
Like her counterpart in Gower, Antiochus’ daughter in Shakespeare’s Pericles<br />
does nothing to merit the appellations “bad child” and “sinful dame” but she bears the<br />
blame with and suffers the same punishment as her father. This condemnation may<br />
imply a reading of her sufferance of the incestuous relationship as eventual acceptance<br />
and enjoyment, making her death by lightning bolt more satisfying to Renaissance<br />
audiences. Maureen Quilligan reminds us that according to Renaissance sensibilities, it<br />
would have been assumed that the guilt was, in fact, shared between the two (215) and<br />
indeed, the daughter is made by Shakespeare to seem to be complicit in the incestuous<br />
relationship. Quilligan likens this identification of father and daughter to the story of<br />
Cordelia in King Lear; this daughter also shares the same fate as her father though she is<br />
kind and virtuous even in the face of Lear’s latent incestuous patterns of thought and<br />
behavior. <strong>The</strong> close proximity in dates of composition of Pericles (1607-8) to King Lear<br />
(1604-5) gives this reading “authority” and “may grant insight into conventional<br />
Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural responses to the daughter’s guilt and its appropriate<br />
punishment in a case of flagrant incest” (ibid.).<br />
Another notable difference between the two versions is the encounter between<br />
Apollonius/Pericles and Marina. In Gower’s version kynde continues to work on the<br />
characters; when Marina is sent for to entertain the woebegone stranger and cheer him<br />
with her cleverness, riddle-telling, and singing she obeys: