Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship.

Bruce Thomas Boehrer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. 189 pp. $25-95.

This idiosyncratic and sometimes confusing book argues that the Acts of Succession following Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon gave incest, and ultimately the family itself, a sovereign place in the ideology of the Tudor and Stuart lines. Boehrer seeks confirmation of this thesis in a sampling of literary works, mostly plays, from the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, closing with a brief look at Paradise Lost. New historicism (everything is politically determined) and feminism (almost everything is a form of violence against women) supply the moral resting places. Lacan is the rather tenuous way Boehrer gets from the one to the other.

His claim about Renaissance England is framed by a still larger contention, that the forms and varieties of royal paternalism somehow passed into the little kingdoms of modern Euro-American abusive families, breeding in particular father-daughter incest. This seems at best an historical trope. In the broad history of Western marriage, the psychopolitical metaphors favored by four English Renaissance rulers are no more than a raindrop in the sea. The author expressly denies the relevance of actual cases of incest recorded in ecclesiastical courts. Such matters "have only the most minimal bearing on the cultural significance of a royal/noble incest conceived in terms of the Renaissance ruling elite" (152). It is peculiar to say the least that real everyday incest, declared irrelevant to the "cultural significance" of incest in Renaissance England, should become in modern times the locus of that very same cultural significance.

Boehrer is at his best on Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Those who teach that play will benefit from his nicely balanced abstractions. The more obscure plays are shoehorned into the marching boots of his thesis. In the face of major works, with critical traditions ample enough to encourage cautious qualification, the author turns reckless.

Cymbeline or Pericles, especially the second, might well have represented Shakespeare in this discussion, but Boehrer chooses Hamlet, drawing on Jason Rosenblatt's idea that Claudius is to Gertrude as Henry VIII was to Catherine. It is immediately clear how far we have drifted from A. C. Bradley. No longer a character with a character, Hamlet is a freeform political cartoon. Determined to squeeze in/out every possible figuration, Boehrer suggests that Hamlet is to Claudius as Elizabeth was to Henry, and interprets the triumph of Fortinbras as a foreshadowing of the Tudor monarchy's barren end. Hamlet is also said to contain that fantasy about totally male birth ("masculine royal parthenogenesis") which has been cropping up everywhere lately, presumably because it is supposed to represent patriarchy's darkest wish.

In the nascent tradition of Jonathan Goldberg and David Miller, the Faerie Queene is caught in a flashlight performing all sorts of metaphorical indecencies on the body of Elizabeth I. The luridness begins when pen is set to paper: "Spenser's very project of reduplicating Elizabeth's virtue on the page both eroticizes it and introduces it into the logic of sexual reproduction" (83). Metaphorical sex seems readily convertible into metaphorical dismemberment. Spenser's is a "minutely detailed process of literary dissection, fashioning bits and pieces of her into separate characters whose incoherencies would be immediately evident if they were reassembled into a single whole" (84-85). (Is individual existence a "single whole" with no room for incoherence? The Lacanian passages of this book would not lead us to think so.) Ultimately Spenser's multiplying and dividing epic "satisfies itself in itself" (81), its contrary energies harmonized in a muted demonstration of public onanism.

The pages on Milton are perhaps the testiest in years. Paradise Lost wants to endorse the hierarchical family but deny kingship. It is immediately clear that Milton's intentions so conceived threaten the entire thesis of Boehrer's book. For if Milton could imagine a hierarchical family without endorsing kingship, then royal ideology could not be the only source of the family's cultural significance. Real incest cases might matter; real familles might matter; Milton might have learned something from his mother and father long before he sent up royalist paternalism in Eikonoclastes. To keep his argument on track, Boehrer must find "covert royalism" (115) in Milton. And he does. But the evidence is at once so obvious and so slight (the kingdom of heaven) that the cavalry of postmodernism must be called out to shoot the whole poem full of holes.

The loyal angels copulate in their special way but cannot commit incest. God, however, who is "differance itself" (134), shows the trace of the missing taboo. Perhaps instructed by the example of Spenser, the Holy Trinity "copulates with itself throughout eternity" (135), in the meantime damning Satan, Sin, and Death with sexual malfunction. Here the author should have considered the anti-trinitarian drift of Milton's theology. The unholy trio of Satan/Sin/Death might well be a parody of trinitarianism rather than the Trinity; perhaps the metaphorical account of the creation, read in terms of Milton's subordinationism, might have yielded another instance of masculine parthogenesis. Boehrer supposes that he has God dead to rights on the question of being "All in All" at the end of time. Milton "cannot achieve the |All in All' of absolute presence. He might have done well to take a hint from Aquinas and simply stopped writing" (136). Johnson said we do not wish it longer than it is. This author wishes it out of existence.

But there are hints enough to go around. Boehrer might have done well to take a hint from Milton and simply stopped arguing an overwrought thesis.