Incest in Pardon and Marriage - People Fas Harvard

Incest in Pardon and Marriage
it but according to the trick" (5.1.502-3) is all he says by way of defense.
(This "trick" recalls the "mad fantastical trick" of the usurping
Duke him~elf.)~' Perhaps the Duke pardons Lucio's slander because he
finally recognizes Lucio in himself (cf. 5.1.334), just as Lucio may have
recognized the Duke in the Friar.
By virtue of such recognition, Lucio is the Duke's illuminating "glass
of the sinful soul." The greatest slanderer of the Duke in Measure for
Measure is not Lucio: Lucio's outrageous statements are generally reserved
for the private audience of the Duke as Friar. The Duke himself,
whom Lucio reflects, is ultimately his own greatest slanderer.
"The Duke's unjust" (5. I .298) he says before the only public assembly
in the play-an assembly he has called for the very purpose of exposing
injustice. The Duke himself commits "slander to th' state"
(5. I .320). And in not enacting the corporal punishment of Lucio, Vincentio
is, so to speak, forgiving himself for the slander he has done
himself.
Bastardizing. The principal political telos of marriage in Elizabethan
England (and perhaps whenever and wherever it is practiced)
is to avoid illegitima~y.~~ Gilbert Burnet writes that "the end of Marriage
[is] the ascertaining of the Issue."34 Ascertaining the issue is important
to prevent incest, which is a fundamental challenge to the political
order. That is why Vincentio as liberal can forgo punishing
Lucio for the offense of slander, but as parentarchal Duke he cannot
leave uncorrected Lucio's offense of bastardizing.
Illegitimate procreation, or the conflict between illegitimate procreation
and the need to establish paternity, gave rise to the action of
Measure for Measure in the first place. Even before the action began the
Duke had sought unsuccessfully to establish legally the paternity of a
typical bastard, the son of the prostitute Kate Keepdown (4.3.167-72;
cf. 3.2.192-94) At the end of the play, the Duke forces Lucio to become
the legitimate father of this child, whose natural paternity the
play has revealed.35 In this way Vincentio seems, by establishing a paternity,
to transcend the problematic part of himself figured on stage
in the person of Lucio; and in one representative case (that of Lucio's
natural son), at least, he begins to weaken the stranglehold that illegitimacy,
and hence incest, have on the political order of Vienna.
We may ask, Can Lucio's illegitimate child be made legitimate? The
significance of the question itself is more important than any answer.
On the one hand, Thomas Aquinas suggests that it can be done;36 and
since at least the medieval Council of Merton, in England the Church
had urged "that children born before the marriage of their parents
should be counted as legitimate at English law."37 On the other hand,