Incest in Pardon and Marriage - People Fas Harvard

Incest in Pardon and Marriage
the secular authority in England allowed no such thing. (English law
made no changes in practice until a 1920 Act of Parliament.) This rule
of the secular authority against legitimating bastards was seen by legal
theorists as more than merely one law among many; it was understood
as the foundation of all law. 'Thus the highest English court
ruled in 1830 that illegitimate children cannot be made legitimate.
The rule against legitimation, claimed the court, "is sown in the land,
springs out of it, and cannot according to the law of England, be abrogated
or destroyed by any foreign [i.e., essentially extrinsic] rule of
law what~oever."~' This statement, which uses the language of natural
propagation, recalls how in Measurefor Measure the rule against fornication,
hence against bastardy, cannot be changed insofar as it goes
to the basis of laws.
It is, of course, the possibly unavoidable illegitimacy of the child of
Claudio and Juliet, not that of Lucio and Kate Keepdown, that constitutes
the more essential threat to the political order and to a happy
ending. There are two ways, at least, to make a happy ending plausible.
One is for Claudio to marry Juliet some time after his delivery
from prison and before his child's delivery from the womb. The best
reason for Juliet to appear still pregnant at the end of the play is to
make conceivable this way of providing a happy ending. As we have
seen, however, it is essential to the logic of the plot that Juliet appear
already delivered of her child, since Claudio's delivery from death is
itself the delivery of his child from the womb.
A second way to make a happy ending seem plausible is to imply
that Juliet and Claudio were married all along.39 There is some textual
basis for this view, since Claudio says that he and Juliet were associated
by a "true contract" and that he intended to marry her (1.2.134). The
best reason to argue that intent is conflated with act throughout Measure
for Measure is to make conceivable this second way of providing a
happy ending. In the logic of the play, however, the argument by
which Isabella saves the life of Angelo, and hence of Claudio himself,
is that an intent does not make for an act. A corollary of this argument
is that Claudio's presumed intent to have chaste sex in wedlock does
not make for a chaste act, or that his desire to have a legitimate child
(the telos of his intent to marry) does not turn his bastard into a legitimate
child. As we have already seen, moreover, the plot of Measurefor
Measure is informed by a conflation of aesthetic with biological teleology.
Were Claudio and Juliet already married, the movement of that
plot would not have been necessary, and its real motor would be not
the inevitable confrontation between nature and law but rather an accidental
event-Angelo's mistakenly choosing the wrong person to