Incest in Pardon and Marriage - People Fas Harvard

Incest in Pardon and Maniage
prosecute. I do not wish to argue that Claudio and Juliet either are or
are not married, however. Rather, I would suggest that the position
that they are not married raises at the end the specter of fornication,
hence of illegitimacy and incest, whereas the position that they are
married is a necessary condition for a happy ending.
Claudio's intention to marry Juliet must be considered in the con-
text of the overall relationship between intent and act in the plot. In
the teleology of the play, individuals' private purpose of marriage
matters no more to the political or secular order-whose purpose is to
use marriage to ensure public acknowledgment of parentage-than
individuals' intention to fornicate but not to reproduce matters to na-
ture, whose purpose is reproduction no matter what. The secular law
can and must make its rulings about legitimacy only on the basis of
such visible acts and signs as public marriage banns and pregnancy.
(Neither illicit sexual liaison nor unintended pregnancy is in itself a
direct threat to the social order, but the future illegitimacy they sig-
nify is.) Thus the secret, or invisible, aspect of the marital contract be-
tween Juliet and Claudio, a contract lacking "outward order" and
public "denunciation" (1.2.138, 137), necessitates that their child be
illegitimate from the point of view of the secular law. What concerns
the law is essentially the public establishment of paternity. William
Harrington thus writes that if there is something wrong with any mar-
riage, "such as . . . the banns not lawfully asked," then "the children
born to the couple are bastard^."^' Whether or not Juliet and Claudio
are privately married, their child is thus, to all political intents, a
bastard."
The confusion about the marital contract between Juliet and Clau-
dio echoes similar ambiguities throughout the play involving inten-
tions to enter into a contract or estate with someone, or Someone,
else. One example is the contract between Mariana and Angelo. An-
other is Isabella's novitiate, her intention to become the spouse of
God; that novitiate is left hanging just as is the spousal of Juliet and
Claudio.
Either for Juliet to be still pregnant or for Claudio and Juliet to be
actually married would easily result in a happy, unproblematic end-
ing. For the authority in Vienna finally to become both secular and
religious-as in the Viennese Holy Roman Empire, where the laws set
down in heaven and on earth were one and the same (as they are not
in Isabella's pleas before Angelo [2.4.~jo])-wouId provide a third way
to escape the problem of bastardy. By the end of the play, however,
Vincentio as Friar has slandered the secular state, claiming not only
that he himself as Duke is unjust but implying that no temporal ruler