Incest in Pardon and Marriage - People Fas Harvard

Incest in Pardon and Marriuge
chaste and wholly unchaste. Just such a marriage is figured in the second
proposal that the Duke makes to Isabella: "What's mine is yours,
and what is yours is mine" (5.1.534).
But does Isabella accept? To judge from her verbal response, or
rather lack of it, Isabella no more accepts or rejects the second proposal
of the Duke than she pardons or does not pardon Claudio. (Isabella's
silence does not, in itself, mean refusal in either case; compare
the apparent refusal of marriage at the end of Love's Labor's Lost.) Yet
we should not dismiss the question of whether the Duke and Isabella
eventually marry, calling it as irrelevant as the question How many
children had Lady Ma~Beth?~~ The question of marriage in Measure
for Measure concerns not only what Isabella says but also the gist of the
plot. Is it the telos of the plot for Isabella and the Duke to marry? To
put it another way, would such a marriage solve the confrontation between
the natural requirement to reproduce and the political necessity
to prohibit incest, the essential human problem that gave rise to
Measure for Measure in the first place?59
An answer to the question of whether Isabella marries the Duke depends
upon answers to two other questions: What are her options?
and What is marriage? One purpose of Measure for Measure is to bring
us to ask the latter question in a new way. To see how the play raises
questions about marriage, let us take the question Does Isabella marry
the Duke? to mean, Is it consistent with the plot or hypothesis of Measure
for Measure that Isabella marry the Duke? An answer involves a
number of related issues connected with the general problem of incest.
Blood Siblings and Siblings-in-Law. The first issue concerns whether
anyone in Vienna (or in the world, for that matter) can know with certainty
who his father is, and thus whether his spouse is not his blood
kin. The secular, political need for public marriage to establish paternity
is as intense at the end of the play (when the question of whether
a marriage will take place involves Isabella and the Duke) as it was at
the beginning of the play (when the question of whether a marriage
has taken place involved Juliet and Claudio). The threat to the political
order represented by Juliet's pregnancy has by no means been resolved.
Making Lucio the husband of Kate Keepdown and thus establishing
one (albeit representative) paternity does not so much transcend
(or master through loving moderation) as repress, or keep
down through fear of punishment, the problem of natural lust within
the individual and within the city. The punishment of Lucio is a failure
of genuine moderation or temperance (as opposed to mere restraint
or continence); moreover, the drawn-out final dialogue between
Lucio and the Duke reminds us of the motivating dilemma of