Incest in Pardon and Marriage - People Fas Harvard

Incest in Pardon and Marriage
incest) in Vienna and to cancel out the offense of bastardizing. For in
Measure for Measure the law of Vienna must seek to abort illegitimately
conceived fetuses before they are "hatch'd and born" (2.2.98), that is,
before they achieve, by "successive degrees" (2.2 .gg), infancy and
eventually that adulthood in which they will become willy-nilly incestuous
sexual partners.
In the context of Measure for Measure, to answer the question of
whether feticide would be better than bastardy and incest involves,
not the problem of whether a fetus is a human being, but the problem
of whether interference with the natural telos of sexuality is worse
than incest. Saint Bernardine of Siena (whose name echoes, intentionally
or not, the murderer Barnardine) argues that "it would be better
for a woman to permit herself to have relations with her own father
than it would be for her to engage in 'unnatural' relations with her
husband."' Before we reject as outside the Shakespearean pale this
apparent preference of incest to acts, such as sodomy, that interfere
with the natural process of conception, we might recall that in The
Winter's Tale Leontes orders Antigonus (whose name, like Antigone's,
means "against generation") to kill Perdita because Leontes presumably
believes that she is a bastard-that is, because he rates the unnatural
act of infanticide as preferable to the natural conclusion of
bastardy.*
One might argue that no audience could see so much in the presence
or absence of a newborn babe. But this is precisely a play about
pregnancy: Escalus is pregnant with knowledge (1.1. 1 I), Angelo with
unvirtuous intentions (4.4. 1 8), and Juliet with a human fetus. And it
is a play about delivery: Angelo gives birth to unvirtuous actions that
reflect his actual intentions, and Claudio is delivered-liberatedfrom
the prison of death. In discussing Juliet's offspring, I hope to get
at the one literal offspring, the son (liber), of the play. That son, the
"thanks and use" (1.1.40) offered to nature for our lives, demonstrates
or represents in nuce all the issues of Measure for Measure. In
The Comedy of Errors, the Abbess notes that "Thirty-three years have I
but gone in travail 1 Of you, my sons, and till this present hour 1 My
heavy burden ne'er delivered" (ERR 5.1.40 1 -3). Such a delivery, one
that outnatures nature, is a telos of Measure for Measure.
The identification of Claudio reborn with Claudia's son born, or of
rebirth with birth, involves the various interchangeabilities of Claudio
*The Winter's Tale, like Measure for Memure, explores desired homicide (the intended
infanticide of Perdita [cf. WT 2.3.5, 2.3.134-401) and desired incest (the attraction be-
tween Mamillius and Hermione [WT 2.i .2 I -331, and the attraction between Leontes
and Perdita when he meets her grown up [WT 5.1.222-251).