SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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made them safe. His speech to his people is paternal: “. . . when there is / A want of any
thing, let it be known / To me, and I will be a Father to you” (II.868-70).
Arbaces, as brother and king, exercises his patriarchal authority over Panthea, deciding to
offer her to Tigranes, but before he himself saw her. As absolute monarch and guardian
of his sister he will brook no resistance to his will.
Arbaces: My sister take [the news of her betrothal] ill?
Gobrius: Not very ill.
Something unkindly she does take it Sir to have
Her Husband chosen to her hands.
Arbaces: Why Gobrias let her, I must have her know, my will and not her own
Must govern her: what will she marry with some slave at home?
. . .
’Tis fit. I will not hear her say, she's loth. (III.1.1-22)
Arbaces claims for himself absolute control of his sister’s sexuality. In her discussion of
The Duchess of Malfi, Jankowski notes that the “nature of Renaissance dynastic marriage
served almost totally to objectify the woman. She became on object of commerce who—
passed from father to husband—sealed a bargain of greater or lesser economic
significance” (228). Panthea too becomes an object of trade, with her brother following
the same pattern as Duke Ferdinand in Webster’s play. The tyrant does not think twice
about using females or subordinates to advance his own desires.
Arbaces’ passion for Panthea, conceived almost at his first sight of her, leads him
dangerously close to the loss of his reason. To be ruled by desire and passion is to reject
God-given reason and its corollary, self-control. If the psychomachic struggles end badly
and the body wins out over the mind, then the person who houses both becomes more
beast than human, having lost the divine gift of reason that separates man from beast.