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

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societal forces. The plays focus on the challenges of increasing female agency to
patriarchy and of upward class mobility to the nobility and potentially to the monarchy,
and these newer threats prove to be a more pronounced concern, as evidenced by the
treatment of the female and lower class characters in the end of the plays, than the
tyrannical male characters in Gower and Malory. The censure of Antiochus’s daughter in
Pericles, the marriage of Panthea in A King, and No King, and the gruesome fate of the
Duchess of Malfi provide three examples of the ways that the threat of increasing female
agency are dealt with, with The Duchess of Malfi also presenting a resolution of the
problem of the pretensions of the lower class to rise above their stations. These three
works seem to question new, ‘modern’ attitudes toward the roles of women and the lower
classes, but the resolutions of the plays leave no doubt as to what those roles should—
must—be.
It will be noted that these three early modern plays were first performed near the
time or soon after James’ succession to the throne in 1603. James, an absolutist monarch,
outlined his political philosophy in a speech to Parliament on March 21, 1610:
The estate of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth; for kings are not only
God's lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself
they are called gods. . . . Kings are justly called gods, for that they exercise a
manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. . . . Kings are also compared
to fathers of families; for a king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his
people. And lastly, kings are compared to the head of this microcosm of the body
of man (James I, qtd. in Lively 39). 2
2 King James’s speech to Parliament, 21 March, 1610.