Female Transgression in Early Modern Britain

Literary and Historical Explorations

Richard Hillman, Pauline Ruberry-Blanc

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317135876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Presenting a broad spectrum of reflections on the subject of female transgression in early modern Britain, this volume proposes a richly productive dialogue between literary and historical approaches to the topic. The essays presented here cover a range of 'transgressive' women: daughters, witches, prostitutes, thieves; mothers/wives/murderers; violence in NW England; violence in Scotland; single mothers; women as (sexual) partners in crime. Contributions illustrate the dynamic relation between fiction and fact that informs literary and socio-historical analysis alike, exploring female transgression as a process, not of crossing fixed boundaries, but of negotiating the epistemological space between representation and documentation.

PART I
Imag(in)ing Female Transgression and Transgressors

Chapter 1
Criminalizing the Woman’s Incest: Pericles and Its Analogues

Richard Hillman

This essay ventures warily into a vast cultural issue by way of a narrow textual, or rather intertextual, study. Such a procedure may be common these days, but it is as well to be sensitive to the risks and limitations: I prefer to treat the limited evidence with circumspection, and not to push it too far. For at stake, finally, is nothing less than a paradigm shift from medieval to early modern conceptions of female transgression – and more broadly of agency – as this may be traced, I propose, through intertextual presences within a Jacobean dramatic text, one which amounts, more clearly than most, to a palimpsest comprising past and contemporary narrative inscriptions. On the question of periodization, a vexed one for many scholars, I take comfort (if not refuge) in the defence of a meaningful cultural shift offered by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, who resolutely answers her own question – ‘Do Women Need the Renaissance?’ – in the affirmative.¹ On the other hand, Wiesner-Hanks is not particularly concerned to link the cultural narrative to an evolution in the narrative (much less the dramatic) representation of female figures, and, given the exceptionally rich opportunity presented by the intertexts in question here, it is this link I seek to develop.

Critics of Pericles (c. 1607²), Shakespeare’s dramatic adaptation (probably in collaboration with George Wilkins) of the venerable story of Apollonius of Tyre,³ have long been fascinated by the incest motif. By way of the episode initiating the action, the motif serves as the mainspring of the adventure plot that ensues: Pericles, Prince of Tyre, risks his life at Antioch in an attempt to found a royal dynasty by marrying the beautiful daughter of King Antiochus; to gain her, he has to answer a dangerous riddle – his predecessors have paid for their failure with their lives – but the true answer which he discovers also reveals the incestuous relation of the father and daughter. Thereupon Pericles must flee for his life, symbolically abandoning, along with his kingdom, his very identity, all sense of self. This is, then, the first and foremost of a long succession of lessons in love and life administered, like most effective lessons in romance, through painful loss but finally recompensed, as the genre will also have it, through restoration. In finally recovering his supposedly deceased daughter and wife, Pericles dispels the shadow of death and corrects the perverse confusion of human and sexual bonds enacted by Antiochus and his daughter, who, meanwhile, are duly destroyed by a divinely dispatched lightning bolt.

As presented in the dramatic version, the episode is enriched by insistent overtones of the Fall of Man, through female and ultimately diabolic seduction, into the knowledge of good and evil – and, pointedly, into mortality. The play presents a brash young prince dazzled by specious beauty (‘As heaven had lent her all his grace’ [I.0.24]), self-assured to the point of defying mortality itself (‘Think death no hazard in this enterprise’ [I.i.5]), and knowing his mortal limits less profoundly than he claims: ‘Antiochus, I thank thee, who hath taught / My frail mortality to know itself’ (42–43).⁴ As Pericles approaches the ‘golden fruit … dangerous to be touched’ and guarded by ‘death-like dragons’ (29, 30), his language ominously implicates him in the dynamic of seduction by sin set in motion by father and daughter, acting in discordant concert:

You gods that made me man, and sway in love,

That have inflamed desire in my breast

To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree

Or die in the adventure, be my helps,

As I am son and servant to your will,

To compass such a boundless happiness. (20–25)

Pagan though the setting remains, the dramatic hero’s encounter with incest thus gains impact from a conspicuous overlay of Christian mythology.

This effect is part of the ‘early modernizing’ tendency the present essay seeks to document, but it works by enhancing the taint of taboo and the force of folklore already attached to the incest motif, which is central within the Apollonius narrative tradition generally.⁵ Recently, Deanne Williams has usefully reopened the play along its fraught incestuous fold by invoking this tradition, although she may overstate (if not outright mistake) what she calls the ‘important departure from the play’s sources’ represented by Pericles’s less-than-forthright response to Antiochus, which she takes to provide a significant connection to the subsequent action.⁶ The sources in question, as formally recognized by criticism, are two. They are, most influentially, the fourteenth-century poetic rendition by John Gower included in his vast dream-vision compilation, Confessio Amantis. This version generally follows the line laid down by the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri.⁷ Comparison with Pericles is not merely authorized but imposed by the deployment of the poet ‘John Gower’ himself to serve as Chorus within the play. Now widely acknowledged as a subordinate source, especially for the tribulations of the hero’s daughter, is the Elizabethan novelistic reworking by Laurence Twyne, The patterne of painefull aduentures (putatively first published in 1576, reissued in 1594 and 1607); the latter was based, not on Gower’s version, but, with basic fidelity, on the widely diffused thirteenth-century narrative incorporated in the Gesta Romanorum (from which Gower also took some details).⁸ Pace Williams, on the point of the hero’s response to the riddle of Antiochus, there is, in fact, an essential concordance between the dramatic version and the traditions of the Historia and Gesta, as represented by Gower and Twyne, respectively.⁹

There is, however, another striking departure from the sources which commentators have not made much of. In keeping with the biblical allusions, with their insinuation of female culpability, the play makes Antiochus’s daughter the willing partner of her father in a mutual act of transgression. Elsewhere, by contrast, she is unequivocally his victim. Not just in Gower’s and Twyne’s versions but across the narrative tradition, the sexual initiation of the daughter is depicted straightforwardly as a rape. Concomitantly, her suffering, shame and despair – to the point of inducing thoughts of suicide – are powerfully evoked. The play, however, entrusts the episode to the choric mediation of Gower, who makes it a matter of seduction (‘provoke’ and ‘entice’ are his key words), then complicity, offering no suggestion at all of the daughter’s victimization or even reluctance:

the father liking took

And her to incest did provoke.

Bad child, worse father, to entice his own

To evil should be done by none.

But custom what they did begin

Was with long use account’ no sin. (I.0.25–30)

The moral blindness of both parties is clearly presented as both cause and effect of their ‘sin’, and we are thereby prepared to see the tainting of the hero by his contact with the incest as more than symbolic or mythical. Rather, it points up his own need for better judgement, finer discrimination, which painful experience must supply. For Pericles, too, has his perspicacity numbed by sensuality – to the point where he mistakes desire for love, virtue for vice, death for life. He is deluded into a faith in the eternal perfection (‘ever’, ‘never’) of this notably fallen specimen of frail and contingent human nature by what he hears, as Antiochus calls, ‘Music! / Bring in our daughter, clothed like a bride’ (I.i.6–7), and especially by what he sees, although his conditional formulation points to the truth despite himself:

See where she comes, apparelled like the spring,

Graces her subjects, and her thoughts the king

Of every virtue gives renown to men;

Her face the book of praises, where is read

Nothing but curious pleasures, as from thence

Sorrow were ever razed, and testy wrath

Could never be her mild companion. (13–19)

Such a confident display of learning and morality for the purpose of showing, with irony, how seriously the hero has got it wrong marks a distinct passage beyond the medieval pattern. Humanist principles bearing on self-knowledge and folly are suddenly at stake. This new dimension, I suggest, is not necessarily the spontaneous innovation of the English playwrights, anticipating the expectations of spectators ‘born in these latter times / When wit’s more ripe’ (I.0.11–12), as Gower is made to say apologetically. It may conceivably represent instead their response to a recent retelling of the Apollonius story by a French author who likewise took up the challenge of adapting the medieval exemplum to early modern cultural conditions. The text in question, which has generally been dismissed as irrelevant to Pericles,¹⁰ when it has been mentioned at all, is the extensive prose redaction of François de Belleforest (1530–83) in volume 7 of his Histoires tragiques, a collection first published in 1582 and reprinted several times, most lately in 1604.¹¹ It seems to me that this version has light to shed, if not necessarily as a source, at least as an intertext, on the approach to female transgression taken by the English dramatists.

By the early 1600s, writers for the English theatres, including Shakespeare, had been making liberal use for some time of the histoires tragiques in wide European circulation. Of course, the form was recognizably Italian in origin, and direct English translations from that language were sporadically available (notably, a minority of the stories in William Painter’s collection, The Palace of Pleasure [1566–67]), but its diffusion, development and proliferation came primarily by way of France, as was freely acknowledged by English adapters.¹² As early as 1559, Belleforest had taken up the project, initiated by Pierre Boaistuau (1500–1566), of translating, freely embellishing and supplementing what he saw as the cruder inventions of Mattheo Bandello; the genre proved central to his practice and self-image as a professional modern author over 30 years: with a keen sense of the genre’s adaptability to the tastes of the time, he devoted himself at once ‘à la poétique et à la morale qui l’informent [to the poetics and the moral orientation that inform it]’,¹³ and he was as prolific as he was skillful. His production ran to a total of some 120 histoires, depending on how one counts (the counting is not facilitated by the shifting numbers assigned in the various editions).

As for Shakespeare’s use of Belleforest elsewhere, the latter’s name recurs in scholarly indexes and introductions but as often as not records uncertainty, given the frequent availability of the same or similar material in other places; the jury remains out even on the question of whether Shakespeare had recourse to Belleforest’s treatment of the story of Hamlet (from volume 5) in reworking the old play.¹⁴ I am convinced that consu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Imag(in)ing Female Transgression and Transgressors
• Part II Reading (into) the Social Picture
• Index