Incest and Empire in The Faerie Queene

When King Henry VIII wished to divest himself of his first two wives, he cried incest in each instance. Henry invalidated his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (and disavowed the daughter she had given him) by alleging that Catherine's prior relationship to Henry's older brother placed her within the degrees of kinship prohibited by biblical injunctions against incest. He cast off Anne Boleyn (and disclaimed the daughter she had given him) by accusing Anne of incestuous adultery with her brother. Describing the King's twice-tested strategy, Bruce Boehrer affirms: "Henry sought to alter the social significance of his first two wives and their daughters by wrapping them in a thick gauze of incestuous narrative." Boehrer points out, however, that this incestuous narrative did not end with the execution of Anne:

The problems of Henry's first two marriages exerted practical pressure on both Mary and Elizabeth when they sought to inherit their father's throne; with both their mothers adjudged guilty of incest at different times, neither daughter could advance an absolutely unconflicted claim to the English crown; and thus the issue of incest directly informed English political behavior for several decades after Henry's demise.¹

According to Boehrer, Mary I tried to overturn the repudiation of her mother by reenacting Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon: she married Philip II and forged anew England's alliance with Spain. Elizabeth I, on the other hand, refused to marry, insisting that her right to the throne did not need to be dressed up in royal authority borrowed from abroad. As part of this program, Elizabeth tried to cut short all commentary concerning the royal line of succession or her place within it. Elizabeth's reign, Boehrer asserts, "is characterized by an intense reluctance to talk openly about the family matters of the sovereign, particularly as those matters extend to the question of incest."² Not even her own supporters were permitted to talk about the lineal status of Henry's children, an interdiction evident in the imprisonment of John Hales for writing a tract discrediting Mary Stuart's title to the crown. As Boehrer affirms: "Elizabeth clearly regarded her control over genealogical matters, both past and future, as crucial to her tenure on the throne."³

When considered in the context of Elizabeth's effort to silence all discussion of incest, Edmund Spenser's courtly epic aiming to cultivate favor with the monarch looks like a disastrous miscalculation, for incest appears throughout The Faerie Queene. Indeed, incest sits at the center (both literally and figuratively) of the Book of Chastity, the very book wherein Spenser encourages Elizabeth "in mirrours more then one her selfe to see."⁴ In the present essay, I investigate the apparently illogical and impolitic prominence afforded to incest in book three of The Faerie Queene, ultimately arguing that the imperialist logic underpinning the epic is linked to an intense fear of miscegenation that, in turn, privileges endogamous relations as a way of warding off foreign invasion and contamination. For Spenser, incest becomes a positive practice, one that ensures national and individual purity.

To be sure, the incest of book three is often associated with the epic's evil characters and signals moral degeneracy. Thus, Spenser's Malecasta subtly shadows Ovid's Myrrha, the incestuous daughter who tricks her father into sleeping with her. As James Nohrnberg remarks: "There are broad hints of Myrrha's passion in the nocturnal fraud of Malecasta." Ovid, for instance, tells the myth in conjunction with the story of Venus and Adonis; Spenser makes the same connection, setting the stage for Malecasta's seduction by describing the tapestries of Malecasta's castle, one of which gorgeously depicts "the loue of Venus and her Paramoure" (3.1.34). According to Nohrnberg, "the midnight hour and the cosmic backdrop" of Malecasta's illicit seduction "suggest Ovidian originals." So does Britomart's enraged reaction, which duplicates the response of Myrrha's father: "Britomart goes for her sword, as King Cinyras, discovering the filial identity of his bedmate, goes for his."⁵ As the embodiment of chastity, Britomart violently...