MONARCHY AND INCEST IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND: LITERATURE FROM HENRY VIII TO CHARLES I

This study examines the discourse of sexual order in Renaissance England, attending to how that order was expressed in family structure and in Renaissance political theory. Accordingly, the work emphasizes those moments in Renaissance English literature--and history--at which questions of family structure were most politically crucial. The work\u27s immediate premise is that all of these literary/historical moments presuppose intense concern over the nature of kinship distinctions--distinctions that are inscribed within family structure and abrogated in the act of incest. The dissertation, in other words, is about the Renaissance family as a literary and political event, and about the degeneration of that family in incestuous relations. The specific historical subjects of the dissertation (discussed in three chapters) are Henry VIII\u27s divorce from Catherine of Aragon on grounds of incest, Elizabeth I\u27s accession to the throne as a female prince, and Parliament\u27s parricidal execution of Charles I. The literary texts with which these events are collocated (in three additional chapters) are Tyndale\u27s Practyse of Prelates, Shakespeare\u27s Hamlet, and Milton\u27s Eikonoklastes. In considering these literary and historical events, the dissertation traces the nature of the political consciousness as it informs both act and utterance. It argues for the disintegration, during the course of the English Renaissance, of a sensibility that asserted itself in fundamental principles of family structure; and it traces the manner in which those principles are skewed and dismantled as the English Renaissance progresses