Illegitimacy and the National Family in Early Modern England

Helen Vella Bonavita

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781409420316
• eBook ISBN: 9781317118923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.

1 ‘Now attest that those whom you call’d fathers did beget you’

Illegitimacy–as a social problem, as a historical phenomenon, and as a source of stigma and financial hardship, particularly for unmarried mothers–has been studied by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.¹ From the 1960s onwards, the Cambridge Group has undertaken research into the history of the family and in 1980 it produced a benchmark compilation of essays on the topic of illegitimacy. Bastardy and its Comparative History addresses aspects of illegitimacy past and present, and includes historical studies of illegitimacy in England that recognise bastardy as being both ‘a failure in social control’ and an inevitable element of society. Other demographic studies by scholars such as Peter Laslett, Alan Macfarlane, and Richard Adair trace localities and incidences of bastardy, using sexual nonconformity as a marker for mapping demographic, social, and economic changes.² Illegitimacy as an economic and social problem, however, is only one part of the picture, particularly in the context of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.

As I noted in the introduction, the moral and social implications of bastardy go far beyond the economic burden that an illegitimate child generally represents, and this is especially the case in literature. In her comprehensive study of illegitimacy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, Alison Findlay demonstrates that the figure of the bastard had available to him a broad dramatic spectrum that ranged from the heroic right through to the comprehensively evil. This chapter explores the connotations of illegitimacy as a figure of speech associated with evil in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English drama, and explores the associations of the bastard with national and social stability and identity.

For Findlay, who argues that it is closely associated with uncontrolled female sexuality, excess, and is therefore inimical to a mainstream society, bastardy, particularly in domestic dramas, can be read as a challenge to a patriarchal system. The production of illegitimate children subverts established principles of society and at times enables dissenting female voices to be heard. Plays such as Middleton’s The Witch, for example, link witchcraft, and sexual excess to unwanted children, enabling bastards to be conflated with, and at times personify, unruly femininity.³ As previously mentioned, Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History also considers bastardy within the context of subversive female power, arguing that it functions as a sign that patriarchal authority can never be truly complete.⁴

Alongside these feminist readings, it is important to also recognise the paternal implications of illegitimacy. While a child born out of wedlock technically has only its mother as an absolutely known parent, and while too, it is women who have been more directly associated with illegitimacy because they have tended to bear the social stigma and financial burden of a child born out of wedlock, nevertheless, in drama, illegitimacy has significant symbolic meaning in patriarchal political discourse. In a figurative environment where monarchs are cast in the role of fathers/spouses and where subjects can be characterised as children, the discourse of illegitimacy operates as a powerful vehicle for political commentary and, in particular, for investigating the relationship between crown, monarch, and subjects.⁵

In 1929, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who had for many years been working on family and kinship structures, coined what he termed the ‘Principle of Legitimacy’: ‘No child shall be brought into the world without a man, and one man, assuming the role of sociological father, that is, a guardian and protector, the male link between a child and the rest of the community’.⁶ Unsurprisingly, Malinowski’s ‘Principle’ has attracted criticism. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century sociological changes have rendered its assertions questionable if not obsolete, particularly in terms of the necessity for a specifically ‘male’ link to provide a connection between the child and the rest of the community.⁷ But in terms of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, Malinowski’s statement is a useful starting point for exploring the subject of illegitimacy and identity. Malinowski’s ‘Principle’ was, when he wrote it, insightful in that it separated the biological and the sociological function of parenthood. Equally, it was (and still is) useful in considering early modern anxieties over status and identity at both a familial and a national level, since a commonplace of political discourse was that every early modern subject had, or should have, both a biological father and a sociological father, namely the national parent, the monarch.

In early modern England, illegitimacy or questionable or unknown paternity obscured or destabilised the connection between the father and the child, and thereby damaged the links which bound each individual into a community where transfer of property, status, and hence, social identity between generations generally took place along patriarchal lines. Legitimacy, then, was far more than just a biological fact in early modern England. It was the mechanism through which a community or culture, not simply a family, constituted and renewed itself.

How do legitimacy, patriarchy, and bastardy operate together? On an individual level, the answer is self-evident. Men were anxious to ensure that they bequeathed their land to their own children and no one else’s. However, legitimacy and indeed continuity as a society was also a crucial issue, particularly in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. In this period the separation from the Church of Rome, Henry VIII’s matrimonial complexities, and a series of childless monarchs had created profound anxieties over succession and the legitimacy and identity of the nation. As Lisa Hopkins puts it:

Just as the ancient Greeks thought that no man could be counted happy until the manner of his death was known, so there was a sense in which no early modern sovereign could be counted a success until it could be shown that she or he had provided for the peaceful accession of a suitable successor.⁸

Such anxieties were, of course, shaped and articulated in and by contemporary literature, and the trope of illegitimacy in literary texts, particularly history plays, is frequently the point at which these anxieties intersect and are expressed in literary form.

Alongside studies of illegitimacy as a means of mapping social and economic change in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, anthropological studies on strategies for inclusion and exclusion of individuals from particular statuses also provide a cultural framework for understanding the broader connotations of illegitimacy in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.

Michael Neill’s work on illegitimacy exemplifies this approach. His study of illegitimacy in Renaissance drama and more specifically on the Revenger’s Tragedy uses the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas to consider the question of why the bastard in early modern drama is almost invariably depicted as monstrous or evil.⁹ Using the term as it is construed by Douglas, Neill argues that bastards are ‘filthy’. Douglas argues that dirt is defined by being where it should not be: it is ‘matter in the wrong place, belonging to “a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications”, a source of fundamental pollution’.¹⁰ Bastardy, as a pollutant of the family and hence of society, demolishes boundaries and creates chaos. Neill’s argument moves beyond the literally illegitimate bastard figure on stage or in the text and engages with illegitimacy as a rhetorical strategy which can form a significant thematic presence in a play without being necessarily attached to any specific figure. Alongside Douglas’s work, I would suggest that another anthropologist, Edmund Leach, provides an even more useful model for understanding the associations of hybridity, monstrosity, and bastardy because it enables consideration of the relational nature of illegitimacy discussed earlier. Leach suggests that our initial perceptions of the world around us are largely based on binary distinctions: an object is one thing, and not another. If a conceptual object combines attributes of itself with those of another, the intersecting area will be suppressed by the observer so that there may be no hesitation in discerning between them. This repressed area, the area which is neither one thing nor another, arouses fear and fascination:–taboo.¹¹ Leach argues that items such as hair or nail clippings, and blood or semen, are traditionally invested with magical potency in Western culture because they fall into the interstice between the human body and its external environment: they are both part and not part of an individual. In the same vein it is the liminal creatures of a society’s cultural heritage, those that mediate between gods and men ‘incarnate deities, virgin mothers, supernatural monsters which are half-man, half beast [which are] the object of the most intense taboos, more sacred than the gods themselves’.¹²

Leach’s assertions and connections have been widely criticised. John Halverson in particular attacked Leach’s broad use of the term ‘taboo’ and use of etymology to support his argument.¹³ However as Anatoly Liberman and John Mason, among others, have pointed out, with all its flaws, Leach’s work continues to stimulate perspectives in other areas.¹⁴ The liminality that he describes creates the anxiety that surrounds bastards, as they too occupy the repressed ‘taboo’ area between family and strangers. In that it is born out of wedlock, the bastard child has no place within the family structure; yet it cannot be completely relegated to the external world. According to Lynda Boose, the term ‘illegitimate’ is used as a means of ‘segregating children born outside the patriarchal family unit from those “legitimate” within it’.¹⁵ However, if it were possible fully to segregate the illegitimate from the legitimate, the bastard would not be regarded as so great a threat. It is because the segregation strategy fails that the bastard is so problematic. Michael Neill rightly points out the extent to which the topos of illegitimacy is associated with the disintegration of boundaries and consequent loss of coherence and identity, arguing that the bastard is ‘a by-product of the attempt to define and preserve a certain kind of social order’.¹⁶ While agreeing with the direction of Neill’s argument, I would suggest that the bastard cannot be so easily marginalised as the term ‘by-product’ suggests. Rather, it is a liminal figure, one whose existence challenges order because it cannot be adequately contained or excluded in the family structure.

The association between illegitimacy and monstrosity via the liminal nature of illegitimacy is not only apparent in the work of twentieth-century anthropologists. Andrew Sharpe points out that the late sixteenth-century canon lawyer Henry Swinburne, in his popular and frequently republished Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills (1591), offers a ‘taxonomy of monstrosity’ when setting out what could be co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Now attest that those whom you call’d fathers did beget you’
• 2 ‘Give Grandam Kingdom’: King John
• 3 ‘Gelded of his patrimony’: Richard II
• 4 ‘Gave you kingdom: called you children’: King Lear
• Conclusion: We are all bastards
• Bibliography
• Index