Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England by Maureen Quilligan

Abstract

MLR, 102.4, 2007 I137 Marlowe's career as a spy depends on the interpretation of treacherous evidence. Honan follows the lead ofCharles Nicholl's The Reckoning: TheMurder ofChristo pherMarlowe (London: Cape, I992), the firstsystematic attempt to place Marlowe's murder in the context of Elizabethan power politics. Honan tracesMarlowe's in volvement in espionage to his time as a student inCambridge, his murky relation ships with powerful men such as the Walsinghams and theCecils, and his status as an agent provocateur, variously implicated inatheism and counterfeiting as reported by unreliable witnesses such as Richard Baines and Thomas Kyd, whose account ofMarlowe's 'vile opinion[s]' was extracted after he had been tortured (p. 379). As Honan concedes, 'We know something about thepoet's lastweeks, butmuch remains unknown and troubling' (p. 355); or, as Lowell puts it with a blast ofMarlovian bom bast, 'one blurred, hurried, stillundecoded month I hurledMarlowe fromEngland to his companion shades'. Honan's biography does more than retell this familiar story. By virtue of itssustained attempt tounderstand Marlowe as a product ofhis culture as an Elizabethan entrepreneur, someone who took risks personally, politically, and culturally-Honan gives a freshgloss to theold, stillundecoded storyof the reckoning. THE OPEN UNIVERSITY RICHARDDANSON BROWN Incest and Agency inElizabeth's England. By MAUREEN QUILLIGAN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. viii + 28I pp. ?39. ISBN 978-o-8122 I905-0. In Incest and Agency inElizabeth's England Maureen Quilligan urges literarycritics, and especially feminist literary critics, to be more sophisticated in their analysis of the nature ofmarriage in the sixteenth century.Above all, she urges us to recognize how family structuresmay have empowered aswell as constrained women in theEli zabethan period; literarycritics, it is suggested, need to catch up with developments in anthropological theory.For anthropologists, marriage is no longer seen solely in termsof the exchange ofwomen as passive giftsbetween groups ofmales; women, in non-Western and tribal cultures,may continue tobe valued members of theiroriginal families after theyhave become wives. Quilligan's contention is thata similar situation can be observed in earlymodern England. Within the sixteenth-century exogamous marriage, therewere still endogamous relationships and social positions available to women. These endogamous family structures allowed women tohalt the exogamous trafficinwomen and exercise considerable power. Quilligan pursues a new historicist approach todetailing and exploring thatpower. She moves fluentlybetween biography, social and political history, and literary texts. She deals with one aristocratic family, the Sidneys, in particular, and looks at the ways inwhich Philip Sidney's, Mary Herbert's, and Mary Wroth's membership of that familyauthorized and informed their literaryworks, aswell as theways inwhich their literary works promoted the interestsand shaped the identityof that family.She finds substantial areas of female agency, and argues that such areas, in literature and life,always have an incestuous undercurrent-as one might expect of endogamous formsof power. Incest and female agency are thus intimately related.What gives this relationship its especial vigour and interest is the fact that, at this cultural moment, such incestuous agency was not only suspect and subject to attack, but was also re ceiving divine and political legitimation. Here the translation, by an eleven-year-old Elizabeth I, ofMarguerite de Navarre's LeMiroir de l'aimepecheresse is seen tobe key. Quilligan argues that thiswork released intoEnglish literaryand political discourses thenotion of a holy incest. Female agency, inotherwords, was contested through tropes and schemes of incest and, forthosewho believe incultural poetics, understanding those tropes and schemes II38 Reviews is important to an understanding of the relationships between the texts,genres, and lives of the period. These are impressive claims, and Quilligan's insistence thatwe recognize formsof female agency different from those incontemporary Western cul tures is valuable. Yet the account given of the texts and lives themselves is far less satisfying than the overall argument. There are several reasons for this.The book's wider historical picture lacks nuance and is sometimes crude. The handling of the literary and material details of texts could be more authoratative. The demonstra tion of the pervasiveness of an incestuous component to female agency relies on a troublingly rapid alternation between general and precise definitions of incest.Most importantly, Quilligan's argument tends todominate and occlude...