Abstract
Chapter 8 discusses how Shakespeare’s plays touch on incestuous currents within the family—erotic attachments that may block the transfer of desire away from kindred and into a romantic, exogamous relationship. The chapter first considers how some close brother-sister ties—Laertes and Ophelia in Hamlet and Octavius and Octavia in Antony and Cleopatra—suggest sexual interest. Mother-son relationships in Shakespeare may also turn erotic; several movie productions of Hamlet accentuate the prince’s latent incestuous feelings for his mother. While in Coriolanus the hero is deeply attached to his mother, it is Volumnia who sometimes acts as if she were his wife. After examining how far King Lear’s possessiveness over his daughter Cordelia borders on the incestuous, the chapter ends by analysing father-daughter reunions in Shakespeare’s Romances. Apart from the opening narrative in Pericles, any shadow of unlawful love—in the royal fathers Cymbeline and Leontes—is fully dispelled, while in The Tempest Prospero’s sexual ‘will’ is displaced on to Caliban, the ‘thing of darkness’.
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