- Elizabeth's childhood and its rampant incestuous theme
- one might say incest was the dominating dynamic of her young life
- her choice at age eleven to translate Marguerite d'Navarre's confessional poem on spiritual incest as a gift for her stepmother the dowager Queen Catherine Parr
- Marguerite was the mentor of Elizabeth's own mother Anne Boleyn
- Marguerite was said to have had a passionate affair with her brother the French king
- prefaces each chapter with a quote from Shakespeare, often from the incestuous closet scene of Hamlet and Gertrude.
See Mark Taylor’s Shakespeare’s Darker Purpose: A Question of Incest. And Mark Anderson studies the Polonius-Ophelia relationship in the Winter 2000 edition of the Shakespeare-Oxford Society Newsletter (17-19, 24) in an article titled “Ophelia’s difference, or ‘To catch the conscience of the counselor’”
- click on the Newsletters section of the SOS website
- click on Fall 1999 to get the Winter 2000 issue
- article begins on page 17
(from Dan Wright)
In same issue, Winter 2000 Shakespeare-Oxford Newsletter: 'Why Pericles was not included in the First Folio' By Charles Boyle
"Incest is clearly in the background of plays like Hamlet and King Lear, among others, but nowhere is it so obvious as in Pericles. Here the father/daughter relationship is not only obvious, it is at the center of the play, and it is between a king and his daughter. . . If that is so, then Pericles is the one play that makes it all crystal clear, and might lead people to consider . . that . . incestuous behavior at the highest levels of Tudor society dated all the way back to the behavior of Henry VIII, and may have continued right on into the regime of Elizabeth I and her 'Shakespeare.'"
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