'In Everything Illegitimate': Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama

Abstract

In Conan Doyle's story 'The Adventure of the Priory School' Holdernesse Hall, the country seat of that stately patriarch the Duke of Holdernesse, is threatened by a peculiar revenant. Mr James Wilder is to all appearances a modern young man who occupies the mundane post of secretary to the Duke, but he is actually a sinister intruder from the past, whose family tree reaches back, through nineteenth-century melodrama and gothic fiction, to the bastard-figures of Jacobean tragedy.2 An illegitimate son of the Duke, Wilder is a vindictive misfit, bent, like Edmund in King Lear or Spurio in The Revenger's Tragedy, on the displacement of the half-brother whose legitimacy he so bitterly resents. By comparison with his seventeenth-century kin he may appear somewhat colourless: unlike Spurio he does not actually seek to cuckold his father, but is content to sow a fatal discord in his marriage; his conspiracy against the legitimate sibling is limited to kidnapping and blackmail, and the story's only murder is an almost accidental consequence of his accomplice's attempt to avoid pursuit. Nevertheless, this bastard's identity as a dangerous social outsider, an incarnation of the disruptive anti-social energies associated with his begetting, is signified by his name, Wilder.3 It marks him, evidently, as the symbolic denizen of that realm of unredeemed nature, the moor on which Holmes and Watson follow the tracks of his crime. Their task is made more difficult by the fact that Wilder has shod the horses of his kidnap vehicle with shoes 'shaped below with a cloven foot of iron' supposed relics of the 'marauding Barons of Holdernesse in the middle ages'.4 As well as equipping the villain with suitably gothic credentials and stamping him with the cloven-footed mark of the

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