Incest in the white gaze: Myrrha’s tree-becoming in two seventeenth-century epyllia

Two versions of the same story of Adonis’s mother, Myrrha, were published within six years in the early seventeenth century. Epyllia by William Barksted (1607) and Henry Austin (1613) each retold Ovid’s etiology of myrrh. In the Metamorphoses, Myrrha seduces her biological father, Cinyras, the king of Cyprus, and eventually becomes a myrrh tree. While we have revisionist accounts of Myrrha in feminist histories of sexuality, her race and that of Cinyras have been ignored. Austin’s version condemns his heroine as a hypersexual Ottoman woman who threatens white English futurity and its linear family trees, while Barksted and his male literary collaborators perfume Shakespeare and his literary corpus with an anadem of myrrh. As they graft their poems to his, these men experiment with queer and Black identities across gender, using the plant kingdom to reimagine the generative afterlives of texts that preserve, inhabit, and challenge the dead. Still, in their selective interpretations of Ovid and use of early modern racial grammar, both seventeenth-century epyllia underscore an Islamophobic, white supremacist position that incest is blackening, non-Christian, and geographically distant from England. They engage in a process that identifies nonwhite women as the primary incest victims and victimizers and implies that white Protestant readers who break this taboo would lose a racial identity they were simultaneously being taught to recognize as their innate white property.