Those Democratic Bastards

EDMUND: Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

- King Lear, Act I Scene ii

If both popular culture and history have a short-hand for a villain, it’s calling him a bastard.

Greek mythology’s bastards are often deformed or monstrous. King Arthur’s son Mordred is a bastard (of incest no less). Shakespeare crafted several bastard villains. In Much Ado About Nothing’s Don John plots to ruin a woman’s good name out of spite. In The Tempest Caliban, whose very name is an anagram for ‘canibal’, plots murder and rape. Most famously, Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester, lies, manipulates, and cheats his way through King Lear, sacrificing everyone and everything in his way to achieve what he feels was denied him because of his illegitimate birth.

Similarly, the Bible makes it clear that bastards are to be punished and cast out: “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 23:2) And again here: “Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood, enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks?”…