“Upon a true contract/I got possession of Julietta’s bed”: The Body and the Law in Measure for Measure
p. 35-43
Texte intégral
1Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure opens onto a world that has been turned upside down, where values and the sense of justice seem to have been completely perverted as the Duke himself, the figure of authority, asserts:
So our decrees
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
And liberty plucks Justice by the nose
The baby beats the nurse (1.3.27-30).
The main challenges to authority and justice are bodied forth by the inappropriate sexual appetites of some characters in the play. In Measure for Measure, human bodies seem to be driven by their animal instinct as is evidenced by the presence of Mistress Overdone – one of the first citizens of Vienna seen on stage – and, more obviously, by the pregnant Juliet and Mistress Elbow. Entrusted with the Duke’s authority to restore law and order in Vienna (“To enforce or qualify the laws/As to your soul seems good,” 1.1.65-66), the two deputies, Escalus and Angelo, representing the “body public” – to quote Claudio (1.2.148) – have to regulate all these human bodies. The death sentence pronounced against Claudio for having sexual intercourse with Juliet out of wedlock – despite the existence of a betrothal–illuminates one aspect of the complex relations that are bound between law and the human body throughout the play. While act 1 closes onto Angelo’s tyranny, the next act gradually exposes the duplicity of “the body public” by suggesting that its representatives also have a human body. The metamorphosis of Angelo’s body highlights the hypocrisy of the judicial system in Vienna where the legal body is not ruled by right and wrong, but by animal instinct. Ironically enough, the perversion of the course of justice within a perverted society is to be turned upside down at the end of the play by satisfying sexual needs and applying contract law.
Regulating the excesses of the flesh
2In his study of punishment in Measure for Measure, Arthur L. Little Jr shows how Bakhtin’s theory on the body highlights the nature of human bodies in this play. The “classical body,” or the “body of the state,” is first and foremost represented by Angelo while “Mistress Overdone, Pompey, Elbow and Barnadine, constitute Vienna’s grotesque citizenry1”. The “body public” – a term used by Claudio to describe Angelo’s new authority (1.2.148) – brings to mind the traditional bodily metaphors to describe the king’s power and authority2. The play hints at this particular imagery when the Duke describes “all the organs/Of our own power” (1.1.20-21). It is echoed by the metaphor of anatomy used by Isabella who still believes that authority can punish sins:
because authority, though it err like others
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
That skins the vice o’th’top (2.2.135-137).
Angelo’s “absolute body,” to quote Arthur L. Little Jr, has turned him into a senseless statue that administers a dehumanized justice embodied by his disproportionate death sentence for Claudio’s offence of fornication. Many characters in the play allude to his lack of emotion (1.3.50-53/1.4.57-59) so that all the “images of metal, stone, and coldness work to define Angelo as an inanimate thing, a statue3”. At the beginning of the play, this statuesque body and the many grotesque bodies that people Vienna are at opposite poles. The marble world of act 1 scene 1 stands in sharp contrast with the following scene opening onto the underworld of Lucio, the prostitute Mistress Overdone and the sinful Claudio who is led to prison after his sentence. Nevertheless, this sharp opposition is only visible on the surface as the two worlds might not be so different as they seem. While the name “Overdone” hints at the excesses of the flesh that prostitutes have to deal with, her nickname “Madam Mitigation” (1.2.41) surprisingly echoes the verb “to qualify” previously referred to by the Duke when advising the two deputies about enforcing the laws in Vienna while he is away (“To enforce or qualify the laws,” 1.1.65). This unexpected verbal reverberation might first hint that in very different ways, prostitutes and justice aim at reaching a kind of measured balance. Still, the collusion of this character’s nickname with the world of justice through this synonymy points to the blurred line between the two worlds and foreshadows how easy it is to cross it.
3After ordering to pull down all the brothels in Vienna (1.2), the second attempt at curbing the excesses of the flesh is seen through Claudio’s death sentence for inappropriate intimate behaviour with Juliet out of wedlock. Not only does this sentence appear disproportionate in the play, but it must also have been puzzling for a Jacobean audience since fornication was not punished so heavily in early 17th century. This potentially tragic situation is all the more confusing as the defendant, namely Claudio, asserts the validity of the contractual terms of their sexual intercourse:
Thus stands it with me: upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta’s bed.
You know the lady; she is fast my wife,
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order. This we came not to
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends,
From whom we thought it meet to hide our love
Till time had made them for us. But it chances
The stealth of our most mutual entertainment
With character too gross is writ on Juliet (1.1. 134-144).
The term “contract” alludes to what was also known as “spousal” or “espousal”. As David Cressy has put it “contracting marked the successful conclusion of courtship, the transition from wooing to wiving4”– nowadays, this type of “contract” is akin to engagement. Even though B. J. Sokol rightly claims that “Shakespeare was somewhat spousal obsessed” as “representations of spousals are found in a wide variety of his dramatic settings, and they serve many differing dramatic purposes5,” the first two lines of the quotation bring to the fore the complex relations between law and the female body, present here through the synecdoche of the bed. Throughout the play, the terms “contract” or “pre-contract” tackle the delicate and problematic regulation of consummation in early modern England, revealing the deficiencies of Jacobean matrimonial laws. The ambiguous nature of family law in early 17th century originated with the Reformation. Initially, a “spousal” – stemming from the Roman “stipulation” – was regarded as valid when the man and the woman had freely exchanged promises. Consent was thus the basis of marriage in canon law and was enforced by the decretal of Pope Alexander III in late 12th century. In England, the Council of Westminster asserted the need for mutual consent in 1175. Nevertheless, this type of contract was later rejected by the Council of Trent in 1573 to adopt the system of a public ceremony held in facie ecclesiae along with witnesses. After the break with Rome, England did not integrate this new legal reform and maintained the old decretal in English canon law. Thus, not only did a conflict arise between the English canon law and the Continental one6, but also between Canon law and Common law in early modern England. Even though Common law courts heard cases related to real property arising from marriage, Church courts were still in charge of settling disputes regarding the formation and validity of marriage. Although Common law and Canon law courts agreed not to challenge the validity of marriages celebrated in public and in church, their legal interpretations of spousals and clandestine marriages were at odds. For instance, the clandestine marriage contracted by Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare’s play was accepted by Common law, but considered as void in a Church court. Although church-celebrated public ceremony had become legal by 1604 and was encouraged both by the State and the Church, Jacobeans still entered into “contracts” before marriage which were still canonically accepted, but sometimes acted as husband and wife before the public ceremony while it was strictly forbidden by Canon law. David Cressy has discovered that the “analysis of parish registers shows some 20 to 30 per cent of all brides bearing children within the first eight months of marriage. The illegitimate birth rate was low – around 2 to 4 percent – and was mostly associated with broken betrothals7”.
4As Ernest Schanzer has argued, the contract that Claudio and Juliet entered into constitutes a per verba de praesenti spousal while Angelo and Marianna’s is more akin to a per verba de futuro8. Accordingly, Claudio’s contract is “true” since he and Juliet exchanged their promises which made their marriage immediately binding. However, legally speaking, Claudio’s “contract” with Juliet could have been valid if consummation had not taken place – or had been more discreet – and if this promise had been turned into an “outward order” (1.2.138), more precisely a church celebration. Common law would obviously reject such a contract as it could threaten the division of real property in the couple. As Claudio underlines, the consummation or enforcement of their marital contract “with character too gross is writ on Juliet” (1.2.144). The pun on “written” and the legal term “writ9,” which is typical of Common law, brings to mind all the legal issues arising from the future birth, whether it be bastardy or any non-contentious matters such as probate. The death sentence given by Angelo is utterly inconsistent with the Duke’s recommendation to “qualify the laws” and would have never been issued in early modern England. As Ernest Schanzer points out
“being technically guitly of fornication, Claudio is therefore punishable under the law which Angelo has revived. Angelo’s condemnation of Claudio was – and no doubt was intended by Shakespeare to appear – absolutely tyrannical10”.
5Nevertheless, the dichotomy between the senseless and merciless “body public” and the “grotesque body” represented by Claudio and the pregnant Juliet in act I, is to be reversed by the desirable body of the statuesque Isabella.
When the “body public” turns into Pygmalion’s statue
6In his analysis of Angelo’s statuesque body, Arthur L. Little Jr argues that the Duke aims at breaking down the iconic deputy by setting up the “bed-trick”: “[his] ability to be or become statue challenges his power in Vienna. His power is manifested not by any talent he has for creating statues but by his ability to destroy or deconstruct them11”. However, the final scene does not actually stage the deconstruction of Angelo’s statuesque legal body since he has already deconstructed his “classical body” himself. Act 2 subtly reveals the confusion between the “body public” he is supposed to embody and his own “grotesque” human body driven by sexual appetite. The senseless and tyrannical statue slowly turns into a body of flesh and bone just as Pygmalion’s statue did in Ovid’s Metamorphoses12. Lucio lustfully refers to these mythical sculptor’s statues as whores: “Is there none of Pygmalion’s images newly made woman to be had now” (3.2.43-45). Although it was divested with different readings in early modern England, the story of the sculptor Pygmalion who madly fell in love with his statue first and foremost represented lust, vice and idolatry. In Confessio Amantis (1390), John Gower depicts him as the embodiment of sloth, one of the seven deadly sins13. According to Christine de Pizan, Pygmalion was the epitome of temptation that the virtuous knight should resist: “Pygmaliones ymage, on whom the good knight schulde not be assotid, we schall take for the synne of lecherye, from the which the knyghtli goostli spirite schuld kepe his body14.” As for the statue coming to life, it exemplified the overwhelming and dangerous power of women, deluding men by using their charms. In his mock-epyllion, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (1598), John Marston lampooned the story of Pygmalion by expanding the erotic innuendos embedded in Ovid’s text to turn his attraction to his statue into mere perversion.
7The seemingly despising reference to Pygmalion’s myth in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure conceals a deeper connection with Ovid’s text. After his first encounter with Isabella where the legal “body public” has opposed his vision of authority and severity to the young nun-to-be’s view on divine justice and mercy, Angelo’s human body is stirred by desire (“Dost thou desire her foully?,” 2.2.174; “What, do I love her,/That I desire to hear her speak again?/And feast upon her eyes?,” 2.2.177-179). The metamorphosis of the statue into a body of flesh and bone is complete in act 2 scene 4 when Angelo feels the blood of life and of lust rushing through his heart: “Why does my blood thus muster to my heart?” (2.2.20). Likewise, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the rush of blood through the ivory body of the statue testifies that Pygmalion’s work of art has turned into a maiden whose body of flesh is warm and alive (“by laying on his thumb/He felt her pulses beating15”). As the sculptor kisses the statue coming to life, she can also feel the rush of blood through her body (“She felt the kisse and blusht thereat16”).
8The two main matrimonial contracts entered into in Measure for Measure – namely the per verba and the de futuro ones – are foiled by other types of illegal and immoral contracts, such as the one offered by Angelo to Isabella in act 2 scene 4. This strange “contract” was shaped by diverse literary sources17. The irony lying behind the drafting of the contractual terms in act 2 scene 4 is that they are couched in unusual religious and even legal terminology. First, Angelo tries to convince Isabella that if she accepts to be more intimate with him, her brother will be saved and even redeemed: “to redeem him/Give your body to such sweet uncleanness/As she that he hath stained” (2.4.53-55). As Isabella seems unwilling to enter into that illegal contract, Angelo shifts his speech to legal rhetoric since he reminds her that he is “the voice of the recorded law” (2.4.61). While the offer is the release of her brother and the immediate suspension of his death sentence, the consideration in this odd type of contract is not money, but Isabella’s body:
Admit no other way to save his life […]
and that there were
No earthly meant to save him, but that either
You must lay down the treasures of your body
To this suppos’d, or else to let him suffer :
What would you do? (2.4. 88/94-98).
His odd wooing of Isabella is followed by a surprising shift from contractual terminology to criminal law terminology: “this testimony of your sex” (130); “I do arrest your words” (133); “by all external warrants18” (136). This scene mockingly points to the confusion between the legal body and the “grotesque body” as the lustful Angelo’s declaration of love is pervaded with legal terms. The law is here summoned to subject the female body to Angelo’s animal instinct: “Bidding the law make curtsey to their will/Hooking both right and wrong to th’appetite,/To follow as it draws!” (2.4.174-176.).
Restoring justice through the “bed-trick”
9As the female body seems to be doomed to be submitted to the excesses of Angelo’s authority at the end of act 2, the Duke decides to play an ironical but legal trick on Vienna’s new tyrant. While Angelo has wanted his needs to shape the course of justice through his illegal “betrothal,” the Duke plans to satisfy his sexual appetite by performing an old matrimonial contract. In act 3 scene 1, he reminds Isabella that Angelo had previously entered a betrothal with Marianna and the ceremony had even been planned, but unfortunately, this contract had been deemed void as Marianna’s brother died at sea with the dowry (3.1.212-223). Unlike Claudio and Juliet’s contract, Angelo’s was regarded at the time as a per verba de futuro. Although A. D. Nuttal claims that per verba de praesenti and per verba de futuro contracts lie on “a distinction of canon law [that] rests entirely on the tense used in affirming the contract19,” the terms of the contract differed in some ways. Even if consent was still absolute, it was possible to break the contract if one of the parties decided to reject it. A dowry could also be part of a de futuro contract. It goes without saying that in case of copulation, the de futuro contract was turned immediately into a de praesenti one–hence the “bed trick” set by the Duke.
10The dramatisation of the “bed trick” in Measure for Measure might reveal at first sight a strange conception of the female body which is used here to perform a matrimonial contract that had been deemed void. Furthermore, consent is no longer the basis of the contract as B. J. Sokol underlined: “Such tricks involve sexual consummation lacking the element of ‘pure and perfect’ mutual consent essential to establish a marriage insisted on by Swinburne20.” The terms of the contract are laid down in falsehood and deceit:
With Angelo tonight shall lie
His old betrothed, but despised:
So disguise shall by th’disguised
Pay with falsehood false exacting,
And perform and old contracting (3.2.271-275).
The substitution of the female body could even threaten the validity of the contract since Angelo is to be misguided. Still, the Duke manages to transform deceit and falsehood into the main piece of evidence in the trial scene. Angelo’s guilt and abuse of power can hardly be defended in a court of law all the more so as he was supposed to embody law and order:
This deed unshapes me quite; makes me unpregnant
And dull to all proceedings. A deflower’d maid ;
And by an eminent body, that enforc’d
The law against it! (4.4.18-20).
11As the play draws to an end, the complex relation between the human body and the law reaches its highest point in the trial scene. The stage directions indicate that the scene takes place in a public space which is quickly turned into a court of law, more akin to a church court. While Isabella kneels down before the Duke, begging for justice and accusing Angelo of raping her, Marianna enters the stage, wearing a veil. She plays the role of the witness giving exculpatory evidence to prove Angelo’s innocence. Indeed, the twist of this testimony lies in the clever substitution of the female body as the two female characters actually swapped in bed: “Why just, my lord, and that is Angelo,/Who thinks he knows that he ne’er knew my body,/But knows, he thinks, that he knows Isabel’s” (5.1.201-203). As she unveils her mask to reveal her identity, the substitution enables to seal the former de futuro contract between Angelo and Marianna as there was indeed consummation:
This the hand which, with a vow’d contract,
Was fast belockr’d in thine: this the body
That took away the match from Isabel
And did supply thee at thy garden-house,
In her imagin’d person (5.1.208-212).
12The trial scene in public is akin to a public ceremony, not exactly held in church, but in what looks like a Church court. The presence of witnesses makes this union official as the Duke reminds Angelo: “this new-married man” (5.1.398). Accordingly, the conflict between the different matrimonial laws that arose in the play is finally solved with the official ceremonies held in the last scene.
***
13To conclude, the main legal cases that are dramatised in Measure for Measure are all related with sins of the flesh and their diverse punishment, starting with the inappropriate death sentence against Claudio and ending on the application of an old marital contract between Marianna and Angelo. The resort to criminal law exemplified by the tyrannical threat of execution turned out to be utterly inefficient to regulate the excesses of human appetites since even the bodies representing authority and the law are finally driven by their own sexual appetites. The fair enforcement of the contractual relationships created by the diverse “betrothals” through a kind of public ceremony settles the diverse conflicts that arose in the early scenes. The restored harmony between the law and the human body brings fertility expressed through metaphors of reaping – just as consummation gave life to a future being (“from the seedness the bare fallow brings/To teeming foison,” 1.4.41-42), the revival of an old contract through a “bed-trick” is a promise of life (“our corn’s to reap, for yet our tithe’s to sow,” 4.1.76).
Notes de bas de page
1“Absolute Bodies, Absolute Laws: Staging Punishment in Measure for Measure,” Shakespearean Power and Punishment, Gillian Murray Kendal (ed.), Cranbury, Associated University Press, 1998, p. 118.113-129.
2I am refering here to the well-known doctrine of the King’s two bodies. See for instance Rolls Albert, The Theory of the King’s Two Bodies in the Age of Shakespeare, Lewiston, NY, E. Mellen Press, 2000.
3Op. cit, p. 117.
4Birth, Marriage and Death, Oxford, Oxford University Press, (1997), 1999, p. 267.
5Shakespeare, Law and Marriage, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 15.
6Subha Mukerji wittingly underlines that “in a sense [English canon law] remained more Roman than Roman law itself which had modified the inherited canons after the Council of Trent, while England persisted with pre-Tridentine rules way into the middle of the seventeenth century,” Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 19.
7Op. cit., p. 277.
8“Marriage contracts in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 1960, p. 30-40. Some critics have challenged that particular interpretation. See, for instance, Nagarajan S., “Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 14, n° 2, 1963, p. 115-119.
9Originally, a writ was a letter written by the King, usually in Latin. As English Common Law developed, writs became orders issued by a court to allow litigants to have their cases heard in one of the Royal Courts.
10The Problem Plays of Shakespeare, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 77.
11Op. cit., p. 118.
12Book X, l. 243-297.
13The English Works of John Gower, G. C. Macaulay (ed.), London, Oxford University Press, 1969.
1422, Allegorie, The Epistle to Othea, Curt F. Bühler (ed.), London, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 35.
15Translation of Golding Arthur, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytled Metamorphoses, 1567, W. D. House (ed.), London, Centaur Press, 1961, book 10, l. 315-316.
16Ibid, l. 319.
17These sources are summarized in the edition of Measure for Measure, J. W. Lever (ed.), London, Methuen, (1965), 1987, p. 36-39.
18Even though this term refers here to token or sign, warrant is also used in criminal law to refer to arrest or search warrants.
19“Measure for Measure: the bed trick,” Shakespeare Survey, vol. 28, 2002, p. 52, p. 51-56.
20Op. cit., p. 26.
Auteur
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Armelle Sabatier
Agrégée d’Anglais, maître de conférences à l’université de Paris-II Assas, membre du laboratoire VALE (Paris-IV Sorbonne). Elle a soutenu une thèse de troisième cycle intitulée « Mort et résurrection dans le théâtre élisabéthain et jacobéen ». Ses publications portent essentiellement sur le théâtre et la poésie de la Renaissance anglaise ainsi que sur les rapports entre littérature et droit, entre autres, « “You have ravished justice” (3.2.274) : de la parodie de justice dans The White Devil de John Webster », Justice, Frédérique Fouassier et Alexis Chommeloux (éd.), Tours, GRAAT On-Line, 2009, p. 97-107.
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