“In our remove be thou at full ourself”: the Measures of Friendship in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
p. 103-118
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1 Measure for Measure may seem to be an unlikely candidate for an analysis of Shakespeare’s treatment of friendship. Unlike other plays by Shakespeare – such as The Winter’s Tale or The Two Noble Kinsmen, two texts that have received considerable scholarly attention recently for the dramatist’s respective treatment of the friendships between King Leontes and King Polixenes, and Palamon and Arcite – Measure for Measure contains no celebrated pair of friends1. Indeed, the governing themes of Measure for Measure have traditionally been seen by scholars to evolve around such issues as justice and mercy – a theme which is evoked by the allusion made in the title of the play to the well-known biblical precept from the Sermon of the Mount to “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7: 1-2)2. As Stacy Magedanz has remarked, “as the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to carry a biblical title, Measure for Measure draws on an explicitly Christian body of thought about law, mercy, justice, and the right exercise of authority3”.
2No doubt, the relation between justice and mercy and the question about the proper limits of authority are of special import in a play where the morality of a supposedly strict Christian, Angelo, is put to the test when he is appointed to the role of magistrate by a Duke who is thereby trying to make amends for his own past failure to strictly enforce justice4. As Robert B. Pierce has recently argued, the actions of these characters bring up a number of issues pertaining to practical ethics as they try to raise themselves to the challenge of acting as moral agents5. While acknowledging the centrality of such themes as justice, mercy, and moral agency in Measure for Measure, my own attempt here will be to shed light on the significance of concepts of friendship in the play. As I would like to suggest, while this appears to be an issue of minor importance in Measure for Measure, the play in fact employs the notion of friendship in ways that may, on the one hand, serve to broaden our perspective on some of the political and theoretical implications of early modern friendship, while on the other, illuminating the complex interrelation between early modern conceptions of friendship and theories of political power and authority. Indeed, as I will be pointing out in this essay, an exploration of the various valences of friendship in Measure for Measure may provide a fresh perspective on the perceived polarity between justice and mercy that is so often seen as a governing theme in readings of the play.
3Friendship is invoked in many different instances and within different kinds of contexts in the play that also suggest the multiplicity of meanings and usages the word “friend” had during the period when Shakespeare was writing. Examples abound in the text. Take, for instance, the reason provided by Claudio for not having observed the religious formalities that would render him and Juliet officially married in the eyes of the law. As he says,
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 (1.2.138-142).
Here, the term “friends” clearly refers to those kinsmen or relatives who were entrusted with Juliet’s dowry6. The word is invested with a different meaning in Lucio’s reference to Claudio having “got his friend [Juliet] with child” (1.4.29), where “friend” has the connotations of “lover7”. In other instances, “friend” is used to refer to someone who wishes another one well and is willing to give a helping hand8 – as in Claudio’s reference to Lucio as a “good friend” (1.2.182) following Lucio’s eagerness to help Claudio escape the penalty imposed upon him by Angelo’s decree and his undertaking of the task of visiting Claudio’s sister, Isabella, to ask her to implore Angelo for some leniency. In other cases, such as Escalus’s question to Froth, “Where were you born, friend” (2.1.190), the term “friend” has a much looser definition as it is used in a much more general sense to refer to someone who may be a mere stranger9.
4Therefore, the various meanings attributed to “friend” in the text cover a wide range of possible relations which include the affective and more intimate type of relations often linked with friendship as well as a broader and much looser type of associations. This multiplicity of possible meanings to the term “friend” is often suggested by early modern commentators on friendship, but also by one of the earliest theoretical discussions on the topic in the classical period, found in books eight and nine of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In this discussion – the theoretical formulations of which had considerable impact, as I will be pointing out, on early modern notions of friendship – Aristotle notably analyzes friendship in terms of three distinct, though often overlapping, categories. The first category concerns friendships which are based on utility: these are marked by Aristotle as defective as “friends whose affection is based on utility do not love each other in themselves, but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other10.” Similarly, friendships that belong to the second category and are based on pleasure are also marked by Aristotle as imperfect, since the friend is not loved for what he is in himself but for the pleasure he provides to the other. Both of these categories are distinguished by Aristotle from what he defines as perfect friendship: in this category, friends are drawn together not by the hope of having any personal benefit or pleasure but because they “wish each alike the other’s good in respect of their goodness, as they are good in themselves”. As Aristotle further affirms here, “it is those who wish the good of their friends for their friends’sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally11”. In this perfect kind of friendship which is based in virtue, friends may still enjoy and benefit from each other. However, pleasure and profit do not provide the formative principles of their relationship. In effect, this type of friendship provides such an ideal and absolute form of bonding that the perfect friend “feels towards his friend in the same way as towards himself (‘ for a friend’, as Aristotle memorably remarks, ‘ is another self’12)”. This is a trope I will be discussing in much greater detail in relation to Measure for Measure later in this essay.
5The different types of friendship and especially the distinction between true or perfect friendship and more defective or imperfect kind of ones also preoccupied various other commentators on this topic. A number of treatises, in particular, show special concern with the distinction between true and false friendship or the true friend and him who merely simulates friendship with the expectation of personal gain – a problem which was considered, as one would expect, of special import in relation to those in positions of power who would more often attract around them individuals hoping for different kinds of benefits and favors. An example from the classical period may be found in Plutarch’s essay on “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend” from his Moralia, a text that emphasizes the significance of testing the trustworthiness of one’s friends – and the importance of doing so before critical moments of need, “for we must not wait for injury to open our eyes, but to avoid injury we must gain acquaintance with the flatterer and learn how to detect him; otherwise we shall be in the same case with those who try to learn about deadly drugs by tasting them first, and so ruin and destroy themselves in order to reach the decision13”. This treatise – which was translated by Erasmus into Latin and appended to his edition of The Education of a Christian Prince in 151614 – was influential for a number of early modern texts that concerned themselves with the distinction between true and false friendship. In England – where Plutarch’s text became available in the vernacular in a translation by Sir Thomas Elyot, produced at the request of King Henry VIII, and subsequently in a second English translation by Philemon Holland in 1603 – this distinction provides a recurrent preoccupation in a number of texts, ranging from Erasmus’s “The prince must avoid flatterers” and Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier to Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Friendship”.
6On the early modern stage also, the distinction between true and false friendship (especially as it relates to those in power) often offered a theme of inspiration for dramatists. Shakespeare himself turned his attention to the possible simulation of friendship by self-serving individuals in a number of his plays, most notably in Othello where Iago employs various rhetorical and histrionic methods to put himself in Othello’s trust and present himself as a true friend – the play, as Robert C. Evans has suggested, presents various connections with Plutarch’s treatment of flattery in relation to friendship15. In Measure for Measure too, Shakespeare points to the practice of making friends for the purpose of serving one’s own interest when Claudio asks Lucio to “Implore her [Isabella], in my voice, that she make friends/To the strict deputy [Angelo]” (1.2.170-171) so as to convince him to show leniency and pardon Claudio for this offence. As in Othello, where Iago’s successful deception of Othello is largely based on the former’s dexterous command of both linguistic and histrionic skills, Claudio’s hope for his sister’s success in “assay[ing]” (1.2.171) Angelo is based on his belief both in Isabella’s abilities in rhetoric as well as in her histrionic power of speechless performance which he considers particularly effective when practiced by women on men. As he says,
I have great hope in that. For in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect
Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art
When she will play with reason and discourse,
And well she can persuade (1.2.172-176).
7As J. W. Lever rightly observes in his notes to these lines in the second Arden Shakespeare edition of the play, “the overt drift” here is “an application of psychology to the art of rhetoric”. However, there also appears to be a subtext of irony in Claudio’s use of such ambiguous terms as “prone,” “move,” or “play,” all of which are “capable of suggesting sexual provocation16” and ironically serve to look ahead to Isabella’s subsequent non-intentional sexual provocation of Angelo.
8The problem of friendship in relation to those in high social or economic positions also finds poignant expression in Measure for Measure in the speech delivered by the Duke (disguised as friar) in the first scene of act 3, in an attempt to provide consolation to Claudio and help him face the death sentence imposed on him with greater courage and resolution. Urging Claudio to see life, and then by extent death, with contempt, the Duke’s speech at some point turns attention to the misery of the rich who are likened to the proverbial figure of the ass in carrying a heavy load of riches from which they are only released at the time of their death. Thus, having enjoyed little of the riches accumulated on their backs, they end up having lived in poverty:
If thou art rich, thou’rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And Death unloads thee (3.1.25-28).
This plight of the rich is further aggravated, as the Duke says, when they grow old. This is a period of loneliness, as he describes it, during which one is deprived not only of youth and good health but also of friendship:
Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum
For ending thee no sooner (3.1.28-32).
As J. W. Lever notes, this description is reminiscent of a relevant passage in Marcellus Palingenius’s Zodiacus Vitae (translated in English by Barnaby Googe and first published in a complete English edition as The Zodiake of Life in 1565) which refers to the abandonment of old men by friends and relatives:
And when that aged hayres shal hap and sicknesse shall thee hent,
Who shall thy wearied age relieue? who shall thy hurts lament?
Thy brother or thy kinsman neere, or will doe this thy friend?
No sure, for to be heyre to thee they rather wish thyne end17.
9This passage implicitly contrasts the affection of true friends to the interest of those friends and relatives who merely surround the rich old man in expectation of soon inheriting his fortune – a situation savagely satirized on the early modern stage by Ben Jonson in his play Volpone. These texts, as well as the Duke’s speech in Measure for Measure, significantly raise questions concerning the viability of true friendship for the wealthy and powerful. In this light, while on one level the Duke’s speech intends to provide consolation to Claudio, on another level it raises an issue which is much closer to home for the Duke himself than for any other character in the play.
10It is to the figure of the Duke that I would now like to focus my attention, as the character’s evocation of friendship opens up a compelling set of considerations in Measure for Measure. In particular, I would here like to examine the ways in which notions of friendship are employed in the play with respect to the relation between the Duke and his two deputies, Angelo and Escalus. As I would like to suggest, this discussion raises significant questions about the figure of the ruler in Measure for Measure that touch upon some of the broader theoretical issues concerning the implications of sovereign power and authority in the early modern period. The Duke’s greeting to Escalus at the beginning of the fifth act, “Our old and faithful friend, we are glad to see you” (5.1.2), is revealing of his appropriation of early modern notions of friendship, with Escalus being presented as the loyal old servant – a figure which makes frequent appearance in Shakespearean plays (with examples found in such characters as Kent in King Lear or Adam in As You Like It). A more challenging notion of friendship though may be found in some of the Duke’s references to Angelo. Indeed, as I would like to argue, the Duke’s assignment of a deputorial role to Angelo at the beginning of the text is reminiscent of that classically-inspired concept of friendship which presented the friend as “another self” and to which I briefly made reference earlier in this essay. This idea is most clearly evoked in the Duke’s instruction to Angelo shortly before the Duke’s departure: “In our remove be thou at full ourself” (1.1.43). My suggestion is that the Duke’s evocation of the concept of the friend as “another self” in these words addressed to Angelo carries a rich and varied set of implications which I would like to discuss in the rest of this essay.
11As various studies in recent years have suggested, this idea of the friend as “another self” – the codification of which has often been ascribed to Aristotle – came to be employed in the rhetoric of numerous discussions of friendship from the classical to the early modern periods, thus giving shape, as Robert Stretter has noted, to “a highly theorized tradition of ideal male friendship stretching from Aristotle to Montaigne18”. Cicero’s De Amicitia – one of the most widely-disseminated classical texts during the early modern period and one that came to hold a central role in humanist education – was instrumental in transmitting the tenets of this tradition in early modern Europe19. In this treatise Cicero, like Aristotle, lays emphasis on the significance of true friendship, reiterating the idea that the true friend is “another self” or an “alter idem”20. The significant impact of this codification of friendship in early modern Europe is testified by such texts as Michel de Montaigne’s well-known essay “De l’amitié” (first published in French in 1580 and in an English translation by John Florio in 1603)21. In England, the concept found expression in a broad range of texts, including such humanist advice-books as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531), poems such as Nicolas Grimald’s “Of Frendship” (published in Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557), and plays such as Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias (first performed in 1564)22. Shakespeare himself employed the concept of the friend as “another self” in a number of his plays – most notably in the two plays cited at the beginning of this essay, The Winter’s Tale and Two Noble Kinsmen, where Shakespeare in fact demonstrates the failure of the ideal when that is put to the test of real-life interactions (in both plays, the initially celebrated pairs of friends fall out and friendship turns to bitter enmity – in the former case, due to King Leontes’s obsessive suspicion that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful to him with his friend King Polixenes, and in the latter, due to the development of an erotic rivalry between Palamon and Arcite who fall in love with the same woman).
12As Laurie Shannon has highlighted in her landmark study on early modern friendship, central to this classically-inspired tradition of friendship that cast the friend as “another self” is a rhetoric of sameness and equality that emphasizes the significance of friends’likeness in sex, as well as in social station, opinions and ideas. This principle expounded on by Aristotle – who affirms that “Amity consists in equality and similarity, especially the similarity of those who are alike in virtue23 ” – and taken up by Cicero in De Amicitia, was indeed re-appropriated in the rhetoric of a great many discussions of friendship in the early modern period. “Renaissance friendship’s intersubjective condition,” as Shannon points out, “founds itself on emphatic principles of sameness; its most consistent impulse is homonormative24 ”. This idea of sameness is fittingly suggested by that other trope often used to refer to the idea of the friend as “another self”: that which refers to true friends as “one soul in bodies twain”. As Montaigne highlights in “De l’amitié,” such is the “correspondence” of perfect friends “according to that most apt definition of Aristotle’s”. This “unique, highest friendship,” Montaigne further affirms, “loosens all other bonds”. So, while redoubled physically, true friends constitute a single, perfectly unified entity – one that is expressed through the “total interfusion of [their] wills”. In effect, as Montaigne further holds, the friend “is not another, he is me25”. So absolute is the fusion of true friends’identities taken to be here that individuality collapses, rendering the two practically indistinguishable.
13From a certain perspective, this discourse of sameness renders the figure of the ruler uniquely unfit for the realm of friendship with respect to his subjects. Indeed, the asymmetrical social relationship between ruler and subjects may be said to raise a fundamental obstacle in the ruler’s capacity to partake in this type of friendship where the friend is “another self”. And yet, from a different perspective, this classical trope is uniquely appropriate to express the figure of the sovereign and the ways in which political power might be exercised through what one might call deputorial redoubling, or in other words, the corporeal duplication of the sovereign’s body by deputorial agents who undertake the execution of the sovereign’s desires and designs. This idea, as I would like to suggest, is particularly resonant in the Duke’s instruction to Angelo in the opening scene of Measure for Measure that calls upon the newly-appointed deputy to be “at full ourself” (1.1.43) during the Duke’s absence. Thus evoking the language of ideal friendship, what the Duke is calling upon Angelo to do is to be “another himself” during his own physical absence and exercise the role of the magistrate as his perfect duplicate.
14The significance of such deputorial redoubling for the purpose of effective government is succinctly emphasized by Francis Bacon in his essay “Of Frendship26,” a text that highlights the important benefits of friendship by analyzing its so-called “fruits”. The first one of those concerns the benefits of communicating one’s thoughts and ideas to a friend – a means of achieving “the Ease and Discharge of the Fulnesse and Swellings of the Heart, which Passions of all kinds doe cause and induce27” – while the second one emphasizes the significance of receiving good and faithful counsel from a friend. As I have pointed out elsewhere, these “fruits” are considered by Bacon particularly important for kings and rulers who are in fact thought to have a duty, as well as a vested interest, to pursue friendship as a means of preserving their power and authority and safeguarding the well-being of the body politic28. The fundamental contribution of friendship to effective governance is further highlighted by Bacon in his analysis of the third “fruit” which is, as he says, “like the Pomgranat, full of many kernels” as it provides “Aid, and Bearing a Part, in all Actions, and Occasions29 ”. Here Bacon invites his readers to consider “how many Things there are, which a Man cannot doe Himselfe,” but may accomplish with the help of a good friend. For example, as he points out, it often happens that a man dies without having fulfilled many of his desires – such as the completion of a work or the bestowal of property on children. But, “If a Man have a true Frend, he may rest almost secure, that the Care of those Things, will continue after Him. So that a Man hath as it were two Lives in his desires.” Likewise, even while living, there are numerous things one cannot very easily do himself which he can accomplish more effectively through a friend. These include situations where one may need to breach the rules of social decorum, such as in extolling one’s own merits or pleading to others for various issues. “But all these Things,” Bacon holds, “are Gracefull in a Frends Mouth, which are Blushing in a Mans Owne”.
15In effect, what Bacon describes here is a clone-like configuration of the self that enables one to transcend the limitations imposed on one’s natural body by time and space, by assigning the execution of one’s plans and desires to the friend: “A Man hath a Body, and that Body is confined to a Place; But where Frendship is, all Offices of Life, are as it were granted to Him, and his Deputy. For he may exercise them by his Frend.” As Laurie Shannon has very convincingly argued in her discussion of this extract, this composite figure described by Bacon “echo[es] not only theories of kingship and of political organization in general but even those of modern corporation laws: a supercession of the natural body’s spatial and temporal limitations, an expansion of implementable ‘Offices of Life’, and a protocol of deputation, proxy, or agency by which this larger body may enact ‘desires’30”. Indeed, what Bacon’s description seems to suggest is a radical extension of the self that significantly redefines the classical figure of the friend as “another self”: for as Bacon firmly affirms, “it was a Sparing Speech of the Ancients, to say, That a Frend is another Himselfe: For that a Frend is farre more then Himselfe”.
16The political implications of this conglomerate figure of the self and the ways in which the friend/deputy might serve to expand the body of the sovereign are particularly notable and were in fact given visual expression in emblem books of the period. A striking example may be found in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modern (1635), in an emblem that shows the unconquerability of power “Where many-Forces joyned are31” (Figure 1). The emblem portrays the figure of a monarch whose strength is signified by the six arms extending from his body, each carrying a different type of weapon. The explication accompanying the image of this multi-armed body refers to the “unconquerable strength” of him who “hath many Faculties, or Friends /To keepe him safe (or to acquire his ends),” and manages to bring them together in a single body and thus make them help in his endeavors “As if so many Hands, they had been made32” – a description which is highly reminiscent of Bacon’s analysis of the third “fruit” of friendship. The indomitable power of this sovereign self is properly signified by its monstrous outlook: as Wither remarks “this doth rather fashion out a Monster,/Then forme an Hieroglyphicke”.
17Such a composite figure of the sovereign self is clearly evoked by the Duke when he calls upon Angelo to be “at full ourself”. Angelo, as the Duke says, is “one that can my part in him advértise” (1.1.41) – a statement that partly qualifies the announcement of his decision to entrust Angelo with the office of first deputy during his upcoming absence in the opening scene of the play. As he explains to Escalus shortly before Angelo’s arrival:
we have with special soul
Elected him our absence to supply;
Lent him our terror, drest him with our love,
And given his deputation all the organs
Of our own power (1.1.17-21).
And yet, as I would like to suggest, while used as a symbol of power and good governance, this figure of the multi-membered sovereign employed here by Duke Vincentio may be said to point to a governing incapacity which is at the centre of this configuration of the sovereign self and constantly threatens the sovereign with subversion.
18This foundational incapacity is rather unwittingly betrayed in Bacon’s discussion of his third “fruit” of friendship despite the author’s eagerness to valorize the role of the friend as deputy. Indeed, as Bacon’s analysis suggests, it is one’s own inability to cope with all aspects of life that renders the friend/deputy so indispensable. The examples he uses extend beyond issues that concern the possible breach of social decorum to various other instances where one may find himself unable to act without the friend’s help. These include situations where one is unable to speak with the appropriate measure of candor, openness, or severity, and assigns this task to the friend who undertakes to speak on his behalf: “A Man cannot speak to his Sonne, but as a Father; To his Wife, but as a Husband; To his Enemy, but upon Termes: whereas a Frend may speak, as the Case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person.” The political implications of this type of weakness or incapacity in relation to the figure of the sovereign may be seen more clearly in Bacon’s essay “Of Counsell” that betrays the ruler’s unnerving and potentially subversive reliance on the figure of the counselor33.
19Ultimately, as Bacon notes in his essay “Of Frendship,” “to enumerate” the things in which the friend/deputy might be useful “were endless: I have given the Rule, where a Man cannot fitly play his owne Part: If he have not a Frend, he may quit the Stage”. This theatrical metaphor that duly emphasizes the indispensability of the figure of the friend/deputy – but also by implication one’s powerless reliance on this figure – is intriguingly appropriate for the Duke’s transfer of his duties to Angelo in Measure for Measure. Indeed, as becomes clear during the course of the play, the Duke’s hurried departure in the first scene and his assignation of the powers of government to Angelo are largely due to such an incapacity or failure on behalf of the Duke to “play his owne Part”. This is revealed to the audience in act one scene three where the Duke, who has not actually left the city, meets with Friar Thomas and discloses the real reasons why he has “deliver’d to Lord Angelo –/A man of stricture and firm abstinence –/My absolute power and place here in Vienna” (1.3.11-13), letting his newly-appointed deputy and everybody else under the impression that he has traveled to Poland. This, as he explains, he did due to his own past failure to enforce the law with appropriate strictness, something which has resulted in the law being disrespected and mocked rather than feared and respected:
We have strict statutes and most biting laws,
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong jades,
Which for this fourteen years we have let slip;
Even like an o’er-grown lion in a cave
That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers,
Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,
Only to stick it in their children’s sight
For terror, not to use, in time the rod
Becomes more mock’d than fear’d: so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
Ad Liberty plucks Justice by the nose,
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum (1.3.19-31).
Responding to the Friar’s interjection that “It rested in your Grace/To unloose this tied-up justice when you pleas’d” (1.3.31-32) and that justice, had that been done, would “more dreadful have seem’d/Than in Lord Angelo” (1.3.33-34), the Duke suggests that such an action would be politically unwise and self-defeating as justice would thereby have seemed “too dreadful” (1.3.34). As he explains, “Sith’twas my fault to give the people scope,/’Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them/For what I bid them do” (1.3.35-37). Therefore, his decision to assign this office to Angelo “Who may in th’ambush of my name strike home,/And yet my nature never in the fight/To do in slander” (1.3.41-43).
20In effect, to use Bacon’s redefinition of the classical trope of the friend as “another self,” what the Duke is calling upon Angelo to do is not simply to be “ another Himselfe ” but to be “farre more then Himselfe ” and to make amends for his own past failure and current reluctance to enforce the law with the appropriate strictness. Quite importantly, while pointing to the governing incapacity or failure which is found at the heart of this configuration of the sovereign self, the Duke’s employment of Angelo’s deputorial services further suggests an inherent division in this figure that may be said to hreaten its alleged unity. Indeed, contrary to the classical figure of the friend as “another self” which is largely based on the principle of sameness, this composite figure of the sovereign where the friend/deputy is “farre more then Himselfe” appears to be based more on the principle of difference and division. It is notably Angelo’s difference from the Duke himself, his greater inclination for strictness, that frames the Duke’s decision to appoint him as his substitute – and in fact to choose him over Escalus whose greater proneness to mercy and leniency highlights his similarity to the Duke. In this respect, the composite figure of the sovereign self, so aptly portrayed in Wither’s emblem of the monstrously, multi-membered body of a monarch, may be said to provide a body of division rather than a body of unified and unconquerable power. Power and division thus come to be simultaneously signified in the monstrous body of the sovereign that thereby encloses the constant possibility of crisis – a product of the sovereign’s ineffective containment of the friend/deputy’s difference.
21In Measure for Measure, this crisis comes to be expressed through Angelo’s own failure in his appointed duties. In the first place, this is registered by his excessive attachment to an exorbitantly rigid moral code and especially by his obsessive persecution of ungoverned sexual desire which ironically, as J. W. Lever has remarked, has “the result that a well-intentioned young man on the point of becoming a father [Claudio] is sentenced to death, and a hardened professional bawd [Pompey] is discharged scot-free34 ”. As Isabella points out to Angelo with regards to Claudio, Angelo’s fault lies in having lost measure by measuring her brother’s fault with excessive severity, thus producing a travesty of justice and a perversion of power into tyranny. “O, it is excellent,” as she says, “To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous/To use it like a giant” (2.2.109-111) – a reference that notably alludes to the classical myth, told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of the revolt against Jove by the Giants who were invested with divine strength but lacked the equally important attribute of divine wisdom35. More importantly perhaps, Angelo’s failure is testified by his own inability to act as a moral agent and abide by the standards of his own code when he finds himself driven by his sexual desire for Isabella. If, as Robert B. Pierce has convincingly suggested, “Desire here stands as the representative example for the broader moral-political problem of establishing justice within the self and the state36,” it also points to a crucial moment of division within the composite figure of the sovereign that manifests the fine balance on which this supposedly powerful model of unified government is based. Thinking in terms of the metaphor of the multi-membered sovereign body, Angelo here ceases to act like a well-conglomerated deputorial arm that serves the sovereign head’s desires. Rather than that, he comes to provide an autonomous arm that serves its own wishes or a second head that challenges and distorts the sovereign head’s authority.
22Quite importantly, this idea of division within the body of the sovereign also reflects the complexity of the role of the ruler himself as appointed deputy of God on earth. Partaking both of the human and the divine, this “demi-god, Authority” (1.2.112) as Claudio calls it shares the monstrously composite nature of the figure used in Wither’s collection of emblems as an illustration of unconquerable power. And yet, as I have argued, it is precisely the composite nature of this figure, its constant need to balance between opposites, that ultimately marks its inherent weakness. As in Bacon’s analysis of the friend/deputy in his essay “Of Frendship,” this “demi-god” figure of the sovereign/deputy-of-God-on-earth is based on a complex and paradoxical combination of sameness and difference. The idea of sameness is suggested in numerous early modern discussions that support the divine right of kingship based on the concept that rulers are the image of God upon earth. As Henry Smith, for instance, suggests in The Magistrates Scripture (1591), “the prince is like a great Image of God, the Magistrates are like little Images of God37”. However, being human, rulers cannot be said to aspire fully to godly nature – a problem which Bishop Bilson tried to address in his coronation sermon preached before King James I in 1603, saying that since “Princes can not be Gods by nature, being framed of the same mettall, and in the same moulde, that others are; It foloweth directly, they are gods by Office; Ruling, Iudging, and Punishing in Gods steede, & so deseruing Gods name here on earth38”.
23Thus caught in-between the human and the divine, this “demi-god authority” shares the fate of Bacon’s conglomerated figure of the friend/deputy as it constantly finds itself treading on a fine thread between opposites. This is perhaps best attested by the ruler’s relation to justice and mercy, especially as it concerns the biblical mandate to “Judge not” – which is evoked, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, by the title of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. As J. W. Lever suggests, while considered an imperative for private individuals, this mandate was intriguingly problematic for rulers whose public duties necessitated the assumption of the role of the judge:
“As human beings [rulers and magistrates] were obliged, like all men, to show mercy and forgive trespasses. But in their office they were considered to function as deputies of God on earth, or as deputies of these deputies, themselves bearing the title of ‘ gods’and exercising under God the diving right to judge and condemn.”
In effect, as Lever further mentions, having to keep a constant equilibrium between the opposite poles of justice and mercy, the demi-godly figure of the ruler “saw himself as faced with a more difficult task of maintaining ethical poise than private individuals with only their own unregenerate impulses to control39”.
24Highlighting the ruler’s uncomfortable balance between justice and mercy, the Duke’s self-admitted past failure in his role as distributor of justice – and by extent in his role as God’s deputy on earth – in Measure for Measure, reflects and resonates on his own deputy’s subsequent failure in the same task. Framing both Angelo’s and the Duke’s failed attempts in their deputorial duties, the concept of friendship and especially the theoretical model of a composite sovereign self that monstrously combines divergent opposites in a supposedly unified entity, raises significant questions concerning early modern notions of good and effective governance. Indeed, Shakespeare’s engagement with friendship in Measure for Measure serves to draw attention to what Bacon’s treatment of the figure of the friend-as-deputy only unwittingly reveals: the limits and inherent weakness of the conglomerated figure of the sovereign self as a model of power, authority and good governance.
Figure 1: George Wither, Illustr. XLV (“Where many-Forces joyned are”), from A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modern, London: A. Mathewes, 1635, p. 179.

Reproduced with the permission of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries.
Notes de bas de page
1For an incisive recent contribution to the field of early modern friendship that pays special attention to The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen, see Shannon Laurie, “Friendship’s Offices: True Speech and Artificial Bodies in The Winter’s Tale” and “Professing Friendship: Erotic Prerogatives and ‘Human Title’ in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 185-222 and p. 90-122 respectively. For another insightful recent study that largely concentrates on the theme of friendship in Shakespeare’s plays, see Macfaul Tom, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Various other studies have also made an important contribution to the field of early modern friendship. These include: Hutson Lorna, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England, London and New York, Routledge, 1994; Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800, Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (ed.), Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse, Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (ed.), Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 6, Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter, 2011; Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700, Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere Lopez and Lorna Hutson (ed.), Farnham and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2011.
2Cited from The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, with an introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.
3Magedanz Stacy, “Public Justice and Private Mercy in Measure for Measure,” SEL, vol. 44, n° 2, 2004, p. 317-332, p. 317. As Magedanz comments, p. 317, due to the significance of the Sermon of the Mount in the play a number of scholars have been prompted to read Measure for Measure “as a straightforward Christian allegory where Mercy pleads before God in a grand Last Judgment,” while others, on the contrary, have been more inclined to see in the play “a subversion of the expected outcomes of justice, or even a radical subversion of all authority”.
4As J. W. Lever points out, Angelo (who ultimately fails in his task) finds a foil in the character of Escalus who is appointed by the Duke as vice-deputy. Indeed, as Lever suggests, in the first two acts especially, Angelo and Escalus come to express contrasting views on the issue of justice, “demonstrat[ing] respectively the extremes of severity and ‘vain pity’”. See Lever’s introduction to his edition of Measure for Measure, The Arden Shakespeare, 1965; reprint, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008, p. lxvi. Quotations from Measure for Measure in this essay are from this edition.
5Pierce Robert B., “Being a Moral Agent in Shakespeare’s Vienna,” Philosophy and Literature, n° 33, 2009, p. 267-279.
6See OED “friend, n. and adj”. A. n. 3: “A kinsman or near relation.”
7See OED “friend, n. and adj”. A. n. 4: “A lover or paramour, of either sex.”
8See OED “friend, n. and adj”. A. n. 5a: “One who wishes (another, a cause, etc.) well; a sympathiser, favourer, helper, patron, or supporter.”
9See OED “friend, n. and adj”. A. n. 2: “Used loosely in various ways: e. g. applied to a mere acquaintance, or to a stranger, as a mark of goodwill or kindly condescension on the part of the speaker.”
10Text cited in English translation from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Horace Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 73, 1926; reprint. Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press, 1934, p. 459 (Book VIII. iii. 1). On Aristotle’s treatment of friendship, see Price A. W., Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989; Schollmeier Paul, Other Selves: Aristotle on Personal and Political Friendship, SUNY Series in Ethical Theory, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994; Stern-Gillet Suzanne, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995; and Pangle Lorraine Smith, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
11Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 461 (Book VIII. iii. 6).
12Ibid., p. 535 (Book IX. iv. 5). Even though the dictum that “a friend is another self” has often been credited to Aristotle, evidence suggests that it in fact predates him and may be traced back to another ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras. See Stretter Robert, “Cicero on Stage: Damon and Pithias and the Fate of Classical Friendship in English Renaissance Drama,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 47, n° 4, 2005, p. 345-365, p. 347. Indeed, as Aristotle himself notes in the Nicomachean Ethics, p. 549-551 (Book IX. viii. 2), versions of the concept were already in circulation by his own time in the form of proverbs, such as “Friends have one soul between them” and “Amity is equality”.
13Cited from Plutarch, Moralia: Volume I, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library 197, 1927; reprint. Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 261-395, p. 269. On Plutarch’s treatment of flattery in relation to friendship, see Engberg-Pedersen Troels, “Plutarch to Prince Philopappus on How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,” in Friendship, Flattery and Frankness of Speech: Studies on Friendship in the New Testament World, J. T. Fitzgerald (ed.), Supplements to Novum Testamentum 82, Leiden and New York, E. J. Brill, 1996, p. 61-79; Whitmarsh T., “The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Plutarch on Flattery,” in Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire, David Konstan and Suzanne Saïd (ed.), Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Supplement 29, Cambridge, Cambridge Philological Society, 2006, p. 93-111.
14See Lisa Jardine’s introduction to her edition of Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath, with the Panegyric for ArchDuke Philip of Austria, trans. Lisa Jardine, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1997; reprint. Cambridge, New York et al., Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. xiv.
15Evans Robert C., “Flattery in Shakespeare’s Othello: the Relevance of Plutarch and Sir Thomas Elyot,” Comparative Drama, vol. 35, n° 1, 2001, p. 1-41.
16Lever (ed.), Measure for Measure, p. 18.
17Quoted in Lever (ed.), Measure for Measure, p. 68. As Lever comments here, while “this passage in Palingenius forms part of a eulogy of marriage, whose offspring will comfort their father when all others fail him,” the Duke’s speech in Measure for Measure “adds children’s neglect to that of other kinsmen and friends”. On Shakespeare’s debt to Palingenius, see Hankins John Erskine, Shakespeare’s Derived Imagery, Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1953.
18Stretter, “Cicero on Stage,” p. 345.
19As Laurie Shannon has remarked in Sovereign Amity, p. 25, in England – where Cicero’s treatise was first made available in the vernacular in an influential translation by John Tiptoft published in 1481 – De Amicitia came to be placed “at the heart of a secular public culture,” thus pointing to “an expanding readership deemed to be actively interested in consuming classical examples by putting them to use to detect and to practice ‘ true’friendship”.
20Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, William Armistead Falconer (trans.), Loeb Classical Library 154, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, p. 108-211, p. 188-189.
21For a discussion of Montaigne’s treatment of friendship, see Weller Barry, “The Rhetoric of Friendship in Montaigne’s Essais,” New Literary History, vol. 9, n° 3, 1978, p. 503-523.
22As Laurens J. Mills notes in his now dated but still indispensable study, this concept of ideal friendship had an almost ubiquitous presence in the literature of the period. See Mills Laurens J., One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama, Bloomington, IN, Principia Press, 1937. For an incisive recent discussion of this concept in the early modern period, see Shannon, Sovereign Amity.
23Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 483 (Book VIII. viii. 5).
24Shannon, Sovereign Amity, p. 19. As Shannon further remarks here, this “homonormativity […] suggests both an affective regime and a political one”.
25Cited from Montaigne Michel de, The Complete Essays, M. A. Screech (trans. and ed.), 1987; reprint, London, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 205-219, p. 214-215.
26A version of this essay first appeared in print in the 1612 edition of Bacon’s Essayes. I have here made of use of the final version of the text as it appeared in the expanded edition of 1625 and am citing it from Bacon Francis, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, Michael Kiernan (ed.), The Oxford Francis Bacon 25, 1985; reprint, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006, p. 80-87.
27Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, p. 81.
28See Achilleos Stella, “Friendship and Good Counsel: The Discourses of Friendship and Parrhesia in Francis Bacon’s The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall,” in Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (ed.), p. 643-674. This article, that reads Bacon’s essay “Of Frendship” side by side with his essay “Of Counsell,” analyzes the political implications of Bacon’s treatment of friendship, especially as it concerns the relation between king and counselor which is according to Bacon an indispensable tool of good governance.
29For the extracts quoted from Bacon’s “Of Frendship” here and hereafter in this essay, see Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, p. 86-87.
30Shannon, Sovereign Amity, p. 197-198.
31Wither George, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modern, London, A. Mathewes, 1635, p. 179. See also [<http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/withe179.htm>].
32Shannon, in Sovereign Amity, p. 36-38, discusses this emblem and a similar one which appeared in Andreas Alciati’s Emblemata (1577).
33For a discussion of the discomfiting balance between king and counselor in “Of Counsell,” especially as that may be seen in Bacon’s treatment of the story of Jupiter and Metis, see Achilleos, “Friendship and Good Counsel,” p. 670-674. For the political implications of Bacon’s treatment of this story, see also HOLCOMB Christopher, “Kings and Counselors: the Politics of Francis Bacon’s Rhetorical Theory,” Philological Quarterly, vol. 74, n° 3, 1995, p. 227-227; and Solomon Julie Robin, “Bacon’s Myth of Metis: The Fabrication of Consensus,” in Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, p. 103-160.
34See Lever’s introduction, p. lxvi.
35As Lever notes with regards to the Giants in this myth, “because they had the divine attribute of strength, without divine wisdom or forbearance, their actions were tyrannous, a travesty rather than an imitation of God”. See Lever (ed.), op. cit., p. 45.
36Pierce, “Being a Moral Agent in Shakespeare’s Vienna,” p. 270.
37Quoted in Lever (ed.), op. cit., p. 14.
38Quoted in Lever’s introduction, ibid., p. lxiv.
39Ibid., p. lxiv.
Auteur
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Stella Achilleos
An Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests lie in the field of early modern literature and culture. She has published essays on seventeenth-century literature, sociability and cultural exchange, focusing especially on Ben Jonson and his “sons” and on the royalist culture of mid-seventeenth-century England. Her most recent publication in this area, titled “Herrick’s Anacreontics and the Politics of Conviviality in Hesperides,” appeared in “Lords of Wine and Oil” : Community and Conviviality in Robert Herrick, Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her current research largely concentrates on the discourses and practices of friendship in early modern literature and culture, and her essay “Friendship and Good Counsel : the Discourses of Friendship and Parrhesia in Francis Bacon’s Essayes or Counsells, Civill and Morall ” in Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (ed.) (Walter de Gruyter, 2011), is part of a longer project in this area.
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