“Be absolute for death”: The Arts and Politics of Dying in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
p. 119-135
Dédicace
This essay is dedicated, with thanks and admiration, to Dr Carme Font.
Texte intégral
1In the year 1600, three years before the death of Elizabeth I and four before the first staging of Measure for Measure, a small octavo-sized volume was published in London under the title Disce Mori, or, Learn to Die. Its author was the Oxfordian cleric Christopher Sutton; the book was a moderate but firmly protestant guide for private self-training, and for the training of others, in the acceptance of death. Among the many remarkable features of this tract (some of which will be mentioned later on in this essay), I would like to draw particular attention to one that might initially appear to be set apart from its general doctrinal thrust, but which was doubtless very important for Sutton himself: the fact that its publication could be seen as playing a modest part in the polemics against religious radicalism, and specifically against the spread of Puritanism, within the Church of England. Should not a better awareness of death, Sutton asks, make us loath to pass judgement on others, and prone to examine ourselves all the more firmly? Are not too many among the faithful that are ready and willing to proclaim themselves as models of “godliness” (and the use of this term is, of course, politically and doctrinally charged), forgetting that they will soon have to stand before the ultimate judge?
“We may entreat them at the least to recount within themselves their own folly, in making it (as they have done) a perfection of godliness, to call and reckon others ungodly […] Let these men know that obedience is better than sacrifice, and that he who is wont to give grace unto the humble, is also said to resist the proud. Be they assured, this slight stuff will shrink before it comes to the wetting, this counterfeit coin will prove dross when it shall be put to the great trial. An easier matter it is for devisers to reprieve others, than to amend themselves1.”
Readers of Shakespeare will inevitably be reminded here of one of the basic themes of Measure for Measure: the mercilessness and hypocrisy of those who would appoint themselves publicly as pure, who are in fact as sinful as those they would punish, and who will have to confront their own corruption at the time of death. In his warnings against the godly, Sutton clearly positions himself within the mainstream of late sixteenth-century Anglicanism, in terms that would not have displeased archbishop Whitgift (or, just a few years later, archbishop Richard Bancroft): no selected group should establish themselves as purified guardians of the flock, reclaiming a monopoly on morality. But what I find particularly remarkable is not the anti-Puritan strain of the text, but rather the way in which Sutton connects it with the over-arching subject of the awareness of death, which is at the core of his volume. For, as he indicates emphatically, the frequent thought of death prompts self-examination and humility: it brings home the necessity of thinking of one’s own soul, and leads to a inward, rather than outward, reformation. The inwardness prompted by the thoughts of death should call for private obedience, not public sacrifice; if properly channelled and administered, it should bring the individual both into conformity with himself and with the doctrinal community he belongs to.
2The aim of the following pages will be to examine how these concepts are represented, discussed and put to the test in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. I certainly would not wish to posit a direct, unproblematic ideological continuity between Sutton’s position and Shakespeare’s. Even if it seems to me true that, as some scholars have pointed out in recent years, the play shows a distinct anti-Puritan bias (and this is something I shall be returning to in the course of this essay, and at its conclusion), it nevertheless retains shadows of ambiguity in all of its aspects. The play constantly generates spaces of ethical discussion by dramatising clashes between selfhood and authority (both secular and spiritual); what I intend to do here is to show that the rhetoric and the situational patterns of the ars moriendi tradition (to which Sutton’s treatise belongs) can be seen as structuring several of these clashes and clarifying some of the ideological patterns that they dramatise. It has often been remarked that this is a comedy that hovers uneasily on the brink of tragedy, that seems to bring its protagonists to the brink of the gallows again and again only to extricate them at the very last minute; along with its preoccupation with state-administered death, however, is coupled a serious investigation into the subjective responses of those who have to die and into the institutional role of those who guide them in their last moments. Measure for Measure puts the thematic and doctrinal repertoire of the ars moriendi at the service of its dramatic machinery in challenging ways, bringing them to bear especially on two major, interlocking aspects: death as a moment of self-definition and death as a key site for the intervention of church and state. A site, that is, where these institutions seek to assert their capacity for control, but where they also have to confront the inescapable limitations to their power.
3Considering the dramatisation of the ars moriendi in Measure for Measure will necessarily entail a renewed consideration of its representation of the figure of the absolute ruler (Duke Vincentio), for it is he who, through his adoption of a religious identity, controls and directs all the scenes in which rehearsals for death take place. It must not be forgotten that the play was first staged in 1604, very shortly after a major dynastic change in England (from Tudor to Stuart rule), and that a representation of the head of state as possessing a double-sided identity, with power over souls as much as bodies, would inevitably evoke some of the hopes and anxieties that were being projected on the figure of the new King, James I. It would be unwise and limiting to assume too much proximity between the figure of Vincentio and that of James, but it would be just as misguided to overlook the fact that the play attributes a strong ideological content on the religious function of absolute rulership, precisely at a moment when the factions in the Church of England were strongly polarised between proponents of Puritanism and of inclusive Anglicanism, and when the latter were clearly gaining ascendance and reinforcing their positions (the Hampton Court conference had taken place on January of that year2). Since, through his disguise as a friar, the character of the Duke assumes the powers both of the church and of the state, it is not always immediately obvious in which capacity (spiritual or secular) he is acting towards his subjects. If we try to assume, as the cultural materialist readings of two decades ago did, that he is using his religious facet as a mechanism of surveillance, then we could see him as seeking to manipulate the other characters’awareness of death in order to bring them into psychological submission3. Such an interpretation cannot completely be ruled out or discarded: indeed his very strategy makes it impossible for us to do so, since all of it is based on a fantasy of complete integration of religious and civil power in one single person. But, as we shall see, a more balanced picture appears if the play is carefully put in the context of the ars moriendi literature: one in which, through the figure of Vincentio, a penitential approach to spirituality is privileged against a punitive agenda, and in which an inclusive image of the state church and its functions is set against the attempts to enforce the rule of self-appointed guardians of public morality4. We shall also see that such a picture is certainly not presented in idealised or unambiguous terms, nor left free of l ingering fears and anxieties. But before considering these matters in detail, it is necessary first to understand the cultural importance of the preparations for dying that the Duke repeatedly brings onstage.
4To a large extent, the ars moriendi was a legacy inherited from the late Middle Ages. There are several instances of early English printed books (beginning with The Art and Crafte of Knowing Well How to Die, published by William Caxton in 1490) that can be taken as adaptations or distillations of a widespread European network of texts on this matter. These usually came well provided with woodcuts depicting the death scene: in these illustrations, the sick-room was usually far from being a space of intimacy, but appeared crowded by the presence of demons and angels, along with the family of the dying person, thus becoming a space where, as Aron Gurevich put it, “paradise, hell and the world are brought closely together5”. The liminarity of the situation allowed for vivid verbal interactions between the dying person and his supernatural attendants: some of these came to save him, while others (the demons) tried to cause a last moment of doubt, of despair or of refusal of God’s grace6. To be sure, the more theologically oriented humanists started working early on towards relativising the role of human or supernatural attendants in the moment of death. Erasmus of Rotterdam offered his approach to the subject in his Preparatio ad Mortem (translated into English as Preparation to Death in 1538), in which, very characteristically, he simultaneously asserted the importance of dying within the framework of the church and insisted markedly on the importance of personal conscience as the ultimate, true site where salvation was to be decided. For Erasmus, both confession and extreme unction are of paramount importance and have to be regarded as “great solaces and comforts of the mind7” (Erasmus 1538: 65), but it is only the free will and recta intentio of the dying person that can ensure his or her salvation:
“It belongs to the sincerity and pureness of a Christian man, to accomplish (if he may) all justice, but it appertains more to a Christian man to wish for faith and charity, without which none of the other avail […] Surely I doubt not, that many neither afforded of the priest, nor anointed, nor yet their maker received, nor yet buried after the rites of the church, have gone to everlasting joy and bliss, whereas some others, after all the ceremonies of the church solemnly done, and also buried in the church next to the great altar, be carried down to hell8” (Erasmus 1538: 65-6).
Above all, it is especially important for the observers to acknowledge the limitations of their judgment on the state of the soul of others: “by the outward things we ought not to judge any person” (ibid: 67). This is a central aspect, and one that will recur and be explored in great detail in the Reformation: the inner space of the soul cannot be entered or determined by external onlookers, nor even by the priests who have performed the final ceremonies, and who might after all be easily fooled by a clever sinner. Even as he asserts the authority of the church, Erasmus pulls the rug from under it; salvation is, after all, a matter that can only concern the individual and God. Within the originally crowded scene of the ars moriendi, an important space of profound inwardness, inaccessible to any kind of external scrutiny, has thus been opened and affirmed.
5The importance of last-minute spiritual assistance for the dying was necessarily reduced in the culture of the Reformation. In the Edwardine and Elizabethan periods the extreme unction lost its traditional significance, and the same thing happened with the Eucharist (even though in this latter case the consequences were not so immediately obvious or far-reaching). In the versions of the ars moriendi that were produced under a protestant doctrinal framework, the presence of supernatural attendants, either satanic or angelic9, was significantly reduced (with only a few exceptions that marked the intermediate stages of transition from Catholicism, such as Thomas Becons’s 1561 dialogue The Sick Man’s Salve, where the struggle with the devil still played a significant part). The confessional was preserved in the Church of England, but it acquired a very secondary importance: the Order for the Visitation of the Sick was precisely the only space that remained for personal confession in the revised Book of Common Prayer, which implied that a function was still given to the priest in the final moments, and that this function granted him an access to the conscience of the dying person. The aim of the confessor was now to make the moriens reassess his life, repent and achieve a complete state of sincerity with himself and with God, as befitting the solemnity of the moment; he thus retained a guiding and supervising role, even though that role could not fully guarantee salvation. In the phenomenally popular A Salve for A Sick Man, from 1595, the preacher and theologian William Perkins offers a revised and more assertive version of the very same remark that we have earlier noted in Erasmus: for Perkins, it is absolutely necessary to “reform our judgement of such as lie at the point of death […] and by the outward condition of any man, either in life or death, we are not to judge his estate before God10”. This does not involve a forsaking of the duties that the priest is expected to perform in his care for the moriens: Perkins’s treatise determinedly insists on the importance of his work as a comforter and as a teacher. Teaching how to die implies teaching resignation, and it is a process that will necessarily encounter opposition; the main aim of the priest, then, is to overcome and subdue the natural resistance and fears of the dying:
“The sick party, troubled in mind with the memory and consideration of any of his sins past, or any manner or way tempted by the devil, shall freely of his own accord open his case to such as are both able and willing to help him, that he may receive comfort and die in peace of conscience […] Because howsoever men fear death naturally during the course of their lives more or less, yet in the time of sickness, when death approaches, this natural fear bred in the bone will most of all show it self, even in such sort, as it will astonish the senses of the sick party, and sometimes cause desperation11.”
The emphasis is now firmly placed on the constitution of a dying self, whose main characteristic should be the reconciliation with his/her fate: the unavoidable lapses that will be caused by “natural fear” in the final moments must be seen as inevitable steps towards the acceptance of mortality. The versions of the ars that were produced in England around 1600 thus preserve some elements inherited from the medieval tradition, but their essential lookout has changed. They tend to adopt the form of an essay or guidebook rather than that of a dialogue; their whole situational pattern has been simplified and re-materialised. The convulsions and hallucinations that the dying body may experience can now be explained away as the effect of physical disease rather than of a fight between Satan and the soul. Perkins described them in the following terms:
“As for other, strange events which fail out in death, they are the effects of disease. Ravings and blasphemies arise out of the disease and melancholy and of frenzies, which often happen at the end of burning fevers, the choler shooting up to the brain. The writhing of the lips, the turning of the neck, the buckling of the joints and of the whole body, proceed of cramps and convulsions, which follow after much evacuation12…”
A passage such as this, coming from a writer and preacher that was widely considered as a major spiritual leader and undoubtedly one of the “godly,” signals the beginning of the medicalisation of the ars: a process that is only beginning here, but which will inevitably increase in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And indeed, in the treatises produced around 1600, a favourite recurring metaphor is that of the priest as doctor: one, to be sure, whose effective capacities are limited (since grace and salvation cannot be guaranteed), but whose practice is nevertheless regarded as crucial for the adequate care of the self in its final moments. A volume such as the above-mentioned Disce Mori (1600) by Christopher Sutton, self-consciously moderate in its theology and openly Anglican in its doctrinal approach, offers itself both as an extended meditation on death and as a manual for priests and attendants, recommending specific practices to be used in the preparations for the end (holy conversation, a careful revision of one’s own sinfulness, constant thinking on the general fragility of man) and going so far as to systematize in a diagrammatic table (p. 7) the recommended elements that must be offered for meditation to the sick, as well as their intended effects. The protestant ars has now fully become a techné: a method through which the self can be gently disciplined into quietness, repentance and reconciliation to its fate.
6In order to achieve this end, two parties must collaborate: the moriens on the one hand, and the church on the other. Christopher Sutton carefully stakes out the role of the priest in the process, clearly demarcating its significance in an Anglican context: rites such as the extreme unction are not necessary any more, they are practices whose time has passed, but the role of the priest remains indispensable for the production of penitent selves.
“We are charged not to let men live loosely and most unchristianly to depart this world, to lead their lives and go out of their lives without order… Though there be not in use unguentes cum oleo, which we find rather appropriate to the former times of the church, and nearest unto the Apostles themselves, yet we say with St. James, Infirmatur quid inducans presbyteros! And to this end is our Church form of prayer set down, ‘An Order for the Visitation of the Sick’, so entitled13.”
Sutton insists again and again on the responsibility of the priesthood over the overseeing of penitence: his overall intention is to frame death not only within specific moral attitudes, but also within a clear institutional framework. In the introduction to Disce Mori, this firm assertion of the role of the Church is strongly bound up with an ongoing polemical argument against the domination of the Puritan faction within it (“these strange-minded men” who have made “a perfection of godliness”), and against its obsession for external punishment rather than private penance: meditation on death, leading to the “private examining of themselves” should make “these public controllers of all others… to look much nearer home and amend in themselves where is much amiss14” (emphases mine). Such a polemical intention should not obscure the fact that there are more similarities than differences between Sutton’s and Perkins’s respective approaches to the ars moriendi: apart form the occasional insistence of Perkins on double predestination, their doctrinal positions are remarkably close. But it is nevertheless very significant that, in 1600, Sutton should present meditation upon death as a good corrective for the “godly” and a reminder of the mortality and frailty that they share with the rest of the Christian community: it signals a perception of Puritanism as a dangerous appropriation of Christianity, and as a disciplinarian interpretation of it, that was widespread in the central Anglican priesthood (and that is certainly not alien to Measure for Measure, especially in what refers to the character of Angelo).
7Let us now turn to Measure for Measure, and examine how the aspects we have mentioned resonate within its dramatic structure and its language. The first situation that directly evokes the situational patterns of the ars moriendi takes place in act 3, as Claudio is coming to terms with the proximity of his execution, that is slated to take place on the following morning; it is at this point that he receives the advice of the Duke who, disguised as a friar, has already been acting as spiritual advisor to several characters. The speech that the Duke offers to Claudio here, enjoining him to abandon all hopes of a pardon from Angelo (“Be absolute for death…,” 3.1.4-41), has often been seen as a major example of consolatory literature which develops a few topics extracted from the tradition of classical scepticism, most especially the contempt for life verbalised by Cicero in the Disputatio Tuscalanae. But the analysis of classical sources and the recognition of their strength at this point cannot exhaust, in itself, the significance of this speech in the definition of the Duke’s role. It is especially important to take into account, first of all, the fraternal identity that he has adopted, and the whole set of connotations that it brings onstage: it is as a confessor that he speaks to Claudio, and this is the second time that we see him using the authority and secrecy of the confessional on stage (he has already employed them in his earlier exchange with Juliet). As Sarah Beckwith has stated, it is essential to bear in mind that the Duke’s disguise “gives him metaphorical jurisdiction over the internal forum as well as the external forum… and grants him access to the character and virtue of those he purports to confess15”. The function of confession is absolutely essential here: as we have already seen, this practice had been almost eliminated from the rituals of the Church of England, and the first audience of the play would have immediately identified it with the outdated Catholic tradition; but we must also remember that it had been preserved in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, and that it was actually used in the final religious services offered to those under the death penalty. The whole situation that is presented at the beginning of act 3, therefore, can be understood as a theatrical version of the basic situational pattern that Protestantism had preserved from the ars moriendi: the moriens is presented here together with his spiritual attendant, the latter trying to bring the former into entire conformity and acquiescence to his fate, and framing his own speech carefully in order to achieve full persuasive effect16. Hence, the Duke’s discourse cannot be detached from the basic Christian attitudes that his priestly role entails here; the essential points that he makes must necessarily be read in this light. Take, for instance, the core of the narratio in his speech, once he has clarified the subject in the propositio (“Reason thus with life:/If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing/That none but fools would keep,” 3.1. 6-8):
Duke. – Thou art not noble;
For all th’accomodations that thou bear’st
Are nurs’d by baseness. Thou’rt by no means valiant:
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep;
And that thou oft provok’st, yet grossly fear’st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exists on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust (3.1.13-21).
8All of these arguments can certainly be read in terms of the classical tradition of scepticism; yet all of them are also commonplaces of the ars moriendi tradition, recurrent images in its figural repertoire. I am not suggesting that the ars is acting as a direct source for Shakespeare’s text here; what I would like to point out is that its situational pattern colours this whole scene and that, as a consequence, the language of the Duke may well have been understood, in 1604, in the interpretive terms set by it. Thus the “poor worm” to whose bite man is exposed might be seen as evoking the serpent from Genesis, to whom power has been given over all of humanity (“sin is the sting and the poison with which he wounds and kills us,” states William Perkins); the ciceronian notion of death as a form of sleep could be glossed over as the sleep that came before the resurrection (in Thomas Becon’s words, “the body… sleepeth in the earth for a time, according to the ordinance of God”); and even the atomistic or materialist notion of little particles that are here said to compose the human body, the idea of a “thousand grains/That issue out of dust,” had been appropriated to a Christian consolatory pattern in the ars (Christopher Sutton reminds his readers that “the foundation of all our building is a small substance, always kept cold by an intercourse of air”)17. It is therefore not possible to disentangle completely the ciceronian or epicurean elements of the Duke’s speech from the religious significance they might also receive; his discourse on death remains strategically placed between both ideological spaces (secular and sacred), harnessing both to the aim of generating conformity in Claudio18. And when the latter answers, he does so in terms that are unmistakably based on the gospel: “I humbly thank you./To sue for life, I seek I want to die,/And seeking death, find life. Let it come on” (3.1.41-43): the acquiescence of the dying subject has been successfully obtained, and it has been obtained in terms that echo the voice of Christ19. The fact that Claudio should fall back into fear later in this same scene, as soon as he sees the opportunity of saving his life (if Isabella accedes to Angelo’s sexual bribery: 3.3.117-31), should not necessarily be seen as a failure on the part of the Duke or as a sign of Claudio’s moral weakness; this is indeed one of these above-mentioned moments of “natural fear bred in the bone” into which, according to William Perkins’s Salve, every dying man may fall, and which may “sometimes cause desperation20”. As such, it is only a momentary weakness: once Claudio is reminded firmly of his duty, and has finally lost hope, he quickly regains a full and serene acceptance of his destiny. Like the ideal moriens depicted by Thomas Becon, he has finally “learnt not to fear death… but lovingly to embrace it21”:
Duke. – Do not satisfy your resolution with hopes that are fallible; tomorrow you must die; go to your knees, and make ready.
Claudio. – Let me ask my sister pardon; I am so out of love with life that I will sue to get rid of it (3.1.167-171).
This outcome thus seems to confirm the capacity of the friar-Duke to generate orthodox and adequate responses to the proximity of death in his subjects22. But a much more difficult and troubling challenge is almost immediately put to him in the person of another condemned convict, the bohemian Barnardine. This character first enters the stage simply as a voice: before we actually see him, we hear his rude complaints against those who are trying to wake him up on the morning of his execution. The exchange that follows touches sarcastically on some of the topics traditionally offered for consolation before death: if death can be thought of as a slumber, Barnardine is too sleepy even to think of dying, and he has not the least intention of going from a cozy physical rest into a permanent one, no matter how seraphic it might be:
Pompey. – Master Barnardine! You must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine!
Abhorson. – What ho, Barnardine!
Barnardine. – (Within.) A pox o’your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are you?
Pompey. – Your friends, sir, the hangman. You must be so good, sir, as to rise and be put to death.
Barnardine. – Away, you rogue, away, I am sleepy.
Abhorson. – (Within.) Tell him he must awake, and that quickly too.
Pompey. – Pray, Master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards (4.3.22-32).
Initially, this exchange might seem to set the stage for a comic inversion of the rehearsals for death that have taken place earlier between the Duke and Claudio. But the actual, presential encounter between Barnardine and the Duke takes the irony much further than this:
Abhorson. – Look you, sir, here comes your ghostly father. Do we jest now, think you?
Duke. – Sir, induced by my charity, and hearing how hastily you are to depart, I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you.
Barnardine. – Friar, not I, I have been drinking all night, and will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent to die this day, that’s certain.
Duke. – O Sir, you must, and therefore I beseech you,
Look forward on the journey you must go.
Barnardine. – I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion (4.3.47-59).
The terms used here by Abhorson, and more specifically by the Duke, define quite closely the function that the Church of England assigned to the priest in the offices for the visitation of the dying: the “ghostly father,” moved by “charity,” should indeed “advise… comfort… and pray” with the person on the brink of death. We have come again upon a protestant, even Anglican, conception of the priestly role in these occasions: a role that is more oriented towards consolation and guidance than towards the sacramental, even though it must not exclude the latter. But Barnardine has decided univocally that his time has not yet come: the sharp starkness of his first refusal (“Friar, not I”) immediately suggests a cold, uncaring impenetrability, one that does not even correspond to a spiritual reticence but rather to a drunken tiredness (“I have been drinking hard all night”). The Provost has suggested earlier on that Barnardine is some sort of atheist, not because he should profess any intellectual scepticism, but simply because he is “careless, reckless and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come, insensible of mortality and desperately mortal” (4.2.141-43). But not even this precise description could prepare the audience, or the Duke himself, for the blank indifference with which Barnardine meets any attempts to discipline him spiritually. His very vocabulary seems oriented towards a negation of the attitudes that the ars moriendi recommended, and of the means that it proposed for their assumption by the dying: he “will not consent to die today,” and he will not do so “for any man’s persuasion” (emphases mine). It was precisely on the matter of personal consent that much of the English tradition of the ars had insisted, and it was on the strategies for persuading the dying person that writers like Sutton and Perkins had proved most resourceful. But there can be no rehearsals for death if the moriens refuses to constitute himself as such:
Duke. – But hear you –
Barnardine. – Not a word. If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward; for thence will not I today. (Exit.)
Duke. – Unfit to live or die. O gravel heart! (4.3.60-63).
“Gravel heart”: such a metaphor would immediately evoke in the early seventeenth-century audience the concept of the “hardened heart,” a favourite topos of protestant predication23. Even allowing for the unpredictability of divine grace, Barnardine would seem to be a lost soul already, one that is surely bound for spiritual perdition. But this does not lead the Duke to give up on him or to deny him religious guidance; on the contrary, it only seems to make him all the more certain of the necessity of intervention. Barnardine’s execution must be postponed:
Provost. – Now, sir, how do you find the prisoner?
Duke. – A creature unprepared, unmet for death,
And to transport him in the mind he is
Were damnable (4.3.65-68).
Barnardine’s attitude not only complicates or questions the usual mechanisms of the ars Moriendi: it actually deactivates them at a stroke, cancelling their resources at the start, emptying their rhetoric of any meaning. This also obliterates the role of the visiting priest, for there is no dialectic exchange in which he could play his part, no way through which he could get to the mind of the dying subject. The Duke’s initial postponement of the execution becomes a provisional counter-strategy against this obstacle, one that allows him to win some time. And in this way the situational pattern of the ars is grimly reversed once again: here it is the priest that wants to delay the arrival of death, while the subject he is trying to assist simply could not care less. The discourses on death have been silenced not by death itself, but by something even more ominous: a gaping void in the space that should be occupied by the penitent soul. The main problem with Barnardine is that his being “unprepared, unmeet” lays a heavy burden on the shoulders of his spiritual counsellor, since the latter is not authorised to give up on him, he cannot discard him as a lost soul, even though most signs seem to point in that direction: no external sign, we must remember, must ever be taken as an absolute truth on the spiritual condition of a given individual, and in any case the church is under the obligation of disposing the souls adequately for the reception of divine grace, should that grace ever be afforded. Thus, and notwithstanding the desire for power which underlies all his actions, the Duke’s decisions concerning Barnardine in act 4 can be understood as exemplifying a widespread protestant understanding of the adequate ways in which death should be confronted, and of the obligations of the priesthood in relation to it24. Of course, these decisions can only adjourn the problem of trying to soften the recluse’s heart, of mollifying it away from its hardened (or “gravel”) condition; after all, this is a problem which might well be beyond solution, outside the bounds of human intervention. As such, it will necessarily continue to challenge the authority of the Duke, both in his secular and religious capacities, and Vincentio will have to find another way to assert both capacities against it. This will take place in the final scene, and it is towards it that we must now turn.
9It is in the last scene that the Duke, in a masterful act of stage-managing, gathers all the elements of the plot and attempts to give them a coherent shape; it is also then that he abandons his disguise and reveals himself openly to all. Quite significantly, this revelation does not seem to put in question the validity of the gestures and acts that he has performed earlier on as a friar: his use of auricular confession, his administration of the confidence that others have vested on him and the marriage arrangements he has negotiated do not appear to be retrospectively cancelled, as they should rightly be if the play proposed a strict distinction between the secular and religious domains. Instead, what happens is the opposite: the Duke now re-absorbs his religious persona into his civil authority, and this absorption is apparently legitimated onstage by the silent acquiescence (though, of course, not necessarily the inner consent) of all the characters to the decisions he has been making on their behalf25. But before his voice brings the play to a close, a few of the characters do in fact speak concerning the destiny of Angelo, whose corruption has now been publicly exposed: Mariana and Isabella plead energically for his life, the first as his rightful wife, the second on the grounds of a juridical distinction between intention (his desire to possess Isabella’s body) and action (his failure to do so). What is especially significant here is the fact that Angelo himself should not utter one single word asking for mercy, even while Mariana and Isabella are doing it: he has indeed spoken before them, but he has done so only to acknowledge his guilt before Vincentio and to propose his own execution as the only logical or desirable outcome. And he has done so by asserting the Duke’s unique hold over the truth and his capacity to bring it out:
Angelo. – O my dread lord,
I should be guiltier than my guiltiness,
To think I can be undiscernible
When I perceive your grace, like power divine,
Hath looked upon my passes. Then, good Prince,
No longer session hold upon my shame,
But let my trial be mine own confession :
Immediate sentence then, and sequent death,
Is all the grace I beg (5.1.364-372).
10The Duke is acknowledged to be endowed with an all-perceiving “power divine” before which nothing can become “undiscernible”: his jurisdiction over the state of the soul and his right to intervene there (as he has done throughout the play) are asserted by the very same person on whom his civil capacity is now going to be exerted. Religious authority thus flows unproblematically into political power and becomes one with it. But this recognition also involves a form of personal anagnorisis for Angelo: by submitting to the all-seeing perspective of the absolute ruler, he has also been forced to consider himself anew and to gain a new sense of his own unworthiness. What we have in lines 368-72 is, then, the last of the various enactments of the ars moriendi which occur in the play, the major difference being that in this occasion the speaker is not the passive subject of a death sentence, but is actively offering himself as a candidate for one. The act of confession that has been at the heart of the previous preparations for death in the play (or, in the case of Barnardine, of the Duke’s fruitless attempts to stage them) and the desire for grace that should characterise the dying subject are recovered here, but with a very different significance: this particular confession is not auricular, but open and public, and the “grace” that is sought for is not one that should come on the threshold of death, but is directly identified with death itself. It is useful to evoke here the words by Christopher Sutton against the religious rule of the Puritans that I quoted at the very beginning of this essay: for here, as well, a “counterfeit coin” has proved to be dross when it has been “put to the great trial” and a renewed sense of personal sinfulness has rendered one of the self-appointed “godly” aware of his basic humanity26. And yet it is highly significant that Angelo should not have reached this state through patient self-examination and acceptance of his mortality, as Sutton would have wished, but through the sole mediation of the ruler’s gaze: it is only by adopting that gaze, by surrendering himself fully to it and making it his own, that Angelo has come to accept his own guilt. Still, the final result has been the constitution of a state of mind that corresponds very precisely to the ideal attitude of the dying subject according to the ars moriendi tradition:
Angelo. – I am sorry that such sorrow I procure,
And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart
That I crave death more willingly than mercy.
’Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it (5.1.472-475).
11Sorrow at one’s own misgivings, a willing desire for death and above all a “penitent heart”: an ideal fashioning of the dying self has been achieved here, even if it has come at an apparently heavy cost. But because, after all, we are in the realm of comedy, this cost is less weighty than it initially seems: the Duke hastens to reveal that Claudio’s life has in fact been preserved, so that there is no real need for Angelo to die; he will be pardoned along with Barnardine, who is brought onstage again so that the full extent of the ruler’s mercy can be displayed. This latter pardon, however, seems to ring a rather hollow note: Barnardine utters no words of compunction, and the Duke himself seems to leave his amendment (if it ever should occur) to an unspecified future:
Duke. – Which is that Barnardine?
Provost. – This, my lord.
Duke. – There was a friar told me of this man.
Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul
That apprehends no further than this world,
And squar’st thy life according. Thou’rt condemned,
But for those earthly faults, I quit them all,
And pray thee take this mercy to provide
For better times to come. Friar, advise him,
I leave him to your hand (5.1.476-484).
12In stark constrast to Angelo’s words of contrition, Barnardine remains obdurately silent: there is no thankful response, no hint of any moral transformation on his part, no matter how much the Duke should trust that it shall occur in “better times to come”. The protestant ars moriendi tradition had repeatedly insisted on the ultimate inscrutability of the soul, on the fact that the destiny of each individual, his salvation or his perdition, remained necessarily free from the intervention of human agents. There is always going to be a hidden, inner space of the soul that cannot be touched or reached from the outside, no matter how much an absolutist power might wish to condition and determine it. In this sense, the silences of Barnardine and of Isabella may be equally interpreted (despite their very different motivations) as signs of a quiet but solid rejection of such external intervention: these silences are, just like death itself, areas that will remain closed to external manipulation, that cannot be operated upon by the ruler.
13The weight of these silences will necessarily qualify my final conclusions, to which I now turn. I have tried to show how the play brings onstage, again and again, a major preoccupation with the constitution and production of individual selfhood at the hour of death; its dramatic structure, taken as a whole, works towards legitimising the absolute ruler’s intervention in that production, his jurisdiction over the souls of his subjects and his right (or his self-imposed obligation) to intervene in their shaping for their own benefit. The fact that this intervention should be presented as manipulative and articulated through deception and disguise certainly opens some space for scepticism as to the methods and practices of the ruler, but this does not detract from his right to give spiritual assistance to the dying: this specific aspect of his activity is not openly questioned at the end, nor does it seem that it could become (as his administration of justice, and of marriage27, might) the subject of an unvoiced complaint. To that extent, the play seems to acknowledge the idea of the secular head of state as minister of God, endowed with full religious authority and assuming complete responsibility over the spiritual welfare of his subjects: an image that would closely correspond to the one James I had given of his intented office in Basilikon Doron (1599, reprinted in his accession, 1603) and other writings. If this is the case, it is at the same time true that the ruler’s handling of death, of the preparations towards it and of its administration as a form of punishment, is carried out in terms that would have been acknowledged in 1604 as being inclusively protestant (Anglican) rather than strictly Puritan: a major emphasis is put on the necessity of private, inner penitence rather than on public, outward forms of punishment; the latter are emphatically brought into play as useful forms of menace, tools through which souls may be disciplined, but they are left practically unused. The kind of religious instruction for the dying that the Duke promotes is geared towards the promotion of repentance (Barnardine, Angelo) and towards the moriens’ recognition of his belonging to a common and frail humanity, bound to physical decay (the core of the instruction given to Claudio) or intrinsically prone to moral error and sinfulness (as Angelo learns). Most importantly, all those who are facing death deserve spiritual assistance, all of them need to prepare themselves adequately and acquire a proper consciousness of themselves at the moment of their death: in these circumstances, no quick and rash distinction must be made from the outside between the wicked and the just, between the chaff and the wheat. Such a distinction may be made with ultimate authority only by God, and both political and spiritual powers should better err, if err they must, on the side of mercy.
14And yet, despite all of this, some shadows of uncertainty and doubt necessarily remain. The last minutes of the play are entirely dominated by the voice of the Duke (except for his final, comic exchange with Lucio, which also ends in a pardon), and it is precisely this overwhelming dominance, its drowning out of other voices or accents, that suggests a lingering sense of uneasiness on stage. Seen in this light, his insistence on enjoining moral improvement against all resistance, of administering mercy and cancelling justice in the face of utter indifference, may seem as misguided and obsessive as Angelo’s punitive agenda, even if it is less directly harmful; it signals an over-arching desire to force the intervention of authority in all areas of religious and civil life, reaching from the affairs of public justice into the innermost recesses of private feeling or of the life of the soul. A desire, that is, for such authority not to be “absolute for death,” as the Duke has recommended to Claudio earlier on, but rather to remain “absolute in death” (emphases mine), presiding over mortality and controlling its significance in the minds of believers. In the end, and thanks in great part to its clever dramatisation of the ars moriendi, it is in the space between the open affirmation of an all-perceiving monarchy, with a firm hold upon the secular and sacred domains, and a subtle interrogation of its capacities and its will to power, that Measure for Measure remains positioned.
Notes de bas de page
1Sutton Christopher, Disce Mori, or, Learn to Die, London, 1600, fol. A1-A3. All extracts from early English prints and books are quoted directly from the originals; I have consistently modernized spellings in the quotations taken from them throughout this article.
2For the wider implications of this competition and its development in the Jacobean period, see Lake Peter, “Calvinism and the English Church,” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, n° 114, 1987, p. 32-76.
3See especially Greenblatt Stephen, “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne,” in Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearan Negotiations, Oxford, Clarendon, 1988, p. 129-163, and also Dollimore Jonathan, “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure,” in Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore (ed.), Political Shakespeare, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985, p. 72-87.
4My own approach, in this sense, comes much closer to other readings of the figure of the Duke that are less obviously post-foucauldian than those mentioned in the previous note. I must especially point out those by Bawcutt N. W., “‘He Who the Sword of Heaven will Bear’: The Duke versus Angelo in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, n° 37, 1984, p. 89-97, Lindley David, “The Stubbornness of Barnardine: Justice and Mercy in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Yearbook 7, 1996, p. 333-352, Brett Julia, “‘Grace is Grace, Despite all the Controversy’: Measure for Measure, Christian Allegory and the Sacerdotal Duke,” Ben Jonson Journal, n° 6, 1999, p. 189-207, and Shuger Debora, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England, London, Palgrave, 2001.
5Gurevich Aron, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 187.
6For a brief but accurate description of the iconography of the ars moriendi and its evolution in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see Poole Kristen, Supernatural Elements in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 64-80.
7Erasmus of Rotterdam, Preparation to Death, London, 1538, p. 65.
8Ibid., p. 65-66.
9For a survey of the cultural shifts informing this specific aspect, see Marshall Peter, “Angels Around the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in the English Art of Dying,” in Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, Angels in the Early Modern World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 91-95.
10Perkins William, A Salve for A Sick Man, London, 1595, p. 17.
11Ibid., p. 62-63.
12Ibid., p. 15-16.
13Sutton Christopher, Disce Mori, fol. A8-A9.
14Ibid., fol. A2.
15Beckwith Sarah, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 73.
16The best analysis of the rhetorical structure of this speech remains the one carried out by Baldwin T. H. in William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1944, p. 84-86.
17Perkins William, A Salve for A Sick Man, London, 1595, p. 8, Becon Thomas, The Sick Man’s Salve, London, 1561, p. 264-265, Sutton Christopher, Disce Mori, London, 1600, p. 86.
18It is especially important to take into account that this specific exchange cannot be seen as anything other than a serious, earnest attempt to prepare Claudio for death on the part of the Duke. N. W. Bawcutt has pointed out that there can be no hint of emotional manipulation here: this may take place in other cases and with other characters, but not at this moment, since the Duke does not know yet of Angelo’s attempts on Isabella, and has not devised a plan against them (and on behalf of Claudio’s life) yet. See Bawcutt, op. cit., p. 89-97.
19Matthew 16, 25: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
20Perkins William, A Salve for A Sick Man, p. 63.
21Becon Thomas, The Sick Man’s Salve, p. 16.
22For an interpretation of this whole scene that is the exact reverse of the one I propose here, see Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations, op. cit., p. 141.
23The image comes from Exodus 9,12: “And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not unto them.” It was usually used in protestant literature to refer to the reprobate soul, unable to receive grace.
24Debora Shuger has shrewdly noted, in Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England, p. 152, that “the issue dividing Anglicans form Puritans concerned the ungodly, men like Lucio and Barnardine […] It is crucial that the Duke extends his mercy to those whom common sense (to say nothing of Puritans) would label castaways”.
25It is certainly true that the notorious silence of most characters in this final scene can be read as implying uneasiness, and perhaps a surprised disappointment, on their part: the fact that they do not verbalise their response has been used to great effect in many productions of the play, so as to suggest the persistence of strong tensions between the ruler and the ruled (especially in the case of Isabella, who is often played as expressing a mute astonishment, and even anger, at Vincentio’s decision to take her as his wife).
26For a further perspective on the possible identification between Angelo and the Puritans, see the remarks made by Peter Lake and Michael Questier in Lake Peter and Questier Michael, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 624-626.
27For a couple of suggestive treatments of this particular aspect, see the observations made by Beckwith Sarah, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, op. cit., p. 69-73, and those made by Reinhard Lupton Julia in Citizen-Saints. Shakespeare and Political Theology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 142-145.
Auteur
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Joan Curbet
A lecturer in the English Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and a member of the Institute for Medieval Studies (UAB). He has translated into Spanish (and edited) John Milton Paradise Regain’d/Samson Agonistes, as well as Milton’s Areopagitica. Joan Curbet has published several international articles on the interaction between literature and spirituality, and about the cultural and literary changes brought about by the end of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of modernity (with a special emphasis on heretical movements and on the Reformation). His articles have been published by Routledge, Oxford University Press and Manchester University Press, among others.
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