The Duke is the King is the Prince: The virtuoso play of Machiavellian representation in Measure for Measure
p. 137-158
Texte intégral
“[Machiavelli was] a strong supporter and enthusiast for democracy. [He] was born, educated, and received public honors in a republic. He was extremely hostile to tyranny. Therefore he did not help the tyrant; his intention was not to instruct the tyrant, but by making all his secrets clear and openly displaying the degree of wretchedness to the people […] he excelled all other men in wisdom and while appearing to instruct the prince he was actually educating the people1.”
“Whether the tyranny be in his place,/Or in his eminence that fills it up2”
1“Upon [the Duke’s] place,/And with full line of his authority,/Governs Lord Angelo” (1.4.55-57): fittingly, it is a hyperbatic sentence that best encapsulates the political situation in Measure for Measure. What happens when a Duke’s “figure” (1.1.16) is borne by his Puritan deputy, when the deputy is duplicated and the chain of delegation lengthens – when a modern “state” (5.1.320), in short, is seemingly being born3 – is the main subject of the play. The duplication of deputies is unprecedented in earlier versions of the story, and Measure for Measure repeatedly plays its duplications and duplicity off against the literal, monological bent of “absolute power” (1.3.13). What happens, then, is not just a comedy of political errors or somehow apolitical free play but the virtuoso play of political representation, and the star of the political show is constructed as an ambivalent figure whose political locus lies somewhere between James I’s theories and his political practice, between Jacobean theories and Machiavellian discourse, and between two representations of Machiavelli’s virtuoso prince himself. Bearing in mind that the machiavellian Duke – authorial figure though he may be – is not the Bard, this reading suggests that Measure for Measure is a profoundly anti-Jacobean Machiavellian play4.
“[T]he image of a murder done in Vienna5”
2“Of government the properties to unfold/Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse” (1.1.3-4): under the cover of paralipsis, the first full line in Measure for Measure sets the agenda. As with Hamlet’s Mouse-trap, the “tropical” displacement of the English (or Danish) action to eastern (then exotic), Catholic Vienna is a smokescreen – and indeed, though Jacobean drama was known for being intensely political, it apparently took a long time for the Jacobean story in Measure for Measure to emerge; thus, although Thomas Tyrwhitt may have gotten there first, in 1766, George Chalmers thought he claimed a scoop in 1799: “The commentators seem not to have remarked, that the character of the Duke, is a very accurate delineation of that of King James6.”
3The jury is apparently still out on the Jacobean connection, though, and not every critic agrees that “[i]f one wished to grasp what royal absolutism ‘felt’ like in the first year of James’s reign, Duke Vincentio might not be a bad exemplar7”; for some scholars, in fact, it seems to be so out of the question for Shakespeare’s play to criticize the king that a lot of those who do see a resemblance rush to conclude that Measure for Measure could not possibly have been as critical as it seems, or downplay the political significance of the Duke, while others prefer to deny the similarity altogether. Discussing James and Vincentio’s putative dislike for crowds (1.1.67-72; 1.3.8-9), as well as the typically Jacobean sensitivity to “[b]ack-wounding calumny” and “slanderous tongue[s]” (3.2.179-182), Nina Bawcutt for example raises the “central issue” in these terms: “was Shakespeare’s purpose flattery, and if so, why did he base it on these particular aspects of the king’s personality, which hardly seem an impressive foundation for it?” The conclusion is unimpeachable: “[i]t would be best to be sceptical about excessive claims for a royal presence in Measure for Measure”; likewise, “[o]n the question of the play’s status as a tract directed at King James, it seems inherently implausible that a mere playwright would have the impertinence to act as a schoolmaster to the king8” – which means a few (rhetorical) questions are in order: what if the “purpose” of the play is not flattery? What if mere plays – as “low-end” pieces of socially inclusive entertainment – were precisely the best locus for subtle political criticism? And what if the play speaks of the king, not just to him?
“Looks ‘a not like the king9?”
“Many politicians, I dare not deny, maintain religion as a true means, and sincerely speak of it without hypocrisy, are truly zealous and religious themselves. Justice and religion are the two chief props and supporters of a well-governed commonwealth; but most of them are but Machiavellians, counterfeits only for political ends10.”
To be fair, the king is subject to displacement and dissemination in the play: the avuncular Escalus can, like James, turn authoritarian and be quick to denounce “Slander to th’state!” (5.1.320), the Duke is not consistently Jacobean, and the Puritan Angelo himself is not totally unlike the king who described Puritans as “pests” and a “poison11”. “Lord Angelo is precise” (1.3.50): the play’s keyword for Angelo’s literalistic-puritan excesses, half of whose occurrences in the Shakespearean corpus are in Measure for Measure, is indeed also to be found (in a similar context) in James’s Basilicon Doron, which became a political bestseller in England with his accession: “in any thing that is expressly commanded or prohibited in the book of God, you cannot be over precise, even in the least thing12”. The word, incidentally, also applies to Claudio (1.2.69), in an ironical echo that suggests a resemblance between ruler/judge and prisoner: “precise villains they are” (2.1.54)? Besides, since “A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit13” (which – though not a University Wit – Shakespeare may very well have been), there could be cases of royal “slandering with ostensible praise14” in the play: “I have never heard the absent Duke much detected for women; he was not inclined that way” (3.2.118-119), the Duke’s insistence on his chastity and sexual inclination, can be read as an allusion to James’s own (then problematic) reputation for homosexuality – “how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward” (Twelfth Night, 3.1.12-13), indeed, and the rhetorical gambit also comes across as a Machiavellian inversion of values15.
4In adapting the previous storylines, Shakespeare went out of his way to make Vincentio central to the action, but as a character it seems the Duke “remains a collection of attributes which fail to coalesce16” – possibly because he is an ambiguous figure and a multifaceted actor, meant to be seen as a Machiavellian prince, “un homme sans qualités ou l’homme de toutes17”. He may blunder through his own plot (with Barnardine, for instance), but he can also adapt to changing circumstances, improvise and seize the moment, with a timely bed-trick or the opportune production of his seal (4.2.191) for example – therein behaving like a virtuoso prince, who “received nothing from Fortune except opportunity, which gave [him] the material [he] could mould into whatever form [he] liked18”. “[I]f peradventure/He speak against me on the adverse side” (4.6.5-6): the Duke is also a master rhetor, who can use the quintessentially rhetorical technique of disputatio in utramque partem (or arguing on both sides of the question), as he told Isabella he might (4.6.5-8), and as he theatrically does in act 5 until Lucio unmasks him (5.1.353sd), yet he styles himself as a very reluctant actor-director:
I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes :
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and Aves vehement ;
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it (1.1.67-72).
5The next time the audience sees him, however, Vincentio is saying he “will, as ‘twere a brother of [Friar Thomas’s] order,/Visit both prince and people” (1.3.44-45) and asking for the required “habit” (1.3.46) as well as for instructions “How [he] may formally in person bear/Like a true friar” (1.3.47-48) – a histrionic venture that is also, in the play’s key duplicity, part of a surveillance operation, and which may put spectators in mind of James and his queen’s (failed) attempt to remain incognito on a stealth visit to the Exchange meant to enable them to watch the merchants on the sly. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, the king is described as “a loving Father, and careful watchman19,” and the Duke is a very careful watchman, who sees almost everything and eavesdrops on almost every important conversation, such as the one between Isabella and Claudio, which the good friar/Duke tells him he “overheard” (3.1.159), when the audience heard him ask the provost to “Bring [him] to hear them speak, where [he] may be conceal’d” (3.1.52). This strategy of firsthand information gathering carries Jacobean associations, since in Basilicon Doron the king tells his son that “for the better reformation of […] abuses among [his] estates, it will be a great help unto [him], to be well acquainted with the nature and humours of all [his] Subjects,” and that a king should visit all his kingdoms, “not listening to Vice-royes, but hearing [him] self their complaints20”.
6In one reading of the Duke’s assumption of a specifically religious disguise,
“The fact that no one objects to the Duke’s stratagem or even suggests that there could be an objection means that the issue does not, in this play, matter […] [T]he play nowhere suggests that the Duke’s actions are improper; the point of his taking on a friar’s role and garb, over and above its utility as a plot device, seems to be rather to indicate, to gesture toward, the sacerdotal nature of royal authority21.”
7That no character objects, however, does not mean that the issue does not matter: Friar Thomas is not given a lot of discursive space to do so in 1.3, and once the friar has been exposed as the Duke in act 5, it becomes a little harder for his subjects to “object”. Besides, there may very well be one character who does object: on meeting the friar, Lucio – whose name evokes light, and who appears as suspicious of official discourse from the start (1.4.52-55) – asks him, out of the blue, if he has news of the Duke (3.2.83), and goes on to say that “It was a mad, fantastical trick of [the Duke] to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to” (3.2.89-90), where the reference to the beggary of, say, a mendicant friar could be seen as an indication that Lucio has somehow seen through the Duke’s disguise, and objects to it. As for the friar’s cowl indicating the “sacerdotal nature of royal authority,” it is a bit of a stretch, since friars were not universally popular in (officially) Protestant England and since it is above all their schemes (say, in Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing) that characterize Shakespearean friars. The Duke’s religious disguise, then, can more plausibly be looked on as a theatrical costume made necessary by his surveillance scheme – and as the sign of how easy it is for rulers to appear religious.
“[T]he old fantastical Duke of dark corners” (4.3.156)
“[L]e prince est à la fois acteur sur une scène déjà là et metteur en scène d’une scène qui n’était pas encore là, la mise en scène n’étant pas un des rôles du politique mais sa praxis même22.”
8Now, with respect to rulers being drama kings, in Basilicon Doron James agrees with the “true old saying, that a King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly do behold”; since “people are naturally inclined to counterfeit (like apes) their Prince’s manners,” however, royal performance carries the risk of mimetic contagion – and of popular misreading, for “the people that see you not within, cannot judge of you, but according to the outward appearance of your actions and company, which only is subject to their sight23” – a situation that, for better or for worse, is not unlike the Machiavellian prince’s:
“[T]o those seeing and hearing him, he should appear to be all mercy, all faithfulness, all integrity, all humanity, and all religion. And there is nothing more necessary than to seem to possess this last quality. Men in general judge more by their eyes than their hands: everyone can see, but few can feel. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few touch upon what you are24.”
A public figure or a persona, the ruler is exposed to a diverse audience’s judgment – a theatrical transaction that may end up being too dialogical for some absolute rulers’tastes. Scriptwriting and directing are similarly both politically indispensable and fraught with pitfalls in the play, and the Duke’s metaleptic-mythocratic undertaking (his turning other fictional people into characters in his own plot-within-the-plot) does not always go smoothly. A Duke turned friar turned lawful bawd, he comes up with the outlandish and morally dubious bed-trick, tries to dispatch Barnardine before schedule (4.2.169-170 vs 4.2.119-120), and uses dramatic suspense and theatrical shock tactics in acts 4 and 5 to achieve his ends. “I am always bound to you” (4.1.25), Mariana says, and the “accident[s] that heaven provides” (4.3.76) or that the Duke/friar scripts in effect make him crucial to the resolution – as in Nietzsche’s Antichrist, “toutes les affaires de la vie sont ordonnées de telle sorte que le prêtre est partout indispensable25”. “[L]ate come from the See/In special business from his Holiness” (3.2.213-214), the self-styled representative of God’s go-to bishop moves in mysterious ways and in a (machiavellian) permanent state of emergency. He may not be “the first that ever dissembled in such a gown” (Twelfth Night, 4.2.5-6), but his “counterfeit miracle26” in act 5, when Vincentio spectacularly cures the disease he himself sent – i. e. stages the resurrection of a Claudio that never was executed except in Angelo’s imagination and in his own tear-inducing (4.3.127) lie to Isabella (4.3.114-115) –, is not dissimilar to what Robert Burton describes as the devil’s theatrical tactics, which consist in directing “actors in his tragedy” and “troubling [men’s] consciences, driving them to despair, terrors of mind, intolerable pains27”. The “old fantastical Duke of dark corners” (4.3.156), then, carries a whiff of the “god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices” (whose “earthly kingdom […] is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom”) which Nietzsche describes in The Antichrist28.
9“[Y]our grace, like power divine,/Hath looked upon my passes” (5.1.367): given Vincentio’s propensity for mystification and apparent unconcern for others’suffering, it has seemed to some that “The only way to make the Duke morally acceptable is frankly to take the whole piece as a morality play with the Duke in the role of God, omniscient and unseen, looking down on the world29.” Which, in a way, is the kind of reading James might have favored or found to his liking, since (in the most forceful expression of his theological semiotics of power) the representative is a duplicate and God’s lieutenant a god (or even God’s God?) himself: “The State of Monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth: For Kings are not only God’s Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods. […] Kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of Divine power upon earth30.” The Duke being a godlike figure, however, cuts both ways: “The Duke’s is an extravagant piece of bravado, a high-risk venture, and one that emphasises a highly improbable plot. Might all this be thought of as touching on the chief objections to the theory of absolute monarchy advocated by the new king, James I? To treat grave and lofty matters such as these in so profoundly comic a spirit is perhaps a way of concealing from the authorities the real force of dissent the play animates31.” The representation of a flawed king/Duke as God’s substitute may also morph into criticism of divine-political substitution itself, with the Duke’s substitution of Angelo for himself – and the play’s other unsatisfactory or morally dubious substitutions (Mariana for Isabella, Ragozine for Barnardine for Claudio…) – calling into question the whole substitution process: “The political leader as God’s substitute, with his obvious flaws in morality and judgment, troubles ideas of God as much as ideas of the ruler. Furthermore, the failed surrogacies of this play analogically point to the deep inadequacy of surrogacy itself as a theology [dating back to Augustine]32.”
“I can speak/Against the thing I say” (2.4.59-60)
10For one thing, the play of substitution, delegation and representation is hard to contain. The Duke’s deputy, a Puritan who projects himself as “the voice of the recorded law” (2.4.61), a literal enforcer of the putatively impersonal text of the law (2.2.80), arguably becomes the object of his earlier criticism – “Guiltier than him [he tries]” (2.1.21) – in his dealings with Claudio’s sister (and representative). Intriguingly, the text is a little confused at the very moment that Angelo tries to distance his from a flawed justice:
I not deny
The jury passing on the prisoner’s life
May in the sworn twelve have a thief, or two,
Guiltier than him they try. What’s open made to justice,
That justice seizes. What knows the laws
That thieves do pass on thieve? (2.1.18-23).
Line 21 is hypermetrical, and the syntax of lines 22 and 23 is as confusing as the composition, since “laws” can be both object and subject of “knows” – just as Angelo is both zealous subject and rightful object of the policing of desire. As for his key assertion that “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother” (2.2.80), the verb form in the first person tells an opposite story to Angelo’s, since the verb either agrees with I, or with the law and I, thus giving the precise deputy the lie. The play “turns an equally ruthless gaze on the legitimacy of the law and what masquerades as justice33”: in the case of Elbow v. Pompey (2.1), the tedious foolery (2.1.115) of carnivalesque proceedings causes Escalus to substitute for Angelo as chief justice (2.1. 134-135) and ends up raising the issue – “Which is the wiser here, Justice or Iniquity?” (2.1.169). In the next scene, the interrogation of justice takes a more serious turn when the “severe” Lord Angelo (2.1.280) concludes that “Thieves for their robbery have authority,/When judges steal themselves” (2.2.176-177) – a conclusion that Lear famously echoes: “change places and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief34?”
11“Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?” (2.1.227-228): in the play’s theocratic world “[l]a morale cesse d’être l’expression des conditions de vie et de croissance d’un peuple, cesse d’être son plus élémentaire instinct de vie, mais est devenue abstraite, est devenue l’antithèse de la vie35,” and Angelo’s theocratic zeal, mixed as it is with personal corruption, can be read alongside of Machiavelli’s analysis of Christian religion: “By imposing [an] other-worldly image of human excellence, it has not merely failed to promote civic glory; it has actually helped to bring about the decline and fall of great nations by corrupting their communal life36.” Angelo, indeed, is a textbook case of the intermingling of political and moral corruption: “each person [rulers included] who is not regulated by the laws will commit the very same errors as an uncontrolled crowd of people” and “Princes should not complain of any sin committed by the people they have under their control, because such sins of necessity arise either from his negligence or from his being tainted by similar errors37.” “Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery” (4.2.26-27): in even more obviously Machiavellian fashion, Angelo is an absolute ruler who operates “unchecked, beyond the law, and secretly” and whose “machiavellian plots” are a way for the play to “exhibit the workings of the internal power-system of the state38” for its socially inclusive audience’s benefit, thereby demystifying the putative mystery of the Jacobean state.
12“The first thing one does to evaluate a ruler’s prudence is to look at the men he has around him. […] [W]hen they are otherwise [than capable and loyal], one can always form a negative judgement of him, for the first error he makes is made in this selection39”: if the Duke is to be seen as competent, his choice of Angelo (not Escalus, who has seniority and was “first in question,” 1.1.46) as a deputy does not make a lot of sense unless it is a test of, and possibly a machiavellian plot against, Angelo: “Hence shall we see/If power change purpose, what our seemers be” (1.3.53-54). Before he leaves, Vincentio has scripted the political drama to come: “There is our commission,/From which we would not have you warp” (1.1.13-14), he tells Escalus, prescribing a strict construction of his authoritative authorizing text. Other strong Shakespearean rulers have similar trouble letting go: Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra tells his friend and follower Towrus to “not exceed the prescript of this scroll40,” while in Hamlet Claudius dispatches ambassadors but gives them “no further personal power/To business with the King more than the scope/Of these delated articles allow” (1.2.36-38). Angelo himself, who wants to “arrest [Isabella’s] words” (2.4.133) and to be “received plain” (2.4.82) even as he cryptically speaks two languages (2.4.139), is not unlike those absolute rulers in this respect, since he can send both a text and its embodied how-to: “My lord hath sent you this note, and by me this further charge: that you swerve not from the smallest article of it, neither in time, matter, or other circumstance” (4.2.100-103).
13“[S]o I have strew’d it in the common ear,/And so it is received” (1.3.15-16): the communication of “absolute power” (1.3.13), then, posits and prescribes the identity of reception and authorial intention, and strictly enforces the distinction between its official “special warrant[s]” and mere “private message[s]” (5.1.457-459). “[S]cope,” however, may not be the ruler/author’s to “give” (1.3.35), not every text is a decree that can be “inflict[ed]” (1.3.28), and the text of power meant to arrest power, the commission that is supposed to control the play of deputation and representation in Vienna, for one, is subject to a strange reception process. It is double, since both Escalus and Angelo get one, and Angelo appears reluctant to receive his: after asking him to “[h]old” the document (1.1.42), the Duke/author has to ask again (“Take thy commission,” 1.1.47) and possibly again (“therefore take your honours,” 1.1.52), as if there were invisible obstacles in the way of even the most seemingly direct textual route. “Un texte n’est un texte que s’il cache au premier regard, au premier venu, la loi de sa composition et la règle de son jeu41,” and Vincentio’s next texts play a baffling game with their readers:
Escalus. – Every letter he hath writ hath disvouched the other.
Angelo. – In most uneven and distracted manner. His actions show much like to madness; […] And why meet him at the gates and redeliver our authorities there?
Escalus. – I guess not (4.4.1-6).
“La loi et la règle ne s’abritent pas dans l’inaccessible d’un secret, simplement elles ne se livrent jamais, au présent, à rien qu’on puisse rigoureusement nommer une perception42”: the letters the Duke writes contradict themselves, and are also contradicted by his other missives (presumably bearing another signature, or written in another hand, unless the Duke is a dead author), which are “letters of strange tenour, perchance of the Duke’s death, perchance entering into some monastery; but, by chance, nothing of what is writ” (4.2.199-202). As suggested by the ambiguity or “gap in the sense43” of this passage, however, the game of puzzling authorial self-contradiction, the play of conflicting self-representations, is a dangerous one, for texts are not mere tools their author can master, nor is their trajectory always predictable: “hold you ever to our special drift” (4.5.4), Vincentio tells Friar Peter as he gives him letters that are material to his plot, and the use of “drift” is a possible example of auto-antonymy, for drift means either a driving movement, an impetus, or a deviation from a set course, and thus suggests either control or lack of control. Drifting is then also the author’s plan, scheme or intention, and the auto-antonym may be a sign of the Machiavellian virtuoso’s confidence in his ability to bend unpredictable circumstances to his will; the play, however, ironically shows the character’s (self)confidence to be misplaced, since the letters which (in one reading of “deliver me,” 4.5.1) are supposed to return to sender never do, lost or mislaid as they probably are in the shadowy spaces of (real) textual composition or (fictional) textual circulation. However clever, however mysterious, however powerful the author may be, then, the law of the text’s composition is not his to lay down, the rule of its game not his to conceal, and the vagaries of its reception not his to control.
14Incidentally, James himself – no stranger to “authorized versions” – was familiar with drifting signs, runaway texts and purloined letters, since – “in respect that papers out-live their authors” – his book of instructions to his son Henry, Basilicon Doron (with an official title, “the king’s gift,” as against the unofficial “the King’s Testament”) is a “trusty friend” that morphs into a “Testament” which could bring a “curse44” on the disobedient, less-than-model reader who did not become the kind of king the book de/prescribes. The text’s duplicity may be an authorial tool to control the target reader, but the publication process shows how slippery texts can be:
“[C]ontrary to my intention and expectation […], this book is now vented, and set forth to the public view of the world, and consequently subject to every man’s censure, as the current of his affection leads him; I am now forced […] both to publish and spread the true copies thereof, for defacing of the false copies that are already spread, as I am informed45.”
Another word for current, incidentally, is drift, and “the un-timous divulgating of this Book, far contrary to [the author’s] intention” is both an authorial attempt at controlling the royal text’s production as well as its reception by a “Hydra of diversely-inclined spectators46” (or by “Millions of false eyes,” 4.1.60?) and an illustration of how vain the attempt may be.
15The trajectory of the letter is not without pitfalls, the instrumental words of political plotting not devoid of ambiguity – and the language of the law not immune from slippage, as shown by the precarious grasp on legalese of “the poor Duke’s constable” (2.1.47-48), or by Portia’s adverse reinterpretation of Shylock’s seemingly ironclad, interpretation-proof contract in The Merchant of Venice. No matter how hard power tries to control the interpretation of its texts and to turn reading into mechanic “execution” (1.1.59), the law of the text makes swerving and warping and drifting inevitable, and no sooner has the Duke left the political stage than the “free speech” (1.1.77) of hermeneutic collaboration becomes necessary to make sense of his (written) commissions and parting speech: “A power I have, but of what strength and nature/I am not yet instructed” (1.1.79-80), Escalus says, and Angelo too is in the dark (1.1.81) – possibly because of the duplication of deputies. As this passage and Angelo’s subsequent dealings with Isabella suggest, the Duke’s supposedly literalistic representative cannot be controlled by a text calling for a strictly literal interpretation. More broadly, it is the entire social structure that goes rogue as the play of duplication and chain of substitutions play fast and loose with the official social or moral differences between the characters they link up:
“The play’s constant resort to cloning and transposition is […] apparent in the organization of its scenes. The structural principle of switching between the rulers and the ruled, between the upholders and the violators of the law […] begins by reinforcing points of contrast and discrimination. But the cumulative impact of this oscillation transforms an initial acceptance of disparity into the realization of resemblance, as the grounds of incongruity dissolve […]. Detail and structure conspire in Measure for Measure to dismantle the scaffolding of hierarchy and expose the fragility of the class distinctions and moral oppositions on which the action is built. […] Measure for Measure unravels the divisive dispensation that the Duke’s plot defends and that radical critics have accused it of endorsing47.”
The play’s free play of substitution is political through and through, and “The system is reduced to absurdity when to preserve justice the Duke becomes a kind of pimp, while to escape justice the pimp becomes an executioner48.”
“[F]ellow[s] of much license” (3.2.198)
“[T]hose who condemn the disturbances between the nobles and the plebeians condemn those very things that were the primary causes of Roman liberty49.”
16Pompey the pimp, “Pompey the Great” (2.1.215-216), who carnivalizes his own trial in 2.1 and whose Shakespearean-clownish rhetoric reveals the performative nature of judicial discourse50 when he says his trade would be lawful “If the law would allow it” (2.1.224), is just one of the play’s dissenting, apparently unscripted voices – which, problematically (at least for critics whose simple algebra equates voice with power and silence with subjection), do not include the prostitutes’. The sexual substitutes, who stand in for wives just as rulers supposedly stand in for God – and are thus part and parcel of the play of representation –, are often adduced in support of readings of the play as ultimately conservative51, although Mistress Overdone for one is not just an employer or exploiter but can be read as a “contestatory voice” in the play, “one who strives to tell a story about prostitution not as a moral evil, but as a socially, politically, and economically determined practice52”.
17First among the play’s more obviously intractable characters, who won’t follow the Duke’s script, is Lucio, a figure of mobility and lability, and probably a good fictional example of what James had in mind when he wrote, “unto one fault is all the common people of this Kingdom subject, as well burgh as land; which is, to judge and speak rashly of their Prince53”. Shakespeare is the first, according to Gibbons, to seriously exploit “the potential of the disguise plot for subjecting the person in disguise to disconcerting home-truths about his own shortcomings54,” and if pro-Vincentio critics think Lucio’s discourse is “reduced to absurdity by his scurrilous aspersions on the Duke’s kindness and charity, and his inability to recognize virtue in his superiors55,” it spices (critical) things up to look on Lucio as not just a mimetic character (the source of true or false statements in the fictional world) but as the locus of a discourse within the play’s (and by extension the world’s) discourses. First, as shown above, his assertion (about the Duke’s sexuality) can goad the Duke into a denial that may actually be a way for the play to allude to James’s reputation for homosexuality (3.2.112-119). Second, Vincentio v. Lucio is not necessarily an open-and-shut case, and “the Duke is deeply disturbed by Lucio’s construction of him in his apparent absence because in every other circumstance in the play, Lucio’s judgement, while flippant, is sound56”. His dramatic-ironic claim, for example, that the friar does not know the Duke “so well as [he, Lucio, does]. He’s a better woodman than [the friar takes] him for” (4.3.160-161), is in fact proved right, or at least close to the mark, by the Duke’s proposal to Isabella in act 5 – Vincentio, after all, would not be the only Shakespearean ruler to have ever but slenderly known himself; besides, from a Machiavellian point of view, “to know the nature of princes well one must be of the people57”. Be that as it may, “If there is some substance in Lucio’s insight, when its skew is corrected, it may help us to recognise the Duke as having faults, an imperfect nature – that is, as a man among the ranks of humanity. This does not correspond to James I’s view of the absolute monarch’s status as above the law58.” Third, even if Lucio’s assertions are false, the character’s being wrong (or lying) does not mean his discourse is not revealing (of something other than his moral or intellectual character); seen in a Machiavellian light, it could mean that the city’s corrupt or inefficient judicial process is to blame: “Men are publicly indicted before the magistrates, the people, and the councils; they are falsely accused in the public squares and under the porticoes. False accusations are most often employed where there are fewer public indictments and whenever cities are less well organized to receive them59.”
18Lucio’s discourse, then, should not be read in a reductively psychological or moral light, and may be symptomatic of political problems such as the Duke and his deputies’mismanagement of the city and the one-way direction or top-down orientation of public indictments. As for Lucio’s carnivalesque rhetoric (his reference to Angelo “mak[ing] water” and to his urine being “congealed ice,” 3.2.106-107, for example), his outrageous hyperbole (3.2.113-115), or his playful genealogy of power (3.2.104), they may in fact make an irresponsible Shakespearean fool out of him – “Cucullus non facit monachum” (5.1.261): his Latin, for one thing, is as good as Feste’s in Twelfth Night (1.5.51-52). “I can tell thee pretty tales of the Duke” (4.3.163-164), he says, and indeed he has “the double role of plain speaker and tale-spinner60” – what matters, then, is his capacity for producing counternarratives, “volumes of report” (4.1.61), that playfully resist the Duke’s dominant storytelling, for testing the limits of free speech and revealing the ambivalence of license, and for making Vincentio’s repression (of his “[s]landering a prince,” 5.1.521) appear for what it is, i. e. a Jacobean “over-sensitive reaction to calumny61” and a reminder that the general pardon of the Duke’s would-be comedic ending is not devoid of – is in fact predicated on – coercion.
19A much less talkative, and yet possibly more resistant figure is Barnardine – who, like Lucio, has no direct equivalent in the play’s sources and seems to have been invented “precisely to frustrate the Duke’s fanciful scheme to save Claudio […] [and] to invite criticism of the Duke62”. As he interrupts Vincentio (“But hear you –/Not a word,” 4.3.60-61), the “stubborn soul/That apprehends no further than this world,/And [squares his] life according” (5.1.478-480) also undermines “the authority of Church, State and playwright by refusing to be a mere cog in the comic plot. Interrupting the series of substitutions, he obliges the plot to declare its absurdity by conjuring up an unlikely pirate [4.3.69-72] to provide the head that he has refused to relinquish63”. A perceptive reader who is not taken in by “seeming warrant[s]” (4.2.150), a perennial prisoner who “hath evermore had the liberty of the prison” (4.2.145-146), “[u]nfit to live or die” (4.3.63), he dwells in a legal-conceptual twilight zone and unhinges the Duke’s taxonomy; thus his is not only represented resistance, safely contained within the fiction of the play, but a resistance to representation that introduces free play into the representational order of power. Likewise, Pompey’s swift transition from “unlawful bawd” to “lawful hangman” (4.2.14-16) and his wisecrack in jail that “one would think it were Mistress Overdone’s own house, for here be many of her old customers” (4.3.2-4) blur the boundary between inside and outside, between imprisonment and freedom, between inmates and subjects – as if the play implied that prisons in effect concealed the general incarceration in Viennese society, as if the Foucauldian panopticon, perspectival space and internalized surveillance that several critics have detected in the play was just part of a story that might also include an early-modern Baudrillardian hyperreality in which seemingly interchangeable positions circulate and perspectival space collapses64.
“[A] looker-on here in Vienna” (5.1.315)
20The free play of representation and substitutions, however, is seemingly brought to a halt, and the dissenting voices apparently silenced, in act 5 by the Duke’s reassertion of his authority over the script and of his monopoly on the legitimate construction and implementation of the law – a monopoly which is consonant with the Jacobean representation of the king as “a Judge set by God over [his subjects], having power to judge them, but to be judged only by God, whom to only he must give count of his judgement65”. In an orgy of compassionate conservatism, the Duke saves the day in a godlike Jacobean gesture: “the King is above the law, as both the author and giver of strength thereto […]. And where he sees the law doubtsome or rigorous, he may interpret or mitigate the same66”. Which, of course, can be read as the play’s tribute to the Jacobean way of doing judicial business–for Lever, “the Duke’s wisdom is most thoroughly displayed in the finale of the play. Like Severus at Pompeii, like James I at Newark [when the king himself sentenced a pickpocket to death while granting amnesty to all the prisoners in the tower], he sets an example of justice by presiding over the trial in person67”.
21The coup de théâtre is also a political coup, since the Duke in effect instrumentalizes justice and chastises Angelo, a political actor (and possibly a Puritan rival) in the field of power, while enhancing his own authority as a godlike ruler – to the extent that several critics have seen Vincentio as not just an authorial figure but a Bard look-alike: “With both [Vincentio in Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest], their plot and plan is the plot and plan of the play: they make and forge the play, and thus are automatically to be equated in a unique sense with the poet himself68.” The equation often results in readings of the finale as the sign of the “dramatist’s collusion with the Duke and his political practices,” which conclude that “Shakespeare seems to be endorsing a conservative political position in Measure for Measure69” as the play is made complicit with Jacobean power (in enhancing the royal mystique, rationalizing discipline and surveillance, and silencing or recuperating dissent in a fanfare of comedic closure) by an alignment or identification of its final scene with the projected finale of a putatively extradramatic – all-powerful, all-seeing but unseen – Duke. Now, like James’s, that may be the Duke’s plan, but Vincentio (very much an intradramatic figure) does not see everything (coming): “neither his intelligence nor divine Providence seems able to overcome the unpredictability of events or the intractability of a number of characters70” – and the spectators (if not – all – the characters) do (or can) see him (for what he is).
22If “surveillance, rather than spectacle, had become the royal road to power in early modern London71,” surveillance is indeed the object of the play’s spectacle, while official state spectacle is still part of the Duke’s endgame. In Desmond Davis and Cedric Messina’s 1979 BBC TV production, act 5 is obviously stagy, and the presence on stage of a large crowd/audience of static extras makes it clear that this is a theater of order, a hieratic play within the play. That the judicial spectacular of act 5 is not entailed by the play’s (as against the Duke’s) plot is a bit of a giveaway, and arouses “suspicion in the light of later events that the sexual corruption of Vienna was just a pretext, that the real purpose of the Duke from the beginning was to create an opportunity for himself to act out the role of the all-poweful, omniscient sovereign, who is ultimate judge and his subjects’ auctor72”. The representation of the prince is part of the “ideological state apparatus73,” and the finale could be read as a euphemized, symbolic version of the old-school show put on by the closest thing to Machiavelli’s “Prince,” one “Cesare Borgia, called by the people Duke Valentino74,” whose strategy to pacify the region of Romagna was as follows:
“[H]e gave a cruel and unscrupulous man, Messer Remirro de Orco, the fullest authority there. In no time at all Remirro reduced the territory to a peaceful and united state, and in so doing, the Duke greatly increased his prestige. Afterwards, the Duke judged that such excessive authority was no longer required, since he feared that it might become odious, and in the middle of the territory he set up a civil tribunal […]. Because he realized that the rigorous measures of the past had generated a certain amount of hatred, in order to purge the minds of the people and to win them completely over to his side he wanted to show that, if any form of cruelty had occurred, it did not originate from him but from the violent nature of his minister. Having found the occasion to do so, one morning at Cesena he had Messer Remirro’s body laid out in two pieces on the piazza, with a block of wood and a bloody sword beside it. The ferocity of such a spectacle left that population satisfied and stupefied at the same time75.”
“I am directed by you” (4.3.136): since “ordinary people are always taken in by appearances and by the outcome of an event76,” the prince’s image relies on “le suspens de la connexion77,” and it is vital that the Duke’s spectators see only effects and not causes. The play, however, focuses throughout (say, in 1.3, 3.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.5 and 4.6) on the causes of the Duke’s theatrical effects.
23It seems to a lot of critics as if the play “is cast from Vincentio’s angle of viewing the dramatic events78,” but maybe “a stand most fit,/Where you may have such vantage on the Duke/He shall not pass you” (4.6.10-12) is in fact what spectators get from a play whose “visionary displacement of the Viennese regime is mainly achieved by subliminal means, by the structural manipulation of perspective and supposition rather than by overt assertion79”. The Duke is in the frame or on the stage, providing perspective – thus spectators do, in a sense, see what he sees from his point of view; and yet, he is no transparent funnel, no absolutely legitimate and dominant “point de vue sans point de vue80,” but also the object of the spectator’s gaze, constantly seen (by James I, among others) in the process of seeing (and producing the spectacle) – a collapse of perspective which may be another instance of early-modern hyperreality effects deconstructing the Foucauldian panopticon of power. The readings of Measure for Measure as pro-Jacobean in its implementation or rationalization of a new mode of power that is the more irresistible for being diffuse and “hidden” (5.1.390), therefore, only tell one side of the story (or one of the play’s stories): by showing both the Duke’s mythocratic spectacle and his star turn as scriptwriter-producer-director-actor, by putting on a political show and taking spectators backstage, Measure for Measure represents (and does not really enact, let alone endorse) royal representation, makes power and its operations visible to its subjects, and frees spectators of believers’ “pathological limitations” to their vision81.
“Sir, make me not your story” (1.4.30)
“[L]e lieu fixé par Machiavel pour son texte, le lieu de son point de vue, n’est pas le Prince, qui est pourtant déterminé comme le ‘sujet’ de la pratique politique décisive, mais le peuple82.”
24Is all well that ends (conservatively) well, anyway? In particular, is the free play of representation really brought to a halt with the spectacular reassertion of authority at the end? The finale, it would appear, does not entirely go according to plan for Vincentio. Lucio’s unmasking of the Duke (5.1.353sd) is an example of poor timing, and his response to his final sentence (5.1.520-521) is more rain on the comedic parade as it “undermines the whole notion that in comedy marriage is a happy ending83”. Speaking of marriage, a lot of critics past and present have been to one (fictional) wedding too many: true, the Duke’s proposal is meant to “complet[e] the plot of a comedy84,” but it does not follow, nor should it be taken for granted, that the Duke “gets the girl85” – which, incidentally, is no trifling matter, since the “woman” issue is often seen as the problem86 in (and with) the “problem play”:
“Some, in righteous and justified defence of the play’s heroine, have refused to see any fault in the play at all. […] [I]n defending her, we must not forget that in the play Isabella marries and in so doing makes herself the more open to irrelevant comparisons. Her enemies have at least that excuse for their attacks87.”
The conclusion of a later reading is that “Feminist criticism of this play is restricted to exposing its own exclusion from the text. It has no point of entry into it, for the dilemmas of the narrative and the sexuality under discussion are constructed in completely male terms88”. It may be, however, that the character’s silent evasion (Isabella’s final, resounding silence in reply to the Duke’s reiterated proposal) is just such an entry point for readers. Shakespeare’s, after all, is the only take on the sexual blackmail story in which the Isabella character is a religious novice, and also the only version in which “the heroine refuses to surrender herself to save the man under sentence of death89”. Besides, lest we forget, one of the play’s biggest issues is what makes a marriage valid – that one of the “parties” does not say anything might thus not be totally insignificant. Isabella’s silence thus opens a hole in the seemingly hermetic seal of the denouement, which is bound to remain tentatively hypothetical: “if you’ll a willing ear incline” (5.1.533), then, invites us to read into and beyond the ending, and is a reminder that “closure, however much narrative may seem to invite it, is finally something only we can confirm, and only if we choose to do so90”. If the Duke’s offer, which can be read as the expression of his “loss of power at the end,” is the sign of “Shakespeare’s withdrawal as well as the Duke’s91,” then Isabella is the ultimate author, in that she gets to write the ending to the Duke’s story beyond the ending – a fictional situation, a “lack” of closure, that is not an artistic failure but which, by authorizing alternative readings, empowers readers and directors, who are thus free to fill (or, in a Shakespearean alternative, not to fill) the gaps in the playtext.
25In calling for mercy (5.1.445-451), Isabella is “forced to speak contrary to the scrupulous logicality she embodies early in the play92” – which is just one of the contradictions that expose the denouement as staged and forced, and which dismantle the “dependency of thing on thing” (5.1.65), the would-be tightknit structure of the Duke’s narrative resolution. Like his sister’s, Claudio’s silence (after he has been unmuffled, 5.1.487sd) is striking, and reminds us that a (fictional) subject’s silence (or refusal, like Barnardine’s) can be a way for the play to covertly speak and to open hermeneutic doors into (or out of) its carceral fictional universe. Of course, Claudio may be too kinetically happy or busy (jumping up and down the stage, kissing Juliet) for words, but if so the punishment of Lucio (5.1.497-521) is a verbal distraction and a bit of a turnoff. Alternatively (since the Claudio character dies in the standard version of the story), it may be that “this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and […] no sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show of coherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper and rightful end93,” as Swinburne wrote in 1879 – which incidentally makes it harder to view any “intense resistance to the play’s resolution” as providing “insights into late-twentieth-century democratic notions of law and justice, criminals and victims, power and submission94”. In a move that subverts teleology and turns narrative homeostasis upside down, the Duke (like the king of France and matchmaker-in-chief in All’s Well, who is seemingly bent on doing with Diana95 what he oh so successfully did with Helena) appears at the end to repeat his previous mistakes: “[a]s he ultimately extends a free pardon to all the guilty, we do not see how his original purpose, in committing the execution of laws to other hands, of restoring their strictness, has in any wise been accomplished96,” Schlegel wondered in 1809 (again, some time before the late twentieth century). Maybe Vincentio in fact had another “original purpose,” but the fact remains that the Duke “resolves none of the disasters voiced by the citizens of Vienna97,” and his brand of justice may be even more questionable than Angelo’s: his clemency towards his deputy in particular “is not less extreme than Angelo’s decision to follow the strict rule of law in Claudio’s case98”. Finally, in an instance of the original supplementing its supplement, of the Duke duplicating his substitute (an intimation, then, that there may be no end to the play of representation), Vincentio in act 5 in effect tries to do what His Precise Villainy, Angelo, wanted to do before him – that is, exchange Claudio’s life for Isabella’s body.
“Dress’d in a little brief authority” (2.2.119)
26“By eliciting a longing for certainty that is promised but perpetually deferred, the play does not merely frustrate; it encourages its audiences to view both the world they inhabit and the fictional world of the play as representations99”: if seen as imperfections, the play’s representation galore and the story’s “lack” of closure can be read religiously and taken to mean that in Measure for Measure Shakespeare experiments with “a Protestant aesthetic of the stage,” that he “deliberately cedes the reforming powers of the artist to a higher, divine authority and sacrifices the satisfaction of a comic ending in order to create a felt need for grace100”. There is another interpretation of interpretation, though, and when incompleteness is seen as openness instead, the story ends without answering the questions it raises because (for example) the play is a dramatic version of mooting – the legal practice in which law students perform imaginary cases. A legal counterprocess which Henry VIII tried to discourage and Elizabeth to suppress because it was “perceived as undermining parliamentary and royal prerogatives, disseminating among a wide range of subjects an equally wide range of ways of imagining issues of social and political importance,” mooting had a structure that was “[d]eliberately devoted to irresolution and contestation” and plots that were “structured to keep doubts alive”: “Considered as an instance of dramatic mooting, […] Shakespeare’s speculative tragicomedy aims more at raising than at resolving important points about contemporary issues […]. It would have been a provocative play, a theatrical moot that staged versions of, and challenges to, ‘the terms/For common justice’ [1.1.10-11]101.”
***
27The play’s “high level of formal inventiveness,” then, “allowed [Shakespeare] to think beyond the absolutism of Jacobean rule102”. “Thoughts are no subjects” (5.1.451), and through the lability of its representations and the openness of its forms Measure for Measure insistently interrogates authority, questions the divine right of kings, and deconstructs an incipiently panoptic Jacobean power. Like Shakespeare’s, “la théâtralité machiavélienne est une théâtralité du mouvement fort différente de celle de la raison d’État qui renvoie à une théâtralité de l’ordre103”; a lion at both ends of the play and a fox throughout, Vincentio makes “use of the natures of both the beast and the man104,” but his seemingly godlike authority is exposed as a theatrical construct, and if he succeeds in chastising his Puritan deputy, he fails to overhaul the state – to be a truly Machiavellian founder. No true virtuoso, the Viennese Duke is a “royal Prince” (5.1.60), both a machiavellian prince and a would-be godlike Jacobean king, whose failure to achieve the closure he so elaborately stages and Measure for Measure so thoroughly subverts is also, or actually, the virtuoso atheological play’s way of empowering those of its readers and spectators who are not afraid of its unanswered questions or of the dis-quiet and play of interpretation – in other words, of “lawless and incertain thought105” (3.1.126).
Notes de bas de page
1De Legationibus (1585), by Gentili Alberico (an Italian jurist who taught at Oxford), cited in M. Viroli’s introduction to The Prince, P. Bondanella (trans.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. xix.
2Shakespeare W., Measure for Measure, 1.2.152-153. All references to the play are to J. W. Lever’s edition, The Arden Shakespeare, London, Cengage Learning, 2008 (1965).
3See Bourdieu P., Sur l’État. Cours au collège de France (1989-1992), Paris, Raisons d’agir/Le Seuil, 2012, p. 486.
4Henceforth, however crude the distinction, “Machiavellian” refers to the “true,” republican Machiavelli of, say, Gentili and Rousseau and Diderot and Gramsci and Althusser, whereas “machiavellian” refers to the (usually – though not always – anti-Machiavelli) stereotypes or to the figure of the stage Machiavel. Gloucester’s claim that he can “set the murderous Machiavel to school” (3 Henry VI, 3.2.13), for example, “perpetuates the Elizabethan demonic caricature of Machiavelli,” and yet the Florentine’s “real insights about power and influence are in fact embodied in Shakespeare’s history plays” (Shakespeare W., King Henry VI, Part III, J. D. Cox and E. Rasmussen [ed.], The Arden Shakespeare, London, Cengage Learning, 2001, p. 280 n.).
5Shakespeare W., Hamlet, 3.2.232 (A. Thompson and N. Taylor [ed.], The Arden Shakespeare, London, Thomson Learning, 2006). Incidentally, the Viennese murder is “the murder of Gonzago,” who (as it happens) is a Duke, who may be related to the historical Vincenz(i)o Gonzaga, who might be the “source” for Duke Vincentio…
6Cited in Schanzer E., in C. K. Stead (ed.), Shakespeare: Measure for Measure. A Casebook, London, Macmillan, 1988 (1971), p. 234 (incidentally, it’s George, not Edward Chalmers, pace Lever, p. xlviii, n° 2). Interestingly, in Macbeth (4.1), the weird sisters’“show of kings” is a fictional procession that metaleptically fast-forwards to its real royal audience; through this ghostly representation of the lineage of James I, putative spectator-in-chief that he was, the play that one brand of contextual-topical reading has often described as a Jacobean puff piece may in fact play Hamlet to James’s Claudius, catching the image (if not the conscience) of the king in the mirror of its specular representation and the net of its riddling ambiguities: “[j]uxtaposed to the projection of James’s line, the witches’riddles complicate its complimentary gesture with what amounts to a genealogy of treason and equivocation” (Mullaney S., “Lying like Truth: Riddle, Representation, and Treason in Renaissance England,” in A. Sinfield [ed.], Macbeth. Contemporary Critical Essays, “New Casebooks,” Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992, p. 115). The spectral-specular apparatus, then, is another way Shakespeare’s plays could complicate reception so as to fly below the state-censorship radar and get away with the (symbolic) murder of including King James in their designs for political examination.
7Shuger D. K., Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England. The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001, p. 81.
8Shakespeare W., Measure for Measure, N. W. Bawcutt (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 5-6. In his dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’Medici Machiavelli’s excuse for doing just that is, famously, that “to know the nature of the people well one must be a prince, and to know the nature of princes well one must be of the people” (The Prince, op. cit., p. 6).
9Hamlet, 1.1.42.
10Burton R., The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 3, London, Dent, 1964 (1621), p. 329.
11James VI, Basilicon Doron, in J. P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I. Political Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (1994), p. 26 and p. 27. (Some spellings have been silently modernized.)
12Ibid., p. 19.
13Shakespeare W., Twelfth Night (3.1.11-12), K. Elam (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare, London, Cengage Learning, 2008.
14Shakespeare W., Measure for Measure, B. Gibbons (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (1991), p. 74.
15“[S]omething which appears to be a virtue, if pursued, will result in [the Prince’s] ruin; while some other thing which seems to be a vice, if pursued, will secure his safety and his well-being” (The Prince, op. cit., p. 54).
16Bawcutt, op. cit., p. 55.
17Sfez G., Machiavel, la politique du moindre mal, Paris, PUF, 1999, p. 125.
18Machiavelli, The Prince, op. cit., p. 21. The “defining characteristic of a virtuoso prince,” by the way, is “a willingness to do whatever is dictated by necessity – whether the action happens to be wicked or virtuous – in order to attain his highest ends” (Skinner Q., Machiavelli, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000 [1981], p. 44).
19Sommerville (ed.), op. cit., p. 65.
20Ibid, p. 31.
21Shuger, op. cit., p. 5; p. 60. (See Lever, op. cit., p. lxxxi for a similar take.)
22Sfez, op. cit., p. 143.
23Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I. Political Writings, op. cit., p. 49, p. 20 and p. 35.
24The Prince, op. cit., p. 62.
25Nietzsche F., L’Antéchrist, Paris, Flammarion, 1996 (1994), p. 74.
26Burton R., The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 3, op. cit., p. 325.
27Ibid., p. 335 and p. 325.
28The Antichrist (chap. 17), H. L. Mencken (transl.), New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1918. (The French translation of the key passage reads “le Dieu des biais, le Dieu de tous les coins et recoins ténébreux, de tous les quartiers malsains de l’univers entier,” L’Antéchrist, Paris, Flammarion, 1996 [1994], p. 61).
29Goddard H. C., The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 2, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1968 (1951), p. 58.
30James’s speech to Parliament on 21 March 1610, in Sommerville (ed.), op. cit., p. 181. (His version of the idea that the king is God’s minister on earth is of course expressed earlier, in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies for instance.)
31Gibbons, op. cit., p. 38.
32Mallin E. S., Godless Shakespeare, London, Continuum, 2007, p. 30.
33Ryan K., “Measure for Measure: Marxism before Marx,” in J. E. Howard and S. C. Shershow (ed.), Marxist Shakespeares, London, Routledge, 2001, p. 239.
34Shakespeare W., King Lear (4.6.148-150), R. A. Foakes (ed.) The Arden Shakespeare, Waltonon-Thames, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997.
35Nietzsche, L’Antéchrist, op. cit., p. 72.
36Skinner, Machiavelli, op. cit., p. 72.
37Machiavelli N., Discourses on Livy, J. C. and P. Bondanella (trans.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008 (1997), p. 141 and p. 323.
38Gibbons, op. cit., p. 41.
39Machiavelli, The Prince, op. cit., p. 79.
40Shakespeare W., Antony and Cleopatra (3.8.3), M. Neill (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.
41Derrida J., La dissémination, Paris, Le Seuil, 1972, p. 79.
42Derrida, loc. cit.
43Lever’s footnote, op. cit., p. 110.
44Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I. Political Writings, op. cit., p. 10, p. 1 and p. 3.
45Ibid., p. 4-5 (my emphasis).
46Ibid., p. 9.
47Ryan, op. cit., p. 243.
48Gash A., “Shakespeare, Carnival and the Sacred: The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure,” in R. Knowles (ed), Shakespeare and Carnival. After Bakhtin, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998, p. 203.
49Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, op. cit., p. 29.
50“[L]e droit le plus rigoureusement rationalisé n’est jamais qu’un acte de magie sociale qui réussit. Le discours juridique est une parole créatrice, qui fait exister ce qu’elle énonce” (Bourdieu P., Langage et pouvoir symbolique, Paris, Fayard/Le Seuil, 2001, p. 66).
51Such as Jonathan Dollimore’s (Dollimore J., “Transgression and surveillance in Measure for Measure,” in J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield [ed.], Political Shakespeare, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996 [1985], p. 85-86). From another perspective, however, “Shakespeare’s erasure of the whores might seem to accord […] with Foucault’s dictum that the role of the intellectual is not to speak for the silenced, but to expose the power that represses their speech, of which he himself is an agent” (Wilson R., “Prince of Darkness: Foucault’s Shakespeare,” in N. Wood [ed.], Measure for Measure. Theory in Practice, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1996, p. 169).
52Chedgzoy K., William Shakespeare. Measure for Measure, Horndon, Northcote House, 2000, p. 51 (with reference to J. Singh’s reading).
53Basilicon Doron, in Sommerville (ed.), op. cit., p. 30.
54Gibbons, op. cit., p. 15.
55Lever, op. cit., p. lxxv.
56Piesse A., “Self-preservation in the Shakespearian System: Gender, Power and the New History,” in N. Wood (ed.), Measure for Measure. Theory in Practice, op. cit., p. 83.
57The Prince, op. cit., p. 6.
58Gibbons, op. cit., p. 41.
59Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, op. cit., p. 42.
60Piesse, op. cit., p. 62.
61Lever, op. cit., p. xlix.
62Gibbons, op. cit., p. 36-37.
63Gash, op. cit., p. 204.
64See Lane R. J., Jean Beaudrillard, New York, Routledge, 2009 (2000), p. 96.
65The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in Sommerville (ed.), op. cit., p. 72.
66Ibid., p. 75.
67Lever, op. cit., p. lxxi.
68Wilson Knight G., cited in Stead, op. cit., p. 98-99.
69Krontiris T., “The Omnicient ‘Auctor’: Ideology and Point of View in Measure for Measure,” English Studies, vol. 80, n° 4, 1999, p. 293-306, p. 305. In Dollimore’s analysis, the Duke is omniscient and the play “a reactionary fantasy, neither radical nor liberating […] but rather conservative and constraining; the very disclosure of social realities which make progress seem imperative is recuperated in comedic closure, a redemptive wish-fulfilment of the status quo” (See Dollimore, op. cit., p. 83-84).
70Yachnin P., “Shakespeare’s Problem Plays and the Drama of His Time,” in R. Dutton and J. E. Howard (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, p. 65.
71Wilson R., op. cit., p. 152-153.
72Krontiris T., op. cit., p. 300.
73Althusser L., Machiavel et nous, Paris, Éditions Tallandier, 2009, p. 160.
74The Prince, op. cit., p. 24.
75Ibid., p. 27.
76Ibid., p. 62.
77Sfez, op. cit., p. 123.
78Krontiris T., op. cit. p. 294.
79Ryan, op. cit., p. 237.
80Bourdieu, Sur l’État, op. cit., p. 53.
81Nietzsche, The Antichrist, op. cit., chap. 54 (L’Antéchrist, op. cit., p. 117).
82Althusser, op. cit., p. 63.
83Chedgzoy, op. cit., p. 18.
84Radel N., “Reading as a Feminist,” in N. Wood (ed.), Measure for Measure. Theory in Practice, op. cit., p. 126.
85Paul Yachnin, for example, describes Vincentio as “the master strategist who ends up with both an enhanced reputation and the much prized Isabella” (Yachnin, op. cit., p. 64).
86See Rose J., “Sexuality in the reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure,” in J. Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, London, Routledge, 1996 (1985).
87Tillyard E. M. W., Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965 (1950), p. 118 and p. 120.
88McLuskie K., “The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” in J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (ed.), Political Shakespeare, op. cit., p. 97.
89Bawcutt, op. cit., p. 56.
90Abbott H. P., The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (2002), p. 212.
91Piesse, op. cit., p. 88.
92Radel, op. cit., p. 123.
93Swinburne A. C. (1879), in Stead (ed.), op. cit., p. 63.
94Diehl H., “‘Infinite Space’: Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 49, n° 4, 1998, p. 393-410, p. 405 (my emphasis).
95Shakespeare W., All’s Well That Ends Well (5.3.328), S. Snyder (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.
96Schlegel A. W. (1809), cited in Stead (ed.), op. cit., p. 45.
97Cunningham K., “Opening Doubts Upon the Law: Measure for Measure,” in R. Dutton and J. E. Howard (ed.), op. cit., p. 326.
98Shuger, op. cit., p. 132. From a Marxist perspective, besides, mercy is the symptom of the disease, not its cure: “Measure for Measure demystifies mercy, which feeds off the oppressive hierarchy it secretly consolidates – the power structure that produces the need for mercy in the first place” (Ryan, op. cit., p. 241).
99Diehl, op. cit., p. 403.
100Ibid., p. 394 and p. 410.
101Cunningham, op. cit., p. 329, p. 318, p. 321 and p. 318.
102Yachnin, op. cit., p. 66.
103Sfez G., op. cit., p. 156.
104“[A] prince must know how to make good use of the natures of both the beast and the man […]. It is […] necessary to be a fox, in order to recognize the traps, and a lion, in order to frighten the wolves” (The Prince, op. cit., p. 60).
105“Mais n’est-ce pas […] dans le registre de l’inquiétude et de l’interrogation que se pense la vraie démocratie?,” Abensour M., La Démocratie contre l’État. Marx et le moment machiavélien, Paris, Éditions du Félin, 2004, p. 24.
Auteur
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Ifig Cocoual
Enseigne en khâgne au lycée La Bruyère (Versailles). Ancien membre du jury du CAPES externe d’anglais, il a publié des articles sur la poétique du fragment dans The Handmaid’s Tale de Margaret Atwood, sur la rhétorique dans Le Roi Lear, et sur la narration dans Le Conte d’hiver.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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