“Let’s Write ‘Good Angel’ On the Devil’s Horn”: Queering Puritan Performance in Measure for Measure
p. 185-200
Texte intégral
1In Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses, a 1583 tract detailing the social and moral problems of Elizabethan England, the “horrible vice of Whoredom” in the anagrammatic kingdom of “Ailgna” is illustrated, in part, by the rather messy tale of one William Ratsurb, a “notorious Usurer” who would go about “pretending alway a singuler zeale to religion, so that he wold seldom tymes go without a byble about him”. Ratsurb bailed a prostitute, “a famous Whore but a very proper woman,” out of Bridewell (or, as Stubbes calls it in keeping with his naming practices, “Lewedirb”), and had an affair with her. But the two, as one might expect in a text like this, came to an incredibly unpleasant end:
“Whilest these two members of the Deuill were playing the filthie Sodomites together in hys chamber, & hauing a litle pan of coales before them wherin was a very litle fire, it pleased GOD euen in his wrath, to strike these two persons dead in a moment. The woman falling over the panne of coals, was burned, that all her bowelles gushed out, the man was founde liyng by, his clothes in some partes being scorched and burned, and some partes of his body also. But which is moste wonderfull, his arme was burned to the very bone, his Shurt sleeue, and dublett, not once perished, nor touched with the fire. Whereby may bee thought, and not without great probabilitie of truth, that it was euen the fire of God his wrathe from heauen, and not any natural fire from the Earth. And in this wonderfull and fearfull manner, were these cupple found1.”
The reference to Ratsurb and his mistress “playing the filthie Sodomites” is, on first glance, rather confusing. After all, their relationship, adulterous as it may be, is patently heterosexual, and, as Stubbes himself notes, there are numerous other stories in the Bible which serve as exempla against adultery and/or fornication2, although few of the others offer analogous fires raining down from heaven. But, as Will Fisher has noted, in early modern discourse usury was often associated with sodomy because “the usurer’s attempt to make barren money breed is the equivalent of the sodomite’s attempts to make a non-reproductive sexual object or orifice breed3”. Ratsurb’s crime of usury, therefore, inscribes itself onto all aspects of his life; the sterile breeding of coins reflects the extramarital and presumably non-reproductive qualities of his affair with his mistress.
2Adultery, though, is not the only sin this anecdote condemns. Stubbes stresses the usurer’s hypocrisy as well: the tale also demonstrates “ye iudgements of God vpon them that will take his word in their mouthes, and yet lyue cleane contrary, making the worde of God a cloke to couer their sinne & naughtinesse withal as many do in these daies”. As such, Ratsurb is connected implicitly with Stubbes’s most famous condemnation: that of players, whom Stubbes calls “dissembling Hipocrites4” – and who, according to a well-known passage in the Anatomie, are guilty of equivalent sexual misconduct, carried out in remarkably similar phrasing: “Than these goodly pageants being done, euery mate sorts to his mate, euery one bringes another homeward of their way verye fréendly, and in their secret conclaues (couertly) they play ye Sodomits, or worse5.” Thus Ratsurb is a sodomite not just because he’s a usurer and an adulterer, but because he is a hypocrite (a “counterfeiter”), and therefore, by Stubbes’ logic, an actor.
3Like Stubbes’s ill-fated usurer, Shakespeare’s Angelo in Measure for Measure is outwardly zealous but also prey to illicit sexual appetites. His hypocrisy aligns him with the players as imagined by their critics – the line between authoritarian puritan and libertine player is blurred in a way that at least implicitly evokes the gendered anxieties expressed repeatedly by opponents of the stage. Although the play contains little in the way of overt homoeroticism, Shakespeare nevertheless evokes the greatest assumed sin of players by subverting the nexus of associations between theatricality and sexual license6. The play achieves this subversion by juxtaposing another traditional association: that of sodomy and adultery with usury and counterfeiting – a connection made because all four acts were seen as debased forms of (re)production, usurping the role of the family and state respectively. Yet, as Stephen Deng points out, although the numismatic imagery in Measure for Measure plays with the metaphorical link between coining and sexual offenses, the play’s purposes are more complicated:
“[T]he subsequent actions of the state’s representatives call into question the state’s own offenses against the coin, especially debasement. Although Angelo proves false, the duke cannot avoid the fact that it was his own legitimate stamp that has permitted his judicial substitute Angelo to perpetrate his crimes7.”
Through his depiction of the “precise” (1.3.50) Angelo, then, Shakespeare demonstrates some of the ways in which theatricality becomes destructive when used in the service of authority. In contrast to the threat posed by illegal coining, the “counterfeiting” practiced by those in power transforms theatricality into the sociopolitical threat envisioned by the harshest critics of the public theater.
4When Angelo first realizes his attraction to Isabella and its grounding in her virtue, he expresses his mingled desire and disgust, in terms of desecration:
Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman’s lightness? Having waste ground enough,
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? O fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo? (2.2.168-1738).
5As Jennifer Rust has noted, Angelo’s metaphor has a more specific resonance for an early modern audience: “Angelo’s identification of Isabella with a ‘sanctuary’ threatened with defilement relates Isabella’s body more precisely to the sanctuaries of the Catholic past converted to ‘waste ground’ by the era of the play, yet remembered in sixteenth-century antiquarian discourses9.” The desire of the puritan Angelo for the Catholic Isabella, in other words, is imagined to re-enact the dissolution of the monasteries. It is fitting, then, that one effect of the destruction of Catholic sanctuaries had lingering effects on the way English law constructed sexuality. As Bruce Smith has pointed out, the statute of 25 Henry VIII, chapter 6, is the first to present sodomy as a felony separate from heresy and witchcraft, with which it had been associated in earlier common law as codified under Edward I. This distinction, Smith argues, was a vital part of Henry’s consolidation of church and state, insofar as it gave the king leverage against the Catholic clergy:
“Sodomy had been considered a specifically clerical vice since it first began to be mentioned in ecclesiastical law in the thirteenth century. Making sodomy, along with sorcery and heresy, a felony under the civil law would give Henry’s agents the legal power they needed to make answerless accusations during the impending visitation of the monasteries. […] All in all, making sodomy a felony seems to have been a convenient way for Henry VIII to get rid of one category of political enemies, priests who were loyal to Rome, and thus consolidate his personal power10.”
Smith’s analysis of the history of English sodomy laws outlines, within the legal sphere, “a gradual narrowing of focus: from the cosmos of God’s creation in the legal codes of Edward I, to the secular state in the statutes of Henry VIII, to the family in the revised laws of Edward VI and Elizabeth I11”. But if the legal definition of sodomy is, as scholars such as Alan Bray12 and Jonathan Goldberg have noted, an increasingly narrow matter, the concept of “sodomy” remains, in early modern thought, remarkably broad.
6Goldberg’s seminal treatment of early modern perceptions of sodomy clarifies the extent to which Shakespeare’s portrayal of Angelo is a critique of political as well as sexual hypocrisy. Goldberg’s argument, by now well-known, hinges on the notion that “although sodomy is, as a sexual act, anything that threatens alliance… these acts… emerge into visibility only when those who are said to have done them also can be called traitors, heretics, or the like13…”. In Angelo’s case, his assumption of the visible position of ruler as well as his pretense to piety makes his sexual coercion of Isabella sodomitical, in the sense that his actions are truly threatening and disruptive in a way that theatrical performance can never be. By recontextualizing the sodomitical dimension theatricality was perceived to have, and by locating the dangerous performativity in the puritanical authority figure, Shakespeare deflects attacks made against his art and in doing so insists on the legitimacy of the theater as a site of political criticism. By demonstrating power both as something that can be performed and something that can be observed, the play privileges the role of the stage in political discourse. As David Scott Kastan has argued, during a theatrical representation of rule, “the audience becomes, as the political discourse of the seventeenth century increasingly maintained of the community, the ultimate source of authority in its willingness to credit and approve the representation of rule14”. However, the play also insists that the power to stage things belongs exclusively to the dramatists, and when that power is co-opted by those with tangible state or civic authority, it becomes corrupted.
7According to Goldberg, Measure for Measure’s examination of royal power occurs in the realm of representation: “In the Duke, Shakespeare has written a role that represents his powers as playwright as coincident with the powers of the sovereign. This is more than the analogical statement that dramatist and king rule their realms, for the Duke reigns in both; dramatist and monarch represent each other, a doubleness housed in his single person15.” The Duke, in other words, functions as playwright not only because of his control, but because he engages in repeated acts of representation and duplication; “in these re-presentational procedures, the play offers an image of its relation to sovereign power16”. But if the Duke is a playwright, what of the players? Shakespeare, as he frequently does, depicts the exercise of power as a particularly dangerous kind of theater; in Measure for Measure the political criticism implicit in his appropriation of antitheatrical arguments goes a step further by locating some of this power in a character who is rather explicitly aligned with opponents of the stage. For while Angelo is clearly associated with English Puritanism, it is necessary to point out that this is not the only faction Shakespeare criticizes through him, and that Puritanism and antitheatricality do not necessarily go hand in hand. Opponents of the theater were not exclusively Puritans, and the city authorities in early modern London frequently attempted to have the institution shut down, usually on practical rather than moral grounds17. Nor were Puritans monolithically opposed to drama (as the example of Milton demonstrates). Certainly, as Leah Marcus argues, the play allows for a reading in which Angelo represents the city government rather than simply the Puritanical fringe; as Marcus remarks: “For London theater audiences, part of the game of topicality in ‘Vienna’ would have been the titillating pleasure of measuring the hypocrisy of Angelo against their own civic authorities18.” His first act as ruler is to decree that “all houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be pluck’d down” (1.2.95 96). The connection between the suburbs of Vienna and the Liberties of London, home to such dens of iniquity as brothels, bear-baiting pits, and playhouses, is made clear by the recurring use of the word liberty to describe the offense Angelo seeks to stamp out; Claudio, for instance, famously laments that his impending death is the punishment for “too much liberty” (1.2.125). As Steven Mullaney puts it:
“If the Liberties of Vienna resemble the Liberties of Shakespeare’s London in all respects but one, if the suburban houses being plucked down in Measure for Measure do not include the similarly threatened playhouses of Jacobean London, it is not because Shakespeare’s stage is absent from his imaginary city19.”
8Leah Marcus elaborates:
“To the extent that London theatrical audiences resented the reformers’ endless campaigns against the public ‘enormity’ of stage plays, they may have found it easy to applaud the duke’s exposure of a civic leader who was overly precise. The place of the duke’s highly theatrical trial just outside the jurisdiction of the city was, in London, the place of the stage itself. There is a natural topographical alliance between the theatricality of the duke and the institution which brought him to life on the outskirts of London20.”
9The play’s engagement of the theater controversy is not, however, limited to the setting of the play in a location that resembles Jacobean London in some capacity (or in many), or the alignment of Angelo’s strict policies with those of people with a Puritanical bent21. Shakespeare appropriates the discourse of selfhood that pervades the literature questioning the morality of theater, and reconfigures it so that their concerns rebound onto the “precisian” Angelo. This is not peculiar to Measure for Measure, of course; things said by players about Puritans tend to look very like things said by Puritans about players. So, for instance, Stubbes denounces players as “painted sepulchres” and “doble dealing ambodexters22,” while Stephen Gosson in The Schoole of Abuse describes the hypocrisy of players thus:
“pul off the visard that Poets maske in, you shall disclose their reproch, bewray their vanitie, loth their wantonnesse, lament their follie, and perceiue their sharpe sayings to be placed as Pearles in Dunghils, fresh pictures on rotten walles, chaste Matrons apparel on common Curtesans23”.
10But if the Puritans saw players as hypocrites – a word whose theatrical etymology William Prynne was eager to exploit24 – critics of Puritanism, whether they were defending the theater explicitly or not, were equally quick to make the same accusations against their opponents. Thus one of the contributors to the Overburian Characters describes “A Precisian” as a “varnisht Rottennesse […] a demure Creature, full of orall Sanctitie, and mentall impietie; a faire object to the eye, but starke nought for the understanding25…”. Indeed, the charges of hypocrisy frequently leveled against Puritans imply not only that they secretly and lustily commit the vices they condemn in others, but that therefore they are just as accustomed to performance as the players they criticize. As Ben Jonson would later put it:
I cannot think there’s that antipathy
’Twixt puritans, and players, as some cry;
When Lip, at Paul’s, ran from his text away
T’inveigh’ gainst players, what did he then but play26?
Jonson’s epigram, of course, points specifically at the high-flown rhetoric deployed against the stage in sermons (and pamphlets). Puritanism as constructed by its opponents tends to entail a blurring of the lines between polemicist and performer: if the antitheatricalists insist that hypocrisy is an inherently and etymologically theatrical quality, then when supporters of the theater make the same accusation against their critics, they’re pointing to what they see as a performative dimension of public piety27, and one that’s fundamentally less honest than theatrical performance. One might recall Sidney’s famous question: “What childe is there, that coming to a Play, and seeing Thebes written in great Letters vpon an olde doore, doth beleeue that it is Thebes28?”
11In his “preciseness” as well as his political power, then, Angelo is performative not in spite of, but because of his affiliation with a faction that claims to oppose performance. Indeed, as Peter Lake has argued, a major motivation for the antitheatrical movement was a sense of competition, the insistent depiction of playgoing as inimical to godliness an outcome of “a struggle between the moralised, incipiently godly pamphlet and the drama, indeed between the pulpit and the stage, over a common body of traditional or popular assumptions, narrative habits and patterns29”. The correspondence noted in Jonson’s epigram, in other words, was the result of a very real contest:
“[T]he starkness of the contrast being drawn between the two houses or realms might be taken as evidence of precisely the contrary of what was being protested rather too stridently by these authors. Rather than proof of the dissimilarity, of the cultural and institutional distance between the godly pulpit and the stage, such passages can, in fact, be taken as a sure sign of their structurally parallel relationship to a culturally and socially mixed, ‘popular’ metropolitan audience for the attention of which the stage and pulpit were rivals30.”
In this competition, the state is an important player; one target audience of antitheatrical pamphlets was the magistrates, who could, theoretically, shut down the theaters. But, Lake points out, another function of these pamphlets was self-definition for the puritanically inclined, establishing the theater as “a place in which no self-respecting godly person should be seen dead31”. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Angelo as a magistrate therefore draws on the assumed incompatibility of theatricality – a necessary tool for those in power – and godliness. The imagery at the opening of the play emphasizes the various forms of role-playing in which the role of deputy will require Angelo to engage. The Duke, announcing to Escalus that he’s chosen Angelo as his deputy, asks: “What figure of us, think you, he will bear?” (1.1.16), introducing the coinage motif that becomes very prominent in the play, and imagining the transfer of power in terms of representation32.
12In the first act of the play Angelo is “figured” in several ways. First of all, by assuming power, he becomes a “figure” of the Duke. Furthermore, the Duke informs him that he’s been chosen as deputy because “There is a kind of character in thy life/That to th’observer doth thy history/Fully unfold” (1.1.27-29). “Character,” in Shakespeare, always has the primary sense of “writing,” so the use of the word is connected to the coining imagery applied to the transfer of power: the play makes frequent use of metaphors involving writing, stamping, or things being done to metal. As Huston Diehl puts it: “In Measure for Measure characters repeatedly define the human condition in representational terms, describing themselves as figures, mirrors, coins, stamps, prints, and forms that image something else33.” But even if the imagery is primarily of writing, “character,” like “figure” earlier in the scene, has a representative significance as well. In early modern usage, the word “character” doesn’t so much denote any kind of interiority as much as it establishes him as a type, a kind of stock figure – albeit an unusually self-aware one34. Indeed, the Duke later assigns to him a specific “character” when he remarks that “Lord Angelo is precise” (1.3.50), as the word – which was construed by actual Puritans as a slur35 – indicates Puritanism and therefore, by the shorthand of the early modern stage, hypocrisy. As Stephen Deng has argued, this is also the charge that the play makes against statecraft. Through its imagery of coining, the avenue through which people most frequently interact with state authority36, Measure for Measure subverts the traditional associations between counterfeiting and bastardy, suggesting that the Duke’s nomination of Angelo as deputy ultimately serves to debase his own “stamp,” destabilizing the connection between the state’s control of coinage and its dispensing of justice, both of which should be forms of fair exchange:
“It is ultimately this other explanation for the coin imagery – the figurative association between coinage and justice – that creates difficulties for the authority figures in Measure for Measure. Whereas metaphors of coining God’s image in believers and coining the father’s image in children could be deployed without necessarily calling attention to the state’s own practices of coin production, the connection to justice, a central concern in the play, destabilizes the figurative case against coining crimes by revealing the hypocrisy of state officials37.”
Coining and theatricality, two forms of representation and figuration, run parallel to one another in Measure for Measure. As Marc Shell has argued, disguise “dramatiz[es] the legal and politically necessary fiction that typifies all commensuration” and thus “informs not only the commercial but also the sexual and incestuous exchanges of Measure for Measure38”. Angelo is a false coin, a false image of the Duke, but bears his legitimate authority; at the end of the play the Duke himself “tells the truth in a false guise, which negates the authority of his claims39”.
13Furthermore, the play’s treatment of power and its effects on selfhood evokes the tension that pervades antitheatrical tracts when they try to address the issue of the nature of identity. Angelo’s own reaction to his deputization envisions an almost physical dimension to the assumption of power:
Now, good my lord,
Let there be some more test made of my metal
Before so noble and so great a figure
Be stamp’d upon it (1.1.47-49).
The imagery, with its accompanying pun40, suggests a kind of permanent change: as the figure of the ruler is stamped on a coin, the actor’s role stamps itself onto his consciousness. The concern Angelo expresses regarding his ability to undergo this change, although not directly indicative of antitheatricality, nevertheless evokes some of the fears of performance expressed by opponents of the stage. Invariably, attacks on the theater were concerned with two different notions of selfhood. The first of these holds that identity is something immutable, and that, as Lake puts it, “the whole theatrical medium, the essence of theatrical performance, was illusion and pretence and therefore lies41”. On the other hand, identity was simultaneously seen as highly malleable, and thus playing a part is dangerous because it effectively rewrites one’s personality42. Indeed, John Rainoldes makes striking use of precisely that metaphor in The Overthrow of Stage-Playes:
“For, the care of making a shew to doe such feates… worketh in the actors a marueilous impression of being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate: chiefly when earnest and much meditation of sundry daies and weeks, by often repetition, and representation of the parts, shall as it were engraue the things in their minde with a penne of iron, or with the point of a diamond43.”
The imagery of metallic engraving is of a piece with Measure for Measure’s other coining/stamping imagery. Goldberg discusses the implications of this imagery in terms of sovereignty: “Angelo’s pun on mettle in the first scene suggests that he is a coin stamped with the Duke’s figure. Sovereign power, real and stamped, sustains the exchange system of society, the endless refiguration of the king in representative acts of substitution44.” This substitution is, of course, a kind of performance. But it also corrupts Angelo – or magnifies his inner corruption – so that what the play presents is Shakespeare’s redirection of the argument that acting rewrites the performer’s self; he seems to accept the premise but not the context. In other words, while performance can indeed have the effect that the antitheatricalists say it does, the dangerous kind of performance is not that carried out on the public stages, acknowledged as unreal by all but the most fanatical of its opponents, but the acts of substitution and representation demanded by the enactment of power.
14Once Angelo has become aware of his attraction to Isabella, he soliloquizes on the effects that both this attraction and his newly acquired power (which he later attempts to exploit when propositioning her) have had on him:
The state whereon I studied
Is, like a good thing, being often read,
Grown sere and tedious; yea, my gravity,
Wherein – let no man hear me – I take pride,
Could I with boot change for an idle plume
Which the air beats for vain. O place, O form,
How often doth thou with thy case, thy habit,
Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls
To thy false seeming! Blood, thou art blood.
Let’s write good angel on the devil’s horn –
’Tis not the devil’s crest (2.4.7-17).
Angelo’s self-construction, in examining what he’s become, relies on the imagery of written texts. To the extent that his identity as ruler is tied to that of the state, that identity has become meaningless, an exterior that serves only to “wrench awe from fools”; his fixation on Isabella is effectively a revision of his personality. Furthermore, he reveals that his own reputation (“character”) is largely a sham, since he admits that he’s proud, paradoxically, of his modesty. But this admission of hypocrisy merely locks him more strongly into the role of the stereotypical precisian, the puritan-as-hypocrite described in Overbury’s Characters as “often drunke, but not as we are, temporally, nor can his sleep then cure him, for the fumes of his ambition make his very soule reele45”. Indeed, the imagery of writing indicates the falseness of another kind of character; writing “good angel” on the devil’s horn (his very signifier of being the devil) obviously doesn’t change his status. The figure becomes more complicated in light of the play’s monetary imagery: as Huston Diehl puts it, “even Angelo’s name, which calls to mind both the spiritual creature and the English coin stamped with the image of the archangel Gabriel, reminds Shakespeare’s audiences that a deputy bears the image of the divine and gains its value from that image46”. As Shakespeare has Angelo himself point out, though, the image may not be genuine. To “write ‘good angel’ on the devil’s horn” simply makes him a false angel, and thus, punningly, a counterfeit coin. Likewise, when the Duke laments “what may man within him hide,/Though angel on the outward side” (3.2.271-272) he figures Angelo as a counterfeit, made of baser metal than he appears to be.
15The notion of Angelo as a counterfeit coin takes on further significance in light of Will Fisher’s examination of the cultural logic behind the association of counterfeiting with sodomy – two actions that James I had listed as unforgivable crimes in the Basilikon Doron47. This logic holds that “if coining and sexual reproduction were homologous, counterfeiting and sodomy were to be understood as equivalent perversions of them: just as counterfeiting was considered to be a false imitation of legitimate monetary production, sodomy was figured as a false imitation of heterosexual generation48”. Indeed, in the speech that establishes the play’s economic imagery, the Duke chides Angelo for hiding his light under a bushel; he has, in fact, been metaphorically ungenerative:
Thyself and thy belongings
Are not thine own so proper as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
Spirits are not finely touch’d
But to fine issues; nor nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use (1.1.29-31, 35-40).
The language here, in its suggestion that someone of Angelo’s “spirit” should produce “fine issues49,” parallels the more explicitly sexual critique of the fair youth of the Sonnets:
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free …
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive (4.3-4, 9-1050).
As Rust points out, the Duke’s admonition establishes a connection between financial and sexual activity:
“Sexual and monetary generation are not simply compared, but actually conflated in the Duke’s reference to the ‘smallest scruple.’ The most minute portion of natural ‘excellence’ – the ‘loan’ that is ideally recompensed through erotic union and biological reproduction – is also the measure of a fraction of an ounce of gold, a technical term of the goldsmith. From a naturalistic angle, the Duke identifies in Angelo an obstruction that is simultaneously erotic and economic, a dysfunction that he will subsequently remedy in his arrangement of the ‘bed trick’51.”
This connection is typified by Pompey’s lament that “’tis never merry world since, of two usuries, the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed by order of law” (3.2.6-852) – and one that also plays out within the Mariana subplot, as when her brother died she lost “with him, the portion and sinew of her fortune, her marriage dowry; with both, her combinate husband, this well-seeming Angelo” (3.1.221-223).
16Of course, if one identifies “sodomy” with “homosexuality,” as a modern reader might understand it, the application to Measure for Measure is negligible53. However, the more expansive definition offered by early modern discourse allows for the possibility that the illicit liaison proposed by Angelo is in some sense to be seen as sodomitical, particularly in light of Goldberg’s discussion of sodomy as illicit desire (regardless of gender) that is politically and socially disruptive, as well as early Tudor reformist discussions of the topic such as that of John Bale, whose definition of the term includes clerical celibacy as well as adultery, bestiality, masturbation, promiscuity, and pederasty. These definitions certainly color the one relatively uncomplicated piece of generative imagery applied to Angelo, Isabella’s remark that “I had rather my brother die by the law, than my son should be unlawfully born” (3.1.188-9054). While Angelo is not portrayed as literally committed to celibacy, as his prior engagement to Mariana demonstrates, his association with sterile breeding makes the connection clear – an association which also, notably, inverts Protestant objections to Catholicism55. While the play is full of references to pregnancy and childbearing both literal and figurative, Angelo is often seen as a figure of sterility, as in Lucio’s insistence that “This ungenitur’d agent will unpeople the province with continency” (3.2.168-169), or his description of him as “a motion ungenerative” (3.2.107-108). Indeed, he is imagined as the result of an unnatural coupling, “not made by man and woman, after this downright way of creation” (3.2.100-101) but “begot by two stockfishes” (3.2.10556). Angelo himself says that his supposed tryst with Isabella “makes me unpregnant” (4.4.20), the potential pun allowing for imagery of inverse conception57. Indeed, he even argues – although, at this point in the play, somewhat disingenuously – that fornication and murder are equivalent sins, essentially each other’s inverse:
Ha? Fie, these filthy vices! It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’ s image
In stamps that are forbid.’Tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made,
As to put mettle in restrained means
To make a false one (2.4.42-49).
As Stephen Deng points out, the imagery used to describe Claudio’s offense is part of a tendency in early modern discourse to equate coining crimes, which are unmentioned in scripture, with sexual offenses:
“While the equivalence of murder should be enough to warrant justification for punishment, the reference to counterfeiting indicates that Claudio’s action also transgresses against the state in its recent attempt to police sexuality. That is, the coining metaphor is employed here to remind any potential offender that producing bastards, like counterfeiting, has been explicitly forbidden by the state58.”
Curiously, Deng does not mention that Claudio and Juliet are, by early modern English standards if not those of the play’s Vienna, legally married59. Claudio remarks that
upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta’s bed.
You know the lady; she is fast my wife,
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order (1.2.134-138).
Their crime, in other words, is only extramarital sex insofar as they have not undergone the ceremonial dimension of marriage – the part that is associated with church, state, and public performance.
17Mary Thomas Crane argues that the frequent use of generative imagery in the play demonstrates anxiety about control over both body and mind: in the play “the self is imagined variously as stamped unalterably at conception and walled off from influence or as receptive to shaping by physical and cultural forces60”. The major characters of the play, in Crane’s reading, have fluctuating conceptions of selfhood which correspond to those discussed in antitheatrical literature. It is, then, possible to see in the play something of the antitheatricalists’anxiety over the potential erotic (and homoerotic) threat posed by the theater to the potentially receptive bodies and minds of the spectator. As Lake argues, opponents of the theater feared the affective nature of performance, “appealing, as it did, to the senses and the emotions in ways that undermined the sovereignty of reason, unmanned or effeminated even the most rationally masculine or masculinely rational of sensibilities and sent all sorts of subliminally corrupting messages directly through the senses to the soul61” – an impulse Stubbes sums up in his fantasy of playgoers returning home to “play the Sodomites”. Angelo’s fear of (metaphorical) penetration might imply that his heterosexual attraction to Isabella presents a threat not just to his virtue – or his pretended virtue – but to his masculinity. The argument acquires a finer point, too, when one recalls that in the original production Isabella would have been played by a boy, so that Angelo’s attraction to her might visibly evoke the frequent assumption made by antitheatricalists that watching boys dressed as women would be irresistibly erotic to members of the audience62. In Measure for Measure, then, Shakespeare’s use of the imagery of coining, stamping, and engraving serves to critique not only the hypocrisy of authority, as Stephen Deng argues, but also, more specifically, to critique the corruption of stagecraft on the part of those in power – and, in particular, those who would consider the theater a dangerous institution. It is, in other words, not just the dramaturgy of the Duke that casts light on political theater; the hypocrisy of Angelo also serves to engage the opponents of the stage.
Notes de bas de page
1Stubbes Philip, The Anatomie of Abuses, London, 1585, p. 58. Unless otherwise noted, all Stubbes quotes in the following two paragraphs are from this page.
2Indeed, p. 52-54 of the Anatomie are devoted to a list of them.
3Fisher Will, “Queer Money,” ELH, vol. 66, n ° 1, Spring 1999, p. 1-23; p. 11.
4Stubbes, Anatomie, p. 89.
5Ibid., p. 91.
6For a differently-oriented queering of Measure for Measure, see Morrison Paul, “Same-Saint Desire,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Works of Shakespeare, Madhavi Menon (ed.), Durham, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 209-215. Morrison’s reading of the play centers on the concept of prohibition: “What makes this the most problematic of ‘problem’ plays – what positively elevates it to the status of a perverse play – is its unabashed eroticization of artificially constructed and externally imposed strictures” (p. 210).
7Deng Stephen, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 104.
8Measure for Measure, J. W. Lever (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare, 1965, reprint, London, Thomson, 2006.
9Rust Jennifer, The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in Post-Reformation English Literature, forthcoming, Northwestern University Press. I am grateful to Professor Rust for sharing a draft of the Measure for Measure chapter with me.
10Smith Bruce R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 44-45.
11Ibid., p. 47.
12Bray Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 1982, reprint, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995.
13Goldberg Jonathan, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 19.
14Kastan David Scott, Shakespeare After Theory, New York, Routledge, 1999, p. 127.
15Goldberg Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1989, p. 232-233.
16Ibid.
17For a brief overview of the tensions between the acting companies and the London authorities, see Gurr Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 3rd ed., p. 4-12, p. 27-33, and p. 72-79. On the affiliation between Puritanism and antitheatricality see Barish Jonas, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981, p. 82, n. 5.
18Marcus Leah, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, p. 177. Marcus does argue, however, that Angelo’s policies as ruler align him more specifically with the Puritans, so that his “interpretation [of the statute against fornication] is extreme, even by contemporary Puritan standards” (250, n. 4).
19Mullaney Steven, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 114.
20Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, p. 181.
21Deborah Kuller Shuger examines the Puritanical interest in strict legal sanctions against sexual misconduct in Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure, New York, Palgrave, 2001, chap. i.
22Stubbes, p. 89.
23Gosson Stephen, The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579), in Arthur F. Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, Salzburg, Institut Für Englische Sprache un Literatur, 1974, p. 77.
24Prynne William, in Histrio-Mastix, The Players Scourge, or Actors Tragædie, London, 1633, p. 158, asks: “For what else is hypocrisie in the proper signification of the word, but the acting of anothers part or person on the Stage: or what else is an hypocrite, in his true etimologie, but a Stage-player, or one who acts anothers part: as sundry Authors and Gramarians teach us”; OED supports his etymology, if not its implications.
25“A Precisian,” in The Overburian Characters, W. J. Paylor (ed.), reprint, Percy Reprints n ° 13, New York, AMS, 1997, p. 44.
26Epigrams LXXV, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, George Parfitt (ed.), New York, Penguin, 1996, p. 58.
27See also Jonas Barish’s discussion of Thomas Heywood’s 1612 Apology for Actors (Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, p. 117-122), probably one of the best-known defenses of the stage. The Apology relies on many of the same points made by the tracts to which it replies, although Heywood re-evaluates their morality in ways that are frequently surprising.
28Sidney Sir Philip, An Apologie for Poetrie, London, 1595, sig. H.
29Lake Peter, with Questier Michael, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 429.
30Lake, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 429.
31Lake, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 430.
32“Suggested perhaps by the ducal stamp on the seal of the commission, and introducing the iterative ‘stamp’ or ‘coin’ image for the first time” (Lever, p. 4, 1.1.16n.). While the metaphor of coinage is important to the play’s treatment of power and antitheatricality, figure has further significance here; the word can refer, in early modern (as well as modern) usage, to any act of representation, and see especially OED, figure def. 11, which emphasizes the word’s theatrical connotations.
33Diehl Huston, “Infinite Space: Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure,” SQ, vol. 49, n ° 4, Winter 1998, p. 393-410.
34The earliest OED citations for character in reference to a person’s inner qualities date to the later seventeenth century: see OED character defs. II. 11-13, whose earliest citations are dated 1660, 1735, and 1712 respectively. Earlier uses (on which see defs. I. 1-7) consistently define the term with reference to letters, symbols, and distinguishing marks. Early modern lexicons give only this definition: see the Lexicons of Early Modern English at [http://leme. library. utoronto. ca/].
35Lake (Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 90-91) cites Anthony Munday’s Second and Third Blast of the Trumpet.
36See Deng, Coinage and State Formation, p. 2.
37Deng, Coinage and State Formation, p. 120.
38Shell Marc, The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Idea of Universal Siblinghood, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 123-124.
39Deng, Coinage and State Formation, p. 131.
40The words metal and mettle were often indistinguishable in early modern usage, although the Folio does use the spelling mettle here. Lever argues that this “was an alternative spelling, interchangeable with ‘metal’, which here draws attention to the primary figure in Angelo’s speech” (1.1.48-50n., p. 7). Editors sometimes retain the Folio spelling.
41Lake, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 442-443.
42On this contradiction, see Barish, chap. iv.
43Rainoldes John, The Overthrow of Stage-Playes, Oxford, 1629, p. 19-20.
44Goldberg, James I, p. 234.
45“A Puritane,” Overburian Characters, p. 27.
46Diehl, “Infinite Space,” p. 398.
47See n. 3 above. On the logic, or illogic, of including counterfeiting with witchcraft, murder, incest, sodomy, and poisoning, see Deng, Coinage and State Formation, p. 103-104.
48Fisher, “Queer Money,” p. 10.
49For spirit as Elizabethan slang for “semen” see Partridge Eric, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 2nd ed., 1955, reprint, Routledge Classics, 2002, p. 243.
50The Sonnets, Katherine Duncan-jones (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare, London, Thomson, 2010. Duncan-Jones, p. 119, notes the many references to masturbation in this sonnet; on “traffic with thyself alone,” cf. Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, p. 266.
51Rust, The Body in Mystery.
52Lever’s note that “The two concepts were traditionally associated, the Greek word for interest, τόκος, being literally offspring” (3.2.6n., p. 82) is also illustrative here. Stubbes also equates usury with murder: “For he that killeth a man, riddeth him out of his paynes at once, but he that taketh Usurie, is long in Butchering his pacient” (Anatomie, p. 76).
53Measure for Measure contains little in the way of overt homoeroticism. Hadfield Andrew, in Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, Arden Critical Companions, London, Thomson, 2004, p. 193-194, understands the disguised Duke’s insistence that “I have never heard the absent Duke much detected for women” (3.2.121-122) as a reference to James I’s attachment to his male courtiers, which is certainly possible, though Hadfield overstates the point somewhat.
54In A Comedy Concernynge thre lawes, of Nature, Moses, & Christ, corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharysees and Papystes (1538). See Mager Donald N., “John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse,” in Queering the Renaissance, Jonathan Goldberg (ed.), Durham, Duke University Press, 1994, p. 141-161. Mager points out that in Bale’s rhetoric “sodomy means nonmarital nonprocreative desires and the behaviors which express those desires” (p. 155) – meaning that even desire within marriage could be potentially sodomitical, for the real point is to make “politically charged attacks upon papists – or whatever other groups one’s politics opposed” (p. 155).
55A full treatment of Isabella as a queer figure and the implications for the play’s depiction of theatricality is beyond the scope of this paper. Theodora Jankowski presents a queer reading of Isabella in Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, chap. vi. Arguing that “virginity represented a queer space within the otherwise very restrictive and binary early modern sex/gender system” (p. 8), Jankowski contends that “Isabella’s consecrated virginity can remind audience members that English society once allowed women an alternative to their subservient position in marriage. The novice’s cloistered and virginal existence is sharply juxtaposed to the various kinds of sexual ‘slavery’ – actual (prostitution) and symbolic (marriage) – that women are subjected to in patriarchal society” (p. 172). It is certainly noteworthy that, despite Protestant critiques of Catholic ritual as mere theater – “popery” is a common critique leveled against the theater – Isabella herself has little aptitude for performance; during the first interview scene (2.2), she requires considerable direction from Lucio.
56Lever notes that “stockfish” is sometimes used figuratively “for one without sexual desire or appeal” (3.2.105n., p. 87).
57Crane Mary Thomas, “Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability in Measure for Measure,” SQ, vol. 49, n ° 3, Autumn 1998, p. 269-292. See p. 276-278 for discussion of the multiple meanings inherent in Shakespeare’s uses of the word pregnant.
58Deng, Coinage and State Formation, p. 114.
59Lever (p. liii-lv; 1.2.134-38n., p. 16) discusses the legalities of verbal marriage contracts: “Sponsalia per verba de praesenti, a declaration by both parties that each took the other at the present time as spouse, was legally binding, irrespective of any change of circumstances, and, whether the union was later consecrated or not, amounted to full marriage. Sponsalia per verba de future, a sworn declaration of intention to marry in the future, was not thus absolutely binding” – unless the couple had sex, as in the case of Angelo and Mariana (p. liiiiv). Rust argues that Claudio and Juliet’s crime is keeping their marriage a secret until they can secure Juliet’s dowry: “Claudio and Juliet enter into their hand-fast marriage in the spirit of the sacramental ideal, but proceed to muddle that spirit with a more mundane agenda, as they engage in a form of erotic usury that anticipates others (including that pursued by Claudio’s persecutor, Angelo) throughout the body politic of Vienna. By attempting to hide their ‘mutual entertainment’ to gain the favor and financial support of Juliet’s family, they transpose their marriage bond into a usurious arrangement, an agreement to exploit their union for financial profit” (The Body in Mystery).
60Crane, “Male Pregnancy,” p. 280.
61Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 445.
62See, for instance, Stallybrass Peter, “Transvestism and the ‘body beneath’: speculating on the boy actor,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, Susan Zimmerman (ed.), New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 64-83.
Auteur
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Lea Luecking Frost
Received her Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University in 2010. Her research interests include Shakespeare, early modern historiography, kingship, and queer theory. She has taught courses in writing, Shakespeare, and Western civilization throughout the St. Louis area, and currently teaches literature and humanities at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. Recent publications include “‘Because th’event doth argue the offence’: Daniel’s Civil Wars and the Anxiety of Representation,” Allegorica 28 (2012), and “‘A Kyng That Ruled All By Lust’: Richard II in Elizabethan Literature,” Blackwell Literature Compass vol. 9, n° 2 (February 2012), p. 183-198.
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