Measure for Measure (Vol. 33) | Katharine Eisaman Maus (essay date 1995)
Katharine Eisaman Maus (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "Prosecution and Sexual Secrecy: Jonson and Shakespeare," in Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 128-81.
[In the following excerpt, Maus discusses the subversive nature of desire in the world of the play and its influence on the lives of the characters portrayed in the play.]
Sexual Secrecy in Measure for Measure
Like [Ben Jonson's] Epicoene, Measure for Measure treats of the public regulation of sexual behavior in a disorderly urban world. Shakespeare's Vienna, like Jonson's London, defies traditional forms of policing, because an enforceable consensus on sexual morality no longer seems possible to attain. Like Epicoene, too, Measure for Measure reflects contemporary misgivings over the functioning of the ecclesiastical courts. In the early seventeenth century an increasingly influential group of...
[The entire page is 4394 words long]
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