[In the following essay, Swann examines the ambivalent ideological function of Lucio at the close of Measure for Measure, particularly in relation to the authoritarian figure of the Duke.]

ELBOW
… I do lean upon justice, sir, and do bring in here before your good honour two notorious benefactors.

(Measure for Measure, II.i. 48-50).

In a recent piece, ‘Transgression and surveillance in Measure for Measure’, Jonathan Dollimore dismissed the blandness of one kind of interpretation of the play adequately represented by J. W. Lever in the preface to his edition of the Arden Shakespeare:

‘Not only are the tensions and discords wrought up to an extreme pitch, threatening the dissolution of all human values, but a corresponding and extraordinary emphasis is laid upon the role of true authority, whose intervention alone supplies the equipoise needed to counter the forces of negation.’ … On this view then unruly desire is extremely subversive and has to be countered by ‘true’ and ‘supreme authority’, ‘age and wisdom’, all of which qualities are possessed by the Duke in Measure for Measure and used by him to redeem the State (pp. lx and lxxi). Only these virtues, this man, can retrieve the State from anarchy.¹

At the same time, he attempts to pre-empt what he fears may too easily be seen as the ‘radical’ interpretation but which Dollimore regards as a mere mirror image of the traditional viewpoint:

With the considerable attention recently devoted to Bakhtin and his truly important analysis of the subversive carnivalesque, the time [may be seen] as right for a radical reading …, one which insists on the oppressiveness of the Viennese State and which interprets low-life transgression as positively anarchic, ludic, carnivalesque—a subversion from below of a repressive official ideology of order.

Dollimore's intention (if it is not too late) is

to forestall such a reading as scarcely less inappropriate than that which privileged ‘true’ authority over anarchic desire. Indeed, such a reading, if executed within the parameters of some recent appropriations of Bakhtin, would simply remain within the same problematic, only reversing the polarities of the binary opposition which structures it (order/chaos).

(p. 73)

Dollimore, more in sorrow than in a-historical anger, reads the ending thus:

By means of the Duke's personal intervention and integrity, authoritarian reaction is put into abeyance but not discredited: the corrupt deputy is unmasked but no law is repealed and the mercy exercised remains the prerogative of the same ruler who initiated reaction. The duke also embodies a public reconciliation of law and morality. An omniscience, inseparable from seeming integrity, permits him to close the gulf between the two, one which was opening wide enough to demystify the one (law) and enfeeble the other (morality). Again, this is not a cancelling of authoritarianism so much as a fantasy resolution of the very fears from which authoritarianism partly grows—a fear of escalating disorder among the ruled which in turn intensifies a fear of impotence in the rulers. If so it is a reactionary fantasy, neither radical nor liberating (as fantasy may indeed be) 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.

In conclusion then the transgressors in Measure for Measure signify neither the unregeneracy of the flesh, nor the ludic subversive carnivalesque. Rather, as the spectre of unregulated desire, they are exploited to legitimate an exercise in authoritarian repression.

(pp. 83-4)

Now this seems to me to be, quite simply, wrong in its suggestion that the end offers a unified ideological message. For all the historical knowledge that Dollimore brings to support his reading, he makes that ending too organically coherent—if only because Dollimore has not given any weight to the presence and voice of Lucio throughout the long scene that is Act V. This neglect is the more noticeable as Dollimore has noted the possibly subversive effect of Lucio in the paragraph that precedes my last quotation.

I don't mean, however, to appeal to Bakhtin. There is little suggestion here of positive ‘ludic carnivalesque’ if only because the potentially anarchic responses are shown as already shaped and conditioned by the world the relevant characters are born into—the Duke's world. The absence of the ruler is no opportunity for carnival anymore than it is a real absence of the real ruler (and he is the only one masked—to be unmasked by Lucio of all people) but rather an opportunity for increased repression—which forces the low-life characters not into temporarily liberating disguise but rather into an enforced declaration of the way they live. I want to argue that the ending (and therefore the play's ideological effect) is not as unitary as Dollimore suggests, that—depending on who is listening—the ending has two conflicting levels of meaning. There is no need to appeal to the Bakhtin of carnival, nor to the perhaps more relevant concept of polyphony. There is a case for appealing to the simpler notion of text and sub-text. And it may well be necessary to look to legal language, to invoke ‘mitigating circumstances’—as what I have to do to make my case is to mount a defence of and for Lucio.

Lucio has rarely had a good press—and neither Marxist nor feminist criticism are likely to see him as a heroic figure. If ever there was a male chauvinist pig (not to say a decadent bourgeois), then Lucio is he. Nor can seeming points in his favour be counted on. If, for example, he calls Isabella ‘a thing enskied and sainted’ and speaks in moving terms of Juliet's pregnancy (I.iv), there are easy answers. The feminist can reasonably claim that even the most aggressively sexist pig frequently puts some women on a pedestal (often for class reasons)—and ‘thing’ is, of course, a giveaway: the term neatly makes Isabella an untouchable by desexing and dehumanising her. But here I'm going further than one feminist critic, Kathleen McLuskie, seems willing to go in an essay, ‘Patriarchal bard’ which is immediately after Dollimore's piece:

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 terms—gelding and splaying hold no terror for women—and the women's role as the object of exchange within that system of sexuality is not at issue, however much a feminist might want to draw attention to it.

(pp. 97-8)

I fail to see why feminist criticism cannot discuss the various constructions of masculinity and femininity in the play—unless McLuskie has too simple a notion of ‘the pleasure of the text’ and too easily presumes that Measure for Measure offers ‘the pleasures of comedy’ (p. 98). One reason, after all, for calling it a problem play is precisely because it is not simply a comedy. And leaving aside the question whether gelding may not in the long run give some problems to the heterosexual feminist as well as to the ambitious patriarch, surely splaying (spaying/neutering) had and has some terrors for many women. I certainly wouldn't care for the tender attentions of a male seventeenth-century doctor. Why should the feminist critic allow herself to be excluded from the text? Pompey's comment (II.i. 228), after all, assumes that men and women are equally subject to sexual desire.

Not that this makes Lucio any easier to defend, it may be said. He refuses to stand bail for Pompey and, it seems, has informed on Mistress Overdone. (Here, ironically, he is a ‘good citizen’—at least as far as official ideology goes.) He has, more seriously, got a whore with child in some may-day frolic—and denied paternity. And yet—if Lucio is corrupt, who and what corrupted him and (a slightly different question) how corrupt would he have seemed to a seventeenth-century audience? Is he not, very largely, the product of the Duke's Vienna—and as such an embodied criticism of the Duke's régime—as well as in a position to make criticisms? We don't have to read Stubbs literally to see that he was pointing an admonitory if over-excited finger at a recognisable social phenomenon: ‘until everyone hath two or three bastards apiece, they esteem him no man (for that they call a man's deed); in so much as every boy of twelve, sixteen or twenty years of age, will make no conscience of it to have two or three, peradventure half a dozen several women with child at once’.² This, of course, is merely to transfer the blame from the play to the culture—but that does affect the way the playgoer might have read Lucio. There was too a tradition for connecting prostitution with the maintenance of power. Again I draw on Salgado's scholarship: ‘“Suppress prostitution” wrote St Augustine ‘and capricious lust will overthrow society”, while Aquinas was even more explicit: “Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place”’ (p. 51). And what are the results of Lucio's corruption? If it were not for him (as frequently has been pointed out) the too virtuous Isabella and Angelo would kill Claudio between them in about ten lines. If he pimps, he pimps for mercy in that interchange. He is in a particularly authoritative position to pronounce on Vienna—and on the Duke. He is a ‘fantastic’ (as the cast-list puts it), a non-institutional link between the various worlds of Vienna—free-floating and therefore dangerous to any static, hierarchical world-picture such as Angelo's and the Duke's. The Duke wants to turn the clock back—or rather he wants Angelo to turn the clock back for him:

We have statutes and most biting laws,
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong jades,
Which for this fourteen years we have let slip …
Sith 'twas my fault to give the people scope,
'Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them
For what I bid them do …
I have on Angelo impos'd the office;
Who may in th'ambush of my name strike home,
And yet my nature never in the fight
To do in slander.

(II.i. 19-21, 35-7, 40-4)

It is a kind of irresponsible nostalgia—and it is hard not to concur with Lucio: ‘It was a mad fantastical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to’ (III.ii. 89-90).

But before looking further at the scope and validity of Lucio's criticisms of the Duke, it is necessary to examine the historical context. It has for some time been something of a commonplace in scholarly critical quarters that Duke Vincentio has some relationship to King James VI and I. Lever as ever puts the point moderately and fairly (and provides the relevant evidence and references to the literature):

the case for some measure of identification is too strong to be discounted. Shakespeare and his company, honoured and patronised by the new king, could hardly have been impervious to the political atmosphere of the time or quite uninfluenced by the most widely discussed book of 1603 [Basilikon Doron] …

To see the Duke … as an exact replica of James I would be to misunderstand both Shakespeare's dramatic methods and the practice of the contemporary stage.³ But to suppose that no parallel was to be drawn between the two characters, or that, according to the familiar formula, ‘any resemblance to any living person was purely accidental’, would seem just as untenable.

(pp. xlviii, 1)

The usual tendency of this line of argument has been to state that, if this parallelism is accepted, it very strongly reinforces the view of the Duke as the benevolent providential ruler. This might be thought to support Dollimore's thesis and his methodology, his attempt ‘to recover the text's history’, to ‘look directly for history in the text including the historical conditions of its production’ (p. 85). But one can accept the case for some connection between the Duke and James, accept this historical contextualising of the play without accepting the conservative interpretation that may seem so naturally to flow from it—if one looks more closely at that history. Among the evidence usually put forward for this thesis are James's how-to-be-a-good-king book, Basilikon Doron, his known dislike of the slander of princes and two cases of James's stage-managing of guilt, mercy and justice. The first was a celebrated case ‘when the king in person sentenced a pick-pocket to death but amnestied all the prisoners in the tower, thus demonstrating that justice should be combined with mercy’ (Lever, p. 1). This was in April 1603 at Newark—as James journeyed South to claim his kingdom. The second, which took place at Winchester in the winter of 1603-4, was connected with the so-called Raleigh conspiracy. Again I quote Lever:

After a number of executions, James resolved upon a striking and carefully timed display of mercy. On the very morning fixed for the execution of a group of conspirators, a letter with the royal countermand was secretly conveyed to the sheriff. The prisoners were actually brought out to the scaffold, expecting immediate death; taken back without explanation; and at last recalled to hear a speech on the heinousness of treason and the surpassing mercy of the monarch who had pardoned their lives. This time the king's coup de thèatre was an unqualified success.

There seems an odd tendency to take James at his own valuation here, a tendency to believe that, just because the play was once acted before James, it was only directed towards the king and those entirely loyal to him and his view of the world. If one accepts the poem that prefaces Basilikon Doron as the statement of ideas of seventeenth-century kingship this might be fair enough. But there is something of a gap between ‘God gives not Kings the style of Gods in vain, / For on his throne his Sceptre do they sway’ and Selden's ‘A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness’ sake. Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat’. Selden's may have been an extreme position—but at least it reminds us that there was a spectrum of views. James's intention to make symbolic statements about his kingship in the two cases cannot be doubted—but these statements were not always interpreted as James intended. Sir John Harington made an acid comment about the first: ‘I hear our new King hath hanged one man before he was tryed; 'tis strangely done: now if the wind bloweth thus, why may not a man be tryed before he hath offended?’⁴ It's a statement not without relevance when the Duke's progressive amnesia about the laws he wanted Angelo to enforce is recalled.

There is a well-known letter describing the second case from Dudley Carleton to his gossipy friend John Chamberlain but too often only a small part of the letter is quoted and its tone ignored. Lever, for example, merely takes this (and takes it from a secondary source which only gives a part of the letter):

There was no need to beg a plaudite of the audience, for it was given with such hues and cries that it went forth from the Castle into the town and there began afresh. … And this experience was made of the difference of examples of justice and mercy, that no man could cry loud enough, ‘God save the King’. …

Unfortunately, the quotation continues ‘and at the holding up of Brooke's head, when the executioner began the same cry he was not seconded by the voice of any one man but the sheriff’. And the passage is bracketed in a way that suggests that Carleton is ironically framing and placing the plaudits of the crowd:

[A]s Grey and Markham, being brought back to the scaffold as they then were but nothing acquainted with what had passed no more than the lookers on with what should follow, looked strange one upon the other, like men beheaded and met again in the other world. Now all the actors being together on the stage (as use is at the end of a play), the sheriff made a short speech unto them, by way of the interrogatory of the heinousness of their offences, the justness of their trials, their lawful condemnation, and due execution there to be performed, to all which they assented; then, said the sheriff, see the mercy of your prince, who of himself hath sent hither a countermand and given you your lives. …

You must think, if the spectators were so glad, the actors were not sorry … Raleigh, you must think (who had a window opened that way), had hammers working in his head to beat out the meaning of this stratagem. … The resolution was taken by the king without man's help, and no man can rob him of the praise of yesterday's action; for the lords knew no other but that the execution was to go forward till the very hour it should be performed and then, calling them before him, he told them how much he had been troubled to resolve in this business, for to execute Grey, who was a noble, young spirited fellow, and save Cobham who was as base and unworthy, were a manner of injustice. To save Grey, who was of a proud, insolent nature, and execute Cobham, who had shewed great tokens of humility and repentance, were as great a solecism, and so went on with Plutarch's comparisons in the rest till travelling in contrarieties but holding the conclusion in so different balance that the lords knew not what to look for till the end came out, ‘and therefore I have saved them all’. The miracles was as great as with us at Winchester and it took like effect: for the applause that began about the king went from thence into the presence and so round about the court. I send you a copy of the king's letter, which was privately written the Wednesday night, and the messenger dispatched the Thursday about noon. But one thing had like to have marred the play, for the letter was closed and delivered him unsigned, which the king remembered himself and called for him back again. And at Winchester there was another cross adventure: for John Gib [the Scotch groom of the bedchamber who carried the pardon] could not get so near the scaffold that he could speak to the sheriff but was thrust out amongst the boys and was fain to call out to Sir James Hay, or else Markham might have lost his neck.⁵

It is clear that James intended a surprise coup de thèatre: it is equally clear that one sophisticated commentator saw the symbolic intention and the deliberate element of theatre—and also saw it as a tragi-comedy which nearly became a bloody farce, a black comedy in dubious taste. The letter ends ‘There were other bypassages, if I could readily call them to mind; but here is enough already for un petit mot de lettre and therefore I bid you heartily farewell’.

I don't think it is too much to suggest that the melodramatic theatricality of James would not be lost on a dramatist—nor that an audience might well recall the dramas of December 1603. It is tempting to compare this to the Duke's plan-making which also so nearly goes awry. In Act V, he tells Isabella

Your brother's death, I know, sits at your heart:
And you may marvel why I obscur'd myself,
Labouring to save his life, and would not rather
Make rash remonstrance of my hidden power
Than let him so be lost. O most kind maid,
It was the swift celerity of his death,
Which I did think with slower foot came on,
That brain'd my purpose.

(387-94)

This is very nearly true. When he plans the bed-trick, he tells Isabella ‘by this is your husband saved’ (II.i. 253-4). He clearly believes that Angelo will send the pardon for Claudio: when he doesn't, the Duke has to think very quickly—and it is remarkably convenient that he was hanging around the jail and that Ragozine, the notorious pirate, not only is good enough to look like Claudio, but tactful enough to die at just the right time.

Harington's and Carleton's ironic comments were not the only criticisms to be made of James even so early in the reign as 1604. He was, for example, widely criticised for spending so much time away from the seat of power—and thus leaving too much to his subordinates. Indeed, Measure for Measure was very nearly not played before the King on 26 December 1604. In late November he was at Royston:

‘What for the pleasure I take of my recreation here,’ he wrote, ‘and what for the fear I stand in to offend the Puritans [by celebrating Christmas], I mind not to return to London till after that profane Christ's tide.’ Of this he thought better and came to Whitehall for Christmas … But by the middle of January 1605, the disorderly revels at Whitehall having ended, he was again at Royston, then at Huntingdon and Hinchinbrook.⁶

James and Parliament hardly saw eye to eye about a king's proper authority:

‘The state of monarchy,’ James told the House of Commons, ‘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.’ Like God ‘they make and unmake their subjects. They have power of raising and casting down, of life and of death, judges over all, and yet accountable to none but God only.’⁷

It was not quite how the Commons saw it—even if they didn't quite know how to articulate their opposition. But by June 1604, they were complaining that ‘the prerogatives of princes may easily and do daily grow; the privileges of the subject are for the most part at an everlasting stand’.⁸

Of course far more evidence could be produced, but I hope I've said enough to show that, in terms of the immediate historical context and confining examinations of James to the early days of his kingship, there is no reason to expect the play to have a simple or coherent ideological position. Rather there is reason to expect that the play will need decoding; that it is not unfair to expect that there will be two (or more) levels of meaning—as there are two (or more) audiences and the court audience not necessarily the most important. As Cocke wrote in 1615 of a ‘common player’: ‘howsoever hee pretends to have a royall Master or Mistresse, his wages and dependance prove him to be the servant of the people’.⁹

Resistance to the surface meaning, to the Duke's plot-making is articulated principally by Lucio. Lever (and he is not alone) clearly feels some discomfort with Lucio—though what he has to say is potentially more explosive than he seems to realise (and here too he is not alone). ‘In reality it is Lucio, not Escalus or Angelo who serves here [in the first two acts] as the Duke's true deputy.’ If true, this should have worried Lever (given his high valuation of the Duke) as should this: ‘Lucio … carried out the practical tasks of a dramatic providence in the first two acts.’ And this: ‘In terms of “theatre” the exemplary ruler survived; with the support of a lord of misrule’ (pp. xcvi, xcvii). It is a strange place to put a semi-colon; it is as though he wants to separate the two characters but cannot find an adequate way of doing so. I want to emphasise Lucio's explicit criticisms—but I find satisfying to see Lever calling Lucio a ‘dramatic providence’ with the clear (if unacknowledged) implication that Lucio is doing the job that the Duke should be doing (and that it is the Duke's fault that the job needs doing). It is hard to see how Lever reconciles his general verdict on the play with these statements: if Lucio is the Duke's ‘true deputy’ surely either Lever should revalue Lucio or devalue the Duke? Does Lever suggest that the one is the other's dark double? It would only need improper ingenuity to make a case that the Duke and Lucio can be seen as a doubling of a figure like James. The Duke, then, would be something like what James claimed himself to be: Lucio would be read as James was too often seen—extravagant, bawdy, unreliable to dependents and inferiors.¹⁰ But the temptation has to be resisted for these two ‘halves’ challenge and threaten each other. As the play progresses, the Duke's attempt to suppress what Lucio represents becomes not so much more fully articulated (for ‘slander’—or the Duke's rejection of Lucio's version of him—he always repudiates) but more effective as he more fully exercises his power.

Dollimore says that he has tried to ‘recover the text's history’, looking ‘directly for history in the text including the historical conditions of its production’ (p. 85). But to consider production must be also to consider the conditions of that text's consumption—which is not to say that a sociological study of the audience is necessary, desirable as it would be. If one looks at the text and the historical context, it becomes clear that James VI and I could watch the play and have his views of kingly authority confirmed—at least as in so far those views were declared through his (and the Duke's) rhetoric: ‘Let him be but testimonied in his own bringings-forth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier’ (iii.ii. 140-2). That, of course, is the Friar/Duke on himself. It could be easily paralleled by equally self-enhancing comments by James (or his flatterers)—with the exception of the claim to soldierly virtues. The more sceptical or critical members of the audience (at once more critical of James and more used to watching plays) could see a sub-text in which the Duke's pretensions are repeatedly exposed to examination—the terms for which are provided by Lucio if the audience don't have confidence in their own.

Lucio's comments should, then, have a particular relevance for those disaffected critics—as should the Duke's sour memories of Lucio's ‘slanders’:

And yet here's one in place I cannot pardon.
You, sirrah, that knew me for a fool, a coward,
One all of luxury, an ass, a madman:
Wherein have I so deserv'd of you
That you extol me thus?

(V.i. 497-501)

There is (unfortunately for the Duke) a gap between what he remembers and what Lucio said. No doubt some of this could be accounted for by his sense of outrage (or sheer naughty bad temper). He seems to have forgotten too that Lucio repeatedly desires the Duke's return. But while some of these memories are of vague epithets (ass, madman), one at least is more specific. Lucio never calls the Duke a coward. (Indeed, at one point he seems to imply that he had expected the Duke to lead him and others into action: ‘The Duke is very strangely gone from hence; / Bore many gentlemen—myself being one—/ In hand, and hope of action’ (I.iv. 50-2).) Yet this is what was repeatedly said of James.¹¹ And (qualified) ass is why many called James: ‘The wisest fool in Christendom’ said Henri IV (or Sully). It at least seems possible that Lucio's comments have a particular relevance for the insider—whether he is nostalgic for the days of Elizabeth or anticipating a troubled future for a monarch who claimed more than he should. But even if we remain with the text, surely Herbert S. Weil is right—and particularly right to emphasise performance:

Some dozen passages have seemed unplayable unless we are meant to laugh at the Duke and to find meaningful flaws in his personal private character as well as in his ability to rule …

It is difficult to believe that any actor playing Vincentio could emerge from the dialogue with Lucio and still retain the charisma of an ideal ruler.¹²

It might, however, have been wiser in 1604 to laugh quietly.

The Duke pardons Angelo (among other things in intent a judicial murderer) and Barnardine (a convicted murderer) with comparative ease. He finds it much harder to forgive Lucio:

Thy slanders I forgive, and therewithal
Remit thy other forfeits. Take him to prison,
And see our pleasure herein executed.
LUCIO.
Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death,
Whipping, and hanging.
DUKE.
Slandering a prince deserves it.

(v.i. 517-21)

These are the last lines the Duke speaks to an individual character before his general summing-up. They recall, however, an earlier interchange between the still disguised Duke and Escalus:

                                                                                My business in this state
Made me a looker on here in Vienna
Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble
Till it o'er run the stew: laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanc'd that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,
As much in mock as mark.
ESCALUS.
Slander to th' state!
Away with him to prison!

(v.i. 314-21)

It is in the scuffle to expose the slanderer that the Duke is exposed—and in the excitement the virtuous Escalus's verdict is forgotten by the characters. But isn't it essentially correct? The Duke's words are reminiscent of his earlier denunciation of Vienna:

                                                                                                              our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose,
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum.

(I.iii. 26-31).

After all the action of the intervening acts Vienna seems to remain equally corrupt and the laws remain unenforced. The Duke (unconsciously) signals his part in that corruption by forgetting his general criticism in his outrage at Lucio's attack on his dignity. The questions raised by the Duke's criticism and Escalus's judgement of that criticism are displaced by the Duke's obsessional concern that he has been slandered.

The placing of that speech to Lucio ensures that it is what we remember when we leave the theatre. The Duke is so outraged that he claims to forgive Lucio his slanders but then forgets that he has ‘forgiven’ him all in the space of four lines. Johnson's hypothesis is tempting and plausible but it hardly accounts for the strength of the Duke's feeling or the placing of the interchange: ‘After the pardon of two murderers Lucio might be treated by the good Duke with less harshness; but perhaps the Poet intended to show what is too often seen, that men easily forgive wrongs which are not committed against themselves.’

It is not the severity of punishment that is bothering but the intensity of feeling. It seems to be related to the self pity of the split (?) speech of III.ii and IV.i:

No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure ’scape. Back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?

(III.ii. 179-82)

O place and greatness! Millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee: volumes of report
Run with these false, and most contrarious quest
Upon thy doings.

(IV.i. 60-3)

The Duke certainly does his best to tie up that gall—without paying much attention to the questions of the tongue's accuracy. For one kind of critic there is no problem about the Duke's outrage: ‘To abuse a ruler, according to William Willymat, by “evil speaking, mocking, scorning, scoffing, deriding, reviling, cursing”, is a thing “most unhonourable, yea worthy of death” a belief which must have made Lucio's malicious gossip about the Duke appear a much more serious offence than it seems to a modern audience.’ Unfortunately for her thesis, the critic rather gives her case away by noting that it is noticeable how much of the material she quotes (which includes Willymat's A Loyal Subject's Looking-Glasse) ‘was originally to be composed to be delivered before James himself, and how many of the authors manage to include flattering tributes to their royal master’.¹³ As the immortal Mandy Rice-Davies might have said: ‘Well, they would, wouldn't they?’ If James was the intended audience and hoped-for patron, then much is accounted for. The most that can be claimed is that this was an available idea and understandably attractive to monarchs. The ending of Measure for Measure may seem very reasonable if we are princes—but if you are a cheerfully inventive gossip in the audience, you may well feel some discomfort. Lucio's punishment certainly serves the Duke's desire to declare his power, to stamp his order on Vienna, for whatever else the results of such a marriage may be, one consequence will be to declass Lucio, to fix him somewhere below the rank of ‘gentleman’ (as Lucio has named himself).

Lucio tells truths concealed among untruths—and Shakespeare can be allowed by the authorities to speak those uncomfortable truths by allowing Lucio to be defined by the ‘authority’ within the play as a liar. It is for the members of an audience to pick out those truths among the ‘lies’. Nor are all of Lucio's untruths necessarily lies—except for the most humourless priggish pedant—but rather a metaphorical and extravagant way of speaking a truth. His playful description of Angelo is a good example:

They say this Angelo was not made by man and woman after this downright way of creation: is it true, think you?
DUKE.
How should he be made, then? [Nice to see the Duke as Lucio's feed.]
LUCIO.
Some report, a sea-maid spawned him. Some, that he was begot between two stockfishes. But it is certain that when he makes water, his urine is congealed ice; that I know to be true.

(III.ii. 99-107)

How babies are made is not at issue here: Lucio doesn't expect to be believed literally. The Duke, on the other hand, should be good at recognising untruths (though not at jibes). Not only does he falsely accuse Lucio (as tyrants so often do accuse those who may threaten their power and in doing so unconsciously accuse themselves), he also tells untruths to sustain his role and maintain his ‘priestly authority’ (itself a kind of lie). It certainly isn't true that the Duke is (as he claims) ‘confessor to Angelo’ (III.i. 165-6) and therefore knows his inmost mind—which by itself may not matter much but makes one wonder when, in his final speech, he tells Angelo to love Mariana for ‘I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue’ (V.i. 524). We cannot believe the first statement: why should we believe the second? (To say nothing of our protestant doubts about the confessional.)

It was, I'd claim, a mad trick of the Duke to ‘steal from the state’—and was that ambiguity unmeant? ‘By my troth’ says Lucio to Isabella, ‘I loved thy brother: if the old fantastical Duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived’ (VI.iii. 155-7). He may be fantastical: he is indeed a Duke of dark corners—and what Lucio says is true. The Duke is ‘at home’—and Claudio lives. Lucio tells the Friar/Duke that the Duke ‘would have dark deeds darkly answered: he would never bring them to light: would he were returned!’ (III.ii. 170-3). The Duke does indeed darkly answer the various dark deeds (including the bedtrick—which literally depends on the dark—and the juggling necessary to produce a look-alike head for Claudio's). Such light as does emerge does so only at the last moment—and still leaves certain things in the dark¹⁴ (such as his attitude to the laws)—a point he himself seems to speak to in the last two lines of the play: ‘So bring us to our palace, where we'll show / What's yet behind that's meet you all should know.’ That ‘we’ is, very definitely, the royal we, that ‘you’ excludes us, the audience. There is, it seems, information we are denied.

Dollimore asks for a materialist criticism. There is one way in which a play in performance is irreducibly materialist as anyone who has tried to write or direct a play knows. When we watch a play, there are bodies on the stage who may or may not have much to speak but may have much to ‘say’. (Juliet would be an example here—has she had her baby by the end of the play? She certainly has something to say through her body.) Given that Shakespeare didn't have available to him either electric lights or the advantages of a quick curtain, he has to get his characters on and off the stage with a degree of plausibility, with some significance for the plot. Act V is a good example. The Duke, for example, enters as Duke and has to be got off so that he can reappear as Friar and so be unmasked as Duke/Friar. Lucio is unforgettably present in that last scene (or tiresomely so from the point of view of the Duke—as Lucio repeatedly disrupts his attempts to establish rhetorical power). Among the other points that can be made, he is the only one to protest the Duke's final judgment, who resists the Duke's attempt to get assent to his authoritarianism. The stubborn (and here silent) Barnardine gets a qualified pardon—for sustained passive disobedience? The last exchange of dialogue is between Lucio and the Duke. Lucio could easily have been got out of the way earlier: the fact that he is kept to last means that we have to put particular weight on the placing of that exchange. It breaks up—unnecessarily in terms of plot-making—the harmonious happy ending that Shakespeare could have so easily constructed.

This leads on to the question as to when and how can Lucio exit? There is, of course, a certain liberty about such questions when there are no authoritative stage directions and thus an opportunity for the director to stamp his or her interpretation on the play. According to McLuskie, for example, in Jonathan Miller's production Isabella ‘literally refused the Duke's offer of marriage and walked off stage in the opposite direction’ (p. 95). And Peter Brook left Isabella centre stage apparently considering what she should do—almost asking the audience for guidance. These seem to me to be interesting experiments—but patently against the text and less interesting than the problem presented by Lucio:

DUKE.
Slandering a prince deserves it.
She, Claudio, that you wrong'd, look you restore.
Joy to you, Mariana; love her, Angelo:
I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue …
Dear Isabel,
I have a motion much imports your good;
Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline,
What's mine is yours, and what yours is mine.
So bring us to our palace, where we'll show
What's yet behind that's meet you all should know.

(V.i. 521-4, 531-6)

Lever notes that most editors provide an exit for Lucio after line 521. He rightly comments that this ‘distracts attention from the Duke's speech’. Though this would be a nice subversive touch, I find it hard to believe it a good idea. I also find it hard to believe that this exit ‘sacrifices a welcome touch of honour in the final exit’—even though his hypothesis about that exit seems justifiable (except for its suggestion that there is only one way to do it). His note to line 536 goes like this: ‘A processional exit in pairs seems to be indicated by the dialogue; led by the Duke and Isabella; then Claudio and Juliet; Angelo and Mariana; Escalus and the Provost; Friar Peter and Barnardine; with Lucio under guard bringing up the rear’ (p. 149).

Dollimore points out that we should recognise that prostitutes, the most exploited group in the society which the play represents, are absent from it. He is right—if we don't ask too curiously about Juliet's, Isabella's and Mariana's similarities to and differences from whores, if we don't remember how important money/dowries are to Juliet and Claudio, Mariana and Angelo. In both cases, the men didn't get married because—to put it crudely—they want to be paid more. But it is a point which even if nothing is said can be made visible in a production of the play. Kate Keep-down isn't there (even if a Miller or a Brook could easily produce her—and what of a production that did just that?). If characters exit in pairs (as Lever reasonably suggests both in terms of this and other plays of the period), we have first the marriageable couples, followed by a couple of loyal upholders of the state machine, followed by Friar Peter and Barnardine (what a challenge for the friar in that coupling!)—with Lucio accompanied by a guard or guards bringing up the rear. The Duke may have imposed a shape but it is surely visibly highly asymmetrical and potentially unstable, evidence only of power rather than of justice or harmonious symmetry. To endorse the Duke's version of that ending one has to be a ‘wise’ fool who cannot distinguish between language and (the images of) actuality. One has, say, to be a King James or one of his uncritical supporters—or someone too easily impressed by a ‘legitimising’ rhetoric of power. What we have is a declaration and enactment of the Duke's power—which is, very largely, consequent on nearly everyone's mystified acceptance of that power. (What would happen if others joined Barnardine in refusing to play the game?) That declaration is a fictive pseudo-harmony—and if it is questioned, the Duke suggests that if we could go behind the scenes, we would learn more (indeed, what we need to know). That is the evasion of one kind of challenged power. It is patent mystification as the language of (challenged) power so often is.

Elbow, that ‘simple constable’, who gave me my epigraph, suffers from a linguistic confusion which embodies the moral confusion of the Duke's Vienna. He is referring to Pompey, the bawd, and Froth ‘a foolish gentleman’, the one guilty, the other an innocent. There are, I've tried to argue, two more important ‘notorious benefactors’ in the play. Lucio, if one hears the play from outside the circle of power, is a benefactor—even if that state must define him as notorious: the Duke, that gentlemanly bawd for Mariana is—or should be—‘notorious’.

Notes

1. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds.), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 72-3. J. W. Lever, Measure for Measure (London and New York: Methuen, 1984). All subsequent references will be placed parenthetically in the text.

2. Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1977), p. 51.

3. Lever ought to have been more careful here. The notion that contemporary figures could not be represented on the stage is not always true: ‘December 18, 1604: The tragedy of Gowrie with all the action and actors hath been twice represented by the King's players, with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people. But whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great Councillors are much displeased with it, and so is thought shall be forbidden’ (Elizabeth McClure Thomson (ed.), The Chamberlain Letters: a Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626) (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 34). The footnote to this entry reads as follows: ‘On August 5, 1600, at Gowrie House in Perth, and under highly mysterious circumstances, King James had escaped assassination—according to his account—at the hands of the Master of Ruthven and his brother the Earl of Gowrie. August 5 was made a day of national thanksgiving forever after, and a special sermon was preached at Court every Tuesday to commemorate James's escape. The play mentioned by Chamberlain is lost.’ And even when there were less explicit references, there were those who noted the implied criticisms: ‘It is much observed that the players do not forbear to present upon their stage the whole course of this present time, not sparing either King, State or religion, in so great absurdity and with such liberty as any would be afraid to hear them.’

4. Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae, 2 vols. (London: ed. T. Park, 1804), vol. I, p. 180.

5. Maurice Lee (ed.), Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain 1603-1624: Jacobean Letters (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1972), pp. 51, 52. My emphases. Carleton makes it clear that James had been rather tiresomely mystifying: ‘Whilst these men were so occupied at Winchester, there was no small doings about them at court, for life or death, some pushing at the wheel one way, some another. The lords of the council joined in opinion and advice to the king, now in the beginning of his reign, to show as well examples of mercy as severity and to gain the title of Clemens as well as Justus; but some others, led by their private spleen and passions, drew as hard the other way; and Patrick Galloway, in his sermon on Tuesday, preached so hotly against remissness and moderation of justice in the head of justice as if it were one of the seven deadly sins. The king held himself upright betwixt two waters and first let the lords know that since the law had passed upon the prisoners and that they themselves had been their judges, it became them not to be petitioners for that but rather to press for execution of their own ordinances, and to others gave as good reasons to let them know that he would go no whit the faster for their driving but would be led as his own judgment and affections would move him, but seemed rather to lean to this side than the other by the care he took to have the law take its course, and the execution hasted’ (p. 49).

6. D. H. Wilson, King James VI and I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), p. 179. This presumably means that the choice of plays for that Christmas season must have been a fairly last-minute affair.

7. Ibid., p. 243. James was quoting from memory from his Trew Law of Free Monarchies.

8. J. R. Tanner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of James I 1603-25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 222. They also, incidentally, complained about ‘many forced and ill-suited marriages’ (p. 229).

9. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1933), p. 256. We know that the play was acted in the banqueting hall of Whitehall on 26 December. We do not know whether it had been acted before nor what, if any, revisions were made to it either for that performance or any subsequent production.

10. One odd thing is that if anyone is like James in the play—as far as conversation goes—it is Lucio, bawdy, often perceptive, with areas of moral blindness and tactlessness, and occasional touches of sentiment.

11. ‘King James was the most cowardly man that I ever knew’, wrote the country gentleman, Sir John Oglander. ‘He could not endure a soldier or to see men drilled, to hear of war was death to him, and how he tormented himself with fear of some sudden mischief may be proved by his great quilted doublets, pistol-proof, as also his strange eyeing of strangers with a continual fearful observation’ (D. H. Wilson, op. cit., p. 274).

12. H. S. Weil, ‘The options of the audience: theory and practice in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), pp. 30, 31.

13. Elizabeth M. Pope, ‘The Renaissance background of Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, 2 (1949), pp. 71, 70. Willymat certainly was willing to work hard at showing himself loyal: he turned Basilikon Doron into both Latin and English verse. Pope's argument seems highly eccentric when it comes to religion: ‘Roman Catholics held that open rebellion was sometimes permissible when the ruler was a heretic. As the authorities in Measure for Measure are not heretics, this particular question does not arise’ (p. 71). She seems to have forgotten that England was a Protestant country and that there was frequent fear of Catholic plots. Indeed, she seems to have forgotten the Gunpowder Plot—and the rhetoric that followed on from its discovery. I've always wondered if there wasn't a particular frisson for the firm Protestants in the audience at seeing the Duke disguised as a papist friar—an almost instinctual suspicion of the secrets of the confessional.

14. I've always felt a little sorry for the Provost. Bullied by the disguised Duke into going along with his plans, he later gracefully calls himself the Duke's ‘free dependant’ (IV.iii. 90). The Duke then toys with him in Act V, asking him to surrender his keys—and has the nerve in his final speech to ask Angelo to pardon the Provost for bringing him the head of Ragozine for Claudio's.