SOURCE: Baines, Barbara J. “Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure.” Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 30, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 283-301.

[In the following essay, Baines studies Shakespeare's depiction of Isabella's sexual purity as a means of garnering social power in the world of Measure for Measure.]

For many readers of Measure for Measure, Isabella illustrates better than Angelo the paradox that “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall” (II.i.38).¹ Critics have, in fact, argued that the primary question of the play is whether Isabella is an embodiment of Christian virtue or pagan pride.² Recently Marcia Riefer has defended Isabella as a victim of sexual subjugation who changes in the course of the play “from an articulate, compassionate, woman during her first encounter with Angelo (II.ii) to a stunned, angry, defensive woman in her later confrontations with Angelo and with her imprisoned brother (II.iv and III.i), to, finally, a shadow of her former articulate self, on her knees before male authority in Act V.”³

This defense, however, is not altogether convincing because it is predicated upon a “powerlessness”⁴ that simply does not square with the language and actions of the character. Furthermore, Riefer's delineation of Isabella's defensive reactions does not account for the priority Isabella places upon her chastity at the expense of her brother's life. Although Madeleine Doran identifies the central issue of Isabella as her “choice between her brother's death and the sacrifice of her chastity,” Doran also evades the issue she identifies by simply concluding that “Shakespeare meant to put primary emphasis on the problem of the exercise of power … and not on the problem of Isabella's chastity.”⁵ More important, Doran's pronouncement of the playwright's intention separates what the play clearly aligns: chastity and power. Within the context of the relationship between chastity and power, Isabella's “choice” articulates a complex, culturally determined imperative. Chastity is the definitive virtue precisely because it is a site and mode of secular power.

First of all, the priority Isabella places on chastity reflects the values of the entire society that the play depicts, not simply the values of a young woman about to enter the convent. Whether or not Isabella's choice of her chastity over her brother's life can be justified by Renaissance religious convictions is finally irrelevant because her adherence to scripture, to convent vow, and to her conscience does not adequately account for her choice. What does account for her choice is the social and psychological, rather than the religious, construct in which she and the other characters function. Isabella's values, then, are representative, not eccentric; and they are grounded more firmly in the secular than in the religious. Society, not scripture, defines chastity as the definitive virtue that gives identity and place to women and to men. The priority society places upon chastity, in fact, enables the distinctions between God's law and man's law, between the letter and the spirit of both secular and divine law, and between the intent and the deed. A theologically prescribed virtue, chastity is appropriated as the standard upon which the economy of secular power is based. Chastity thus establishes each character in the play as a subject, within a pattern of subjection. Interrelated constructs—social, political, and psychological—within which chastity operates define it as a form of power that radically complicates the meaning of Isabella as its principal agent.

Within the social construct, chastity is the definitive virtue not because scripture mandates it but because secular law prescribes it as a remedy for the diseased state. The play presents a society in which the health of the nation and the authority of its ruler are jeopardized by sexual license. Although Claudio, in defense of his sexual liberty, claims that Juliet is “fast” his wife, he acknowledges through his simile the detrimental effects of his incontinence: “Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die” (I.ii.128-30). The Duke's response to the threat incontinence poses is to awaken the law that places a higher priority upon chastity than upon human life and to delegate the enforcement of this law to a man whose temperament and sexual conduct appear to qualify him for that harsh task. That a strict enforcement of the law is the Duke's objective is evidenced by his choice of Angelo over Escalus as his deputy and by his approval of Angelo's strict adherence to the law. When Escalus complains to the disguised Duke about the severity of Angelo's enforcement, the Duke answers, “If his own life answer the straitness of his proceeding, it shall become him well” (III.ii.255-56). The Duke also labels his own failure to enforce the law mandating chastity as “my vice” (III.ii.270). The “strict statutes and most biting laws” are, in the Duke's words, “The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds” (I.iii.19, 20).

Within this social construct, the laws mandating chastity constitute a prohibition placed on the individual for the greater good of society as a whole; private freedom is subjected by the disinterested concern for the commonwealth. Chastity is thus the form of power that subjugation assumes.

Through a metaphoric explanation of his failure to enforce chastity, Vincentio supplements this altruistic, social concern with his own political concern as patriarch:

                                                                                                    Now, as fond fathers,
Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch
Only to stick it in their children's sight
For terror, not to use, in time the rod
[Becomes] more mock'd than fear'd; so 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.23-31)

Enforcing chastity thus becomes not only a means of restoring societal health, but also the means of retrieving or buttressing patriarchal authority. Strict enforcement of any law would strengthen the ruler's authority, but society's disregard for the laws that mandate chastity is critical for the Duke specifically because chastity assures legitimacy, and legitimacy authorizes patriarchy.

For similar political and social reasons, the Duke's deputy justifies his strict enforcement of the law that prioritizes chastity over human life by equating the incontinence that results in bastardy with murder:⁶

                                                                                                              It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stol'n
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 metal in restrained means
To make a false one.

(II.iv.42-49)

Angelo's equation and Isabella's response, “'Tis set down so in heaven, but not in earth,” are equally illuminating. It is set down in heaven, in scripture, that fornication and murder are sins, but Angelo's equation of the two is set down so in Viennese law, not in divine law. Samuel Johnson in his textual notes commented on the peculiarity of Isabella's response: “I would have it considered, whether the train of the discourse does not rather require Isabel to say, 'Tis so set down in earth but not in heaven'.”⁷ Johnson was perhaps recalling the place of Mary Magdalene in the life of Christ and Christ's intercession on behalf of the adulteress about to be stoned by the Pharisees. Like English law in Shakespeare's time, Viennese law ignores the example of Christ's compassion for the sexual offender because fornication results in bastardy, and bastardy threatens the social and political privileges of the legitimate male heir within an aristocratic, patrilineal society. In the society this play presents, there is no place for the illegitimate. As Marilyn Williamson has most convincingly demonstrated, bastardy was a major problem of the society for which the play was written. And like Vienna, Renaissance England attempted with little success to check the social and political threat of bastardy with harsh laws.⁸

More effective in the enforcement of chastity than biting laws was the threat of social shame. Honor for all family members resided in the purity of the bloodline, in the legitimacy of birth, and thus in the chastity of the female. In a patriarchal society, men are privileged with authority, yet, somewhat paradoxically, that authority depends upon the chastity of women. Thus chastity becomes for woman a form of power; through it the woman legitimizes the power of the man and preserves the patriarchal social structure. Responsibility for the power inherent in woman's chastity is perhaps what the disguised Duke alludes to when he confesses Juliet. Hearing from her that the sin of premarital intercourse “was mutually committed,” Vincentio tells Juliet, “Then was your sin of heavier kind than his” (II.iii.28). The Duke's judgment of Juliet is not simply an expression of a male chauvinist's double standard (as Riefer suggests)⁹ but an acknowledgment of a patriarchal society's dependence upon woman's chastity.

In Vienna, as in Shakespeare's England, women are defined and placed on the basis of their chastity. The alternatives to Isabella's strict renunciation of her sexuality are the shame and harassment of Juliet, the sorrow of Mariana, the tavern jokes at the expense of Mistress Elbow, the exploitation of Kate Keepdown, and the overuse of Mistress Overdone. According to her chastity or lack thereof, a woman takes her place in the nunnery, the jail, the moated grange, or the brothel (that other “nunnery”). Although sexual relations can be hazardous for men, they are inevitably so for women in this play. The surest protection against the hazards of sexual relations is renunciation and retreat, the nunnery or the moated grange. The chastity that the nunnery protects is thus a form of freedom, the only form of autonomy left for women in a world where sexuality means submission to men and degradation in that submission. Isabella's freedom from sexual subjugation is, of course, not without a price, for it requires her submission to the patriarchal law, defined best by Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream (I.i.67-78). Under this law, a woman's control of her body necessitates a form of self-castration. Her chastity is deprived of its social, political, and psychological power through isolation and renunciation.

Freedom within the confines of the nunnery is the subtext of conversation when Isabella first appears in the play. She desires a “more strict restraint” as additional protection from the masculine world locked outside of the convent. Having made her one great concession to the patriarchal law by renouncing her sexuality, Isabella willingly embraces the strictest law of the Mother Superior to escape total subjugation under the law of the patriarch or father, signified by the phallus. Once she has achieved through her vows the status of a nun, she will have the full protection of the sisterhood under the law of the Mother Superior. Francisca explains the terms of this protection to Isabella when Lucio appears at the locked convent gate:

Turn you the key, and know his business of him;
You may, I may not; you are yet unsworn.
When you have vow'd, you must not speak with men
But in the presence of the prioress;
Then if you speak, you must not show your face,
Or if you show your face, you must not speak.

(I.iv.8-13)

The law of the convent thus anticipates the danger to chastity inherent in man's gaze and in woman's speech that will become apparent when Isabella and Angelo meet. Standing on the threshold between the worlds of masculine and feminine authority, Isabella turns the key of the convent gate to “assay the pow'r” (line 76) of her chastity within the patriarchal order.

As her chastity entitles her to the freedom of the convent, it also elicits the highest esteem in the world outside the convent. The value society places upon chastity is reflected in Lucio's tribute, mocking or not, to Isabella as novitiate:

I hold you as a thing enskied, and sainted,
By your renouncement an immortal spirit,
And to be talk'd with in sincerity,
As with a saint.

(I.iv.34-37)

Even Lucio's somewhat blasphemous salutation, “Hail, virgin,” suggests that through her chastity Isabella mirrors heaven's queen, the Virgin Mary. According to the men in the play, chastity inspires charity, operates like grace and is, in turn, protected by grace. Lucio assures Isabella that “When maiden's sue, / Men give like Gods” (I.iv.80-81). The Duke tells her immediately after she has affirmed the value of her chastity over her brother's life, “The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good; the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair” (III.i.180-84).

Isabella's power, place, and value in society are so determined by her chastity that its forfeiture would constitute for her a form of social and psychological suicide. What is ironic about Isabella's commitment to her chastity is her self-righteous assurance that this commitment is governed exclusively by her religious convictions; what her language subversively reveals is that it is psychically and socially determined. In other words, she is ignorant of how she, as subject, is constituted and subjected by her chastity. Like the critics who attack or defend her, she is unconscious of the imperatives that govern her choice of chastity over life. Furthermore, her discourse reveals an appropriation, however inadvertent or unconscious, of religious authority to valorize the psychological, social, and political imperative of chastity. This appropriation, problematic by itself, becomes increasingly suspect as it resembles the calculated appropriation by the Duke, through his disguise, of holy orders—both scripture and sacraments—to manifest his absolute authority. The match (made on earth, not in heaven) between Isabella and the Duke, illuminates the forms of power through which each controls and is, in turn, controlled.

Confronted by Angelo with the choice between her chastity and her brother's life, Isabella defends her chastity through a series of lexical shifts. She first equates her chastity with her soul as she equates Angelo's term for her sexual submission, the giving of her body, with death: “Sir, believe this, / I had rather give my body than my soul” (II.iv.55-56). Angelo tries to retrieve the meaning of the words she has thus appropriated: “I talk not of your soul; our compell'd sins / Stand more for number than for accoumpt.” As he redefines her sexual submission as one of the “compell'd sins,” he can then ask, “Might there not be a charity in sin / To save this brother's life?” But his efforts to control the meaning of words fail as Isabella shifts the referent of his term “compell'd sins” from her sexual submission to Angelo's granting of mercy to Claudio. Having thus shifted the referent, she then crosses out the signifier: “no sin at all, but charity.” Angelo, having lost this first lexical round, tries once more to force his terms upon Isabella. She, however, again refuses his terms by holding fast to her equation of her chastity with her soul, an equation that allows her to privilege her chastity above her own life as well as her brother's. The equation of her chastity with her soul thus protects the self from any kind of sacrifice: “Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die; / More than our brother is our chastity” (II.iv.184-85). More than an effective linguistic defense, this equation reveals that Isabella is totally subjectified by her chastity. Her language reveals a psychic construct that does not allow for a distinction between her body and her soul.

In her confrontation with Claudio, Isabella's terms and arguments mirror, at first, those in the debate with Angelo; again, forfeiture of her chastity would constitute forfeiture of her soul. Moreover, according to Isabella, Claudio's willingness to extend his life at the expense of his sister's chastity would damn Claudio's soul as well: “There is a devilish mercy in the judge, / If you'll implore it, that will free your life, / But fetter you till death” (III.i.64-66). Again Isabella declares a willingness to give her life but not her chastity for her brother: “O, were it but my life, / I'd throw it down for your deliverance / As frankly as a pin” (III.i.103-105). Once more this offer is highly ironic in that Isabella's life is her chastity.

When religion fails to authorize the priority of her chastity over her brother's life, Isabella is forced to shift the terms of her discourse from the religious to the social. Angelo's “devilish mercy” thus becomes that which “Would bark your honor from that trunk you bear, / And leave you naked” (III.i.71-72). She further urges Claudio not to respect “six or seven winters” more than “perpetual honor” (lines 75-76). Suddenly, the entire family honor is at stake as well. When Claudio speaks of the priority of honor over life, Isabella commends him: “There spake my brother; there my father's grave / Did utter forth a voice” (lines 85-86). Claudio's unforeseen willingness to forfeit his sister's chastity, on the other hand, forfeits not only the honor of mother and father but Claudio's legitimacy as well:

                                                                                          What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair!
For such a warped slip of wilderness
Ne'er issu'd from his blood.

(III.i.139-42)

Isabella's language further makes it clear that her religious concerns merely supplement social and psychological concerns when she confidently declares, “I had rather my brother die by the law than my son should be unlawfully born” (lines 189-91).

Isabella's identification of her self exclusively with her chastity not only precludes mercy and compassion for her brother but also blinds her to her own passion, her desire for revenge against perfidious Angelo. To gratify this desire, Isabella is willing to do to herself what Angelo and Claudio could not persuade her to do: to compromise her chastity and subsequently redefine herself as something distinct from it. To expose Angelo, she denies her chastity by claiming that she forfeited her virginity to save her brother's life (V.i.). Having thus “unmaid” herself, she refashions herself in the compassion she shows Mariana and Angelo as she pleads before the Duke for Angelo's life. What enables Isabella's release from absolute subjection by her chastity is her trust in the authority of the holy father, disguised Vincentio; one form of power modifies another as Isabella becomes less the subject of her chastity and more the subject of the Duke.

The change in Isabella is mirrored by a change in the terms of her discourse. Although the Duke's judgment upon Angelo centers again on the issue of incontinence, Isabella does not ground her defense of Angelo in scripture, as she did in the case of Claudio. She does not, in other words, remind the Duke, as she did Angelo, that “all the souls that were were forfeit once, / And He that might the vantage must have took / Found out the remedy” (II.ii.73-75), because such a comparison of Christ's mercy with the Duke's apparent condemnation of Angelo would call the Duke's power into question, precisely as it did Angelo's. Her appeal for Angelo is, instead, pragmatic and social rather than scriptural:

His act did not o'ertake his bad intent,
And must be buried but as an intent
That perish'd by the way. Thoughts are no subjects,
Intents but merely thoughts.

(V.i.451-54)

In other words, within the social context of man's law, no real harm was done. However, under God's law, according to the Sermon on the Mount, the scriptural subtext for this play, the thought or intent is indeed subject: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery there already in his heart” (Matt. 5:28, Geneva). To this divine law that is not invoked but nevertheless intrudes, Isabella might again say, “'Tis so set down in heaven, but not in earth.”

Perhaps what is most significant in her appeal for Angelo's life is her willingness to speak for him at her own expense by accepting some responsibility for his fall: “I partly think / A due sincerity governed his deeds, / Till he did look on me” (V.i.445-47). Looking back on her relationship with Angelo, Isabella seems to sense what the language of the play has revealed all along: a subtle duplicity in the power of her chastity and thus in the role she, as the embodiment and agent of chastity, has played.

Isabella's role is, in fact, morally problematized even before she appears on stage. Escalus first makes her role suspect through his own efforts to soften Angelo by reminding him of his sexuality. The supposition is thus established that if Angelo were to acknowledge his own sexual desires he would be obliged to show mercy to Claudio. Escalus, however, lacks the power to soften the icy hardness of the deputy. The dark subtext of Isabella's qualifications for the task is indicated by the sexually suggestive language that Claudio uses¹⁰ as he defines for Lucio his sister's power:

Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends
To the strict deputy; bid herself assay him.
I have great hope in that; for in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect,
Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art
When she will play with reason and discourse,
And well she can persuade.

(I.ii.180-86)

Lucio offers Isabella the challenge: “All hope is gone, / Unless you have the grace by your fair prayer / To soften Angelo.” He urges her, “Assay the pow'r you have” and describes the triumphs that result “when maidens sue.” This appeal to the power of her chastity is irresistible because chastity is the seat of Isabella's identity and pride. Her response, “I'll see what I can do,” expresses a willingness to test her power against Angelo's authority. Even the minor characters understand the power of chastity in this contest; the Provost introduces Isabella to Angelo as “a very virtuous maid, / And to be shortly of a sisterhood, / If not already” (II.ii.20-22). The authority of Isabella's chastity is suggested by the fact that at first Angelo does not trouble himself with an address for her, but as she becomes increasingly forceful, he recognizes her with “Maiden” and then “fair maid.”

After some hesitation, Isabella goes about the necessary task of putting Angelo in Claudio's place by telling Angelo, “If he [Claudio] had been as you, and you as he, / You would have slipp'd like him, but he, like you, / Would not have been so stern” (II.ii.64-66). The intent of Isabella's substitution of Angelo for Claudio is to force Angelo to accept the imperative of mercy; the effect of the substitution, however, is to allow Angelo to register his own sexual desire as figured in Claudio. And since Isabella urges mercy for Claudio, who has gratified his sexual desire, Angelo takes hope from the substitution that he too will be shown “mercy.” Having displaced Angelo by putting him in Claudio's place, Isabella, in her angry response to Angelo's dismissal, reveals her desire to displace Angelo in yet another way: “I would to heaven I had your potency, / And you were Isabel!” Isabella's desire for a reversal of roles is ironically fulfilled as she gains the potency to grant or withhold mercy to Angelo, who in his desire becomes her supplicant. The shift in focus of the debate from Claudio's transgression to “the proud man, Dress'd in a little brief authority” reveals that what is ultimately at issue here is power.

Through her power, Isabella does indeed soften Angelo. As he succumbs to his sexual desire for her, he becomes “ten times frail” and “soft as [women's] complexions are” (II.iv.128-29). Angelo defines his submission to Isabella's power in language that suggests, through the image of conception, gender reversal:

When I would pray and think, I think and pray
To several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words,
Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue,
Anchors on Isabel; heaven in my mouth
As if I did but only chew his name,
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception.

(II.iv.1-7)

The implication that his sexual desire has quite unmanned him is as paradoxical as his conviction that Isabella's chastity arouses his desire. Angelo recognizes both his impotence and his submission: “this virtuous maid / Subdues me quite” (II.ii.184-85). But he clearly does not understand the force of Isabella's chastity—“Can it be / That modesty may more betray our sense / Than woman's lightness?”—and can only define it as the work of the devil (lines 167-69). In fact, the operation of Isabella's chastity involves neither supernatural good nor evil. For this society and for Isabella in particular, chastity is a natural form of power; it is the control over the body and thus for woman the control of the self and the means of resisting the political power of men. The attraction of Isabella's chastity is thus the attraction of power, and as politicians (real and fictional) seem inevitably to discover, power is the great aphrodisiac. What Angelo desires most is power; what he fears is being, as he says, “the very cipher of a function” (II.ii.39). By robbing Isabella of her chastity as he robbed Mariana of her reputation (III.i.227), Angelo hopes to regain his position of male dominance—to transfer, that is, the image of feminine subjugation from himself to Isabella.

The reversal of gender roles resulting from the power of Isabella's chastity is emblematically presented in Isabella's account of the tryst with Angelo:

He hath a garden circummur'd with brick,
Whose western side is with a vineyard back'd;
And to that vineyard is a planched gate,
That makes his opening with this bigger key.
This other doth command a little door,
Which from the vineyard to the garden leads;
There have I made my promise upon the heavy
Middle of the night to call upon him.

(IV.i.28-35)

As conventional sexual symbols, the key is masculine or phallic; the lock, gate, and garden are feminine. Yet here Isabella possesses the phallic keys that open the locks of Angelo's enclosed garden; she is the caller, he is the one who passively waits.

Despite the real and obvious victimization of Isabella by Angelo, there is a sense in which Isabella has never been passive, never totally innocent of the power-play inherent in her chastity. Her gracious defense of Angelo, “I partly think / A due sincerity governed his deeds, / Till he did look on me,” is misleading because it implies a passivity that her speech acts and the nature of her language belie. Angelo experiences desire not when he looks at her but when she speaks to him. Her opening words to Angelo constitute a linguistic ambiguity that mirrors the moral ambiguity of the role she is to play:

There is a vice that most I do abhor,
And most desire should meet the blow of justice;
For which I would not plead, but that I must;
For which I must not plead, but that I am
At war 'twixt will and will not.

(II.ii.29-33)

Her intent is to plead not for a vice but for a brother's life, yet her language reveals her equation of the one with the other and inadvertently invites Angelo to make the same equation and subsequently to see Isabella as compromised by her appeal. Her account of herself as “At war 'twixt will and will not” is also duplicitous in that it reflects a dilemma, a degree of moral confusion, and thus a degree of moral vulnerability. The phrase is particularly misleading for Angelo since one meaning of the word “will” is “sexual desire.”¹¹ Because Isabella's first speech presents her as pleading for a vice and caught between desire and prohibition, it invites Angelo to see her as a mirror image of himself as he succumbs to his desire for her. As her words make his desire known, they, in a sense, actively engender desire: “She speaks, and 'tis / Such sense that my sense breeds with it” (II.ii.141-42). The duplicitous operation of Isabella's language is most conspicuous in the closure of her appeal: “Hark how I'll bribe you. Good my lord, turn back” (lines 144-45).¹² Set on by the sexual implication of these words, Angelo is then immediately taken off when the bribe becomes the true prayers of “fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate / To nothing temporal.” Isabella's bribe is yet another reminder of the power of chastity that excites as it threatens and of the ambiguity of the language that presents this chastity. Thus to her farewell, “'Save your honor!” Angelo responds, “From thee: even from thy virtue” (line 161).

Isabella's language serves her no better in the second meeting with Angelo. Her salutation, “I am come to know your pleasure” (II.iv.31), initiates a dialogue of double meanings and conflicting purposes, in which Isabella could say as well as Angelo, “I can speak / Against the thing I say” (lines 59-60). Angelo expresses his frustration with the ambiguity of language, with the breach between the speaker's intent and the listener's comprehension: “Your sense pursues not mine: Either you are ignorant, / Or seem so [craftily]; and that's not good” (lines 74-75). When Angelo confronts Isabella with the trap her own language creates—“You seem'd of late to make the law a tyrant, / And rather prov'd the sliding of your brother / A merriment than a vice”—she acknowledges the burden of her ambiguous language: “O, pardon me, my lord, it oft falls out / To have what we would have, we speak not what we mean” (lines 117-18). Her failure to control language, to speak what she means, elicits an acknowledgment of human frailty and sets for Isabella yet another linguistic trap, her pronouncement that women are “ten times frail” (line 128). Operating within the male discourse that equates virtue with chastity, frailty with incontinence, Angelo springs the linguistic trap:

I do arrest your words. Be that you are,
That is a woman; if you be more, you're none;
If you be one (as you are well express'd
By all external warrants), show it now,
By putting on the destin'd livery.

(II.iv.134-38)

Within Angelo's linguistic equation, to be woman is to be frail, to be subject to and subjected by the sexual desires of men. This language Isabella refuses to comprehend: “I have no tongue but one; gentle my lord, / Let me entreat you speak the former language” (lines 139-40).

At this point the duplicitous play of her language has so betrayed Isabella that she sees no choice but to submit to the authority of the holy father, disguised Vincentio, whose words promise to do what hers could not: preserve her chastity and save her brother's life. But the Duke's performance depends upon the willingness of Mariana and Isabella to allow him to appropriate and exploit the power that resides in their chastity. The power of the father-ruler is qualified not only by this appropriation and exploitation but by the deceptions within which his power operates: the bed trick and the false testimony of Isabella against Angelo.

Aware of the moral questions his scheme raises, Vincentio assures Isabella that Mariana will not be compromised: “I do make myself believe that you may most uprighteously do a poor wrong'd lady a merited benefit” (III.i.199-201). But an element of doubt persists in the clause, “I do make myself believe,” and this doubt is not erased by the differences between sponsalia per verba de futuro, the betrothal of Angelo and Mariana, and sponsalia per verba de presenti, the betrothal of Claudio and Juliet.¹³ What seems to justify the forfeiture of chastity by one couple but not the other is neither a statutory nor a moral difference but simply the Duke's authority, the law of the father. The absence of any substantial difference in the premarital consummations of the two couples validates Claudio's perspective:

Thus can the demigod, Authority,
Make us pay down for our offense by weight
The words of heaven: on whom it will, it will;
On whom it will not, so; yet still 'tis just.

(I.ii.120-23)

Chastity acquires importance as the site or context within which authority manifests itself. Derived from woman's chastity, masculine authority asserts itself by the control of woman's chastity. Angelo, likewise, cannot be “scal'd” and found wanting by the Duke until Isabella, in compliance with the Duke's instructions, is willing to claim that her chastity has been forfeited. Isabella voices to Mariana her reservations about this lie:

To speak so indirectly I am loath.
I would say the truth, but to accuse him so,
That is your part. Yet I am advis'd to do it,
He says, to veil full purpose.

(IV.vi.1-4)

Mariana's simple reply, “Be rul'd by him,” underscores the contextual, contestatorial relationship between feminine chastity and masculine authority.

Masculine authority depends not only upon control of the chastity of women but upon the male's adherence to chastity as well, for chastity determines power and place for men as well as for women. Restraint comes “from too much liberty” (I.ii.125) as Claudio, Angelo, and Lucio discover. Even the prince is subject to the rule of chastity. In fact, Vincentio's right to rule others is directly associated with his self-governance, his chastity. He assures Friar Thomas, “Believe not that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom” (I.iii.2-3). Disguised as the friar, Vincentio takes great solace in Escalus's pronouncement that the Duke is “a gentleman of all temperance” (III.ii.237). Because chastity authorizes authority, nothing, not even the perfidy of Angelo, seems to evoke the ire of Vincentio as much as Lucio's depiction of him as incontinent (III.ii.114-88). The Duke's anger over Lucio's slander threatens for a moment the comic resolution of the play as the Duke twice pronounces the death sentence upon Lucio: “Let him be whipt and hang'd” (V.i.513). The conventions of comedy prevail, however, as the Duke reduces Lucio's sentence from death to marriage.

Shakespeare's adherence to the conventions of comedy goes too far, according to many critics,¹⁴ in the proposal of marriage by the Duke to Isabella. This proposal is not only precipitous but contextually problematic, for it is spoken to one who has already chosen to be a bride of Christ and spoken within the Duke's display of absolute authority. The Duke's proposal is precipitous because the dramatist is trapped by the chastity essential to the characterization of the Duke. One whose “complete bosom” is safe from “the dribbling dart of love,” whose chastity allows him to wear the robes of a holy friar, can hardly acknowledge that he has fallen in love. His proposal of marriage must, likewise, by couched not in terms of the fulfillment of his desire but as a benefit to Isabella: “I have a motion much imports your good” (V.i.535). Darryl Gless argues that a Protestant audience would see the offer of chaste marriage to the Duke as preferable to the celibacy of the convent and thus something that, indeed, imports Isabella's good.¹⁵ This argument is, of course, predicated on the dubious assumption that the audience (uniformly reconciled to Protestantism) would share the Duke's perspective, not Isabella's, or would not even register a difference in the perspectives of these two characters.

If the Duke's desire is written out as Isabella's “good” is written in, wherein lies the good of this match for the Duke? Perhaps the answer lies in the terms of his offer. Somewhat inept at asking for anything, he begins with the wrong, but nevertheless telling, terms: “Give me your hand, and say you will be mine” (line 492). He then corrects his egocentric orientation and authoritarian language:

I have a motion much imports your good,
Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline,
What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.

(V.i.535-37)

What the Duke has to offer in this exchange is his authority, his power; what Isabel has to offer is her autonomy, forfeited as she gives her body in marriage. At first glance the Duke's terms of exchange seem an ideal resolution of the power conflict between masculine authority and feminine chastity. But such an offer coming from a prince whose identity is his absolute authority can hardly be taken literally. Furthermore, since marriage institutionalizes the authority of the husband over the wife, the Duke, in fact, has everything to gain and nothing to lose through Isabella's acceptance. Marriage is thus not only the Duke's solution to all forms of sexual liberty but also his solution to the resistance against patriarchy inherent in Isabel's sexual renunciation. By making Isabella his chaste wife, the Duke appropriates the power of her chastity and closes off the one avenue of her resistance to masculine authority. Her probation complete, he takes this prospective bride of Christ as his own in the ultimate act of appropriation that asserts his power as indeed “like pow'r divine” (V.i.369).

To the Duke's twice-offered proposal of marriage, Isabella responds with a perfect silence that challenges the interpretive skills of readers and directors alike. Isabella's silence is usually interpreted in performances as happy compliance and gratitude. Smiling and taking the hand of the Duke, she speaks with her body a submission to marriage in keeping with the conventions of comedy and the ideology of patriarchy. To stage Isabella's silence in this manner, however, is to see it through the Duke's eyes; woman's silence is her submission to the “natural,” patriarchal ordering of things. Marcia Riefer offers a different gendered reading of Isabella's silence: “She remains speechless, a baffled actress who has run out of lines. The gradual loss of her personal voice during the course of the play has become, finally, a literal loss of voice. In this sense, Measure for Measure is Isabella's tragedy. Like Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, the eloquent Isabella is left with no tongue.”¹⁶

To these readings of Isabella's silence as either cheerful compliance or tragic defeat, I wish to offer two alternative interpretations. The first is that Isabella does not lose, but only holds, her tongue; she is not silenced but, instead, chooses silence as a form of resistance to the patriarchal authority and to the male discourse within which this authority operates.¹⁷ In her silence to the Duke's proposal, Isabella thus adheres to the rules of the sisters of St. Clare: she shows her face but remains silent, perhaps with the key to the convent still in her pocket.

Appealing as this reading of Isabella's silence might have been to recusant Catholics in Shakespeare's audience or might be to feminist readers today, it is, perhaps, improbable, given that the silence occurs within the context of the Duke's intimidating display of power. But the proposal, itself, attests, parodoxically, to the fact that the Duke's power requires a supplement. His proposal, “What's mine is yours” has validity as an abbreviated and thus coded acknowledgment that can be decoded: “My sexuality and thus my identity as patriarch is yours to validate by your affirmation of your sexuality through your acceptance of me as your husband.” Isabella's sexual renunciation, a form of self-castration, would thus, if perpetuated, constitute a form of castration for the Duke as well. Given the significance of Isabella's acceptance of the Duke, the freedom to refuse him seems highly improbable. But the absence of choice for Isabella does not constitute for her the absence of power; the power of chastity operates through and upon the Duke and Isabella alike. The play's depiction of the relationship of the Duke's authority and Isabella's chastity thus confirms Foucault's assertion that

Power is employed or exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.¹⁸

The Duke is correct in the sense that “What's yours is mine and what's mine is yours” already and inevitably, for authority privileges chastity and depends in turn upon chastity to authorize authority. Whether or not Isabella is free to keep the convent key, she clearly holds the Duke's “key” in her pocket.

Notes

1. All quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. Marcia Riefer, “‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure,” SQ 35 (1984): 157-69, provides a brief survey of the conflicting responses to Isabella. For a more detailed survey, see George L. Geckle, “Shakespeare's Isabella,” SQ 22 (1971): 163-68. In defense of Isabella, Raymond Wilson Chambers (Man's Unconquerable Mind [London: Jonathan Cape, 1939], p. 288) asserts that “Christianity could never have lived through its first three hundred years of persecution, if its ranks had not been stiffened by men and women who never hesitated in the choice between righteousness and the ties to their kinsfolk.” Chambers argues that Isabella's adherence to her chastity must be seen in light of her identity as a votarist of St. Clare: “Whether she remains in the Convent or no, one who is contemplating such a life can no more be expected to sell herself into mortal sin, than a good soldier can be expected to sell a stronghold entrusted to him” (p. 292). J. W. Lever refutes Chambers by arguing that Isabella's stance “is occasioned by no true principle. If lay heroines in previous versions of the story were commended for setting aside the thought of shame in order to save a brother's or a husband's life, the novice of a spiritual order might also overcome the fear of disgrace in the world's eyes and manifest true grace by a sacrifice made in self-oblivious charity. Chastity was essentially a condition of the spirit; to see it in merely physical terms was to reduce the concept to a mere pagan scruple” (Introduction to the Arden Edition of Measure for Measure [London: Methuen, 1965], p. lxxviii).

3. Riefer, p. 158.

4. Riefer, pp. 158, 161-62.

5. Madeleine Doran, The Endeavors of Art (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 368-69.

6. Angelo's equation reverses, but with the same sophistry, Parolles's equation of virginity with suicide: “He that hangs himself is a virgin; virginity murthers itself, and should be buried in highways out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature” (All's Well, I.i.138-41).

7. Quoted from A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, ed. Mark Eccles (New York: Modern Language Association, 1980), p. 109.

8. Marilyn L. Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 81-99.

9. Riefer, p. 168.

10. David Lloyd Stevenson contends that Claudio “thinks that Angelo's liability to Isabella's attractions as a woman, to the ‘prone and speechless dialect’ in ‘her youth,’ to the seductive, feminine qualities he understands so well and has already succumbed to in Juliet, may save his life” (The Achievement of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure” [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966], p. 38).

11. Shakespeare's frequent play on the word “will” is perhaps most evident in the sonnets. See, for example, Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), pp. 293-94.

12. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 439, describes Isabella's use of “bribe” as “one of those single words on which worlds turn that Shakespeare was growing steadily more fond of.” Harriett Hawkins points out that Isabella's speech in her debates with Angelo are “charged with an erotic power that might well envoke a gleam in the eye of the most depraved marquis in the audience, to say nothing of a saint-turned-sensualist like Angelo” (“‘The Devil's Party’: Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure,” ShS 31 [1978]:107).

13. For a discussion of the two forms of “spousals,” see Lever, pp. liii-liv and lxv; also, Darryl F. Gless, “Measure for Measure,” the Law and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 179-80, 200-201, and 234-35. Gless (p. 200) cites other studies on the subject: Ernest Schanzer, “The Marriage-Contracts in Measure for Measure,” ShS 13 (1960): 81-89; S. Nagarajan, “Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals,” SQ 14 (1963): 115-19; and J. Birje-Patil, “Marriage Contracts in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,” ShakS 5 (1969): 106-11.

14. Most recently, Williamson, pp. 104-105, and Joseph H. Summers, Dreams of Love and Power (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 68.

15. Seeing the play as a reflection of the Protestant antimonastic tradition, Gless argues that Isabella's acceptance of the Duke's proposal frees her from “the sterile bondage” of the convent and marks “her entry into a world governed by fruitful, married love” (p. 212).

16. Riefer, p. 167.

17. Williamson supports this interpretation, arguing that “Isabella's silence may be a compound of shock and defiance, and we have other examples in Iago and Hieronimo, where silence after eloquence may signify not acquiescence, but defiance of an urgent authority” (p. 104).

18. Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon et al., (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 98. Although Williamson (p. 11) quotes this passage from Foucault in her introduction, she says nothing in her discussion of Measure for Measure about the Duke's “undergoing” or submission to power, but virtually everything about his exercise of power; much, likewise, about Isabella as a point of power's application, but nothing about her as an agent of power.