[In the following essay, Dollimore provides a materialist analysis of social transgression in Measure for Measure, which he sees as the result of “unregulated desire” responded to by “authoritarian repression.”]

In the Vienna of Measure for Measure unrestrained sexuality is ostensibly subverting social order; anarchy threatens to engulf the State unless sexuality is subjected to renewed and severe regulation. Such at least is the claim of those in power. Surprisingly critics have generally taken them at their word even while dissociating themselves from the punitive zeal of Angelo. There are those who have found in the play only a near tragic conflict between anarchy and order, averted in the end it is true, but unconvincingly so. Others, of a liberal persuasion and with a definite preference for humane rather than authoritarian restraint, have found at least in the play's ‘vision’ if not precisely its ending an ethical sense near enough to their own. But both kinds of critic have apparently accepted that sexual transgression in Measure for Measure—and in the world—represents a real force of social disorder intrinsic to human nature and that the play at least is about how this force is—must be—restrained.

J. W. Lever, in an analysis of the play noted for its reasonableness,¹ draws a comparison with Shakespeare's romantic comedies where disorders in both society and individual, especially those caused by ‘the excesses of sentiment and desire’ are resolved: ‘not only the problems of lovers, but psychic tensions and social usurpations or abuses, found their resolution through the exercise of reason, often in the form of an adjudication by the representatives of authority’. In Measure for Measure the same process occurs but more extremely: ‘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’. Lever draws a further contrast with Troilus and Cressida where ‘no supreme authority exists; age and wisdom can only warn, without stemming the inevitable tide of war and lechery’. 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.²

But consider now a very different view of the problem. With the considerable attention recently devoted to Bakhtin and his truly important analysis of the subversive carnivalesque, the time is right for a radical reading of Measure for Measure, 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. What follows aims (if it is not too late) 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). I offer a different reading of the play, one which, perhaps paradoxically, seeks to identify its absent characters and the history which it contains yet does not represent.

TRANSGRESSION

Whatever subversive identity the sexual offenders in this play possess is a construction put upon them by the authority which wants to control them; moreover control is exercised through that construction. Diverse and only loosely associated sexual offenders are brought into renewed surveillance by the State; identified in law as a category of offender (the lecherous, the iniquitous) they are thereby demonised as a threat to law. Like many apparent threats to authority this one in fact legitimates it: control of the threat becomes the rationale of authoritarian reaction in a time of apparent crisis. Prostitution and lechery are identified as the causes of crisis yet we learn increasingly of a corruption more political than sexual (see especially v.i.316ff). Arguably then the play discloses corruption to be an effect less of desire than authority itself. It also shows how corruption is downwardly identified—that is, focused and placed with reference to low-life ‘licence’; in effect, and especially in the figure of Angelo, corruption is displaced from authority to desire and by implication from the rulers to the ruled. The Duke tells Pompey:

Fie, sirrah, a bawd, a wicked bawd;
The evil that thou causest to be done,
That is thy means to live. Do thou but think
What 'tis to cram a maw or clothe a back
From such a filthy vice. Say to thyself,
From their abominable and beastly touches
I drink, I eat, array myself, and live.
Canst thou believe thy living is a life,
So stinkingly depending?

(III.ii.18-26)

This is in response to Pompey's observation that such exploitation not only exists at other levels of society but is actually protected ‘by order of law’ (l. 8). This is just what the Duke's diatribe ignores—cannot acknowledge—fixating instead on the ‘filthy vice’ and its agents in a way which occludes the fact that it is Angelo, not Pompey, who, unchecked, and in virtue of his social position, will cause most ‘evil … to be done’. But, because Angelo's transgression is represented as growing from his desire rather than his authority, his is a crime which can be construed as a lapse into the corruption of a lower humanity, a descent of the ruler into the sins of the ruled. Provocatively, his crime is obscurely theirs.

If we can indeed discern in the demonising of sexuality a relegitimation of authority we should not then conclude that this is due simply to an ideological conspiracy; or rather it may indeed be conspiratorial but it is also ideological in another, more complex sense: through a process of displacement an imaginary—and punitive—resolution of real social tension and conflict is attempted.

The authoritarian demonising of deviant behaviour was common in the period, and displacement and condensation—to and around low life—were crucial to this process. … But what made displacement and condensation possible was a prior construction of deviancy itself. So, for example, diatribes against promiscuity, female self-assertion, cross-dressing and homosexuality construed these behaviours as symptomatic of an impending dissolution of social hierarchy and so, in effect, of civilisation.³ This was partly because transgression was conceived in public and even cosmic terms; it would not then have made sense to see it in, say, psychological or subjective terms—a maladjustment of the individual who, with professional assistance, could be ‘normalised’. On the one hand then homosexuality was not considered to be the ‘defect’ of a particular personality type since ‘the temptation to debauchery, from which homosexuality was not clearly distinguished, was accepted as part of the common lot, be it never so abhorred. For the Puritan writer John Rainolds homosexuality was a sin to which “men's natural corruption and viciousness is prone.”’ And this was because homosexuality ‘was not a sexuality in its own right, but existed as a potential for confusion and disorder in one undivided sexuality’ (Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, pp. 16-17, 25). On the other hand it was distinguished sufficiently to be associated with other cardinal sins like religious and political heresy and witchcraft. This association of sexual deviance with religious and political deviance—made of course in relation to Marlowe by the informer Richard Baines⁴ and rather more recently by the British tabloid press in relation to Peter Tatchell⁵—facilitates the move from specific to general subversion: the individual transgressive act sent reverberations throughout the whole and maybe even brought down God's vengeance on the whole.

Stuart Clark has shown how the disorder which witches and other deviants symbolised, even as it was represented as a threat to order, was also a presupposition of it. Contrariety, he argues, was ‘a universal principle of intelligibility as well as a statement about how the world was actually constituted’ and ‘the characterisation of disorder by inversion, even in relatively minor texts or on ephemeral occasions, may therefore be taken to exemplify an entire metaphysic’ (‘Inversion, Misrule and Witchraft’, pp. 110-12). On this view then the attack on deviancy was not just a diversionary strategy of authority in times of crisis but an elementary and permanent principle of rule. Nevertheless, we might expect that it is in times of crisis that this principle is specially operative. The work of Lawrence Stone would seem to confirm this. He argues that in the early seventeenth century the family household becomes, at least in contemporary propaganda, ‘responsible for, and the symbol of, the whole social system, which was thought to be based on the God-given principle of hierarchy, deference and obedience’. Such propaganda was stimulated in part by the experienced instability of rapid change, change which was interpreted by some as impending collapse. … According to Stone then, ‘the authoritarian family and the authoritarian nation-state were the solutions to an intolerable sense of anxiety, and a deep yearning for order’ and the corollary was a ruthless persecution of dissidents and deviants. Sexuality became subject to intensified surveillance working in terms of both an enforced and an internalised discipline.⁶Measure for Measure, I want to argue, is about both kinds of discipline, the enforced and the internalised. Their coexistence made for a complex social moment as well as a complex play.

J. A. Sharpe's recent and scrupulous study of crime in seventeenth-century England confirms this discrepancy between the official depiction of moral collapse among the lower orders and their actual behaviour. Sharpe also confirms that the suppression of sexuality was only ‘one aspect of a wider desire to achieve a disciplined society. Fornication, like idleness, pilfering, swearing and drunkenness, was one of the distinguishing activites of the disorderly’. Further, the Elizabethan and early Stuart period marked an historical highpoint in an authoritarian preoccupation with the disorderly and their efficient prosecution.⁷ Nevertheless, many of those concerned with this prosecution really did believe standards were declining and the social fabric disintegrating. Puritan extremists like Stubbes saw prostitution as so abhorrent they advocated the death penalty for offenders (Lever, p. xlvi). But if, as Stone and others argue, this fervour is the result of insecurity in the face of change, then, even if that fervour was ‘sincere’, the immorality which incited it was not at all its real cause. This is one sense in which the discourse of blame involved displacement; but there was another: while the authorities who actually suppressed the brothels often exploited the language of moral revulsion it was not the sexual vice that worried them so much as the meeting together of those who used the brothels. George Whetstone was only warning the authorities of what they already feared when he told them to beware of ‘haunts … in Allies, gardens and other obscure corners out of the common walks of the Magistrate’ whose guests are ‘masterless men, needy shifters, thieves, cutpurses, unthrifty servants, both serving men and prentices’.⁸ Suppression was an attempt to regulate not the vice, nor, apparently, even the spread of venereal disease, but the criminal underworld.⁹ Similarly, in Measure for Measure, the more we attend to the supposed subversiveness of sexual licence, and the authoritarian response to it, the more we are led away from the vice itself towards social tensions which intersect with it—led also to retrace several distinct but related processes of displacement.

The play addresses several social problems which had their counterparts in Jacobean London. Mistress Overdone declares: ‘Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom shrunk’ (I.ii.75-7). Lever points out that this passage links several issues in the winter of 1603-4: ‘the continuance of the war with Spain; the plague in London; the treason trials and executions at Winchester in connection with the plots of Raleigh and others; the slackness of trade in the deserted capital’ (p. xxxii). Significantly, all but the first of these, the war, are domestic problems. But even the war was in prospect of becoming such: if peace negotiations then under way (and also alluded to in the play—at I.ii.1-17) proved successful it would lead to a return home of ‘the multitude of pretended gallants, banckrouts, and unruly youths who weare at this time settled in pyracie’ (Lever, p. xxxii). In this political climate even peace could exacerbate domestic ills.

This play's plague references are especially revealing. Both here and at I.ii.85-9, where Pompey refers to a proclamation that ‘All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down’ there is a probable allusion to the proclamation of 1603 which provided for the demolition of property in the London suburbs in order to control the plague. But the same proclamation also refers to the ‘excessive numbers of idle, indigent, dissolute and dangerous persons, and the pestering of many of them in small and strait room’.¹⁰ Here, as with the suppression of prostitution, plague control legitimates other kinds of political control. (Enemies of the theatre often used the plague threat as a reason to have them closed). As this proclamation indicates, there was a constant fear among those in charge of Elizabethan and Jacobean England that disaffection might escalate into organised resistance. This anxiety surfaces repeatedly in official discourse: any circumstance, institution or occasion which might unite the vagabonds and masterless men—for example famine, the theatres, congregations of the unemployed—was the object of almost paranoid surveillance. Yet, if anything, Measure for Measure emphasises the lack of any coherent opposition among the subordinate and the marginalised. Thus Pompey, ‘Servant to Mistress Overdone’ (list of characters), once imprisoned and with the promise of remission, becomes, with no sense of betrayal, servant to the State in no less a capacity than that of hangman.

Yet those in power are sincerely convinced there is a threat to order. At the very outset of the play Escalus, described in the list of characters as an ‘ancient’ Lord, is praised excessively by the Duke only to be subordinated to Angelo, the new man. The traditional political ‘art and practice’ (I.i.12) of Escalus is not able to cope with the crisis. Later, the Duke, speaking to the Friar, acknowledges that this crisis stems from a failure on the part of the rulers yet at the same time displaces responsibility on to the ruled: like disobedient children they have taken advantage of their ‘fond fathers’ (I.iii.23). Hence the need for a counter-subversive attack on the ‘liberty’ of the low-life. Yet even as we witness that attack we see also that the possibilities for actual subversion seem to come from quite another quarter. Thus when Angelo resorts to the claim that the State is being subverted (in order to discredit charges of corruption against himself) the way he renders that claim plausible is most revealing:

These poor informal women are no more
But instruments of some more mightier member
That sets them on. Let me have way, my lord,
To find this practice out.

(V.i.235-7)

Earlier the Duke, pretending ignorance of Angelo's guilt, publicly denounces Isabella's charge against Angelo in similar terms:

                                                  thou knowest not what thou speak'st
Or else thou art suborn'd against his honour
In hateful practice …
                                        … Someone hath set you on.

(V.i.108-10; 115)

The predisposition of Escalus to credit all this gives us an insight into how the scapegoat mentality works: just as the low-life have hitherto been demonised as the destructive element at the heart (or rather bottom) of the State, now it is the apparently alien Friar (he who is ‘Not of this country’, III.ii.211) who is to blame. The kind old Escalus charges the Friar (the Duke in disguise) with ‘Slander to th'state!’ and cannot wait to torture him into confession (V.i.320, 309-10). That he is in fact accusing the Duke ironically underpins the point at issue: disorder generated by misrule and unjust law (III.ii.6-8) is ideologically displaced on to the ruled—‘ideologically’ because Angelo's lying displacement is insignificant compared with the way that Escalus really believes it is the subordinate and the outsider who are to blame. Yet even as he believes this he is prepared to torture his way to ‘the more mightier member’ behind the plot; again there is the implication, and certainly the fear, that the origin of the problem is not intrinsic to the low-life but a hostile fraction of the ruling order.

Oddly the slander for which Escalus wants to have this outsider tortured, and behind which he perceives an insurrectionary plot, is only the same assessment of the situation which he, Angelo and the Duke made together at the outset. What does this suggest: is his violent reaction to slander paranoid, or rather a strategy of realpolitik? Perhaps the latter—after all, it is not only, as Isabella reminds Angelo (II.ii.135-7) that rulers have the power to efface their own corruption, but that they need to do this to remain in power. And within the terms of realpolitik the threat of exposure is justification enough for authoritarian reaction. But the problem with the concept of realpolitik is that it tends to discount the non-rational though still effective dimensions of power which make it difficult to determine whether crisis is due to paranoia generating an imaginary threat or whether a real threat is intensifying paranoia. And, of course, even if the threat is imaginary this can still act as the ‘real’ cause of ensuing conflict. Conversely, terms like paranoia applied to a ruling class or fraction, while useful in suggesting the extent to which that class's discourse produces its own truth and apprehends that truth through blame, can also mislead with regard to the class's power to rationalise its own position and displace responsibility for disorder. Put another way, realpolitik and paranoia, in so far as they are present, should be seen to coexist more at a social rather than an individual level. An interesting case in point is George Whetstone's A Mirror for Magistrates (1584), a possible source for Shakespeare's play. This work related the story of how the Roman emperor, Alexander Severus, re-establishes order in the State by setting up a system of sophisticated surveillance and social regulation which includes himself going disguised among his subjects and observing their transgressions at first hand. These are denounced with moral fervour and the implication of course is that they are condemned just because they are sinful. But as Whetstone's retelling of the story develops we can see a pragmatic underside to his blameful discourse. In fact, as so often in this period, political strategy and moral imperative openly coexist. The focus of Whetstone's reforming zeal are the ‘Dicing-houses, taverns and common stews’—‘sanctuaries of iniquity’. But what gives him most cause for concern is not the behaviour of the low but that of the landed gentry who are attracted to them: ‘Dice, Drunkenness and Harlots, had consumed the wealth of a great number of ancient Gentlemen, whose Purses were in the possession of vile persons, and their Lands at mortgage with the Merchants … The Gentlemen had made this exchange with vile persons: they were attired with the Gentlemen's bravery, and the Gentlemen disgraced with their beastly manners’ (Izard, George Whetstone, p. 135).

Here, apparently, hierarchy is subverted from above and those most culpable the gentlemen themselves. Yet in Whetstone's account the low are to blame; they are held responsible for the laxity of the high, much as a man might (then as now) blame a woman for tempting him sexually whereas in fact he has coerced her. The gentlemen are ‘mildly’ reproached and restored to that which they have transacted away while the low are disciplined. Whetstone believed that the survival of England depended on its landed gentry; in rescuing them from the low-life he is rescuing the State from chaos and restoring it to its ‘ancient and most laudable orders’ (Izard, George Whetstone, p. 136). A reactionary programme is accomplished at the expense of the low, while those who benefit are those responsible for precipitating ‘decline’ in the first place. The same process of displacement occurs throughout discourses of power in this period. One further example: one of the many royal proclamations attempting to bring vagabonds under martial law asserts that ‘there can grow no account of disturbance of our peace and quiet but from such refuse and vagabond people’ (Tudor Royal Proclamations, III, 233)—and this despite the fact that the proclamation immediately preceeding this one (just six days before) announced the abortive Essex rebellion. The failure of the rebellion is interpreted by the second proclamation as proof of the loyalty of all other subjects with the exception of that ‘great multitude of base and loose people’ who ‘lie privily in corners and bad houses, listening after news and stirs, and spreading rumours and tales, being of likelihood ready to lay hold of any occasion to enter into any tumult or disorder’ (p. 232). For the authoritarian perspective as articulated here, the unregulated are by definition the ungoverned and always thereby potentially subversive of government. At the same time it is a perspective which confirms what has been inferred from Measure for Measure: in so far as the socially deprived were a threat to government this was only when they were mobilised by powerful elements much higher up the social scale. Moreover the low who were likely to be so mobilised were only a small part of the ‘base and loose people’ hounded by authority. In fact we need to distinguish, as Christopher Hill does, between this mob element, little influenced by religious or political ideology but up for hire, and the ‘rogues, vagabonds and beggars’ who, although they ‘caused considerable panic in ruling circles … were incapable of concerted revolt’ (The World Turned Upside Down, pp. 40-1). Of course there were real social problems and ‘naturally’ the deprived were at the centre of them. Moreover, if we recall that there were riots, that fornication did produce charity dependent bastards, that drunkenness did lead to fecklessness, it becomes apparent that, in their own terms there were also real grounds for anxiety on the part of those who administered deprivation. At the same time we can read in that anxiety—in its very surplus, its imaginative intensity, its punitive ingenuity—an ideological displacement (and hence misrecognition) of much deeper fears of the uncontrollable, of being out of control, themselves corresponding to more fundamental social problems.¹¹

SURVEILLANCE

In II.i. we glimpse briefly the State's difficulties in ensuring the levels of policing which the rulers think is required. Escalus discreetly inquires of Elbow whether there are any more officers in his locality more competent than he. Elbow replies that even those others who have been chosen happily delegate their responsibility to him.

A similar anxiety about the ungovernability of his subjects leads the Duke to put those of them he encounters under a much more sophisticated and effective mode of surveillance; though remaining coercive, it seeks additionally to get subjects to reposition themselves. First though, a word about the Duke's use of disguise. The genre of the disguised ruler generally presented him in a favourable light. But in Jacobean England we might expect there to have been an ambivalent attitude towards it. In Jonson's Sejanus, contemporary with Measure for Measure, it is a strategy of tyrannical repression; Jonson himself was subjected to it while in jail, apparently with the intention of getting him to incriminate himself.¹² Next there is the question of the Duke's choice of religious disguise. As I've argued elsewhere, there was considerable debate at this time over the ‘Machiavellian’ proposition that religion was a form of ideological control which worked in terms of internalised submission.¹³ Even as he opposes it, Richard Hooker cogently summarises this view; it represents religion as ‘a mere politic devise’ and whereas State law has ‘power over our outward actions only’ religion works upon men's ‘inward cogitations … the privy intents and motions of their heart’. Armed with this knowledge ‘politic devisers’ are ‘able to create God in man by art’.¹⁴

The Duke, disguised as a friar, tries to reinstate this kind of subjection. Barnardine is the least amenable; ‘He wants advice’, remarks the Duke grimly (IV.ii.144) and is infuriated when the offer is refused. Barnardine is especially recalcitrant in that he admits guilt yet is unrepentant and even disinclined to escape; he thus offers no response on which the Duke might work to return him to a position of dutiful submission. But the Duke does not give up and resolves to ‘Persuade this rude wretch willingly to die’ (IV.iii.80; cf. II.i.35). A similar idea seems to be behind his determination to send Pompey to prison—not just to rot but for ‘Correction and instruction’ (III.ii.31). Earlier the Duke had been rather more successful with Claudio. His long ‘Be absolute for death’ speech (III.i.5ff) does initially return Claudio to a state of spiritual renunciation, but Claudio has not long been in conversation with Isabella before he desires to live again. Isabella, herself positioned in a state of intended renunciation, struggles to restore Claudio to his. She fails but the Duke intervenes again and Claudio capitulates.

The Duke makes of Mariana a model of dutiful subjection. Predictably, he is most successful with those who are least powerful and so most socially dependent. He tells Angelo to love Mariana, adding: ‘I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue’ (V.i.524). He has indeed, and earlier Mariana confirms his success in this confessional positioning of her as an acquiescent, even abject subject (IV.I.8-20); for her he is one ‘whose advice / Hath often still'd my brawling discontent’ (IV.i.8-9). His exploitation of her—‘The maid will I frame, and make fit for his attempt’ (III.i.256-7)—is of course just what she as confessed subject must not know, and the Duke confirms that she does not by eliciting from her a testimony:

DUKE:
Do you persuade yourself that I respect you?
MARIANA:
Good friar, I know you do, and so have found it

(IV.i.53-4)

Thus is her exploitation recast and indeed experienced by Mariana, as voluntary allegiance to disinterested virtue.

The Duke's strategy with Isabella is somewhat different. Some critics of the play, liking their women chaste, have praised Isabella for her integrity; others have reproached her for being too absolute for virtue.¹⁵ Another assessment, ostensibly more sympathetic than either of these because psychological rather than overtly moralistic, is summarised by Lever. He finds Isabella ignorant, hysterical and suffering from ‘psychic confusion’, and he apparently approves the fact that ‘through four … acts’ she undergoes ‘a process of moral education designed to reshape her character’ (pp. lxxx, lxxvii, lxxix, xci). Here, under the guise of normative categories of psychosexual development, whose objective is ‘maturity’, moralistic and patriarchal values are reinstated the more insidiously for being ostensibly ‘caring’ rather than openly coercive. But in the play the coercive thrust of such values suggests that perhaps Isabella has recourse to renunciation as a way of escaping them. When we first encounter her in the nunnery it is her impending separation from men that is stressed by the nun, Francisca. The same priority is registered by Isabella herself when she affirms the prayers from ‘preserved souls, / From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate / To nothing temporal’ (II.ii.154-6). She seeks in fact to be preserved specifically from men:

Women?—Help, heaven! Men their creation mar
In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail;
For we are soft as our complexions are,
And credulous to false prints.

(II.iv.126-9)

If we remember that in the play the stamp metaphor signifies the formative and coercive power of authority, we see that Isabella speaks a vulnerability freed in part from its own ideological misrecognition; she conceives her weakness half in terms of women's supposed intrinsic ‘frailness’, half in terms of exploitative male coercion. Further, we see in Isabella's subjection a conflict within the patriarchal order which subjects: the renunciation which the Church sanctions, secular authority refuses. The latter wins and it is Isabella's fate to be coerced back into her socially and sexually subordinate position—at first illicitly by Angelo, then legitimately by the Duke who ‘takes’ her in marriage.

His subjects' public recognition of his own integrity is important in the Duke's attempt to reposition them in obedience. Yet the play can be read to disclose integrity as a strategy of authority rather than the disinterested virtue of the leader. The Duke speaks frequently of the integrity of rulers but the very circumstances in which he does so disclose a pragmatic and ideological intent; public integrity legitimates authority, and authority takes sufficient priority to lie about integrity when the ends of propaganda and government require it (IV.ii.77-83). And the Duke knows that these same ends require that integrity should be publicly displayed in the form of reputation. Intriguingly then, perhaps the most subversive thing in the play is the most casual, namely Lucio's slurring of the Duke's reputation. Unawares and carelessly, Lucio strikes at the heart of the ideological legitimation of power. Along with Barnardine's equally careless refusal of subjection, this is what angers the Duke the most. Still disguised, he insists to Lucio that he, the Duke, ‘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, italics added). After Lucio has departed he laments his inability to ensure his subject's dutiful respect: ‘What king so strong / Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?’ (ll. 181-2; cf. IV.i.60-5). If the severity of the law at this time is anything to go by, such slander was a cause of obsessive concern to Elizabethan and Jacobean rulers,¹⁶ just as it is here with the Duke and, as we have already seen, with Escalus.

The ideological representation of integrity can perhaps be judged best at the play's close—itself ideological but not, it seems to me, forced or flawed in the way critics have often claimed. 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. And of course it is a spectre: desire, culturally manifested, is never unregulated, perhaps least of all in Jacobean London. Apart from their own brutally exploitative sub-cultural codes, the stews were controlled from above. This took several forms, including one of the most subtly coercive of all: economic investment. Some time between 1599 and 1602 the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, appears to have leased property for the establishing of an especially notorious brothel in Paris Gardens, while Thomas Nashe declared in 1598 that ‘whoredom (the next doore to the Magistrates)’ was set up and maintained through bribery, and Gāmini Salgādo informs us that ‘Most theatre owners … were brothel owners too’.¹⁷

At the same time in this period, in its laws, statutes, proclamations and moralistic tracts, the marginalised and the deviant are, as it were, endlessly recast in a complex ideological process whereby authority is ever anxiously relegitimating itself. Measure for Measure, unlike the proclamation or the statute, gives the marginalised a voice, one which may confront authority directly but which more often speaks of and partially reveals the strategies of power which summon it into visibility. Even the mildly transgressive Claudio who, were it not for the law, was all set to become law-abiding, becomes briefly that ‘warped slip of wilderness’ (III.i.141). But if Claudio's desire to live is momentarily transgressive it becomes so only at the potential expense of his sister. The same is true of Pompey and Lucio who, once put under surveillance or interrogation by authority voice a critique of authority itself (III.ii.6-8; 89-175), yet remain willing to exploit others in their position by serving that same authority when the opportunity arises. Ironically though, it is Angelo's transgressive desire which is potentially the most subversive; he more than anyone else threatens to discredit authority. At the same time his transgression is also, potentially, the most brutally exploitative. This is an example of something which those who celebrate transgression often overlook: even as it offers a challenge to authority, transgression ever runs the risk of re-enacting elsewhere the very exploitation which it is resisting immediately.

What Foucault has said of sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems appropriate also to sexuality as a subcategory of sin in earlier periods: it appears to be that which power is afraid of but in actuality is that which power works through. Sin, especially when internalised as guilt, has produced the subjects of authority as surely as any ideology. At the same time it may be that not everyone, indeed not even the majority, has fallen for this. The ‘sin’ of promiscuity, for example, has always been defended from a naturalistic perspective as no sin at all—as indeed we find in Measure for Measure. But those like Lucio who cheerfully celebrate instinctual desire simultaneously reify as natural the (in fact) highly social relations of exploitation through which instinct finds its expression, social relations which, we might say, determine the nature of instinct far more than nature itself:

LUCIO.
How doth my dear morsel, thy mistress? Procures she still, ha?
POMPEY.
Troth sir, she hath eaten up all her beef, and she is herself in the tub.
LUCIO.
Why, 'tis good: it is the right of it: it must be so. Ever your fresh whore, and your powdered bawd; an unshunned consequence; it must be so.

(III.ii.52-8)

And Pompey, whom he refuses to bail, Lucio perceives as ‘bawd born’ (III.ii.66). Mistress Overdone, her plight as described here notwithstanding, was one of the lucky ones; after all, the life of most prostitutes outside the exclusive brothels was abject. Overdone is at least a procuress, a brothel keeper. For most of the rest poverty drove them to the brothels and after a relatively short stay in which they had to run the hazards of disease, violence and contempt, most were driven back to it.

In pursuing the authority-subversion question, this chapter has tried to exemplify two complementary modes of materialist criticism. Both are concerned to recover the text's history. The one looks directly for history in the text including the historical conditions of its production which, even if not addressed directly by the text can nevertheless still be said to be within it, informing it. Yet there is a limit to which the text can be said to incorporate those aspects of its historical moment of which it never speaks. At that limit, rather than constructing this history as the text's unconscious, we might instead address it directly. Then at any rate we have to recognise the obvious: the prostitutes, the most exploited group in the society which the play represents, are absent from it. Virtually everything that happens presupposes them yet they have no voice, no presence. And those who speak for them do so as exploitatively as those who want to eliminate them. Looking for evidence of resistance we find rather further evidence of exploitation. There comes a time of course when the demonising of deviant sexuality meets with cultural and political resistance. From the very terms of its oppression deviancy generates a challenging counter-discourse and eventually a far-reaching critique of exploitation. That is another and later story.

Notes

1. Measure for Measure, ed. J. W. Lever (London: Methuen, 1965).

2. For another kind of critic sexuality in Measure for Measure continues to be seen as something deeply disruptive though now it is the individual psyche rather than the social order which is under threat. Thus for Marilyn French this is a play which ‘confronts directly Shakespeare's own most elemental fears’—hence its ‘sexual obsessiveness, mixed guilt, abhorrence’. She writes further of ‘the hideous and repellent quality sex has throughout the play. It is, it remains, evil, filthy, disgusting, diseased’ (Shakespeare's Division of Experience (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), pp. 195-7).

3. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982); Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present, 87 (1980), 98-127; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

4. For the Baines document see C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Life of Marlowe and the Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage (London: Methuen, 1930), pp. 98-100.

5. Peter Tatchell, The Battle for Bermondsey, preface by Tony Benn (London: Heretic Books, 1983).

6. Lawrence Stone, The Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 653, 217, 654, 623-4; and F. G. Emmison has estimated that in the county of Essex around 15,000 people were summoned on sexual charges in the forty-five years up to 1603 (Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1973), p. 1). Commenting on these figures Stone remarks that “in an adult lifespan of 30 years, an Elizabethan inhabitant of Essex … had more than a one-in-four chance of being accused of fornication, adultery, buggery, incest, bestiality or bigamy’ (The Family, p. 519).

7. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: a County Study (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57, 70, 215-16.

8. A Mirror for Magistrates quoted from Thomas C. Izard's helpful study, George Whetstone: Mid-Elizabethan Gentleman of Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 140.

9. See the Proclamation of 1546 ordering London brothels to be closed, in Tudor Royal Proclamations (3 vols.), ed. Paul L. Hughes and James L. Larkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964-9), I, 365-6; also Wallace Shugg, ‘Prostitution in Shakespeare's London’, Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977), 291-313, especially p. 306.

10. Stuart Royal Proclamations (vol. I), ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 47.

11. See especially Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Representing Power: Measure for Measure in its Time’, in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 139-56; David Sundelson, ‘Misogyny and Rule in Measure for Measure’, Women's Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (1981), 83-91.

12. Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1922-52), I, 19, 139.

13. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester, 1984; University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 9-17.

14. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2 vols., introduction by C. Morris (London: Dent, 1969), II, 19.

15. In the nineteenth century for example A. W. Schlegel praised ‘the heavenly purity of her mind … not even stained with one unholy thought’ and Edward Dowden her ‘pure zeal’ and ‘virgin sanctity’. By contrast Coleridge found her ‘unamiable’ and Hazlitt reproved her ‘rigid chastity’. These other passages from earlier critics are conveniently collected in C. K. Stead, ed., Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, a Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1971); see especially pp. 43-5, 59-62, 45-7, 47-9.

16. See especially Joel Samaha, ‘Gleanings from Local Criminal Court Records: Sedition among the inarticulate in Elizabethan Essex’, Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 61-79.

17. E. J. Burford, Queen of the Bawds (London: Neville Spearman, 1974); Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 483; Gāmini Salgādo, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: Dent, 1977), p. 58.