SOURCE: Slights, Jessica, and Michael Morgan Holmes. “Isabella's Order: Religious Acts and Personal Desires in Measure for Measure.” Studies in Philology 95, no. 3 (summer 1998): 263-92.

[In the following essay, Slights and Holmes highlight the role of religion in Measure for Measure through an analysis of Isabella's character.]

The symbolic centrality of religion in Measure for Measure comes as no surprise; after all, much of the play involves complications that are provoked by the machinations of a duke disguised as a friar. On a more political level, Shakespeare's play encourages audiences to consider the ways in which religion might facilitate personal desires and enable characters to challenge dominant social norms. In particular, the character of Isabella illustrates the implication of religious devotion and institutions in questions of moral agency and cultural reproduction. As a woman about to become a novice of the Order of Saint Clare, Isabella's desire to lead a cloistered existence defies early modern gender norms and suggests ways in which women could find self-affirming affective life together.

Our initial motivation for engaging with this topic was a discomfort with critical appraisals which assign Measure for Measure to a tradition of early modern antimonasticism. At the same time, though, we recognize the importance of these earlier investigations in turning attention to religious issues. Darryl J. Gless, for instance, valuably situates the play within antimonastic legal, ecclesiastical, and literary contexts, focusing on accusations of pride, avarice, hypocrisy, and cupidity leveled against nuns and monks by medieval satirists and reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and Tyndale.¹ In this study, however, we take Gless's recognition of the importance of Isabella's status as a novice in a new direction by pointing to the sympathetic portrayal of Clarist life reflected in Isabella's determined support for “fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate / To nothing temporal.”² Shakespeare, we argue, sets the volitional restraints of convent life in stark opposition to the coercive regulations of public morality practiced by Vienna's secular authorities, thereby drawing attention to the positive aspects of monastic life.

We also engage with recent sex/gender criticism of the play. In their work on Measure for Measure, Kathleen McLuskie, Barbara J. Baines, and Carolyn E. Brown fail to problematize adequately a limiting conception of womanliness that regards disinterest in heterosexual marriage as a complete renunciation of sexuality.³ By accepting the normative definitions of gender roles articulated by the male characters in the play, each of these critics reads Isabella's vocation as instrumental to her victimization by a manipulative patriarchy. Mario DiGangi has a more thorough appreciation of the multiplicity of women's sexual desires, but he too assumes that, along with Mistress Elbow, Juliet, and Mariana, Isabella becomes a wife at play's end.⁴ We hope to demonstrate instead that Isabella's religious devotion actually allows her to resist pressures to marry. As Katherine Eisaman Maus ably shows, “any link between desire and marriage in the play seems to have snapped,” and marriage functions primarily as a form of social “discipline” that attempts to override the “invisibility, inwardness, and incalculable idiosyncrasy” that characterize the citizens of Shakespeare's Vienna.⁵ At the end of her analysis of Measure for Measure. Maus argues that sexual desire's “fundamental unruliness” opens the possibility of unorthodox interpretations of Isabella's aspirations and fate.⁶ Modifying Maus's position, we propose that Isabella's spiritual desires (which may possess an erotic or sexual component) more precisely empower her to resist marital disciplinary measures.

Isabella's yearning for solidarity among women in an all-female community undermines, we suggest, the production of conventional sex/gender identities and the play's heteronormative telos. Drawing on historical and theoretical considerations of early modern nuns' lives and the relations among desire, religion, and the conscience, we examine efforts to subjugate Isabella to a normative definition of womanliness and her own attempts to achieve an alternative existence. On our account, the play's last scene does not necessarily signal Isabella's passive acquiescence to Duke Vincentio's marriage proposal, but may be interpreted as an affirmation that convent life offers her an enriching sense of community and a positive feeling of control over her own destiny.

I

Although there has been a tendency among critics of the 1970s and 1980s to dismiss early modern religious institutions as organs of repression, revisionist historians have more recently sought to emphasize the emancipatory potential of the experiences that religious sisterhood offered its members. The essays collected in Craig A. Monson's volume The Crannied Wall, for instance, put to rest what Katherine Gill, one of the contributors, labels the general “monochromatic” idea of early modern nuns' lives.⁷ Even after the strict post-Tridentine reforms, life in an early modern convent could offer an intelligent woman like Isabella outlets for creative expression. By recovering early modern texts both by and about religious women, historians and literary critics give us a rich picture of nuns whose lives frequently involved as much creative labor as prayer.⁸ Carolyn Walker Bynum's bibliography, for instance, includes a number of works written by fifteenth-century monastic women, while Isobel Grundy discusses the historical chronicles of seventeenth-century English nuns.⁹ As A. F. C. Bourdillon observes, Clarists had the opportunity to read widely in theology and mysticism,¹⁰ and, as Nicholas Orme explains, many early modern nuns had the chance to share their learning and creativity through teaching.¹¹ Monastic women also composed music, painted, and took active roles in architectural and decorative projects.¹²

In addition to acknowledging the creative outlets convent life afforded, an investigation of Isabella's position as a novice requires a sensitivity to women's desires for strong affective bonds—including homoerotic ones—with other women and their frequent discovery of those connections in convent life. Along with artistic endeavors, everyday activities such as cooking for one another, praying together, gardening, and tending each other's illnesses had the potential to draw cloistered women into loving friendships. The “mutual touching, kissing, rubbing, and … cleaning” that marked the daily chores of early modern nuns provided a physical intimacy that was integral to a shared spiritual vocation.¹³ As Grundy observes, seventeenth-century accounts of convent life by English nuns almost always include attention to the duties of good housekeeping. The communal history of Saint Monica's convent at Louvain, for instance, reveals that “shared domesticity” was a principal component in the affectionate relationships between nuns and a way to assert the biblical paradox that, in a place of apparent weakness, there was actually strong familial love in a self-renewing community.¹⁴

The companionship made possible by religious sororities inevitably posed both tacit and explicit challenges to men's control over women's bodies and minds. Unfortunately, women who discovered in convent life a source of resistance did not always escape punishment. For instance, Shakespeare was probably familiar through Holinshed's account with the story of Elizabeth Barton. As a result of her public opposition to the king's divorce and marriage proceedings, Barton became the first female martyr to the Catholic cause during the Henrician Reformation. Known popularly as “the Nun of Kent,” she entered the convent of Saint Sepulchre near Canterbury in 1525 and was vilified as a fraud and executed at Tyburn only nine years later. Barton was at least well remembered by the Benedictine nuns who, upon her death, purchased from the state some of their sister's homely personal possessions.¹⁵

The late-seventeenth-century publication of Mary Astell's Serious Proposal to the Ladies … By a Lover of Her Sex (1694 and 1697) indicates the persistent linkage of female oppositionality and conventual ideals, as well as the long-standing belief held by numerous English Protestant women that the dissolution of the convents had stripped them of an important alternative to married life.¹⁶ Unlike Roman Catholicism, Protestantism offered women no positions of social power, the role of a pastor's wife being a weak substitute for that of an abbess.¹⁷ Added to the emotional and spiritual distress of their forcible removal from their communities was the suffering experienced by English nuns at the dissolution as a result of the acute penury in which many of them were left to survive. In the diocese of Lincoln, for example, sixty percent of nuns were pensioned off at a rate of £2 or less, while only six percent of monks received such inadequate stipends.¹⁸ Throughout England, lay sisters and novices received nothing because it was assumed that they could marry.¹⁹

Despite the changes wrought by the dissolution, many English women continued to turn to Catholicism and to convent life in order to assert their independence and to express politically unorthodox views. Elizabeth Throckmorton and Elizabeth Cary are just two of the women known to have found in their associations with convent life both refuge and an inspiring sense of community. At the dissolution of the three houses of the Minoresses in 1539, Elizabeth Throckmorton of Coughton, the abbess of the Clarist convent at Denny, regrouped several of her sisters in her family's Warwickshire home. While their physical buildings had passed into the Crown's possession, until her death in 1547 Throckmorton and her companions maintained the spirit and practices of the Poor Clares, and stand as historical testament to the determination of certain women to keep their communities alive.²⁰ Although she herself never took the veil, in 1626 Elizabeth Cary defied social pressure and her husband's authority by formally and publicly converting to Roman Catholicism. Despite the hardship that her scandalous defection from both Protestantism and marital obedience brought her, Cary later successfully encouraged four of her daughters to become nuns.²¹

By diminishing women's mobility, independence, social status, and opportunities for positive community life, England's legislators attempted to negate what had for centuries been a locus of female empowerment. If the English Reformation succeeded in inhibiting official religious sororities, however, it had more difficulty quelling public debate about the value of the contemplative life. Indeed, monasticism in Measure for Measure ought to be examined in light of the remarkable tenacity with which sympathy for Roman Catholicism endured in post-Reformation England. J. J. Scarisbrick points to how the work of Marian priests and lay people (in particular, women) ensured the survival of the old faith through Elizabeth's reign and well into the seventeenth century.²² On a similar note, Christopher Haigh has recently detailed the strong doctrinal, priestly, and material (icons, vestments, altars, etc.) continuity between medieval Catholicism and its post-Reformation incarnations as religious conservatism and eventual recusancy.²³ Eamon Duffy also points out that a basic dislike of change and an ingrained Catholic instinct caused even “well-schooled subjects” to respond to vigorous Protestant reforms with inaction and concealment.²⁴ Such demonstrations of the survival of the old faith in England gainsay the assumption that few if any in Shakespeare's audiences would have imagined a cloistered vocation to be a fulfilling life.

There were many people in early modern Europe and England, however, who mocked and opposed nuns' supposedly threatening liberties. Discussions of cloistered women's religiously sanctioned but socially problematic freedoms and the rejection of heterosexual love that their lifestyle occasioned inevitably found their way into literature through accusations of hypocrisy and sexual perversion. Satirization of same-sex desire between monastic women appears, for instance, in both Erasmus's widely read “The Girl With No Interest in Marriage” (Virgo …) and in Clement Marot's lively French translation of that colloquy.²⁵ By 1604, the year of Measure for Measure's first recorded performance, post-Reformation England had also seen the development of a strident strain of anti-Catholicism that routinely targeted convent life for ridicule. Andrew Marvell's characterization in “Upon Appleton House” of the sodomitical Cistercian nuns as “Hypocrite Witches” is a well-known example of such negative attitudes toward women who chose sisterhood over marriage.²⁶

Not all the literary evaluations of monasticism, however, were negative. This plurality of perspectives is attested to by the fact that Edmund Spenser—a writer who usually took a dim view of monks, friars, and nuns—voiced occasional support for monastic ideals.²⁷ Shakespeare too at times presented convent life as a valid alternative to marriage. In A Midsummer Night's Dream Duke Theseus counsels Hermia to examine her “desires,” and to ask herself whether she

can endure the livery of a nun,
For aye to be in shady cloister mew'd,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chaunting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.

(1.1.69-73)

Even Theseus, however, acknowledges the divine nature of clausura, noting that “Thrice blessed [are] they that master so their blood / To undergo such maiden pilgrimage” (74-75).²⁸

The negative elements of Theseus's commentary can be understood not so much as satirizing Catholic devotional practice as responding anxiously to nonreproductive same-sex relations. As Valerie Traub notes in her discussion of early modern dramatic treatments of women's homoeroticism, even when such desires and friendships are not vilified they are relegated to an elegiac past. “Heterosexual desire is produced and inserted into the narrative,” she suggests, “in order to create a formal, ‘natural’ mechanism of closure.”²⁹ Thus, the naturalization of heteronomativity is a matter of both social coercion and manipulative generic convention. Not only does female same-sex desire threaten to destabilize familiar patterns of social behavior, but it also risks disrupting conventional comic tropes and structures.

Measure for Measure constitutes an intriguing complication of Traub's insightful analysis. We suggest that the options afforded women by religious sorority call for the expansion of Traub's conclusions to include same-sex female solidarity expressed through the bonds of religious sisterhood. Such unions offer a form of mutuality that explicitly defies heteronormative closure just as powerfully as it asserts the existence of alternative options for women. Like DiGangi, we are interested by Isabella's “history of homosocial independence and cherished virginity.”³⁰ These two aspects of her character encourage a critical awareness that female solidarity and the potential for choice entailed by the very existence of the homosocial convent and its warrant of virgin chastity remind audiences and readers of the variety of possible constructions of female identity and lifestyle the play offers.

Through its representative, Isabella, the convent of the Clares is made a constant presence in the Vienna of Measure for Measure. Shakespeare's decision to make Isabella a sister of Saint Clare was likely based on an awareness of the order's reputation for asceticism as well as a knowledge of its tradition of resisting patriarchal control. The eponymous Order of Saint Clare—the first of the enclosed sororities—was founded at Assisi, Italy in 1212. At eighteen years of age, Clare received the habit from the hands of Francis of Assisi and, despite dogged protest by her family, entered into monastic life. Clare was eventually joined by other women, including her own mother, sisters, and nieces. Setting a standard of absolute poverty and great austerity of life, she eventually established the Second Order of Saint Francis at San Damiano. Clare's most important cultural legacy was her long battle with the church fathers over her right to compose the rule of her order. In 1253, only two days before her death, Clare was victorious; her rule was approved for use and the Clarists' right to self-determination was confirmed.

In England, the Middle English version of the Rule of the Second Order, or “Menouresses enclosid,” testifies to the continued importance the Clarists placed on chastity and silence. Drawn up circa 1263 (and later revised by Pope Boniface VIII), this version of the rule was probably written for use in the Convent of the Minories in London. According to the rule, chastity and silence are central to the vows taken by the Clarists: “I Suster … bihote to god & owre ladi blissid mayde marie & to seynt Fraunces, to myne ladi seint Clare & to alle seyntis … be alle (th)e time of myne life, In obedience, In chastite, wi(th)owte properte or voyse in (th)e Cloyster.”³¹ In terms of Shakespeare's naming and characterization of Isabella, it is important to note that this uniquely English version of the Rule of the Second Order is known as the Isabella Rule after its author, the Blessed Isabella, sister of Louis IX, King of France, and founder of the monastery of the Humility of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Longchamp, near Paris.³² G. K. Hunter argues that the names of Isabella and her companion nun, Francisca, indicate Shakespeare's “detailed knowledge” of the Clarist presence in predissolution England.³³ Hunter's tracing of her Clarist lineage supports our claim that Isabella's strong convictions go beyond mere personality quirk and are instead grounded in a powerful and potentially oppositional woman-centered social environment.

II

Like Saint Clare's dream of founding a religious order for women, Isabella's desire to become a nun involves a dissident repudiation of men's right to control women's destinies. When we speak of “dissidence” here, we do not have in mind full-scale revolution, but rather the various tactical actions that allow individual agents to resist coercive authority in their daily lives. Such dissident acts are often necessary to accommodate fundamental personal desires and ought, therefore, to be considered techniques of social survival as well as, at times, critical interventions in otherwise hegemonic cultural formations. Jonathan Dollimore argues that “desire” often makes it appear that women and men freely choose their own destinies when, in fact, desire is an ideologically constrained dimension of thought and volition.³⁴ Although we accept that there are no primordial desires which reveal the “truth” of human nature, we nonetheless want to argue that it is precisely at the level of desire that individuals in Measure for Measure are able to resist and reshape the material and ideological forces that constitute their social experience. Nowhere in Shakespeare's play is this better demonstrated than in those desires filtered through religion, a phenomenon implicated in political, sexual, and devotional agency.

Early modern people were acutely aware that ideological systems and social structures are susceptible to fragmentation and change.³⁵ Gaps between individual desires and official norms frequently lead to the disturbance of cultural and political values. In Measure for Measure such a gap is produced through the juxtaposition of Isabella's desire to find a fulfilling life outside the bonds of marriage and state authorities' attempts to deploy religion as a means of policing public morality. Disguised as a monk, Duke Vincentio, for instance, attempts to shape his subjects into devout, orderly, and hence nonthreatening citizens. Stephen Greenblatt and Dollimore point to the Machiavellian component of the duke's attempt to effect an internalization of ideological norms and thereby render his citizenry compliant.³⁶ According to Machiavelli, Roman history proves that religion aids “in the control of armies, in encouraging the plebs, in producing good men, and in shaming the bad.”³⁷ Vincentio's strategy entails just such an appropriation of religion in order to produce “good men” (see Measure 1.2.43-45), most obviously by invoking a weighty contemplatio mortis tradition (3.1.6-11, 19-21).³⁸ The Duke is interested in manipulating Claudio's spiritual identity because he recognizes that it is the conscience which must be shaped in order to produce a docile and pliant citizen. As Claudio's fear and despair show, however, in Measure for Measure control over the conscience is not so easily achieved. In fact, a more powerful but seldom noted connection between religion and conscience in the play explains Isabella's ability to resist such manipulation.

Isabella is first mentioned by her imprisoned brother Claudio, who instructs Lucio to inform her of his plight and to ask her to petition Angelo, the duke's surrogate, for his release. Claudio's description of Isabella informs an audience that she is scheduled to enter a convent as a novice this same day, and that she has powerful persuasive abilities:

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.

(1.2.182-86)

Claudio's description of Isabella is a strange amalgam of mixed metaphor and oxymoron. The image of a “prone and speechless dialect” that he identifies with his sister's particular talent for persuasion (and, implicitly, with his own hope for survival) is ambiguous and erotically charged. Claudio hints that while she has developed and practiced the art of verbal persuasion, his sister's youthful body possesses even greater persuasive potential. By yoking Isabella's logical and rhetorical skills—her ability to “play with reason and discourse” to change men's minds—with “speechless” seduction, he intimates an even more compelling bodily discourse and foreshadows the paradoxical role Isabella is to play as his defender and, later, as his accuser.

If Claudio's exchange with Lucio paints a portrait of Isabella in which agential force resides within her, the language and action of the following scenes further complicate this understanding of representational strategies and social dynamics. When we first encounter Isabella she is at the convent of the “votarists of Saint Clare,” discussing with a nun named Francisca her wish for “more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood” than even the Order of the Poor Clares, renowned for its severity, requires (1.4.4-5). This picture of Isabella clashes fairly dramatically with that drawn earlier by her brother. Here, Isabella associates her religious vocation with a personal desire for restrictions on social interaction and emphasizes her proclivity for taciturnity, if not silence, rather than the oratorical skills her brother chose to accent. While some might regard the Viennese convent as a place of unnatural and coercive repression and surveillance, the history of clausura that we have charted encourages a recognition that many women found personal security and tenderness in such an environment. Given the Clarist emphasis on silence, the actors performing the roles of Francisca and Isabella have an opportunity to convey this affectionate side of nuns' lives through a recurrent readiness to communicate through “speechless” (but not action-less or emotion-less) silence.

Like Saint Clare, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and her other historical analogues, Isabella must find a way to negotiate the competing claims of, on the one hand, male relatives and their authority, and, on the other, her desire for a cloistered life spent solely among other women. When Lucio tries to convince Isabella to act on behalf of Claudio—“All hope is gone, / Unless you have the grace by your fair prayer / To soften Angelo” (1.4.68-70)—Isabella is at first unwilling to accept the task. While Lucio interprets Isabella's reticence as insecurity—she speaks in the briefest of sentences only to greet her visitor and to question him regarding his business—her relative silence suggests an aversion to leaving the convent and a disinclination to abandon its restrictions on speech. Indeed, Lucio's noisy arrival at the convent gates affords a direct glimpse of the quiet, female world Isabella has chosen to enter.

Turning again to the English Poor Clares' emphasis on silence, it is possible to detect what is likely an important precedent for Shakespeare's treatment of Isabella and Francisca:

Silence, be it alle Sustres holden in soche maner, (th)at (th)ey speke nat wi(th)oute licence no one to o(th)er, ne to none o(th)er, sauynge (th)efebel & (th)e syke. But alle gates (th)at (th)e Abbesse, or presedente take kepe ententifeliche in whoche place, whan, & how sche schal gif licence to sustris for to speke. … Whan anybodi to any of (th)e Sustris schal speke, First schal (th)e Abbesses be warnid … And allegatis (th)at (th)e sustris whiche haue for to speke to any straunger, (th)at (th)ey be welware (th)at (th)ey aboundyn nat hem for to speke in vayne wi(th) owtyn profit & houre longe.³⁹

Echoing the general precepts governing speech among members of the Order articulated in this part of “The Rewle,” Francisca's words to Isabella emphasize the separation from a male-centered world of business that convent life in Measure for Measure entails:

It is a man's voice. Gentle Isabella,
Turn you the key, and know his business of him;
You may, I may not; you are not 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.
He calls again; I pray you answer him.

(1.4.7-14)

Francisca's reassuring tone stands in marked opposition to Lucio's boisterously invasive greeting. “Ho! Peace be in this place!” Lucio cries from offstage, inviting an audience to acknowledge that Isabella is only likely to find true peace once she has fully entered into the companionate and silent life of sisterhood for which she yearns. Although the rules of her order are strict, there is no hint of coercion or repression in Francisca's speech. Isabella is free to communicate with this visitor, she insists. Once Isabella has chosen to take the final vows of her order, however, she, like Francisca, will have elected to enter an environment in which her sisters will be her constant companions.⁴⁰

Apparently either ignorant or disdainful of clausura's interdictions against speech and mixing in society, Lucio hollers outside the gates of the convent while the women continue their calm conversation. Once he has gained access to the convent, Lucio is no less abrasive. Ignoring Isabella's first tentative inquiry (“Who is't that calls?” [1.4.15]), Lucio assails her with chatter and innuendo. His instructions to Isabella recast Claudio's earlier confusion of rational persuasion with physical seduction:

Go to Lord Angelo,
And let him learn to know, when maidens sue,
Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel,
All their petitions are as freely theirs
As they themselves would owe them.

(1.4.79-83)

The connotations of the word “sue” in this speech include an eroticized wooing or courting. Whether or not an audience catches Lucio's pun, it seems clear that his strategy for securing Claudio's release depends upon the persuasive force of Isabella's physical presence. Significantly, Isabella does not respond directly to Lucio's scheme or its method, but does finally agree with an unenthusiastic, “I'll see what I can do” (1.4.83). Isabella's offhand, even sullen promise sounds more like the stuff of late-twentieth-century adolescence than of early-seventeenth-century sisterhood, and signals her grudging acceptance of familial duty rather than eager approbation of Lucio's plan.

Isabella again demonstrates her lack of enthusiasm during her initial visit with the Duke's deputy. At first, her suit is unsuccessful; she turns to leave after Angelo's first rebuff and stays on only at Lucio's further prodding. “Give't not o'er so,” urges Lucio,

To him again, entreat him,
Kneel down before him, hang upon his gown;
You are too cold. If you should need a pin,
You could not with more tame a tongue desire it;
To him, I say!

(2.2.43-48)

Although Isabella obeys Lucio's command to remain, she chooses not to use the strategies of persuasion he recommends. Rather than deploying the “speechless dialect” of body language—rather than throwing herself at Angelo's feet and hanging upon his gown—Isabella attempts to win over the deputy by appealing to his reason and faith, relying on rhetorical skill and ethical argument instead of on physical seduction to persuade him.

Importantly, Isabella does not begin to “move” Angelo until she deploys a discourse of religiosity, a strategy of persuasion foreshadowed by Lucio's earlier instructions regarding “grace” and “fair prayer.”⁴¹ The concept of mercy is key to Isabella's rhetoric:

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgement, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that,
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.

(2.2.73-79)

Framed by an appeal to Angelo's secular power, Isabella's speech invokes Christ's merciful dealings with humankind. Rather than attacking his right or might as the Duke's surrogate, Isabella equates Angelo's political powers with those of divine governance. By speaking compassionate words, she suggests, Angelo can become the source of life; by exercising Christian mercy, Angelo might claim both the power of creation and the salvation of the just. Here and elsewhere, Isabella's words allude to the title of Shakespeare's play as they recall Christ's injunction from the Sermon on the Mount:

Iudge not, that ye be not iudged. For with what judgement ye iudge, ye shalbe iudged, and with what measure ye mete, it shalbe measured to you againe. And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brothers eye, and perceivest not the beame that is in thine owne eye? … Hypocrite, first cast out that beame out of thine owne eye, and then shalt thou see clearely to cast out the mote out of thy brothers eye.⁴²

Angelo, the play's principal “hypocrite,” defends his decision to condemn Claudio by denying his own agency, a tactic that enables him to eschew mercy: “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother” (2.2.80). Angelo's recourse to abstract and inherited principles of justice belies both the constructed character of the law and the necessary role of human agency in administering its precepts.

As Judith Butler points out, a judge derives power through “citation”; “it is through the invocation of convention that the speech act of the judge derives its binding power; that binding power is to be found neither in the subject of the judge nor in his will, but in the citational legacy.”⁴³ Indeed, Angelo's defense accords with an early-seventeenth-century shift in English jurisprudence away from reason and the recognition of contingency and toward historical precedent as the guiding force in legal decisions.⁴⁴ The increased inflexibility entailed by this shift is reflected in Angelo's invocation of originary precedent:

The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.
Those many had not dar'd to do that evil
If the first that did th' edict infringe
Had answer'd for his deed. Now 'tis awake.

(2.2.90-93)⁴⁵

According to Isabella, the law's awakening entails the slumbering of human compassion and virtue, and the establishment of “tyrannous” rule (2.2.108). In essence, Isabella does little more than remind Angelo of the full extent of his own power. Angelo is no longer simply an advisor to Duke Vincentio and hence an agent of the law; he is, albeit temporarily, the final authority in Vienna and it is to this ultimate power, this quasi-divine agency, that Isabella appeals. “Mortality and mercy in Vienna,” her arguments seek to remind him, “Live in thy tongue and heart” (1.1.44-45; our emphasis). Worldly justice is always administered subjectively, Isabella asserts; because of its contingent origin justice can and ought to be administered mercifully.

The first clear verbal indication that Angelo has been upset occurs as a result of Isabella's powerful directive to

Go to your bosom,
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault. If it confess
A natural guiltiness, such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life.

(2.2.136-41)

In an aside, Angelo reveals the consternation that Isabella's words have provoked—“She speaks, and 'tis such sense that my sense breeds with it” (2.2.142)—and he immediately attempts to dismiss her from his presence. Isabella's instruction to Angelo to “Go to your bosom, / Knock there” conforms to the Socratic dictum “Know thyself,” a philosophic commonplace much repeated in humanist circles. In addition, however, it suggests an intriguing doubleness in Angelo's identity. On the one hand, Angelo possesses a social, exterior persona as Viennese administrator; on the other, Isabella posits a more fundamental, “natural” self described as inward yet discoverable. Drawing on a Christian ethic of recognizing shared abjection before God, Isabella attempts to provoke in Angelo an awareness of his common humanity with Claudio and, from there, to inspire him to pity and assist other people. Isabella's rhetoric of self-knowledge and shared guilt problematizes a mainstay of Angelo's official position—the equivalence of actions and agents—a view articulated when he claims: “Mine were the very cipher of a function, / To fine the faults whose fine stands in record, / And let go by the actor” (2.2.39-41). Angelo fears that by recognizing his common humanity he will become a “cipher,” a thing that according to the OED “fills a place, but is of no importance or worth, a nonentity, a ‘mere nothing.’”⁴⁶ In order to count in the world, according to Angelo, one must strictly conform to prescriptive moral and legal codes. Isabella instead deciphers normative ethics, showing that juridical categories of being and nothingness, innocence and guilt, are culturally constructed tools necessary for social ordering and exploitation.

Isabella's understanding of human identity and culpability insistently takes into consideration people's intentions as well as the results of their actions; she also applies reason to each case and judges each independently, thereby throwing into stark relief the brutish side of civil order.⁴⁷ As Isabella insists, and as a wary audience likely all along suspects, Angelo's claim for impartial objectivity and unified identity is a sham. When confronted with the power of Isabella's insight, his facade crumbles. Alone on stage, Angelo confesses his moral turpitude:

What's this? what's this? Is this her fault, or mine?
The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most, ha?
Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flow'r,
Corrupt with virtuous season.

(2.2.162-67)

Even the indirection of Angelo's third-person syntax unsettles his vaunted coherence when he asks, “What dost thou? or what art thou, Angelo?” (2.2.172). Angelo is indeed following Isabella's advice and inquiring as to what guilt his heart knows; yet, obdurately focused on his own sexual lust, he is unwilling to take the charitable next step.

Almost prophetically, Isabella's words about “natural guiltiness” come back to haunt her, as Angelo conceives a lustful passion for the Clarist novice:

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.

(2.4.1-7)

Angelo's use of the word “heaven” twice in this short speech points to the precariousness of even the most basic religious and ethical tenets. Without an agent's will, all the heavenly doctrine in the world cannot ensure goodness if a person refuses to digest it. Words, the play reminds us, do not bear a necessary affinity to a person's inward desires and “inventions”; they can also easily be perverted from their common signification.⁴⁸

Seeking to fulfill his own sexual desire, Angelo resorts to brute force, attempting to trade Claudio's life for Isabella's virginity: “You must lay down the treasures of your body / To this supposed, or else to let him suffer” (2.4.96-97). Even as he seeks to take advantage of his privileged position as Vienna's supreme patriarch, Angelo's words direct attention to the gendering of experience that authority inculcates:

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.

(2.4.134-38)⁴⁹

Angelo's lines associate the life of a woman with servitude and demand that Isabella adopt a costume that signifies her subjection. He emphasizes his conviction that the outside of a woman—her anatomical “external warrants”—must conform to a predetermined inward narrative of sexual desire that confirms his own limited notion of identity coherence. Angelo's strategy of molding Isabella confirms Butler's observation that “femininity is … not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm.”⁵⁰ As his words reveal, Angelo desires Isabella to be really “feminine.” The fact, however, that Angelo requires Isabella to supplement her “external warrants” with a womanly “livery” (i.e., the costume of a servant) demonstrates his anxious recognition that gendered “destiny” could be a semiotic, and not necessarily a biological or metaphysical, phenomenon.

The gender aporia that Angelo's talk of performance and fate reveals encourages playgoers and readers to ponder what other identificatory options might exist for Isabella. While Angelo's notion of what a woman can be rejects plurality, his words ironically signal an important connection that bears on subsequent developments in the play. “If you be more, you're none,” claims Angelo. No matter how Isabella is costumed at this moment, attentive audience members will note the play on the word “none” which, in this context, relates to Angelo's equation of the nonconforming woman with nothingness—that is, if a woman won't have sex with a man she has no identity—as well as to Isabella's chosen profession as a sister of the Order of Saint Clare. With this deft doubleness of signification, Shakespeare establishes in Isabella's office as a nun a radical challenge to patriarchal gender norms that predicate female identity on insemination. At once a chaste bride of Christ and a politically savvy woman, Isabella is “more than” a woman in Angelo's terms and as such constitutes a forceful challenge to conventional assumptions about the connection between sexuality and female identity. While the male characters in the play seek to define her according to conventional secular categories of womanliness, Isabella's role as future nun is powerful proof of the inadequacy of conceptions of gender that insist on yoking identity to sexual behavior.

In Measure for Measure the corrosion of normative gender identities is not confined to womanliness; manliness, too, comes under demystificatory scrutiny. When Angelo demands that she acknowledge the essential frailty of women, for instance, Isabella agrees but undercuts his normative logic by arguing that all selves are created selves:

ANG.
Nay, women are frail too.
ISAB.
Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves,
Which are as easy broke as they make forms.
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.

(2.4.124-30)

This passage is often read as Isabella's restatement of the common assumption that women are by nature weak, vain, and therefore susceptible to sexual exploitation by men.⁵¹ Her clever manipulation of familiar images, however, reveals Isabella as anything but “credulous.” She begins by comparing women to glass on the basis of their shared fragility. Her simile, however, not only evokes the proverbial association of glass with virginity, but also yokes women with mirrors through their shared ability to create forms. Women make forms, this figure suggests, not simply by having children, but also by having created the images they see reflected back at them in mirrors. If Isabella's image of women implies their frailty and sexual fecundity, it also emphasizes their ability to fashion themselves. As the pronoun slippage at lines 127-28 and 129 suggests, if women are creators of selves, so too are men. The ambiguity of Isabella's pronoun use when she asserts that “men their creation mar” suggests she is arguing not simply that women are frail and malleable, but also that women are creative and men are malleable.

At the end of her brief speech, Isabella picks up on Angelo's earlier comparison of the unlawful begetter of children and the counterfeiter (“their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image / In stamps that are forbid” [2.4.45-46]). As the subject of Isabella's sentence shifts from “they” (women) to the collective—or at least gender-ambiguous—“we” (socially constructed selves), her figurative image evolves into a metaphoric association of imprintable selves with the soft metal of coins that take the print of sovereigns.⁵² Isabella's final punning homonym drives her dual point home: Angelo's identity is a constructed one, and men and women alike must be wary of both “false prints” in general and the false prince to whom she is speaking in particular.

Isabella recasts her criticisms in even more pointed language when she rails at Claudio for wanting her to exchange her chastity for his life:

Oh, you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame?

(3.1.135-39)

In addition to pointing out the ideological nature of masculinity—a man is “made,” not born—Isabella skillfully argues that Claudio's pride in both his sister's virginity and her agential force rests in their potential to fulfill his own desires. Although he employs religious imagery, Claudio's appeal is based on a claim to “natural” fraternal love: “What sin you do to save a brother's life, / Nature dispenses with the deed so far, / That it becomes a virtue” (3.1.132-34). A sinful action on his behalf, Claudio's sophistry runs, would make Isabella virtuous. For Isabella, sin can never be virtuous; a relationship that calls on her to relinquish not simply her honor but also her personal beliefs, desires, and sense of self is monstrous rather than natural.⁵³

III

While some audience members might criticize Isabella's own protection of something the value of which is itself culturally constructed—as indicated especially by her evocation of the coercive notion of “shame”—many will likely be stirred by her defense of the basic right to self-determination in the face of such hostile attacks. Given what spectators see of Viennese manhood, gentle Francisca and the promise of other like-minded women cannot help but seem a relief from Lucio, Angelo, Claudio, and the duke of dark corners. In addition, Isabella's chastity is presented as much more than simply the mechanism by which she clings to the social status of maidenhead, a power that McLuskie, DiGangi, and others have identified as hollow and determined by men's desires. Understanding Isabella's values as “grounded more firmly in the secular than in the religious” realm, however, Baines suggests that Isabella is duped into self-abnegation by a constraining cultural imperative. Having made her “one great concession to the patriarchal law by renouncing her sexuality,’ Baines argues, “Isabella willingly embraces the strictest laws of the Mother Superior to escape total subjugation under the law of the patriarch or the father, signified by the phallus.”⁵⁴ To understand Isabella's vows of celibacy as nothing more than a repression of natural desire (as both Baines and Angelo seem to do), or to see her chastity as merely a strategy by which she misguidedly attempts to retain agency in the secular world, is to accept a paternalist ideology that ignores early modern nuns' many positive evaluations of convent life. Isabella herself shows no sign of doing either. Rather, she presents her chastity as an instrumental part of her spiritual vocation and a material condition of her desire to devote herself to God. Indeed, Isabella's attitude toward chastity offers audiences the opportunity to consider women's sexuality as comprising more than bodily contact with men, especially for women living in a nuptial relation with Christ.⁵⁵

In the final act of the drama, Shakespeare's reintroduction of the construction of gender through heteronormative sexuality and marriage provides Isabella with an opportunity to affirm her commitment to life as a nun. As disguises are shed and narrative knots united, a predictable series of marital promises is effected. Maids become wives and wives become wives; Claudio will have Juliet and Mariana will wed Angelo. This is all to be expected in a comedy. But even as the apparently paternalist agenda of the play reasserts itself and rescues these women from marginality by returning them to seemingly fulfilling places within the established hierarchy, positively troubling points of resistance to closure remain.

The equation between an actual woman and the cultural category of womanliness is evoked and challenged as Mariana—another veiled woman—appears before the newly returned duke to bear witness against Angelo. When Mariana refuses to lift her veil until commanded by her husband, but replies under questioning that she is neither wife, nor maid, nor widow, the duke, echoing his deputy's earlier words to Isabella, concludes, “Why, you are nothing then” (5.1.177). A woman who cannot comply with available models of femininity and womanly behavior, a woman without a specified role defined in terms of the men with whom she has been associated, ceases to “be” as far as Viennese patriarchy is concerned. Although intended both as an insult and as a joke, Lucio's suggestion that the veiled woman may be a prostitute (179-80), and therefore a “less than nothing” according to the entrenched social and moral hierarchy of the city-state, further illuminates the absurdity of such arbitrary and culturally constructed accounts of womanliness.

If Mariana's betrothal to Angelo occludes the disruptive potential of her marginal status, what then of Isabella's even more precarious position? Although entreated by the duke four times to marry him, Isabella never explicitly accepts his proposal. Tellingly, the first three times the duke raises the subject of marriage he expresses his intent as an imperative: “Come hither, Isabel, / Your friar is now your prince” (381-82); “And now, dear maid, be you as free to us” (388); “Give me your hand, and say you will be mine” (492). The first time, Isabella changes the subject; the second, her “I do, my lord” (399) merely reflects her agreement that “life is better, past fearing death” (397); and, upon the third, Isabella is silent, her actions left up to individual directors. Only the fourth time does the duke alter his speech pattern to sound a little more accommodating:

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 is yours is mine.

(534-37)

Two lines later the play ends, and readers of Shakespeare's text are left to determine for themselves whether Isabella had a “willing ear” or not. In the theater, however, an actor must visually represent Isabella's state of mind, thus allowing audience members to witness her final decision.

Bowing to what seems an unnecessarily limiting conception of comic closure, many productions of Measure for Measure offer audiences a fairly standard final tableau: Isabella smiles at the Duke and takes his arm, tacitly accepting his proposal.⁵⁶ Other directors choose to disrupt both the narrative of nuptials and the comic resolution of the play's close by having Isabella turn her back on Vincentio's “motion.” We contend that neither conclusion manages to account satisfactorily for what an audience has learned about Isabella's habit of mind while also acknowledging the levity of spirit that pervades the play's final scene. In light of our foregoing analysis of gender and agency in Measure for Measure, we argue that there is little textual evidence that Isabella happily betroths herself to Vincentio. Not once does Shakespeare suggest that Isabella has undergone the kind of volitional transformation experienced, for example, by Olivia or Portia of Belmont that would motivate her to accept the Duke's offer of marriage. As Anthony Dawson points out, “the elaborate restitution at the end of Measure for Measure is more hoax than reaffirmation.”⁵⁷

If a pliant Isabella, suddenly willing to sacrifice her hard-won right to self-determination, jars with the play's consistent complication of normative definitions of both identity and happiness, a fiercely hostile Isabella, ready to flaunt secular power and march back to the convent, collides with the play's insistence on the value of community and the need for humane government. Throughout Measure for Measure, Isabella recognizes the importance of her ties to the secular world, affirming the strength of both her own familial bonds as well as those of Juliet and Mariana. She also grants the necessity of secular law and secular rulers, providing that neither contravenes the laws of God. Isabella recognizes the authority of “lawful mercy”; it is the recommendation of “foul redemption” to which she objects (2.4.112-13). Neither meek acceptance nor spiteful refusal seems an acceptable characterization of Isabella's final moments on stage.

At the end of Act 5, a knowing, self-confident, and somewhat amused Isabella—rather than one who is either docile or self-righteous—would be in keeping with her desires and character as they have been revealed throughout the play. Rolling her eyes heavenward, Isabella might direct at audiences an exasperated and conspiratorial smile. The joke is, after all, on the men of the play who have yet to understand the weakness of the normative foundations on which their claims to authority are constructed. Through the course of Measure for Measure, meanwhile, Isabella has won a series of important battles that undermine such misconceptions. She has successfully defended her chastity and hence protected her right to self-determination. She has seen her brother resurrected. She has emerged victorious from both the legal and emotional turmoil of repeated and abusive encounters with an inflexible, male-centered secular world. Without undermining the comic flavor of the play's final moments, Isabella's gaze heavenward and her conspiratorial smile would signal both a firm determination to return to a life of religious devotion and a recognition that, while her battle for the right to define herself and to fulfill her own desires has been won, the war for the control of women's bodies and minds is far from over.

Assuming that her silence equals consent, most recent critics do not discuss the possibility that Isabella rejects the Duke's final attempt at coercion in favor of a return to her convent.⁵⁸ We contend that Isabella's silence at the end of Measure for Measure is a dissident action constituted not in speech, but in the language of the body. When the Duke tries to gain possession of Isabella through marriage, he is met first with derision (as we have already noted, Isabella appears to mock his desire by giving her “I do” to an unrelated issue), and finally with silence. In the opening scenes of the play Isabella employs her rational and rhetorical skills to defend her brother; at the end of the play, her role in secular affairs concluded, Isabella elects to return to the ways of her Order. At Measure for Measure's end Isabella communicates in the same way that her Clarist sisters do, by not speaking. If, in the world of Shakespeare's play, being a woman entails domination and use by men, then Isabella wants no part of that injustice. Literalizing the role of a nun, someone alien to the world and its coercive measures, Isabella rejects speech. Refusing to speak the performative discourse of the secular world, Isabella dissents from the ritualized repetition of patriarchal control over women's bodies, thus making “nunsense” of Western culture's identificatory norms.⁵⁹

IV

A short speech near the play's conclusion conveys in clear terms Isabella's relation to social coercion, personal predilection, and the locus of dissenting desires. As punishments are meted out and marriages arranged, Mariana twice pleads for Isabella to join her in begging the Duke to spare Angelo, her husband-to-be. Finally agreeing to plead on Mariana's behalf, Isabella argues that Angelo should not be punished because his crime existed only at the level of thought and never physically materialized:

For Angelo,
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.

(5.1.450-54)

In the sentence that concludes her speech, the word “subjects” can mean either substantive entities or citizens of the state. Taken either way, the epigrammatic statement indicates the value Isabella places on the sanctity of private thoughts. If one reads “subjects” in a political sense, however, Isabella's words support an interpretation of her desire for the state to leave people's private lives alone, whether those involved are Juliet and Claudio or she and her sisters. In this sense, Measure for Measure marks a stage in the privatization of desire in Western culture, a process that began during the late Middle Ages and that seems to have gathered especial force in the seventeenth century. As boundaries between licit and illicit desires and behaviors came to be ever more regulated and defined by governmental intervention, sexualized and gendered identities began to be constructed around privatized desires.⁶⁰ Isabella's desire to realize an inward spiritual turn—which involves an outward turn toward a supportive community—can be seen as part of Shakespeare's exploration of this historical transformation in ways of conceiving of identity and of possible resistance to its normative configurations.

The importance of a community of like-minded women is apparent even in the secular world of the play, especially in Isabella's relations with Mariana. In the eyes of the world both Mariana and Isabella are “nothing” and Mariana has herself spent many years living a cloistered existence in the moated grange at St. Luke's. During the unfolding of the bed trick in the final scene, the identities of Mariana and Isabella become entwined, the former telling the duke that Angelo “thinks he knows that he ne'er knew my body, / But knows he thinks that he knows Isabel's” (5.1.203-204), the syntactical complexity of her observation underscoring the two women's similarity. The religious resonance of Mariana's words similarly emphasizes a spiritual unity when, unveiling herself, she intones, in language evoking Christ's redemptive grace: “this is the body / That took away the match from Isabel” (5.1.210-11). Finally, the solidarity between Mariana and Isabella is suggested by their joint kneeling in common cause before the Duke, and the silence with which they both greet his marriage plans for them. While Mariana's desire is to move out of a cloistered space into the world of heterosexual marriage and Isabella seeks to return to a society composed entirely of women, they both experience and draw upon the solidarity of female friendships to achieve their ends.⁶¹

In Measure for Measure, invisibility and silence are vital clues to the nature of Isabella's desires. For Isabella, the physical survival of her body is of less concern than the integrity of her beliefs and values. Isabella informs Angelo that she would willingly sacrifice her life or endure torture to save Claudio (2.4.55, 99-103; cf. 3.1.104). She will not, however, “yield / [Her] body up to shame” (2.4.103-4; cf. 2.4.105-8 and 3.1.116). Describing intercourse with Angelo as “foul redemption” (113) and “abhorred pollution” (183), Isabella chooses to safeguard her “chastity” (185). The strength of her conviction is poignantly demonstrated when she looks her imprisoned brother in the eye and declares her resolution with the words: “Take my defiance! / Die, perish!” (3.1.142-43). Isabella's fortitude derives, we argue, from inward conviction. As she tells the disguised Duke several lines later: “I have spirit to do any thing that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit” (3.1.205-7). If her adamant references to “my defiance” and “my spirit” underscore the individuality of Isabella's notions of morality, her vocation for the sisterhood expresses the communal component of her ethical commitment.

The unproblematized assumption that marriage and sexual behavior are linked to gender in immutable ways is not confined to characters in Shakespeare's play-text. The dominant codes of Western public culture dictate that if you are a “woman,” to desire a “man” proves it.⁶² The refusal to credit women with deep and lasting emotional and possibly erotic attachments to other women is still alive in many circles today, including literary criticism. According to many people, being a “real” woman (or, for that matter, a “real” man) means leaving behind same-sex attachments as mere playthings and entering the world of adult-read: heterosexual-relationships. Isabella, however, desires a world of total female companionship within a context explicitly oriented to religious devotion. Her choice illustrates the vulnerability of even the most apparently secure of ideological formations to internal dissidence. Isabella wishes to be a nun and, therefore, according to cultural norms, is “no woman” because she does not sexually desire men. As a sister of Saint Clare, Isabella will be neither married (in corporeal terms) nor procreative. Isabella's challenge to conventional notions of what a woman is and of how she ought to use her body as well as her mind demonstrates that religion in early modern culture was much less a hegemonic absolute than a potentially dynamic zone of self-assertion and cultural critique.

Notes

1. Darryl J. Gless, “Measure for Measure,” the Law, and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). We would like to thank Michael Bristol, Stephen Ahern, and Dennis Denisoff for their valuable insights and good humor. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the intellectual and economic support of the McGill Shakespeare in the Theatre Research Group.

2. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 2.2.154-55. All subsequent quotations from Measure for Measure and from Shakespeare's other plays are from the Riverside edition and are documented parenthetically in the text.

3. Kathleen McLuskie, “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 88-108; Barbara J. Baines, “Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure,” SEL [Studies in English Literature] 30 (1990): 283-301; Carolyn E. Brown, “Erotic Religious Flagellation and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] i6 (1986): 139-65.

4. Mario DiGangi, “Pleasure and Danger: Measuring Female Sexuality in Measure for Measure,” ELH 60 (1993): 589-609.

5. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 158, 179, 177.

6. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 180.

7. Craig A. Monson, ed., The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 16. On convent life in early modern England, see David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Eileen Edna Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1922). On the rich varieties of religious women's lives on the continent, see also McNamara, Sisters in Arms, and Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

8. Establishing a history of early modern nuns' lives has been hampered by a paucity of primary sources and by a scholarly tradition that has marginalized cloistered women's experiences. This process has been further complicated by a critical neglect of writings by early modern women. As Betty Travitsky notes, the forms of writing most common to women of the Renaissance—diaries, memoirs, occasional journals, spiritual autobiographies, and private letters—are now considered uncanonical and therefore receive comparatively little scholarly attention (The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance [New York: Columbia University Press, 1989], xvii).

9. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Isobel Grundy, “Women's History? Writings by English Nuns,” in Women, Writing, History: 1640-1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 126-38.

10. A. F. C. Bourdillon, The Order of Minoresses in England, vol. 12 of British Society of Franciscan Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1926), 78-80.

11. Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066-1530 (London: Methuen, 1984), 60-65.

12. See Jeryldene M. Wood, “Breaking the Silence: The Poor Clares and the Visual Arts in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” RenQ [Renaissance Quarterly] 48 (1995): 272, 267-69.

13. Colin Richmond, “The English Gentry and Religion, c. 1500,” in Religious Belief and Ecclesiastical Careers in Late Medieval England, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1991), 140.

14. Grundy, “Women's History?” 132-33, 136-37. Patricia Crawford also points to the wide variety of domestic activities that could comprise a nun's religious commitment. She cites the case of Lucy Knatchbull, whose experiences as a novice speak to the association between spiritual fulfillment and daily activities like praying, reading, singing, sweeping, and washing dishes (Women and Religion in England 1500-1720 [London: Routledge, 1993, 84).

15. On Elizabeth Barton, see Crawford, Women and Religion, 28-29; Knowles, Religious Orders, 182-gl; Alan Neame, The Holy Maid of Kent: The Life of Elizabeth Barton, 1506-1534 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971).

16. See Retha Warnicke, “Private and Public: The Boundaries of Women's Lives in Early Stuart England,” in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink, vol. 23 of Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993), 133; Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 136.

17. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, abr. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 141; Wiesner, Women and Gender, 193.

18. Crawford, Women and Religion, 29-30; Wiesner, Women and Gender, 192.

19. McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 426.

20. See Bourdillon, Order of Minoresses, 77-84. The survival of Throckmorton's Clarist community is paralleled by that of a group of Bridgettine nuns at Mr. Yates's moated house (Lyford Grange) near Wantage in Berkshire, following the dissolution (twice) of Syon Abbey (J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984], 140-41). See also Scarisbrick on the story of Isabel Whitehead who, after her community in Chester was dissolved, became an itinerant Catholic apostolate (151-52) and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, on the flight of English nuns, including Poor Clares, to the continent (491).

21. It is interesting to note that while two of Cary's sons became monks in France but later recanted and returned to England, her daughters remained steadfast in their allegiances to the Benedictine convent of Cambray. See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski for a discussion of Cary's conversion as resistance to patriarchal control (Writing Women in Jacobean England [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 179-80). St. Monica's chronicle also includes a number of explicit and positive connections between becoming a nun and defying paternal authority and marriage (Grundy, “Women's History?” 136).

22. Scarisbrick, Reformation, 136-61. For more information on women and Catholic survival in Protestant countries, see McNamara, Sisters in Arms, on what she calls the “‘matriarchal’ phase of Catholicism” (462).

23. Christopher Haigh, “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,’ in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 178-207.

24. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 571.

25. Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Clement Marot, OEuvres, vol. 2 (1911; reprint, Geneve: Slatkine Reprints, 1969).

26. Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. George de F. Lord (1984; reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 205. For a literary contextualization of these men's opinions, see Graciela S. Daichman, Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). Judith C. Brown's study of the love and punishment of the sixteenth-century “lesbian” nun, sister Benedetta Carlini, adds a historical and continental dimension to the literary record (Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986]). On the positive medieval representations of same-sex desire between cloistered women, see E. Ann Matter, “My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 80-86. In terms of Isabella, we suggest that these instances of same-sex desire between nuns validate homoerotic companionship as a possible reason for her longing to enter the convent.

27. See Gless, Measure for Measure, 87-89.

28. Another instance of Shakespeare's positive treatment of monasticism is the humble and dignified Friar Francis in Much Ado About Nothing (4.1.161-67; see Gless, Measure for Measure, 89). One might also add to this example Duke Ferdinand's peaceful conversion and decision to live a monastic life at the end of As You Like It (5.4.154-65, 181-82).

29. Valerie Traub, “The (In)significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 159.

30. DiGangi, “Pleasure and Danger,” 605.

31. “The Rewle of Sustris Menouresses enclosid,” ed. Walter W. Seton, in A Fifteenth-Century Courtesy Book, ed. from the ms. by R. W Chambers and Two Fifteenth-Century Franciscan Rules, ed. from the ms. by Walter W Seton (London: K. Paul, 1914), 83-84.

32. The first two English foundations of the Order of Minoresses were made at the end of the thirteenth century in London (at the instigation of Blanche, Queen of Navarre) and at Waterbeach (by Denise de Munchensey), seven miles northeast of Cambridge. For a history of Clarist foundations in England, see Bourdillon, Order of Minoresses, 26; and John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order From Its Origins to The Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). The Minories in London, one of the Order's most important houses, was surrendered to Henry VIII by Elizabeth Savage in 1539 (St. Clare and Her Order [London: Mills & Boon, 1912]). For more information on the Isabella Rule, see Walter Seton's introduction to “The Rewle,” 68-70; on the Isabella Rule's origin and the differences between it and the five other Clarist Rules, see Bourdillon, Order of Minoresses, 2-9.

33. G. K. Hunter, “Six Notes on Measure for Measure,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 15 (1964): 167-72.

34. Jonathan Dollimore, “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 73.

35. Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London: Pinter, 1989), 11, 13.

36. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 24, 27; Dollimore, “Transgression and Surveillance.”

37. Niccola Machiavelli, The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1975), bk. 1, disc. ii, sec. 3.

38. See 3.1.42-43 for evidence of the temporary success of the Duke's plan.

39. “The Rewle,” 87-88.

40. Crawford notes that contrary to Protestant antimonastic literature, “nuns themselves wrote of their choosing a monastic life as a means of finding spiritual satisfaction” (Women and Religion, 83). She notes too that nuns had the opportunity to develop personalized modes and means of devotion within the basic structure of convent existence (84).

41. In addition to the visual and verbal confirmation of Angelo's crisis of conscience provoked by Isabella's arguments, an audience is able to gauge Angelo's state of mind by Lucio's many encouraging and lascivious asides, such as: “Ay, touch him; there's the vein” (2.2.70); XV, to him, to him, wench! he will relent. / He's coming; I perceive't” (2.2.124-25).

42. Matt. 7:1-3, 5, The Geneva Bible, 1602, ed. Gerald T. Sheppard (New York: Pilgrim, 89).

43. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1, no. i (1993): 17-18.

44. See Sharpe, Politics and Ideas, 174-81.

45. Angelo, in fact, merely echoes the duke's own sentiments (1.3.20-32). By contrast, Escalus, the lord placed next in command under Angelo, represents an older, more flexible attitude toward justice, one more akin to Isabella's. Although he does not employ religious language, Escalus makes an argument parallel to Isabella's when he asks Angelo to spare Claudio's life (2.1.5-16).

46. OED [Oxford English Dictionary], 2nd ed., s.v. “cipher,” 2 a, b. The OED records this use of the word “cipher” in Measure for Measure as its first occurrence in print.

47. See, for example, 2.2.117-22. In Act Five Isabella demonstrates her adherence to rational deliberation when she uses the philosophy of intent to defend Angelo against the Duke's death sentence (5.1.450-54). In addition to demonstrating her merciful nature, Isabella's words associate her with a seventeenth-century interest in casuistical reasoning.

48. Consider, for example, the unintended effects of Isabella's rebuttal of Angelo's proposition:

    were I under the terms of death,
    Th' impression of keen whips I'ld wear as rubies,
    And strip myself to death as to a bed
    That longing have been sick for, ere I'ld yield
    My body up to shame.

    (2.4.100-104)

    Although the exquisite language of martyrdom, illness, and torture lends affective force to her argument, Isabella's corporal images seem only to fuel Angelo's lust. Unlike Carolyn Brown, we do not interpret Isabella's statement as a “perverse” “psychological nightmare” that “subconsciously” aims to encourage her “partner [sic] to sharpen his sexual appetite” (“Erotic Religious Flagellation,” 164-65). Brown's grim Freudian view of religious mortification as always indicative of displaced and perverse eroticism (see 140-41, 149, 152-58) takes too dim a view of Isabella's desires for a cloistered life. In order to understand better the phenomenon of flagellation, it is useful to go beyond eighteenth-century antimonastic sources and consult medieval and early modern writings by women on the subject. As Caroline Walker Bynum persuasively shows, the post-eleventh-century focus on somatic suffering in Western Christendom was generally regarded as a matter of imitatio Christi and a way for women to empower themselves in a patriarchal culture (Fragmentation and Redemption, 119-50, 181-238).

49. DiGangi, in “Pleasure and Danger,” notes Angelo's “rich use of the essential ideological verb ‘to be” in this speech, a linguistic sign that betrays “an anxiety about female autonomy (as the super-feminine virgin) and its threat to male desires for ownership and control” (596).

50. Butler, Critically Queer,” 23.

51. See, for example, Brown, “Erotic Religious Flagellation,” 150.

52. Anthony B. Dawson observes that women in the play are often described as “texts” that are “written on” by sex, a tactic which is part of a wide power/knowledge regime that attempts to naturalize ideological gender destiny (“Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power,” SQ 39 [1988]: 336). Isabella seems to be making the related point that all identities are socially constructed.

53. Ironically, in her rebuke of Claudio, Isabella echoes an earlier speech in which she informs Angelo that through merciful treatment of her brother he will be a “man new made” (2.2.79). Not only does this repetition (“Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?” [3.1.137]) further denaturalize masculinity, but it also eerily aligns Angelo and Claudio in hypocritical exploitativeness.

54. Baines, “Assaying the Power,” 287.

55. Bynum explores in depth the eroticized potentials of female piety and its growing materiality in late medieval and early modern Western Europe (see Fragmentation and Redemption, esp. 119-50, 181-238).

56. The 1978 BBC video version of Measure for Measure, for instance, presents Kate Nelligan as a white-robed and wimpled Isabella delighted at the prospect of marriage to Kenneth Colley's Vincentio. Following a seven-second stare, Isabella smiles, puts her right hand in the Duke's outstretched left, and the two parade off with the other couples to the sound of a cheering crowd (Measure for Measure, dir. Desmond Davis, with Kate Nelligan [BBC Enterprises, 1978]). More recent productions sometimes include elements of slight conflict, but ultimately conform to the standard narrative. In his 1994 RSC production, for instance, Steven Pimlott had Isabella (Stella Gonet) slap the Duke (Michael Feast) but immediately thereafter kiss him, thereby signalling her acceptance of his proposal (John Stokes, “Exposing what men lack,” review of Measure for Measure, dir. Steven Pimlott, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, TLS [Times Literary Supplement] 4 [Nov. 1994]: 21). Declan Donnellan's 1994 Cheek by Jowl show presented Isabella (Anastasia Hille) in a traditional nun's habit in a way that, according to Peter J. Smith, “emphasised her desire to abandon modern society” especially through contrast with the late-twentieth-century garb of the other actors. Despite the strong sense of difference such costuming suggested, Donnellan's Isabella still ended up accepting the Duke's offer, even if she did so with a “weak half-smile” (Review of Measure for Measure, dir. Declan Donnellan, Cheek by Jowl, Warwick Arts Centre and Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance English Studies 46 [1994]: 85, 87).

57. Dawson, “Measure for Measure, New Historicism,” 341.

58. Writing in 1939, Raymond Wilson Chambers considers the possibility of Isabella's return to the convent, claiming that “Isabella will do her duty in that state of life unto which it shall please William Shakespeare to call her, whether as abbess or duchess.” Unable to leave the resolution ambiguous, however, Chambers ultimately advocates marriage and actually offers lines Isabella might have spoken after the end of the play (Man's Unconquerable Mind [London: Jonathan Cape, 1939], 307, 308). More recently, Marcia Riefer has dismissed the Clarist community entirely (“‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The Construction of Female Power in Measure for Measure,” SQ 35 [1984]: 157-69). Challenging Riefer, Baines invokes the possibility that Isabella's silence is a form of resistance, but quickly says that such a scenario is “improbable” given the context of Vincentio's “intimidating power of display” (“Assaying the Power,” 299). Maus, meanwhile, supports the possibility that Isabella “flees in horror from the Duke” (Inwardness and Theater, i80); however, she never openly ponders what Isabella's destiny might be. In a short article largely devoted to uncovering Isabella's textual genealogy, David N. Beauregard does point out that the “ambiguity” of the play's end means that, for reasons of character, theme, and politics, Shakespeare distances her from outright rejection of convent life (“Isabella as Novice: Shakespeare's Use of Whetstone's Heptameron,” ELN [English Language Notes] 25.4 [June 1988]: 22). Yet, Beauregard's ultimate interpretation of the play's religious elements as “quite obviously … dramatic devices subordinated to dramatic ends” obfuscates any social commentary or intervention that such a reading might accomplish (23).

59. Christina Luckyj's survey of the varied directorial, actorly, and critical treatments of Volumnia's concluding silence in twentieth-century productions of Coriolanus helps to confirm our position that not only is Isabella's future unconfined by marriage but that the way silence is acted can have an impact on an audience's understanding of the play as a whole. In her discussion of Volumnia's silence, Luckyj argues that Shakespeare uses the Roman matron's speechlessness to problematize the supposed transparency of intention, motivation, emotional state, and character evolution. As Luckyj points out, Volumnia's use of silence in this play bears affinities to Paulina's at the conclusion of The Winter's Tale as well as to Isabella's at the end of Measure for Measure (“Volumnia's Silence,” SEL 31 [1991]: 328).

60. Much has been written recently on the construction of sexual and gender identities in Western culture. Among the most illuminating studies for the present argument are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), see esp. 67-80, and, because of their relevance to early modern studies, Bruce R. Smith's Homosexuality in Shakespeare's England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Jonathan Goldberg's Sodometries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), see esp. 15-23, 105-43.

61. A further Catholic link between the two women is suggested by the possibility that a contemporary audience would have noted in Mariana's name an aural echo of “Marian,” the adjective used in print since at least 1608 to signify things pertaining to Queen Mary (the restorer of the old faith to England) or her time (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “Marian”). The OED also records use of the term “Marian” to denote a “worshipper, or devotee of the Virgin Mary” beginning in 1635, though it is highly likely that this usage was in oral circulation prior to this date.

62. Although controversial since its appearance in 1980, Adrienne Rich's essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (Signs 5 [1980]: 631-60) is still crucial to understanding how heteronormativity constructs sexual and gender identities; on this topic, see also Butler, “Critically Queer,” 28.