SOURCE: Barnaby, Andrew, and Joan Wry. “Authorized Versions: Measure for Measure and the Politics of Biblical Translation.” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 4 (winter 1998): 1225-54.

[In the following essay, Barnaby and Wry trace various biblical allusions used in Measure for Measure, emphasizing that although it is primarily a political play, the work is also a cautionary tale about the danger of using religious rhetoric in a political context.]

Despite the common practice of reading Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in relation to the cultural politics of the first year of the Stuart monarchy, politically-oriented criticism has largely neglected the play's connection to the politics of one of King James's most ambitious undertakings: the new biblical translation first announced in January of 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference. While maintaining that the play cannot be reduced to a simple allegory of James's effort to link his new political authority to the “authorizing” power of scripture, this essay examines how the “topicality” of that effort might be registered in the play's complex pattern of biblical allusion. We argue, finally, that with its staged conflict between ethical ideal and social practice, Measure for Measure offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of deploying religious rhetoric in secular political contexts.

Our comic poets construct their plots on the basis of general probabilities and then assign names to the persons quite arbitrarily … But in tragedy they still cling to the historically given names. The reason for this is that what is possible is persuasive; so what has not happened we are not yet ready to believe is possible, while what has happened is, we feel, obviously possible: for it would not have happened if it were impossible.

—Aristotle

Critics have long been drawn to the notion that Shakespeare's Measure for Measure reflects, either explicitly or in more shadowy ways, topical interest in the circumstances of the newly crowned James I. Despite Richard Levin's complaint, first lodged over twenty years ago, that such a critical approach (what he mockingly referred to as the “King James Version” of Measure for Measure) failed to produce compelling evidence of the play's actual connection to James, continued discussion of the issue has focused not on whether James is figured in the play but rather on which aspects of his reign—which events, royal acts, political and constitutional struggles, or patterns of public discourse—are figured.¹ Nevertheless, even if we feel justified, as Jonathan Goldberg does, in dismissing Levin's objections for their refusal of “any real confrontation with the play,” we must yet admit that there is a decidedly conjectural element to topical readings of the play. In the end, in fact, and despite his own commitment to a “King James Version,” Goldberg is forced to concede that the play's topicality is something we can only intuit—thus his strangely qualified assertion that “criticism is no doubt correct in feeling that Measure for Measure has some special relationship to the king.”² For the modern reader, in short, the precise point of reference of the play's topicality must always remain a question.

Although we believe that Levin's central objection—that most of the alleged connections between play and king are “based on nothing more than a collection of isolated and vague similarities of the sort that could be produced throughout the literature of the period”—has never been adequately addressed, a detailed response to that particular objection is beyond the scope of this essay.³ Still, some consideration of topicality, both the specific use of topical reference in the play and the broader question of topicality as a tool of modern critical practice, is in order. We might begin that consideration by noting Leah Marcus's claim that with its “restlessly oscillating topicality … the topical Measure for Measure is a play that will not sit still.” In response, we might briefly observe that what Marcus really shows is not that the play itself is intentionally topical but that Shakespeare's contemporaries might have read any number of topical references into it. And if we are willing to agree (as Levin is not) with Marcus's more general assertion that “when contemporaries attended and talked about plays it was the currency of the stage, its ability to … ‘Chronicle’ events in the very unfolding, that was the primary object of fascination,” a modern critic might reasonably point to the “unfolding events” of the new Stuart monarchy as the most likely focus of the original audience's “current” interests.⁴

Part of what would make that modern critic's investigation of a play's topicality conjectural would be the difficulty of verifying the claim that a particular element of the play had actually been construed as a topical reference (especially if such a reference had not been intended by the play's author).⁵ But the conjectural quality of modern topical readings is caused also by the fact that we cannot simply equate a play's topical orientation with the references it might be making to current affairs. Indeed, even assuming that Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists habitually drew on such affairs, the fictions of their plays necessarily transformed whatever social or political realities they might have taken as their starting points into the subject matter of theatrical entertainment; hence, as Annabel Patterson concludes, Renaissance plays “both invite and resist understanding in terms of other phenomena.” Even Marcus concedes that, despite the “fascination” with currency, Renaissance “poets and dramatists”—and by extension their readers and audiences as well—always “looked for ways to regularize and elevate topical issues so that they could be linked with more abstract … concerns” (moral, philosophical, religious).⁶ Viewed in this light, topicality should be understood not as some collection of facts, social realities, and popular opinion that a playwright might have merely replicated as a kind of allegory. Rather it should be understood as a framework of recognition prompting a reader or audience to reflect on what we might call, following Aristotle, the “general probability” of “more abstract concerns.” In Renaissance drama, in short, topical reference might be understood as serving the same function that “historically given names” served in classical tragedy: establishing the conditions of persuasiveness (the historical plausibility, we might say) of the story.⁷

We shall return to these metacritical reflections at the end of section I and again in our closing section. But for now we can only admit that, for the purposes of the main body of our discussion, we accept the limitations of topically-oriented criticism of the play. In the absence of any direct evidence—the kind of evidence topical readings are rarely able to produce—all one can have is that “feeling that Measure for Measure has some special relationship to the king.” And even as we acknowledge the theoretical problems posed by working between what is fictional or “abstract” and what is historically real, it is to the attempt to describe how Measure for Measure might be understood as “regularizing” and “elevating” one particular topical issue that the following discussion is directed.

That issue, surprisingly, is suggested by Levin himself, who despite his hostility to such readings unwittingly locates a reference point between play and cultural situation that, to the best of our knowledge, has gone otherwise unremarked in scholarship on the play.⁸ For it is no coincidence, we submit, that Measure for Measure, a play so concerned with how ruling figures attempt to sanction their own public standing and to promote private interests through publicly recognized languages of authority, was written and first performed in the same year (1604) that the new king initiated one of the most significant royalist projects undertaken during his rule: the great collaborative effort of fifty-four scholars and translators that would lead seven years later to the publication of the King James Bible, a project through which James sought to extend his “prerogative” both over and by means of the most authoritative of all languages in Renaissance England, biblical texts.⁹

We shall discuss James's attitude toward and involvement in this project in section I. Nevertheless, as our discussion has already suggested, we do not intend to reduce the play to a simple allegory of it. Rather, we shall attempt to explicate the play's topicality by showing how it offers, in highly fictionalized form, an extended meditation on the project's organizing impetus (at least from James's perspective), which was to promote the status of the Crown as the privileged translator (and hence authorized interpreter) of biblical texts, a privilege that would in turn help to “authorize” the Crown's political authority. Certainly, we are not the first to argue that the play's focus on the nature of the ruler's authority—especially on how a kind of royal absolutism becomes invested with the aura of divinity—shows affinities with (even if it may also be critical of) James's own widely publicized theory of sacred kingship; nor are we the first to note the play's central concern with the language(s) of public authority. As Goldberg tersely observes of the play's specific representations, “authority speaks a language.”¹⁰ But what politically oriented criticism of the play has not adequately explained, we believe, is the context linking these two issues: what we want to address, in short, is why royal authority and the rhetoric of that authority become key themes in a play that is so openly attentive to the language and to the political use of biblical texts.¹¹ And while admitting that it is difficult finally to assess the political commitments of the play, we shall argue that in regularizing and elevating the “topicality” of James's project of biblical translation, Measure for Measure offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of deploying the privileged language of the Bible in secular political contexts. It is to a discussion of both James's stake and the play's engagement in that issue that we now turn.

I

First announced in a royal proclamation of October 1603, the Hampton Court conference was originally intended to reduce the growing friction between the Puritan and Anglican wings of the church by addressing Puritan complaints about the continued “corruption” of the Elizabethan settlement.¹² But although James presented himself as sympathetic to at least some of these complaints, he made it clear right from the start that, because religious issues were inseparable from political ones, any efforts at reform would be carefully scrutinized for their political implications, and especially for possible infringements on the prerogatives of the Crown. Even in the proclamation announcing the conference, James asserted his unwillingness to tolerate those reforms that might in any way promote civil unrest; he thus warned against those whose “contemptuous behaviour” revealed “a more unquiet spirit then becommeth any private person to have toward publike authority” and whose threatened “courses” of action “it is apparent to all men are unlawfull and doe favour of tumult, sedition, and violence.”¹³ To all but the most disinterested reader, James's almost bland observation that the “furtherance of the Gospel … is the duety most besemming Royall authoritie” would have been immediately recognized as registering some equivalence between the maintenance of the current system of “publike authority” (in this case “Royal authority”) and the “furtherance of the Gospel.” Indeed, in the proclamation's final paragraph James mused that the “true service of God” (marked especially by the “increase of the Gospel”) and “a most happy and long peace in the politique State … doe commonly concurre together.” The more critical reader might have also noted James's implicit claim that royal authority both served the “furtherance of the Gospel” and was served by it.¹⁴

At the conference itself, James quickly surrendered the role of impartial moderator of the proceedings to attack any idea that to him smacked of that resistance to royal supremacy he had come to associate with Puritan attitudes towards matters of ecclesiastical and civil government. On the conference's second day, for example, the Puritan signers of the Millenary Petition were equated with the infamous Thomas Cartwright, whose public crusade in the 1570s to make civil authority subservient to ecclesiastical authority—and especially to the only form of ecclesiastical government sanctioned by scripture (Presbyterian)—had given the Puritan efforts at reform their first definitive political orientation.¹⁵ Later that same day, recalling in a related context both his own youthful humiliations and those of his mother at the hands of the powerful leaders of the Scottish Kirk, James pounced on the leader of the small Puritan contingent, John Reynolds (President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) for his use of the terms “Synode” and “Presbyteri” in suggesting a relatively minor reform in the organization of ecclesiastical courts. In William Barlow's account of the proceedings, James “stirred” at the suggestion, seeing in it a direct challenge to his authority as “Supreme Governour in all causes, and over all persons, (as well Ecclesiasticall as Civill).”¹⁶ After the close of the conference, however, James's insistence on asserting his supremacy against all but the most trivial of the Puritans' proposals for reform would come back to haunt him. The country's Puritan divines (a thousand of whom had signed the Millenary Petition) proceeded to align themselves with the Parliament as it convened its first assembly under the new king in March, 1604. The ensuing struggles between royal prerogative and parliamentary privilege would, of course, define the political and constitutional history of the entire Stuart period.

Despite his personal humiliation, it was Reynolds who managed to convince James (earlier in that same day, in fact) to support the one serious proposal to emerge from the conference: that a new translation of the Bible be undertaken “because, those which were allowed in the raignes of Henry the eight, and Edward the sixt, were corrupt and not answerable to the Originall.”¹⁷ James gave a ringing endorsement to the project, and by the end of the conference a formal resolution to establish the “Authorized Version” of the Bible had been issued. As if intending to confirm that the “increase of the Gospel”—that “duety most besemming Royall authoritie”—did indeed serve Crown interests, James made it abundantly clear (as we shall see in a moment) that the particular form of such “increase” recommended by Reynolds could be put to his immediate political advantage. Despite the fact that the suggestion had come from a Puritan leader, James quickly became what the dedicatory epistle to the new Bible would later trumpet as the “principal Mover and Author” of the project; set in a role analogous to God—whom the preface to the AV called the “author” of Scripture—James thus became a kind of human primum mobile whose “authoring” of (which necessarily included both an authorizing of and authority over) the sacred texts resituated them within his sphere of influence and so rendered the authority of the divine Word serviceable to his own “Royall authority.”¹⁸

By late June, the translators (mostly staunch royalists) had been picked and organized into groups (each charged with translating portions of the texts). And even before that the bishops had issued a formal list of “rules” that were to guide the translation. What is especially significant for our purposes is that, as F. F. Bruce remarks, these guidelines were “sanctioned, if they were not indeed drawn up by James himself.”¹⁹ James's attentive involvement in the project, so different from his usual detachment from the business of state, was motivated not simply by his perception of the need for a “uniforme” translation of the Bible but also, and more critically, by his desire to replace the most accessible version currently in use, the Geneva Bible (the one Shakespeare himself used), with one “ratified by his Royall authority.”²⁰

What made the Geneva version unacceptable was less the translation itself (much of which was simply updated in the AV) than the marginal notes that provided commentary on the text.²¹ It was these that James wanted to get rid of, denouncing them as “very partiall, untrue, seditious, and savouring, too much, of dangerous, and trayterous conceipts.”²² Predictably, the two examples James cited both involved challenges to the authority of reigning monarchs. The first, a gloss on 2 Chronicles 15:16, noted that King Asa defied “bothe … the covenant, and … the Lawe of God” when he gave into “foolish pitie” in choosing only to depose his mother, Maacah, rather than execute her for idolatry.²³ Bruce reasonably suggests that James's “suspicious mind” projected the gloss as casting aspersions “upon the memory of his own mother,” though clearly James's suspiciousness may have led him to imagine in it subversive reflections on the legitimacy of his own rule.²⁴

The second example was the gloss on Exodus 1:19-20. Coming at the end a brief narrative on Pharaoh's near-genocidal efforts to control the growth of the Israelite community, the verses recount first, how the Hebrew midwives deceived Pharaoh and “preserved alive the men children” he had ordered them to kill; and second, how God responded to this deception: “God therefore prospered the midwives, and the people multiplied & were very mightie. And because the midwives feared God, therefore he made them houses.” Interestingly, the Geneva gloss is not willing to endorse the midwives' actions without qualification: “Their disobedience herein was lawful, but their dissembling evil.” Still, the implication is obvious: even direct disobedience to a king's explicit command would be “lawful” if the violator were heeding divine authority instead. Such a notion could not be tolerated by James, in part because it allowed the reader to imagine a situation in which secular and sacred law were at odds. And in the image of a “mightie” religious minority at once defying the established government and acquiring the military capacity to establish its own rule James undoubtedly glimpsed the very nightmare Francis Bacon would later describe in “Of Unity in Religion,” where the putting of the “temporal sword … into the hands of the common people” could “make the cause of religion to descend to the cruel and execrable actions of murthering princes, butchery of people, and subversion of states and government.”²⁵ It was precisely this possibility that James sought to avoid by coming out with a new “uniforme translation,” completed by a select group of elite royal servants, “ratified by his Royall authority,” and subsequently disseminated through the institutional powers of the Church. In short, against those whose glosses might (even unwittingly) challenge royal supremacy, James would do what he could to fix the text as inviolable.

Organized, as we have tried to suggest, in a general atmosphere of anxiety concerning the politicization of religion, the royal project of biblical translation was a key element in the establishment of a new religious “uniformity” that was inseparable from James's efforts (so crucial for a new king) to solidify his legal, political, and cultural supremacy.²⁶ And if what the project attempted to do was fix the “letter” of the Bible, it did so precisely to restrict its “spirit,” the range of possible meanings to which the letter might be taken to refer. In thus focusing explicit attention—both in its title and in its larger pattern of allusion—on the text of the Bible (and on the Geneva version in particular) as it is drawn into matters of civic concern, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure seems to register, at a minimum, topical interest in the focal point of James's project: the potential of biblical language (or, more accurately, of the interpretation and application of that language) for sustaining or undermining public authority. More critically, however, the play calls attention to the “authorizing” power of Scripture even as its central plot follows the actions of a political figure who uses (or abuses) religious rhetoric as a political weapon, a weapon through which he manages finally to “ratify” his waning royal authority by imposing fraudulent claims to the divine authority—claims deriving in part from biblical texts—upon the body politic.

We must tread warily here, however. As Goldberg observes of his own “King James Version” of Measure for Measure, if the action of the play “provide[s] a mirror for the cultural situation,” it offers “no exact replay of James.”²⁷ This observation should really be read as a warning to all modern topicalists; indeed, recalling our own earlier observation that for both Shakespeare and his audience the play's very currency might have been transformed through the pressures of its composition and reception, we must also acknowledge that there are no clear critical rules for determining the correct “cultural situation” or for describing the precise way in which the play functions as a “mirror” of it. Graham Bradshaw is right to remind us (and it is only surprising that modern critics constantly need this reminder) that “we should think of [a Shakespeare] play not as an encoded message but as a highly organized and powerfully generative matrix of meanings, or field of forces.” Topicality has a place within the Shakespearean “matrix” as but one of many resources available to him for communicating what Bradshaw calls “dramatic intentions”—not “what we must think, but … what we are being given to think about.”²⁸ As a critical tool, moreover, topicality serves only as a starting point of inquiry, for the more plausible the alleged text-context relation appears the more we are compelled to ask just how the dramatic context resituates its topical material and to what end.

The following discussion, then, is our attempt to elucidate Shakespeare's “dramatic intentions” as the design of his Measure for Measure appears to draw out some of the political implications of James's project of translation. Because the play was written during the same year in which James initiated this project—one that sought to ratify his authority by controlling the reception of Scripture among his subjects—it is not unreasonable to see in Duke Vincentio's deliberate and politically self-serving misapplications of biblical “letter and spirit” a topical engagement in, even a critique of, James's own “authorized version.” As we have been insisting and as we shall further argue, Shakespeare does not merely encode the details of this project; not surprisingly, therefore, most of the specific aspects of the project and its “cultural situation” have no counterpart in the play. For example, unlike James, Duke Vincentio never faces (or even imagines) a direct challenge to his royal supremacy coming from an organized and hostile religious minority. At the same time we might note that a character like Lucio does threaten to undermine the duke's authority, and, as we shall see, this situation is in a general sense “theorized” in the play as a threat posed by any politically-motivated misapplication of biblical texts. Though decidedly not a Puritan nor a satiric portrait of one (as Twelfth Night's Malvolio is), Lucio in the context of the play's topicality might be understood as an instance of what Lisa Jardine has recently termed the “textual residue” of history: an element within a literary work that evokes a specific cultural memory or contemporary association even as, like a literary allusion, it can be used to generate meaning only through a creative reworking of the original point of reference.²⁹

In short, it is not so much in the “letter” of James's project that we find the informing “spirit” of the play. We do argue, conjecturally, that James's project is a topical element in the play's larger “matrix of meanings,” but not because Shakespeare is directing explicit attention toward the project. (Whether a contemporary reader or audience might have read into the play some encouragement to reevaluate the project is another matter, of course.) Rather, the topical reference is important because the audience's or reader's awareness of the historical reality of a political figure's motivated use of religious texts provides the plausibility of what becomes the play's central engagement in a “more abstract concern.” And that concern is to be found in the play's inquiry into how the sustaining connections between religious, moral, legal, and political authority are problematized by their “residence” in a language system in which form always threatens to become separated from content (or in which the “letter” cannot always be trusted to refer to “spirit”).

The discrepancy becomes all the more significant in light of the implied control of linguistic meaning inherent in the very notion of an “authorized version,” in which “form” would be adjusted by the process of translation and “content” regulated by the effacement of those parts of the text “savouring, too much, of dangerous, and trayterous conceipts.” It is therefore especially noteworthy, we believe, that Shakespeare drew so much of the play's pattern of biblical allusion, including the title, from the Sermon on the Mount, which among other things gives special attention to the discrepancy between the spirit and the letter of the law. Specifically, of course, the Sermon rewrites the Old Testament's insistence on keeping the “letter” of the law with a new demand to live by its “spirit.” But in adapting that gospel ideal to a decidedly—and troubling—political context, Shakespeare recontextualizes the ideal as vexed by a problem of signification the Sermon itself never considers. The discrepancy between the letter and the spirit of the law becomes, in short, both a site for analyzing how human and divine law might be conflated in the “letter” (a conflation that seeks to render human institutions of the law signifiers of the divine law by which they claim legitimacy) and a site of meditation on an even larger problem: how the peculiarly challenging ethical mandate of the Sermon (with its privileging of mercy over justice) can possibly be accommodated within a human political system that is constantly confronted with violations of its law. The remainder of the essay attempts to describe Shakespeare's own critical examination of the interplay between the text of scripture and the language(s) of authority both as it is generally represented in the play and as it is traced out specifically in the actions of a ruling figure who attempts to re-authorize his public standing through a rhetorical alignment with sacred texts.

II

Perhaps more obviously than any of his other plays, Measure for Measure marks Shakespeare's obsessive fascination with exposing the mechanisms of power that produce and sustain a cultural order. Indeed, the play is conducted as a veritable experiment in authority, an experiment rendered all the more “hypothetical” by Shakespeare's re-creating within the play's very structure the circumstances of the audience's own observational act. As Angelo, under the watchful eye of the Duke, attempts to impose his new authority on Vienna, we watch the duke create the conditions for his own imposition of authority on Angelo and on Viennese society more generally. And even as the duke declares that he does not like to “stage” himself before the “eyes” of the people, and that he does not “relish … their loud applause” (1.1.68-70), his entire enterprise depends on strategies of manipulation that derive from theatrical practice: the use of disguise, the staging of scenes for public viewing, the arts of story-telling. By this analogy, authority comes to look very much like a form of role-playing that seeks to pass itself off as the “real thing” even as the visibility of this process reveals it as an act of construction whose own interests supersede public ones.³⁰

Moreover, the duke's imposition of coercive fictions is explicitly connected to his fraudulent claim of religious authority. The “habit” and instruction supplied by Friar Thomas, for example, are requested by the duke so that he “may formally in person bear / Like a true friar” (1.3.45-48). But the irony of the final phrase (can mere external resemblance replicate truth?) suggests that the duke's impersonation will enable him to mask political objectives through an appropriation of the signs of religious authority.³¹ The power inherent in the successful imposition of this kind of fraud (what Angelo's lines on the “devil's crest” mark as a kind of public inscription [2.4.16-17]), is confirmed in the play's final scene, where the amazed Angelo submits to the duke's judgment as a manifestation of some inscrutable divine knowledge: “O my dread lord, / I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, / To think I can be undiscernible, / When I perceive your Grace, like pow'r divine, / Hath look'd upon my passes” (5.1.366-70). Moreover, to the extent that, as we shall explore further in section III, the final legitimacy of the duke's authority is grounded upon moral and religious values (explicitly biblical ones), the play also stages a questioning of the limits of applying those very values in a secular, political context.

Even in its minor scenes, in fact, Measure for Measure constantly confronts the possibility that political or legal authority is more appearance than reality, that it creates its semblance of reality through an imposition of ungrounded claims of religious or moral authority. In 2.1, for example, the confused testimony that Constable Elbow brings against Pompey on the charge of pimping calls attention to the workings of law as a semiotic construct unattached to the reality it claims to represent. At one level, Elbow's misuse of language as the instrument of law functions as a comic parody of Angelo's subsequent mistreatment of Isabella; more broadly, however, his specific comic weapon—his penchant for malapropisms—becomes a metonymic figure for how all legal discourse is problematized by its very confinement in language. A malapropism is a comic trope that puts on display how the form of language may be at odds with its content; or, to put this in the biblical language privileged by the play's title, how the “letter” of language may not coincide with its “spirit.” Moreover, in its displacing of content by form, a malapropism achieves its humorous effect by substituting the speaker's new (comically inverted) meaning for a communally accepted one. In legal terms, this slide between signifier and signified threatens to expose the law's drive to “name” crime as actually creating the reality it names.

Elbow's comic function, in short, is conceptually related to the broader political issues explored in the play not only because as a figure of authority he reveals the limited epistemological resources of those publicly charged with managing the law but also because the specific form of his buffoonery calls attention to the problem of law as it is conditioned upon the workings of language. For in Elbow's barely intelligible accusation of Pompey's crimes we witness how the breakdown of the accepted equivalence between signifier and signified (a possibility inherent in any linguistic act) becomes especially damaging to that legal structure dependent on its claimed capacity to name and codify pre-existing moral distinctions.

The conceptual dismantling of the law's transcendental foundation is most perversely effected in an even earlier scene, in the conversation between Lucio and the two Viennese gentlemen:

LUCIO:
Thou conclud'st like the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scrap'd one out of the table.
SECOND Gentleman:
“Thou shalt not steal”?
LUCIO:
Ay, that he raz'd.
FIRST Gentleman:
Why, 'twas a commandment to command the captain and all the rest from their functions; they put forth to steal.

(1.2.7-14)

Lucio's joking about the “razing” of the commandment functions as a grotesque parody of the Sermon on the Mount where, as we noted earlier, Christ rewrites the pharisaical insistence on keeping the letter of the law with a new demand to fulfill its spirit (Matt. 5:17-20). With his typical sense of dramatic economy, Shakespeare uses the brief exchange to get at one of the play's central concerns: that the interpretation of the law, whether human or divine, will end up serving the purposes of the interpreter and so fail to enact the law's true “spirit.” Lucio's mockery thus also demonstrates something of the truth of Pompey's later legal defense; in response to Lord Escalus's rhetorical question of whether his “trade” is “lawful,” Pompey defends himself with the elegantly simple “if the law would allow it, sir” (2.1.226-27). If, as Pompey seems to argue, one might change the meaning of what the law purportedly represents simply by changing the law, Lucio suggests that even divine laws are subject to such rewriting; removing the words from the Mosaic tablet can alter one's moral sensibility, as if the rightness or wrongness of a deed might depend not on its moral “truth” (even when God's own words are at stake) but on the human interpreter who locates truth in a linguistic construct that reflects his own material interests.³²

If in Pompey, Elbow, and Lucio Shakespeare plays on these subversive possibilities to comical effect, the characters also provide proleptic parody of those abuses the play's central story-lines treat more seriously. The circumstances of Angelo's coercive propositioning of Isabella, of course, provide the most compelling evidence of the hypotheses generalized in the comic interludes. At the most obvious level, Angelo's actions reveal the shocking discrepancy between reputation (the words that represent one in public) and the reality those words claim to represent. They also confirm Pompey's theory that whatever the law (or the law-giver) will allow may be deemed morally acceptable: “Answer to this: / I (now the voice of the recorded law) / Pronounce a sentence on your brother's life; / Might there not be a charity in sin / To save this brother's life?” (2.4.60-64). From his privileged position atop the social structure, Angelo here rewrites his own planned act of fornication, the very crime for which he has condemned Claudio, as “charity.” Even more audaciously, he reconstructs the very basis of divine judgment in matters of personal morality by insinuating that individual transgressions do not really count against us, as “our compell'd sins / Stand more for number than for accompt” (2.4.57-58).

Moreover, Angelo's abuse of Isabella is consistently represented as a perversely self-interested rewriting of the claims of the Sermon on the Mount. For example, in misapplying Christ's call for a “perfect” love that sets no bounds (Matt. 5:48), Angelo calls into question Isabella's privileging of her chastity over her brother's life, a kind of solipsism explicitly at odds with the “brotherly love” championed by the Sermon. The coercion is both subtle and in a limited way successful, for by the end of the scene Isabella views herself as the agent of Claudio's death (“Then, Isabel, live chaste, and brother, die; / More than our brother is our chastity” [2.4.184-85]). And Angelo's subsequent circumlocutions, evasions, uses of hypothetical cases—all seeking to distance him from the crime by placing Isabella in the role of its instigator, or at least a willing accomplice—demonstrate the pernicious side of the misuse of language visible in Elbow's malapropisms. Angelo's attempts at manipulating Isabella, that is, all display how the division between the meaning and form of linguistic constructs might be employed to trick innocent subjects into consenting to their own exploitation.³³

Angelo's rhetorical manipulations here confirm Lucio's warning about self-motivated interpreters of the law, which holds that one might use legal prerogative to make the laws, even those with divine sanction, serve private (human, political) interests. Isabella had registered much the same critique in 2.2, where her mocking of “proud man's” apish imitation of God (2.2.117-23) was made in part to denounce that legal authority whose arrogant claim to stand in for divine authority serves only to mask its subjection of others to its “tyrannous” power. Of particular significance in this charge is Isabella's challenging the very source of the law's power—its authority to judge and punish—which is at odds with the Sermon's (and more generally Christianity's) central ethical imperative, forgiveness: “How would you be / If He, which is the top of judgment, should / But judge you as you are?” (2.2.75-77).

From the point of view of human justice, of course, Angelo's complacent response—“It is the law, not I, condemn your brother” (2.2.80)—is entirely reasonable. For, as he has earlier (and rightly) remarked, the idea that a judge might condemn a crime “and not the actor of it” would render the pursuit of justice redundant (“Why, every fault's condemn'd ere it be done” [2.2.37-38]). Still, Isabella's pointed echoing of Matthew 7:2—“judge not, that ye be not judged”—raises a series of vexed questions that the play continues to explore even as it can produce no satisfactory answers: under the Christian dispensation, how can human society deal with the fact of moral depravity? can authority deal with crimes through simple forgiveness? what happens when the lawgiver is guilty of the same crimes he would punish (or if he is simply fallible)? and, most troubling, what are we to make of that human legal authority that derives its legitimacy from a divine law whose mandates it so utterly fails to heed?

The discrepancy between ethical ideal and social necessity etched into Angelo's story will be shifted, finally, to the play's main action: the duke's testing of Angelo. We will turn to that in a moment, but before we do it is important to register that Angelo's abuse of authority is played out not just as an analogy to the duke's situation but entirely within his elaborately produced and self-serving spectacle of power. That artifice is initiated, we might note, in a transfer of legal authority portrayed primarily as a way of compelling virtue to reveal itself in action, action that will both truly signify an otherwise “hidden” virtue and promote virtuous action in others. Thus the duke insists that the reluctant Angelo accept his deputization by suggesting that he has a moral responsibility to show his virtue in public: “Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, / Not light them for ourselves” (1.1.32-33). The force of the duke's lines derives from their echoing of an earlier passage in the Sermon: “Ye are the light of the world. A citie that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Nether do men light a candel, and put it under a bushel. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good workes” (Matt. 5:14-16). Clearly, from the perspective of Act 2.4 the allusion casts a shadow of irony on Angelo's treatment of Isabella; not only are Angelo's “workes” not “good,” but what can be seen in public (what “shines before men”) actually conceals the truth. In short, his actions as judge fail to show the works of authority properly signifying the divine “light” that gives the human law its meaning in the first place. This gap between “workes” and inner truth (act and intent, letter and spirit) necessarily includes the duke as well, who problematically sets up Angelo to represent his own authority. It is a “work,” we might suspect, at odds with its intent. More broadly, it calls into question the capacity of any royal work—the duke's or James's even—to signify divine authority, authority that may actually be claimed only to obscure the ruler's pursuit of some “hidden” and private interest. And as we shall see in the duke's story, that mystification—the production of “workes” that hide the truth—can be carried out precisely in the abuse of the biblical letter itself.

III

If Angelo's actions display with unambiguous clarity how the mere show of moral or religious authority might serve private interests, it is the duke who provides the play's exemplary instance of corrupt political praxis. As we observed at the outset of section II, ample critical attention has been paid to how this “Duke of dark corners” (4.3.157) might be read as a kind of Machiavellian anti-hero. Indeed, even if we accept the explanation he himself provides for his actions (1.3.19-43), it is hard to see them as anything but the machinations of an irresponsible ruler, one whose stated concern with restoring the legal and moral foundations of Viennese culture is but a pretense masking a deeper concern with reinvigorating the legitimacy of his own waning political authority. The duke's strategy in trying to achieve this goal is multifaceted certainly, but considerations of space compel us to focus on one particular element of it: his deliberate employment of what we might call a disinformational biblical rhetoric.

We might start by noting how, over the course of the play, Angelo's fall is carefully crafted for maximum public impact and becomes, in effect, the centerpiece of the duke's strategy of re-authorization. At its simplest level, produced as a public scandal, the fall of the “precise” Angelo becomes a potent demonstration of just how difficult it would be for anyone (including the duke) to enforce the laws against sexual misconduct. But rather than becoming the impetus to what seems a much needed legal reform, the scandal becomes the opportunity for the duke to display a hitherto unseen severity. Having created the conditions for a particularly egregious violation of the law—shocking even by Vienna's standards—he stages a tantalizingly perverse, if largely fictionalized, public discovery of it at the city's gates. On the surface what his “discovery” reveals is a ruling figure (Angelo) in precisely the same situation as one already condemned for that crime. But the duke's plan is intended also to put his own ruling authority on display, for he exposes Angelo to judgment before the people in such a way as to enhance his own reputation as a wise and virtuous ruler, one who, in good Machiavellian terms, should be feared and loved simultaneously.³⁴

More important for our purposes, the duke's staging of Angelo's fall is constructed as a kind of demonstration of biblically sanctioned justice. In endeavoring to manufacture a situation in which Vienna's laws will be enforceable again—a situation serving his own political interests—the duke rightly calculates (as his conversation with Friar Thomas clearly suggests) that the deputized Angelo will awaken the full severity of the law. But the duke shows himself to be a masterful playwright in imposing a kind of peripety on Angelo whereby it is he, rather than Claudio, who will be made the rejuvenated law's most potent example:

[A]s he adjudg'd [Claudio]—
Being criminal, in double violation
Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach, …
The very mercy of the law cries out
Most audible, even from his proper tongue,
“An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!”
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.

(5.1.403-11)

To the extent that the duke's prosecution of Angelo threatens to expose his own duplicitous authority, it is necessary, of course, that he distance himself from the charge of complicity in the crimes he must now punish. And here, having succeeded in stimulating a demand for strict enforcement of the law, the duke can now appear as the impersonal agent of justice, compelled by the logic of the law itself to sentence Angelo to death (“An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!”). The very balance of the phrasing suggests the essential equitableness of the proceedings, even as the inescapable logic of the judgment would seem to rule out any personal stake on the part of the judge. That impersonality is marked most powerfully in—even as it appears to be guaranteed by—the biblical cadences of the sentence. Speaking not just on behalf of the people's will but also on behalf of the law's divine foundation, the duke subtly presents his own role in the proceedings as but serving a higher law.³⁵

We must immediately note that the appearance of biblical sanction for the punishment is itself deceptive, a point which the duke himself recognizes (and whose fuller implications we shall consider shortly). For in alluding to the Sermon on the Mount in rendering his judgment on Angelo, the duke misapplies its central lesson in recalling not its new ethical ideal but rather the Old Testament ethic of an eye for an eye (an ethic specifically set aside in the Sermon [Matt. 5:38-42]). The duke's construction of the phrase would of course be correct from one perspective; as Christ phrases it, God reserves the right to mete out punishment on terms of strict equity: “For with what judgement ye judge, ye shal be judged; and with what measure ye mette, it shal be measured to you againe” (Matt. 7:2). Moreover, in a passage we cited earlier, Angelo suggests that the duke might legitimately claim a similar position for himself: “O my dread lord, / I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, / To think I can be undiscernible, / When I perceive your Grace, like pow'r divine, / Hath look'd upon my passes” (5.1.366-70). Indeed, in his inscrutable, godlike intelligence of Angelo's crimes, the duke appears to manifest that character angelicus which medieval and Renaissance political theology ascribed to the reigning monarch.³⁶

Disguised as Friar Lodowick, the duke has earlier hinted that his secretive actions should be taken as revealing just such a divine condition. Having described for Escalus the “strange tenor” of the messages he has sent Angelo concerning his impending return to Vienna, he editorializes the disinformation as the sign of something akin to divine epiphany: “Look, th' unfolding star calls up the shepherd. Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be; all difficulties are but easy when they are known” (4.2.203-06). G. Wilson Knight was undoubtedly correct when he noted that the duke's words here are meant to recall the “mystic assurance” of Matt. 10:26: “Feare them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shal not be disclosed, nor hid, that shal not be knowen.”³⁷ In Measure for Measure these assurances, which in Matthew call to mind the messianic fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, anticipate the return of the human king and the revelation of that royal intelligence that sanctions secular judgment and punishment.

In so staging the spectacle of human justice as both an analogue and exemplary instance of divine justice, the duke awakens the power of the law as a warning to the citizens of Vienna of what awaits them as well. Indeed, as he informs them, he has full knowledge of what has transpired in his city: “My business in this state / Made me a looker-on here in Vienna, / Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble, / Till it o'errun the stew; laws for all faults, / But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong statutes / Stand like forfeits in a barber's shop, / As much in mock as mark” (5.1.316-22). In his dealings with Angelo, the duke now generates the impression among his subjects that his more general knowledge belongs to one possessed of a godlike wisdom, one for whom “there is nothing covered, that shal not be disclosed, nor hid, that shal not be knowen.”³⁸ What had once seemed simply laxity in enforcing the laws (or even complicity in their violation, as Lucio constantly suggests) now appears, miraculously, as a watchful waiting for an appropriate opportunity to punish.

It is Lucio more than Angelo whose final predicament most forcefully reveals how in the new Vienna past transgressions may suddenly come back to haunt one. Condemned to be “whipt … and hang'd after”—all this to follow his enforced marriage to the prostitute who has borne his child (5.1.507-21)—Lucio finds his protest about the severity of the punishment met by the duke's simple assertion, “Slandering a prince deserves it” (5.1.524). Although we have no way of knowing if Lucio's alleged slanders are actually false, the mere accusation of royal impropriety suddenly becomes a capital offense because it undermines that public “Reverence … wherwith,” as Bacon explains, “Princes are girt from God.”³⁹ It is certainly worth recalling that the very conditions under which Lucio committed this offense were created by the duke's own fraudulent deployment of religious disguise. In this context it is not surprising that the duke's subsequent prosecution is based on biblical sanction: “Thou shalt not raile upon the Judges, nether speake evil of the ruler of thy people” (Exodus 22:27). Nor is it surprising that the duke again violates the new “spirit” of the law as set forth by Christ in the Sermon: “Blessed are ye when men revile you … and say all manner of evil against you for my sake, falsely. Rejoyce and be glad, for great is your rewarde in heaven” (Matt. 5:11-12).

Significantly, Lucio's crime is not simply specified in a biblical verse but in one situated in a scene dedicated to the representation of the divine origin of human laws. In the scene in Exodus, it is Moses who is at once the recipient and sole witness of this bequest as well as its first executor—roles that the duke now borrows. And just as Moses did in his punishment of the idolators (the massacre of the three thousand by the Sons of Levi [Exod. 32:26-30]), so in his punishment of Lucio the duke produces an image of divine authority (and its violation) that sanctions his very actions, a production that translates the responsibility for the execution from human to divine agency.

The threats of punishment for Angelo and Lucio are excessive, certainly (indeed it is not clear that either has committed a capital offense); but then, it would be both impossible and unproductive for legal authority to attempt to punish every violation of the law. What the duke needs, that is, is not so much to enforce the laws but to create the conditions under which his subjects enforce them upon themselves. To accomplish this he must generate their anxious sensitivity to the possibility of enforcement of laws that only appeared dead. And the law that, in imitation of God's final judgment, will show itself when least expected, provides a powerful reminder to all of its violators that fourteen years of unrestrained liberty will not escape the discernment of the “pow'r divine” that has secretly witnessed its “passes.”

Of course, if the staging of legal punishment as divine judgment plays well in the public eye, so too does the staging of pardon as divine mercy. Stephen Greenblatt plausibly suggests that the shocking spectacle at the close of the play of the commuting of Angelo's sentence reflects topical interest in King James's well-publicized pardons of various members of the Bye Plot in late-1603.⁴⁰ He theorizes this connection by noting their mutual dependence on the production of “salutary anxiety,” a “strategic practice” within the Renaissance discourse of authority whereby anxiety was aroused and alleviated in the interests of ruling institutions. In their efforts to manage the anxiety of their respective subjects, both James and the duke use pardon to control public backlash against the perceived misuse of their legal authority by transforming its psychological basis into the very grounds of its opposite: “gratitude, obedience, and love.”⁴¹ James and the duke both seem to understand, moreover, the crucial truth of all ideological constructions of power: that the reproduction of the conditions of production within a culture ultimately depend as much on the ruling regime's successful shaping of its subjects' consciousness of their status as subjects (what Althusser calls their interpellation within a hegemonic discourse) as on overt expressions of its mechanisms of repression.⁴²

If “salutary anxiety” might be understood, then, as one of the key disciplinary techniques sustaining Renaissance England's discourse of authority, Measure for Measure strongly suggests that its persuasive power depends on the production of a public perception of divine approval. Moreover, it represents the divine authority sanctioning pardon, even where pardon seems appropriate, as generated out of the same strategies of deceit and manipulative imposition by which the duke produced Angelo's conviction in the first place. We noted earlier that the appearance of biblical sanction for Angelo's death sentence is deceptive since the very passage the duke cites as warranting his judgment specifically rejects the principles he applies. Indeed, the duke seems to go out of his way to distort the ethical mandate of Christ's Sermon in referring to his death sentence as the logical extension of the law's “mercy” (5.1.407).⁴³ The duke's “remission” of Angelo (5.1.498) will rectify this misapplication and so restore the law's true ethical foundation even as it demonstrates how his rule is grounded in that same providential unfolding by which Christian moral law at once supersedes and fulfills Jewish law (an unfolding recorded most powerfully in the text of the Sermon).

This corrective application, a correction the duke has planned all along, comes only after he has generated anxiety not only in Angelo but also in Isabella, who has been cruelly led to believe that Angelo actually carried out the execution of Claudio. Moreover, the duke himself, as if providing the theoretical rationale for the imposition all such coercive fictions, has earlier noted that keeping subjects “ignorant” is for their own “good, / To make … heavenly comforts of despair, / When it is least expected” (4.3.109-11). The duke produces these “heavenly comforts” for Angelo and Isabella simultaneously, making Angelo's pardon coincide with the discovery that Claudio is still alive, saved as if by some miracle of divine intervention. The duke had earlier assured Isabella, “trust not my holy order / If I pervert your course” (4.3.147-48), and now that trust is justified in such a way as to make the duke's religious disguise appear as the genuine article, the “holy order” through which he rules. Act Five opens with Angelo and Escalus welcoming the return of the duke's “royal Grace” to Vienna (5.1.3); over the course of the scene the duke's power to enforce justice in the city is made to resemble his divine archetype in that his spectacular pardons—of Angelo and Claudio but also, eventually, of Lucio and Barnadine—extend to publicly recognized criminals an unexpected and largely unmerited release from the law's rigor.⁴⁴

This final, fraudulent imposition of the figure of divine authority upon the mechanisms of secular power is centrally at stake in the duke's resorting to a public trial of Isabella to generate the conditions under which clemency will be granted. Many critics have read this testing in strictly religious terms, a reading in which the play's “Christian humanist exploration of mercy's relationship to justice … justif[ies the duke's] deceptive behavior on the grounds that he is acting for the benefit of Isabella's spiritual growth, forcing her to recognize the value of mercy by forcing her to act on her own stated beliefs.”⁴⁵ Without denying how religion provides what we might call the primary language of Isabella's request for the forgiveness of Angelo, we would note that, within the design of the play as a whole, the very situation in which Isabella champions orthodox claims of Christian faith is situated as the culmination of the duke's project, a project he himself has acknowledged as having exclusively political motivations. Since what the duke has sought all along is a changed public perception of his ruling authority, Isabella's moral triumph is assimilated to his interests, for by producing the situation in which Isabella pleads publicly for the man responsible for her brother's death, the duke borrows from her excruciating dilemma that public commitment to the Christian life they both claim to espouse. He can then pardon Angelo in such a way as to be seen both sacrificing his own strong feelings to a higher principle—like Isabella, his concerns for justice are subservient to a higher authority—and balancing the need for strict enforcement of the law with a new public demand for clemency. Hence, even Isabella's coming to recognize superior virtue in her own experience is drawn into the production of her and her fellow citizens' anagnorisis of the virtue that rules their political superior. The display of mercy becomes part of the spectacle of the duke's restoration, another sign of his authority newly legible in his subjects.

IV

What, then, are we to make of the play's topicality? Even as we earlier admitted the impossibility of providing proof for this claim, we have been suggesting that the “cultural situation” being “mirrored” in Measure for Measure is the great royalist project initiated by King James earlier in 1604, a project founded on the notion that the king's own authority was at stake in the public production and reception of biblical texts. But topicality is a tricky business indeed. For even when scholars might agree that a literary work is actually employing a topical reference (and consensus can be hard to come by), it is still a matter of conjecture how that reference might have been meaningful in its original context. For example, what we have been reading in Measure for Measure as subversive reflections on James's own “production” of royal authority might have been either intended or (mis)read as its opposite. In other words, because the play's political community (Catholic Vienna) is in theory “other” in relation to Jacobean England, the play's representation could have conceivably provided a conceptual buffer, distancing readers and audiences from confronting its full implications and even confirming orthodox thought.⁴⁶ Is it possible that the interpretive problem posed here derives from our very idea of “topicality,” with its assumption that what would have been “topical” for a reader or audience in 1604 had to have one specific and easily identifiable historical referent (a fixed “letter” of history employed, with critical hindsight, to restrict the “spirit” of interpretation)?

Without answering it, we might relocate this question by recalling Marcus's assertion that Renaissance “poets and dramatists … looked for ways to regularize and elevate topical issues so that they could be linked with more abstract … concerns.” But which abstract concerns are being worked out in the play? We have focused primarily on the relations between political and religious authority, and the potential for a kind of despotism when the former successfully “stages” itself as the latter. But to the extent Measure for Measure's Vienna stands finally as a general exemplum of that community where religion functions as an interested cultural activity, the play also suggests that, for the human political community, there are problems with the biblical demands themselves and not just with those authority figures who abuse these demands to serve private political ambitions.

Indeed, as we have already suggested, the allusion in the play's title to the Sermon on the Mount is meant to draw attention to one of the central issues of Christian teaching: its distinction between the letter and the spirit of the law. Shakespeare reapplies this distinction most obviously to Angelo's actions in his complex dealings with Isabella and Claudio, but more broadly the gospel paradigm provides a governing idea for the play as a whole in its staged conflict between ethical ideal and social practice. In short, Shakespeare's adaptation of the ideal of ethical behavior put forth in the Sermon seems bent on problematizing it at the point where it enters into the demands of social government. For what is a marker of Christian liberty in Matthew becomes in the final act of Measure for Measure a marker of its failure, or at least of its continued absence under the exigencies of maintaining cultural order. Shakespeare's complex staging of the duke's final abuse of the gospel claim appears then not simply to condemn his (or any ruler's) Machiavellian “fraud” but also to force upon the reader some consideration of what happens when humans try to put divine truths into practice, or perhaps what dilemmas (or perversions) result when humans try to make sense of even the simplest of God's revelations.

We must recognize in the play, then, a kind of a skeptical meditation on the nature, limits, and prerogative of legal power as well as on the ethics of justice;⁴⁷ if Measure for Measure is a “problem comedy” it is problematic precisely because it calls into question the very ideals of comic society as a place freed from the restrictions of law. As old-fashioned as his writing now appears, Northrop Frye is still the finest critic we have of this comic impulse, and his notion that Shakespearean comedy aims at the twin experience of social communion and divine grace as these retain their overtly Christian overtones is still a powerful and insightful formulation of a difficult subject.⁴⁸ Despite the play's final perversion of what we might call a “comic impulse” (marked especially in the three troubling marriages formed at the end), its title strongly suggests that Shakespeare is interested precisely in forcing his audience to confront the vision of a society freed from law, where this “freedom” is now defined in specifically Christian terms as the movement from the letter to the spirit of the law. Measure for Measure undercuts without totally dismantling this ideal by representing its limitations when faced with the reality of human governance in a fallen world. Indeed, what the title and the play's several staged debates concerning the uses and abuses of authority all point to is a kind of anxiety that the cultural necessity of imposing justice runs into conflict with the dream of establishing the Christian ethical life as the basis of human society. In Measure for Measure, finally, justice is put to its greatest test in its attempt to live up to the demands of faith.

Notes

1. Levin, 1979, 171-93. Among the studies that in one way or another attempt to explicate a topical relation between play and king are the following: Bennet; Battenhouse, 1977; Marcus, 160-202; and Bernthal. Although the two types are often related, we might distinguish topical readings from “ideological” readings, those which posit a historically specific meaning for the play in relation not to any particular event in James's reign but to some dominant cultural code. See, for example, Greenblatt, 133-42; Tennenhouse; Dollimore; and Goldberg, 230-39.

2. Goldberg, 286 (n. 24), 232 (our emphasis in this citation).

3. Levin, 1979, 186.

4. Marcus, 200, 26. Levin's more recent work (1995) makes a broader attack on the premises of topicality.

5. There was always this possibility, of course. In the “Epistle” that prefaced his 1607 quarto-edition of Volpone, for example, Ben Jonson chastised his readers for their propensity for assigning topical meanings to his plays (Jonson, 5:18-19).

6. Patterson, 14; Marcus, 41.

7. Aristotle, 33.

8. For the two minor exceptions, see note 9.

9. In light of the many fine, meticulously researched studies on the link between James and the play, it is all the more surprising to find virtually no mention of the politics of one of James's most ambitious and best publicized undertakings: the new biblical translation first announced in January of 1604 at the Hampton Court conference. (Lever, xxxv, postulates that the play “was written between May and August 1604.”) In fact, only two recent studies even mention the conference at all: Battenhouse does so only to note that James “loved the limelight” of those proceedings (1977, 210); Marcus twice mentions the conference in connection to Measure for Measure (172, 194) but does not call attention to the project of translation announced there, and elsewhere, when she does call attention to the project (112) she does not do so in reference to Measure for Measure.

10. Goldberg, 238. For discussion of the play's representation of the relation between political rule and religious authority, see Goldberg, 232-36; Marcus, 178-83; and Tennenhouse, 142-44.

11. Schleiner rightly notes that “in no other play [by Shakespeare] do the central characters evoke specific biblical passages and theological concepts to explain their crucial deeds; in no other are the [biblical] allusions so prominent; in no other do they define so distinct and consistent a pattern”; hence, she concludes, “we must account for these allusions somehow” (227). Schleiner's own “accounting” belongs to a well-established scholarly tradition dedicated to explicating the play's indebtedness to biblical texts as well as to more broadly religious concepts: see, for example, Knight; Battenhouse, 1946; and Velz. But efforts in this tradition almost invariably refuse to place the play in a historical context and so dismiss its explicit attention to the politics of biblical authority in favor of moralized readings of how the play represents “correct” Christian behavior. The main elements in this “Christian tradition” are usefully summarized by Price, 188-92.

12. A number of Puritan grievances (some old, some new) had been formally addressed to the new king in such texts as the Millenary Petition, presented to James while he was making his royal progress from Edinburgh to London in the spring of 1603.

13. In Larkin, 62-63.

14. Ibid., 61-62. James concluded the proclamation by asserting that “our purpose and resolution ever was, and now is to preserve the estate as well Ecclesiasticall as Politike, in such forme as we have found it established by the Lawes here” (63).

15. At the time, Cartwright's views were most strongly challenged by Cambridge's Vice-Chancellor, John Whitgift, who in January, 1604 was the Archbishop of Canterbury (and so the official leader of the Anglican settlement at the conference). The attack on the signers of the Millenary Petition is recorded in Barlow, 26-27.

16. Barlow, 79, 83. James issued his famous synopsis of the Puritan agenda—No Bishop, no King—in this same attack on Reynolds.

17. Ibid., 45.

18. Epistle Dedicatory and Preface to the 1611 Bible, quoted in Opfell, 142, 147.

19. Bruce, 98. The fifteen “rules” were officially drawn up by Richard Bancroft, then Bishop of London. Bancroft had initially opposed the project, but after the death of Archbishop Whitgift in February, Bancroft saw his active promotion of it, so strongly supported by James, as the best way to ensure his ascension to the empty Archbishopric (and indeed James appointed him to that post before the end of the year).

20. The following account is provided by Barlow: “His Highnesse wished, that some especial pains should be taken … for one uniforme translation (professing that he could never, yet, see a Bible well translated in English; but the worst of all, his Maiestie thought the Geneva to be) and this to be done by the best learned in both the Universities, after them to be reviewed by the Bishops, and the chiefe learned of the Church; from them to be presented to the Privy Councell; and lastly to be ratified by his Royall authority; and so this whole Church to be bound unto it, and none other” (46).

21. The first of Bancroft's “rules” of translation specified that the Bishops' Bible, the latest authorized version, was “to be followed, and as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit”; rule 14, however, contradicted this charge, stating that other bibles, including the Geneva version, were “to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops Bible” (quoted in Opfell, 139-40).

22. Barlow, 47. Rule 6 thus states that “no Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the Explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words” (quoted by Opfell, 139); and Barlow notes that James himself, even at the moment when he accepted Reynolds's proposal, “gave this caveat … that no marginall notes should be added” (46-47).

23. All biblical references will be to the Geneva Bible.

24. Bruce, 97.

25. Bacon, 1985, 70. In his Certain Considerations Touching the Better Pacification … of the Church (1603), Bacon had warned James that Puritan demands were tending to a state of rebellion (Bacon, 1861-74, 10:103-27). But in his speech opening the 1604 Parliament, James seemed even more concerned with the dangers posed by Catholics: twice noting the “encrease [of] their number and strength in this Kingdome” and linking this to the imperial ambitions of the Pope, James ventured that the “continuall practise” of the most radical Catholics “is the assasinates and murthers of Kings, thinking it no sinne, but rather a matter of salvation, to doe all actions of rebellion and hostilitie against their naturall Soveraigne Lord” (A Speach, As It Was Delivered … Monday the XIX Day of March 1603 [1604], in James I, 140-41).

26. As another part of these efforts, in March, 1604 James issued a royal proclamation “for the Authorizing and Uniformitie of the Booke of Common Prayer to be used throughout the Realme” (quoted in Larkin, 74).

27. Goldberg, 235. As part of his own effort to narrow down the field of references, Goldberg dismisses the “literalisms of much topical criticism,” and, much in the manner of Levin, goes so far as to remark of one reading that “there is not a shred of evidence” to support its suppositions (286 n. 24, 232). Of course that last claim might be made of Goldberg's reading as well.

28. Bradshaw, 15, 32.

29. Jardine, 6. Levin disparages this kind of historical hedging when he claims that modern topicalists “commonly … disavow the specific historical equations … they suggest and relocate the allusions in a looser analogy to a more general historical situation” (1995, 433); but Levin mistakes the openly conjectural elements of modern interpretive reconstructions of past texts as methodological error, or even bad faith.

30. Despite his reluctance to stage himself, the duke's acknowledgment that as a practice such theatricality “do[es] well” (1.1.69) suggests that he perfectly understands its effectiveness as a kind of social rhetoric. For further discussion of the play's metatheatricality, particularly in relation to the duke, see Van Laan, 98-100; and Wheeler, 130-32. Obviously we are not the first to suggest the pervasive anti-duke sentiment in the play; for a brief overview of this sentiment in earlier Shakespearean criticism (as well as in productions of the play), see Schleiner, 227. For discussion of the relation between the play's metatheatrical design and its analysis (or critique) of a ruler's techniques of statecraft (Duke Vincentio's or James's), see Bernthal; Tennenhouse; Dollimore; and Dawson.

31. In a loose recollection of these lines, Angelo's opening soliloquy of 2.4 calls attention both to the general problem of authority's duplicitous use of the appearance of virtue and to the specific form of deception employed by the duke: “O place, O form, / How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, / Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls / To thy false seeming! … / Let's write ‘good angel’ on the devil's horn, 'Tis not the devil's crest” (2.4.12-17; our emphasis).

32. We might note here that Lucio's parody is conceptually linked to (even as it inverts) Christ's promise in the Sermon to fulfill Old Testament truths rather than destroy them (Matt. 5:17). Lucio's joking reference to the “scraping out” of the commandment—with its emphasis on a deliberate act of textual revision—seems intended to recall (again, only to mock) Christ's very next line in the Sermon: “For truely I say unto you, Til heaven & earth perish, one jote or one title of the Law shal not scape, til all things be fulfilled” (Matt. 5:18; our emphasis). What is an amusing joke for Lucio and the two gentlemen becomes much more serious as a commentary on the reconstructions of sacred texts by real authority figures.

33. Although it does not quite fit within the same pattern (since in it Angelo himself is not shown deliberately misapplying biblical texts to further his own interests), it is worth noting how the “resolution” to Angelo's crime is played out as an extended allusion to the Sermon (and in particular to the Sermon's concern with the discrepancy between letter and spirit). Because Isabella is never actually violated (Angelo paradoxically “fornicates” with his wife), Angelo fulfills the letter of the law as it is set out by Christ: “Ye have hearde that it was said to them of olde time, Thou shalt not commit adulterie” (Matt. 5:27). But by merely desiring Isabella, Angelo more profoundly fails to realize the spirit of the law: “But I say unto you, whosoever loketh on a woman to lust after her hathe committed adulterie with her already in his heart” (Matt. 5:28).

34. In a bizarre way, the duke's actions seem almost self-consciously bent on answering one of the central questions of Il Principe: is it better for the ruler to be feared or loved? As part of this inquiry we might take special note of the duke's description of his transfer of authority to Angelo: “we have with special soul,” he tells Escalus, “lent him our terror, dress'd him with our love” (1.1.17, 19; our emphases).

35. The biblical sanction for Angelo's punishment (Exod. 21:23-24) comes from the section immediately following God's giving of the Ten Commandments, where God gives to Moses a body of judicial precedents to be used in settling issues of law and custom. Interestingly, the gloss on this passage in the Geneva Bible notes that “the execution of this lawe onely belonged to the Magistrate.”

36. For discussion of this “political theology,” see Kantorowicz, 495.

37. Knight, 81.

38. Isabella shows a similar reverence towards the duke's quasi-mystical knowledge: “O gracious Duke, / … let your reason serve / To make the truth appear, where it seems hid, / And hide the false seems true” (5.1.63-67). As if echoing the duke's words, Bacon would remark in the Advancement of Learning (1605) that “men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on” (1861-74, 3:314; our emphasis). In that same text, however, Bacon also suggested that the cultivation of this image of inscrutable divine intelligence was part of the ruling strategy of the “deeper politique”: “[F]or as in civil actions he is the greater and deeper politique, that can make other men the instruments of his will and ends and yet never acquaint them with his purpose, so as they shall do it and yet not know what they do, than he that importeth his meaning to those that he employeth; so is the wisdom of God more admirable, when nature intendeth one thing and providence draweth forth another” (3:359).

39. “Of Seditions and Troubles,” in Bacon, 1985, 45.

40. Greenblatt, 136-37; for the topicality of this representation, see also Bernthal.

41. Ibid., 133, 136, 138.

42. Althusser, 148-58, 170-77.

43. Cf. Matt. 5:38-48.

44. Friar Peter's description of the duke's grand return to the city both underscores the royal drive to produce “spectacle” and, within the play's pattern biblical allusiveness, suggests another violation of the “spirit” of the Sermon. We might compare Friar Peter's lines—“Twice have the trumpets sounded; / The generous and gravest citizens / Have hent the gates, and very near upon / The duke is ent'ring” (4.6.12-15)—to the Sermon's injunction to do God's work in secret: “Thou shalt not make a trumpet to be blowen before thee, as hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the stretes, to be praised of men” (Matt. 6:2; our emphasis). Of course the aspect of the duke's work that is done in secret is precisely political and not godly, for it serves only to further his own interests as ruler.

45. Bernthal, 254; it should be noted that Bernthal is summarizing this traditional reading rather than endorsing it.

46. As Marcus observes, in 1604 Vienna would have been most strongly “associated … by [the original English] viewers with fears of Catholic invasion and repression, with the dread specter of Hapsburg rule, [and with] a return to the Inquisition and to the bloody persecutions of Philip and Mary”; hence, even if the play was intended as a cautionary tale about the fraudulent nature of rulers' claims to divine authority, the subversive image of deceptive rulers depicted by the play might actually have sanctioned James's own authority as a necessary bulwark against “a dark fantasy of alien Catholic domination” (164). As we observed earlier (n. 25), it was just such a “fantasy” that James himself offered in his very first speech before Parliament in March 1604.

47. For a valuable discussion of this complex issue, see Kahn.

48. See especially his “Mythos of Spring: Comedy,” 163-71.

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