[In the following essay, Yoshihara treats the themes of money and sexuality in Measure for Measure.]

Measure for Measure is much concerned with substitution, exchange and replacement. Angelo is substituted for the Duke as deputy; he proposes that Isabella's maidenhead should be exchanged for Claudio's head or his life; Mariana replaces Isabella in the bed trick; Regozine's head is substituted for Claudio's. In other words, they are exchangeable commodities like money. Furthermore, in the play, sexual reproduction is under surveillance by the state, just as coinage is. Illicit generation is compared to counterfeiting, and the crime of those who get “issues” without the state's sanction is a capital one, just as counterfeiting was a capital crime in Shakespeare's time. The model of monetary exchange informs the characters' bodies and souls. Not only coins, but also the subjects' bodies, their words, even the fluids circulating in their bodies must bear the sovereign's “figure” in order to be legitimately current.

The Duke's “figure” gains omnipotent authority over his subjects' sexual, verbal and mercantile transactions. The Duke assumes that he has absolute authority over metal and mettle; he acts as if his right to “issue” coins in his “figure” automatically authorizes him to regulate the way his subjects use their sexual mettle. I shall argue that his assumption of absolute authority over metal/mettle is quite problematic. I do not believe that the Duke's authority over money authorizes him to monetize his subjects' mettle/metal, to coin, stamp and press it into his “image,” to deal with his subjects' sexual reproduction as the mechanical reproduction of his “figure,” or to treat his subjects' sexual mettle as if they were ingots of metal.

1

In act 2, scene 4, when asked by Isabella to forgive Claudio's illicit generation, Angelo describes a child conceived in illicit generation as a “false” coin or a counterfeit:

ANGELO
Ha? Fie, these filthy vices! It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid. 'Tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made,
As to put mettle in restrained means
To make a false one.

(2.4.42-49)¹

Coinage metaphors are usually employed to account for the physical similarities between a biological father and his child; the father's “image” is said to be “coined” and “stamped” on the child. Yet in the lines above, coinage metaphor is employed to affirm the state's authority over its subjects' sexual reproduction, rather than to describe the physical similarities between Claudio and Juliet's fetus. It should be noted that the fetus Juliet bears is not false or a counterfeit, as far as the physical similarities between Claudio and the fetus are concerned. The fetus would be a sterling coin that bears and coins Claudio's original “image” as far as biological kinship is concerned. In the play, however, the political sovereign appropriates biology as a means to naturalize and legitimatize his political authority over the sexual reproduction of his subjects. According to Angelo's argument, the political sovereign has more claim to authority or authorship of a child than the biological father. In order to be legitimate, a child must bear the sovereign's “image,” rather than that of its biological father. In the play, monetary politics assume the state's sexual policy.

Angelo argues that the Duke is authorized to assume the role of a parthenogenetic demi-god who creates everything in his own image, as in the Judeo-Christian myth of the Creation. His subjects must be his copies or clones, monetarily as well as sexually.² In this regard, Claudio's crime is the violation of the sovereign's “copyright.” Actual sexual reproduction becomes a kind of surrogate reproduction in which the sovereign's image, not the biological father's, is copied and multiplied. In the play, the state, not subject, owns the sexual body. Subjects are standardized, stamped and quantified—in other words, they become the bodies of populating animals which, together with accumulated capital, are used to strengthen the nation's power.³

Procreation is imagined as textual inscription by the male member upon the female body, and hence, as male parthonogenesis. Claudio compares Juliet's pregnancy to textual production: “The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet” (1.2.143-45). “Character” here means an inscribed, engraved letter, and suggests the biological father's image inscribed on his child; “gross,” here, means “large.” Claudio is the author, Juliet's body is a blank page on which he inscribes his “character” with large letters; the fetus is a text written by Claudio's male member. Claudio assumes the part of an author who claims an exclusive “copyright” for his child, in the fashion of God in the Creation. Claudio's pen or penis has parthonogenetic power to create art or a biological child out of the “nothing” of the female sexual body.

2

The Duke parthonogenetically re-produces Angelo as his son or a coin that bears his own “figure.” Just before appointing Angelo to be his deputy in his absence, the Duke asks Escalus about Angelo: “What figure of us, think you, he will bear?” (1.1.16). “Figure” here suggests both the physical similarities between a father and his child and the sovereign's figure that a sterling coin bears, and hence the amount of the coin: Angelo is to become the Duke's son who bears his “figure” and “image,” or a coin, pressed with his “figure,” that represents ducal authority in the market. The Duke parthonogenetically “issues” (gives birth to, puts into circulation) Angelo as his own son and a coin of high value. The Duke also assumes the privileged male role of the father or the original “figure” that reproduces itself on the passive and obedient “means” of Angelo's mettle/metal. Will Angelo prove to be the Duke's legitimate son, a sterling coin that reproduces the Duke's “figure” faithfully, or will he be a counterfeit son or coin that distorts the Duke's “figure,” misrepresenting and misappropriating his authority?⁴

Angelo follows the Duke's figure of speech, and replies using the metaphor of metallurgy and coinage: “Let there be some more test made of my metal, / Before so noble and so great a figure / Be stamp'd upon it” (1.1.48-50).⁵ Angelo is an essentialist who believes that the monetary value of a coin (“figure”) should correspond to the “essential” value of its ingot. For him, the Duke's “figure” coined on his mettle/metal should be the sign of the Duke's metallurgical estimation of his mettle/metal.

Yet as the Duke soon shows in his conversation with Friar Thomas, he has little faith in the ‘essential’ value of Angelo's mettle/metal (1.3). Angelo's simple belief that there should be a proper correlation between mettle/metal and the “figure” coined upon it is subverted by the very person whose minted “figure” upon coins is supposed to guarantee the value of coins. Does the issuer of currency who debases the coinage have the authority to punish the two counterfeiters—Claudio, who puts “mettle in restrained moulds,” and Angelo who is to be made a counterfeit coin?

The Duke's monetary policy—and hence his sexual policy—resembles a paper money policy in which the substance of the currency has almost no value, and its monetary value is determined solely by the virtue of the figure impressed upon the paper. Even though the metallurgical metaphor is insistently employed to describe the monetary economy of sexuality in the play, the Duke seems to have almost no faith in the genuine metallurgical value of human mettle. Following the model of the Judeo-Christian myth of the Creation, the Duke endeavors to make his “figure” the sole origin of monetary/political authority: his “figure” creates value out of nothing, in his own image.⁶

The Duke's monetary/sexual politics virtually negates “essentialist” ideas about the distinction between the nobleness and the baseness of human mettle. It is not that the essential value of mettle/metal determines the sign that signifies its value, but that the sign actually determines the value of mettle/metal. Angelo's mettle/metal becomes, in effect, a kind of blank paper of tabula rasa on which the Duke stamps, inscribes and reproduces his “figure”; it has almost no value in itself; it is a void, a nothing, which can be made to signify whatever the Duke's authorial “figure” forges upon it.

The blankness of Angelo's mettle/metal, however, does not serve to prove its innocence. When Angelo is accused of being a “slip,” that is, a counterfeit coin, the question raised is solely about the “corruptible” nature of Angelo's mettle.⁷ The fact of the Duke's misappropriating his own authority as an issuer of coins is totally concealed.

ESCALUS
I am sorry one so learned and so wise
As you, Lord Angelo, have still appear'd,
Should slip so grossly, both in the heat of blood
And lack of temper'd judgement afterward.

(5.1.468-71)

Because of “the heat of blood” and “gross” “intemperate lust” (5.1.98), Angelo's mettle/metal has degenerated into ill-tempered mettle/metal that is only fit for a counterfeit. The Duke, who is said to be “a gentleman of all temperance” (3.2.231), is presented as an all-powerful alchemist who detects the base “temper” of Angelo's mettle/metal.⁸ Vaguely occult suggestions of alchemical refinement and degeneration are, I would argue, a cover to mystify the Duke's illegitimate monetary and sexual policy.

At the start of the play, in praising Angelo's “fine” “spirits,” the Duke employs alchemical terms. In fact, he assumes the role of an alchemist, a touchstone or a metallurgist, who “assays” and tests Angelo's mettle/metal. Even while he employes the rhetoric of occult alchemy, however, his intention remains capitalistic. The ultimate purpose of his alchemical arts is not to “refine” and “sublime” base mettle/metal, but merely to “multiply” the wealth.⁹

Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues; nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.

(1.1.35-40)

Angelo's “spirits,” being “touched” as by a touchstone, should be used as capital in an economically gainful way, to gain “use” or interest. Similarly, “Nature” is a thrifty usurer who would not neglect “the smallest scruple,” or, by extension, the smallest price of gold.

The lines quoted above are clearly suggestive of “spirits” as seminal fluids and of an offspring as interest or “use” begotten through copulation. In the context of usury regulated by the state, these lines imply that even the use of “spirits” must be regulated by the state. Indeed, procreation is imagined as state-regulated usury. Angelo is allowed to have “fine” issues or offspring on the condition that he subjugates himself to the money-issuer's authority.¹⁰ The wasteful “expense of spirit” (Sonnet 129:1) is not allowed in Measure's Vienna. Angelo's “fine spirits,” the Duke urges, must be used to generate themselves in the form of offspring, closely following the model of capitalist accumulation of wealth and of population.

Through usury and through the subjects' sexual reproduction, the Duke's “figure” multiplies. The Duke implies that it is the sovereign himself with the absolute privilege to “issue” coins and to regulate usury, not Angelo, who has the authority to determine what is proper in using Angelo's seminal fluid. Not only the circulation of coins in the body politic, but also the use of seminal fluid that “issues” from Angelo's body, the Duke implies, must be regulated by the money-issuer. The body politic is eroticized, as the human body is monetized and politicized. Every spirit must be optimized to increase the nation's power, in the form of money and the number of men.¹¹ The ideology of heterosexuality, under the guise of benevolent recommendation for the proper use of one's body and spirits, coerces the subjects into becoming usurious machines for mass production of the sovereign's “figure.”

3

It is ironic that Isabella becomes implicated in money-like exchanges of roles and parts precisely because she refuses the mercenary exchange of her maidenhead with her brother's head. When Angelo proposes that her maidenhead should be used as money to “redeem” and “deliver” her brother from the prison, Isabella firmly resists his mystificating the redemption as an imitation of Christ's redemption, insisting on the mercenary aspects of the exchange between her maidenhead and her brother's head.

ANGELO
Then must your brother die.
ISABELLA
And 'twere the cheaper way.
Better it were a brother died at once,
Than that a sister, by redeeming him,
Should die for ever.

(2.4.104-8)

She refuses to be used as a coin to “redeem” her brother's head, and insists on the unique, unexchangeable value of her maidenhead. Yet, when she consents to the disguised Duke's proposal for the bed trick, she becomes implicated in the undifferentiated exchange of her hymen and Mariana's: any maidenhead will do to “deliver” Claudio, just as any coins of the same figure can stand for each other.

As a candidate for a religious sisterhood, Isabella is a kind of “barren metal” that is not current in the market of sexual transactions. Her status exempts her from the market logic of sexual reproduction. However, her view about sexual reproduction in general is not free from the imperative of phallocentrism. She is concomitant with male-centered view about procreation in that she regards women's bodies as mere “means” to reproduce male “forms.”

ANGELO
Nay, women are frail too.
ISABELLA
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.

(2.4.123-29)

The multiplication of “forms” by a mirror is clearly suggestive of sexual multiplication. Isabella's melancholic tone lamenting women's “frailty,” though intended to defend women who are powerless before the assault of phallic aggressiveness, actually degrades women's reproductive capacities. According to Isabella, women's reproductive capacities are merely reflective: just as a mirror cannot produce and create “forms” by itself, so women can only reflect the male “forms” in sexual reproduction; woman has no claim to the authorship of her children; sexual reproduction is capitalistic “profiting.” Isabella's phallocentric notions about sexual print pave the way for Angelo's assault.

ANGELO
Be that you are;
That is, a woman. If you be more, you're none.
If you be one, as you are well expressed
By all external warrants, show it now,
By putting on the destined livery. …
Plainly conceive, I love you.

(2.4.133-40)

Here Angelo voices biological determinism. He implies that to be a woman is to merely “conceive” a male “figure.” Angelo's version of biological determinism allows no rights or possibilities, as far as women are concerned, except for their capacity to “conceive.” All women must be silent, obedient passive mettle/metal and bear the male “figure” and “character.” Angelo urges women as a group to be reduced to a womb. According to his argument, a woman is not allowed to control her reproductive ability; on the contrary, her womb determines her life. His argument is extreme, yet the ideology of heterosexuality and parthonogenetic ideas about sexual reproduction share Angelo's basic assumptions. The “natural” fact that a woman can conceive a child is appropriated to “naturalize” her passive role in the socio-economic system.

Even the “perverted” desire of Isabella, who says she would prefer “th'impression of keen whips” to Angelo's sexual “impression,” might tell us how far she has internalized the phallic mode of sexual imagination. The fantasy image of whipping is clearly eroticized. She talks of whipping as if it were consummation of her erotic desire. Indeed, her fantasy of erotic whipping is disturbingly reminiscent of sexual reproduction imagined as an inscription of the male “figure” upon the blank page of a woman's flesh:

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

(2.4.100-4)

It is almost impossible to distinguish “th'impression of keen whips” from the sexual inscription by the male “figure.” Whipping in public (a standard punishment for prostitutes) is a sign of the state's overwhelming power to regulate the use of the subjects' sexual bodies and blood. In her fantasy, Isabel's flesh becomes a page on which the political authority impresses and inscribes itself; “keen whips” are pens with which the state presses its “figure” upon its subjects' flesh; the blood Isabella sheds resembles ink on legal papers that legitimatize the state's authority or authorship over its subjects' sexual bodies. For Isabella, all blood—whether shed in cutting off men's heads, breaking hymens, or whipping prostitutes—must be used as ink that testifies the state's authority. Isabella's resistance against unlawful inscription of Angelo's “forms” upon her body does not mean that she is giving a dissident voice to male-centered notions about sexual inscription.

Under the regime of state-regulated birth control, a womb is under the state's surveillance. It becomes analogous to a prison, and to the world imagined as a prison, in the recurrent invocation of ideas about redemption and deliverance. The analogy between a womb and a prison is common; here uniquely both are under surveillance by the state.

Apart from the Christian association, “redemption” and “deliverance/delivery” need socio-political and bio-ideological analysis. As we have seen, Isabella would not allow her redemption of her brother to be mystified as an imitation of Christ's redeeming mankind from original sin.¹² In spite of her resistence, Angelo insistently compares the delivering of her maidenhead to Christ's delivering of humankind from the prison of original sin: “Redeem thy brother, / By yielding up thy body to my will” (2.4.163-64). He implies the blood Isabel will shed in yielding her virginity must be used to “redeem” her brother from prison, as Christ shed his blood to “redeem” and buy back humankind from the debt of original sin. His argument has the effect of making Isabel's delivering her maidenhead look as if it were her moral and religious obligation.

Isabella's “redemption” or “deliverance/delivery” of her brother from the prison is understood in terms of her biological capacity to “conceive” and “deliver” a child, as well as in terms of religious “deliverance”; she becomes a mother who “delivers” Claudio from the prison cell of her womb. The association of deliverance from prison with deliverance from a womb is most vividly imagined in Isabel's vehement condemnation of Claudio, who asks her to deliver her maidenhead to deliver him from the prison. She condemns Claudio as a “slip” or a counterfeit, and regards such deliverance as incest:

ISABELLA
Wilt thou be made out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame? What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair:
For such a warped slip of wilderness
Ne'er issued from his blood.

(3.1.137-42)

Claudio is a fetus waiting to be ‘delivered’ from prison. His deliverance is a kind of double incest, for Claudio is either a fetus conceived by incestuous union with his sister, or a fetus conceived by Isabella's incestuous union with their dead father.¹³

Isabella then becomes a demonized mother who refuses either to “conceive” male inscription or, once pregnant, to “deliver” her child from the prison cell of her womb. Pompey's light-hearted comparison between a prison and a bawdy house (4.3.1-20. Cf. 4.2.1-5) and his professional situation—he who once was an executioner of maidenheads becomes an executioner of men's heads—is revealing: as prostitution must be regulated by the state, in a way analogous to the state's policy over usury, so the womb must be under the state's panoptical surveillance, in a way analogous to the state's surveillance over prisons. In the disguised Duke's sermon to Claudio, he describes death as a longed-for deliverance from a world imagined as a prison and a womb. He completely degrades the value of life in the world, yet offers no comfort after the deliverance (3.1.5-41). The world and the womb become claustrophobic prison-like spaces demonized by the dominant ideology. Reproduction-centered bio-ideology degrades the womb as nothing more than a prison for a fetus, while at the same time enforcing sexual reproduction as women's religio-socio-political imperative.

4

At the end of the play, Angelo is condemned as a “slip” or a counterfeit who abuses the Duke's authority. However, there is not much point arguing whether Angelo's mettle/metal is essentially “noble” or “base,” in the situation in which the Duke's “figure” reduces his subjects to endlessly exchangeable commodities and in which the “essential” values of mettle/metal do not count for much. In the market where Angelo's authority is current as a coin of high value, there is confusion about the relationship between the monetary value of a coin and the “essential” value of its ingot, between a sign and its meaning. To a large extent “the crisis of representation,” in which a sign does not correspond to its supposed meaning, is caused by the Duke's misappropriation of his own authority and of Angelo's mettle/metal when he introduces a gulf between “figure” and the value of mettle/metal, between a sign and its meaning.

The most extreme instance of “the crisis of representation” arrives when Angelo acknowledges his own authority is counterfeit. Urged to tender her maidenhead to redeem Claudio, Isabella threatens to expose Angelo's evil intentions. She condemns Angelo, for his reputation as a virtuous person is false “seeming” (2.4.150). However, she is naive about representational strategies, for she seems to believe that the conflict between “seeming” and ‘truth’ can be corrected by simply revealing the falsity of “seeming.” Angelo is more pragmatic: he knows, in this situation, “truth” is unrepresentable. He retorts:

ANGELO
Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoil'd name, th'austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place i'th'state
Will so your accusation overweigh,
That you shall stifle in your own report,
And smell of calumny. …
Say what you can: my false o'erweighs your true.

(2.4.153-58, 169)

Angelo is confident that a false coin will be judged heavier and more substantial than a legitimate coin. As Isabella's testimony against Angelo represents the truth; her words are a metaphorical legal tender, and hence must be heavier than Angelo's words which are a metaphorical counterfeit, made of a “base” or lighter metal/mettle. Angelo acknowledges that his mettle/metal is not equal to his authority, yet he is confident that his authority has currency as a sterling coin, as far as the Duke's “figure” authorizes it. As the title suggests, Measure for Measure is full of references to measurement. Even measurement, a seemingly neutral way of just evaluation, does not function properly in this situation.

“The crisis of representation” here paradoxically consolidates the Duke's authority. The disastrous situation in which his “figure” cannot signify what it is supposed to signify, at first might seem to be destructive to his authority over economical and political representation. However, at the very moment the Duke's “figure” is most drastically misappropriated, it becomes omnipotent, for Angelo the “slip” himself acknowledges that the Duke's “figure” can make his mettle/metal become current solely by virtue of its authority, without any reference to the value of his mettle/metal. This is the very situation the Duke has been seeking from the time he issued Angelo as a coin of high value, knowing his mettle/metal was not equal to the “figure” pressed upon it. The Duke's obsessive pursuit of his authority as the author like God in the Creation myth is paradoxically complete at the moment it is thoroughly violated.

5

In the play, “the rebellion of a codpiece” (3.2.110-11) or the rebellion of a sexual member is tantamount to rebellion against the body politic, and hence to legally lead to the execution of the rebellious citizen. Almost endless substitutions of roles in the play imply that not only can any citizen of the community can be substituted for another, but also the bodily part of one person can be replaced with that of another. In Measure's Vienna, the body is a combination of detachable, exchangeable and replaceable bodily parts.

In the bed trick, Mariana replaces Isabella; or, Mariana's private “parts” represent Isabella's. Urging Isabel to join her in pleading for Angelo's life, Mariana says, “sweet Isabel, take my part” (5.1.428). Isabel is asked to take Mariana's “part” or role in public, in exchange for Mariana's having offered her private “parts” in bed. Furthermore, their mutual exchange of “parts” is a representation in a dramatic sense: in the scene where they appear on stage as Angelo's accusers, they are playing parts assigned by the Duke. He is a playwright whose writing member scripts the scenario. When Angelo detects someone behind Mariana and Isabel, he says, “I do perceive / These poor informal women are no more / But instruments of some more mightier member / That sets them on” (5.1.234-37). The Duke is the “more mightier member.” His “mightier member” that writes the script of Angelo's accusation scene is tantamount to his male member which reproduces his “character” everywhere, making Mariana and Isabel's “parts” represent his authorial intentions. The women's private “parts,” as well as their dramatic and public “parts,” is under the direction of the powerful male author's scripting hand.

In the last scene, Claudio appears on the stage as his own son: he is said to be “as like almost to Claudio as himself:” (5.1.487).¹⁴ He is delivered from the prison and a prison cell of the womb, as a son conceived in the sexual intercourse of Angelo and Isabel represented by Mariana. Isabella's horrified fantasy of her brother's incestuous rebirth is finally realized without the sacrifice of her maidenhead. The Duke's surveillance over his subjects' sexual reproduction is disturbingly complete; Isabella is made to “conceive” and “deliver” Claudio, even without her knowledge.

When the Duke proposes marriage to Isabel, the powerful sovereign orders her to become an instrument to reproduce his “figure.” After conducting a successful experiment to make every subject a vehicle to reproduce his “figure,” the Duke intends to carry out another experiment to see if sexual reproduction of his “figure” through Isabel's body can be as successful as in the cases of other-than-sexual reproductions. Will Isabel accept being made into a sexual mold that reproduces the Duke's sexual “character” by consenting to his marriage proposal?

6

I have tried to delineate the Duke's overwhelming power to multiply his “figure” monetarily and sexually upon his subjects' mettle/metal. In my view, his assumption of authority as the unexchangeable origin of commodity production and procreation is illegitimate. As the exchange value of a coin is partially determined by its content of precious metals, so the Duke's “figure” cannot wholly determine the exchange value of his subjects' mettle/metal. Insofar as the Duke must use his subjects' sexual mettle and molds to multiply his “figure,” his authority is radically dependent on and parasitic to his subjects. Therefore, he transgresses his own political authority as an issuer of currency and overseer of his subjects' sexuality when he deals with his subjects' mettle/metal.

Whether the Duke's transgressing his own authority leads to his subjects' resisting is, however, questionable. Many of the characters seem to subjugate themselves to the illusion that the Duke's “figure” is the only reliable source of justice in monetary, sexual and verbal exchanges. In contrast, I would like to invoke the character of Lucio who would not easily, subscribe to the view that various currencies in Measure's Vienna are dependent on the royal countenance for their circulation.

In the last scene, Lucio is punished for his two-fold violation of the sovereign's exclusive authority over sexual and verbal copyright, i.e., for illicit generation and for his slander against the Duke. Earlier Lucio thought if he pursued the economic activity of buying, the only “interest” or “use” would be a bald head or a “French crown” as a result of venereal disease (1.2.46-53. cf. 27-40); but finally, he is forced to take another “interest,” i.e. his child. He must marry a prostitute who bore his child. Lucio embodies a model of wasteful “expense of spirits” and the market logic of sexual/verbal/monetary currencies that questions the legitimacy of the notion that all currencies depend solely on the royal countenance for their authenticity. As such, he might be qualified as a subversive critique of the Duke's productivity-centered, authoritarian sexual politics over mettle/metal.

Lucio challenges the authoritarian notion that all verbal and monetary transactions depend on the royal countenance for their authority. In fact he recites an outrageous version of the Duke's life to the disguised Duke himself (3.2.83-183). Perhaps Lucio's estimation and interpretation of the Duke's life is not an honest reading. Nonetheless, the Duke's excessive irritation about Lucio's “gall” is suggestive. He laments, “What king so strong / Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?” (3.2.181-82). “Gall” suggests slander, black bile, and an ingredient of ink. The Duke is lamenting the inefficacy of his policy over words, bodily fluids and writing. He can successfully regulate neither the circulation of slander in the body politic; nor the circulation of the black bile (which was supposed to beget malcontent and melancholy) inside Lucio's body; nor the circulation of written words or texts. Lucio, a marginal figure, rewrites the texts that tell about the Duke's life, writing his comments in the margin of the text, with ink full of gall. In Lucio, the Duke's attempt to regulate totally the circulation of various currencies faces a serious challenge.

The most farcical moment of the Duke's failure to control sexual/textual reproduction arrives when he finds he has become a bastardizer of his subjects' fancy and of voluminous piratical texts. His “character,” circulating in the body politic, has multiplied itself, in a fashion analogous to sexual reproduction:

DUKE
O place and greatness! Millions of false eyes
Are struck upon thee: volumes of report
Run with these false, and most contrarious quest
Upon thy doings: thousand escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dream
And rack thee in their fancies.

(4.1.60-64)

The phrase, “thousand escapes of wit,” conceives (in two senses of the verb) the Duke's “character”; reprinted in the subjects' brain-womb, the Duke's “character” produces “volumes” of its piratical versions. The Duke cannot regulate even the way his own “character” circulates. This is a grievous case for him, for his textual/sexual/monetary policy requires total surveillance over the production and circulation of “characters.” He unwittingly becomes a bastardizer or a counterfeiter of “character,” in some ways like Lucio and Claudio.

Lucio shows that the sovereign cannot wholly regulate the way various currencies circulate in the body politic of Measure's Vienna. Even though Lucio is forced to submit himself to the state's regulation of sexual reproduction, even though he must be pressed and inscribed with the figure of the state's authority by whipping (5.1.501-21), his subversive power of questioning the legitimacy of the sovereign's authority over sexual/textual/monetary reproduction has not been canceled.

Notes

1. All citations are from The Arden Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, ed. J. W. Lever (London: Methuen, 1965).

2. In his now classic essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Louis Adrian Montrose remarks about the Aristotelian idea of procreation as male parthenogenesis that: “Shakespeare's embryological notions remain distinctly Aristotelian, distinctly phallocentric: the mother is represented as a vessel, as a container for her son; she is not his maker. In contrast the implication of Theseus' description of paternity is that the male is the only begetter. … A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatizes a set of claims which are repeated throughout Shakespeare's canon: claims for a spiritual kinship among men that is unmediated by women; for the procreative powers of men; and for the autogeny of men.” See “Shaping Fantasies: Figuration of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 42. I shall employ Montrose's terms “the autogeny of men” and “male parthenogenesis” to study sexual economy in Measure for Measure and apply the term to procreation imagined as coinage.

3. Employing Foucault's concept of modern “bio-power,” Richard Wilson remarks that the duke “has grasped the power of the modern state will depend … on the optimising of desire for the increase of its population.” He also argues that a Shakespearean comedy depicts “the interdependence of economic and political interests in this era when the accumulation of capital and the accumulation of men were geared together. Richard Wilson, “Discipline and Punishment in Shakespearean Comedy,” Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 130, 140.

4. The name Angelo suggests angel coins. Although no direct reference to coins appear in the play, Angelo's line, “Let's write good angel the devil's horn” (2.4.16) and the Duke's, “but that frailty hath examples for his falling, should wonder at Angelo” (3.1.185-86) must refer to them. Cf. angel: An old English gold coin (OED [Oxford English Dictionary], n.6).

5. test: to subject gold or silver to a process of separation and refining in a test or cupel; to assay (OED, v. 4.1)

6. In terms of monetary policy based on the “essential” value of ingots, the Duke's policy is untenable, for in that policy the royal countenance, expressed by the sovereign's figure impressed upon coins, cannot be the sole basis of the value of the coins. Discussing the Duke's monetary strategy, Paul Yacknin writes: “With regard to the ideology of monetary value in Measure, it should be noted that in Tudor England and in Jacobean Ireland the marketplace rather than the royal countenance often served to underwrite the value of the coinage. On several occasions, the government attempted to debase the coinage by reducing or removing its precious metal content; on such occasions, market forces took over and had the effect of forcing the monarch to restore the precious metal content of the coinage. Therefore, Measure's audience would have been aware that the value of coinage did not necessarily depend exclusively on royal authority.” See “The Politics of Theatrical Mirth: A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Mad World, My Masters and Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1992), 42n.

7. slip: a counterfeit coin (OED, n.4).

8. temper: to bring steel to a suitable degree of hardness (OED, v.14). The official story about Angelo's mettle/metal, scripted by the Duke, is fairly simple. At first Angelo seems to be made of “incorruptible” mettle/metal like gold. This is the primary reason the Duke issues Angelo as a coin of high value. Confronted with Isabella's body, Angelo reveals his “base” mettle/metal and becomes the “corrupt deputy” (2.1.255; cf. corruption: the oxidation or corrosion of metals. (OED, sb 1.c). Isabella's attempt to save her brother is fittingly called an “assay” (1.4.76), for it functions as a metallurgical trial of Angelo's metal. Cf. assay: to test the composition of an ore, alloy, or other metallic compound by chemical means, so as to determine the amount of a particular metal contained in it (OED, v4.a), and “assay” (3.1.161) and “trial” (3.1.196). In these lines Angelo's temptation to Isabel is compared to a metallurgical experiment on Isabella's metal/mettle.

9. For the distinctions between common alchemists who pursue only the multiplication of capital and occult alchemists who pursue the refinement and sublimation of base metals, and for alchemical patterns in Renaissance literature, cf. Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theater (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). Sometimes the Duke is compared to an alchemist who refines his subjects' “gross” metal/mettle into something like fine incorruptible gold. In my view, his interests lie more in accumulating the “gross” number of his subjects by means of gross sexual reproduction than in refining their metal/mettle.

10. Pompey talks of “two usuries / the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed by / order of law” (3.1.6-8). He pirates the logic of capitalist accumulation, by calling prostitution a means to multiply population. His is critical when both forms of “increase,” usury and procreation are held to be legitimate because they are sanctioned by the state, by the Duke's “figure.”

11. In Measure's Vienna, overpopulation is also inconvenient for the state. This can be seen in the recurrent references to abortion. For example, “future evils / Either new, or remissness new conceived, / And so in progress to be hatch'd and born, / Are now to have no successive degrees, / But ere they live, to end” (2.2.96-100). “Future evils” are compared to babies who must be aborted.

12. Christ's redemption and deliverance of humanity from original sin was, according to Isabella, an unequal exchange between Christ's blood and human sin; Christ's blood was a kind of currency to redeem and deliver mankind from the prison of sin; Christ did not require that there be the exact equivalent between his blood and human sin (2.2.70-79). She argues that Angelo, as a representative of God on earth, must imitate Christ by not asking the exact payment of Claudio's life for his sin.

13. Isabella remains a faithful daughter of partriarchy when she calls her brother a “slip” or counterfeit. Claudio, a bad “issue” or son, is condemned as a counterfeit-like misrepresentation of their father's “figure.” Isabella regards Claudio as a counterfeit “issued” from the contaminated mold of their mother in order to keep their father's “figure” innocent of Claudio's degeneration. As Adelman remarks, Isabella “allies herself with the male voices condemning female contamination” by placing responsibility for Claudio's corruption entirely with her mother.” Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 97.

14. In his inspiring study of various exchanges in Measure for Measure, Marc Shell writes, “Claudio is saved … in a figurative resurrection through ‘a kind of incest’ between him and Isabella … Claudio is born again … as his own new born son.” The End of Kinship: “Measure for Measure,” Incest and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 139.

This paper is based on my presentation of “Metallurgical Metaphors in Measure for Measure at the 31st meeting of the Japan Shakespeare Society, October 1992.