[In the following excerpt, Korda studies the precarious social position of the single woman—variously embodied as Isabella, Marianna, Juliet, and Mistress Overdone—in the patriarchal world of Measure for Measure.]

Measure for Measure, … manifests a profound preoccupation with the place of singlewomen—many of whom had formerly lived in, around, and (in the case of those who were impoverished) by the good graces of the nunneries—in post-Reformation society. What was at stake in this preoccupation, I shall argue, was the threat that placeless singlewomen posed to an increasingly paternalistic state (one that had taken over, secularized, and centralized the task of provisioning the poor, which had formerly been presided over by the religious houses) and to a patrilineal property regime pressured by demographic change. Following early modern usage, I deliberately employ the peculiar, compound form of the term “singlewoman” as a single word, in order to emphasize the singularity of this category in the period. For to be a singlewoman in post-Reformation England was to be something of an anomaly.¹ This is not to suggest that singlewomen were rare; recent historical demography has demonstrated that never-married singlewomen were far more numerous in northern Europe (and in England in particular) than in southern Europe and that their numbers continued to grow during the sixteenth century, reaching a peak of between 20 and 30 percent of all adult women during the seventeenth century (the numbers being higher in urban than in rural areas).² If we add widows or “ever married” women to this calculation (who made up some 15 percent of the adult female population), we arrive at an astonishing aggregate figure of between 35 and 45 percent of all adult women living without husbands.³ What made singlewomen anomalous was thus not their rarity, but rather what Ruth Karras has termed their “lack of social space or social identity.”⁴ In a society in which marital status was a primary “category of difference,” Amy Froide has likewise suggested, singlewomen (who no longer had the option of becoming nuns) quite literally had no social place.⁵ Historians have only begun to ask, “How did these lone women live in a society which theoretically had no place in its social hierarchy, its ‘great chain of being,’ for the unattached female?”⁶ An examination of this invisible population will help to illuminate the Jacobean state's increasingly interventionist role in enforcing domestic decorum, including the wife's role as a keeper of (male) property.

Unmarried “maids” in early modern England were expected to live as household dependents (i.e., with family or kin, or as servants in other men's households) and, of course, to remain chaste until marriage. Those who lived independently risked being classified as “masterless women,” witches, or prostitutes (the term “singlewoman” was in fact often used synonymously for prostitute in the period)⁷ and were singled out for various forms of punitive attention, such as corporal punishment and compulsory labor in “bridewells” or houses of correction (women, according to Froide, “vastly outnumbered men in most of the urban bridewells”).⁸ The preponderance of women in such institutions in part resulted from singlewomen's susceptibility to poverty. Those singlewomen not living as household dependents who could not find work as servants had few legitimate employment options; they often had to get by on unlicensed, ad hoc forms of economic activity (such as victualing, huckstering, and pawnbroking), or were forced into prostitution or onto the poor-rates.⁹ Yet poor relief was available only to singlewomen who were accounted “deserving poor” (i.e., the elderly, impotent, pregnant, or widowed); never-married singlewomen who were deemed ablebodied were classified as “undeserving” and were therefore not eligible.

Only recently have historians begun to look at the feminization of poverty—or what Amy Erickson has termed “the systemic economic vulnerability imposed to varying degrees on all women”—in early modern England. The available evidence suggests, in Erickson's view, that singlewomen “were the social group most vulnerable to poverty.”¹⁰ While this statement includes both never-married and ever-married (i.e., widowed or separated) women, the former, as suggested above, were even more economically vulnerable than the latter. Because widows were considered “deserving” poor, however, we have more accurate information about them as reflected in records of parish poor relief. According to the census of the poor taken in Norfolk in the seventeenth century, more than 60 percent of those in receipt of poor relief were women, most of them widows with young children.¹¹ In Holkham in 1600/1, women represented 75 percent of those on poor relief (66.6 percent of these were widows); and in Wighton in 1614/15, a staggering 90 percent of all recipients were women (70 percent widows).¹² The economic plight of never-married or lifelong singlewomen, and in particular those without children, is more difficult to assess, since they were deemed “undeserving” of poor-relief. There is evidence that many of them migrated to cities in search of a living.¹³ Those who did so, however, risked being apprehended en route, punished as “masterless women” (by branding, whipping, or, if repeat offenders, even death), and then sent “home” (although many had no homes to which to return).¹⁴ Impoverished singlewomen who made their way to towns and cities, but who were unable to find work as servants or in various ad hoc trades (and who, without dowries, were unlikely to find husbands) were liable to be arrested as vagrants or prostitutes and incarcerated in the local bridewell. There, they were “dryven to worke … with such corrections, tyll their handes [were] browght into such use and their bodies to suche paynes as labore and learninge shall be easier to them than idleness.”¹⁵ In an age that had little comprehension of the systemic causes of poverty and unemployment (and perhaps even less of their gendered determinants), unemployed or “masterless” singlewomen were viewed as willfully idle and in need of discipline or correction.

The notion that these placeless singlewomen should be the responsibility of the state, however, was a relatively recent one at the time Measure for Measure was written (c. 1604). The gradual secularization of poor relief and emergence of the poor laws following the dissolution of the monasteries had been cobbled together by local authorities up until the passage by Parliament of the famed Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601.¹⁶ In its final form, the 1601 Act (which would remain largely unchanged until 1834) had three essential features.¹⁷ First were the poor-rates, compulsory tax assessments in each parish to finance the “deserving” poor. The second feature, which Paul Slack describes as “the quid pro quo in return for public taxation,” was the criminalization of “masterless” women and men, who were deemed “undeserving” poor.¹⁸ Finally, there were the provisions for putting the latter to work, a strategy which included the erection of houses of correction.

At first glance, the state's role in provisioning the female poor, on the one hand, and in punishing them, on the other, would seem to be represented in Measure for Measure by the politics of the Duke and Lord Angelo respectively. At the start of the play, the Duke likens his paternalistic benevolence toward his subjects to that of a “fond father” (1. 3. 23), whose excessive affection for his children/subjects prevents him from exacting due justice. As a result, he complains, the punishing “rod” of the state has become “more mock'd than fear'd … / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum” (1. 3. 27, 30-31). The Duke blames his “nursing” of his subjects for the lack of domestic decorum that plagues his state, which is populated not by families but by unwed mothers and illegitimate children. Fearing that a sudden shift in his own style of governance will appear “too dreadful” to his people, he deputizes Angelo, hoping that he “may in th'ambush of [the Duke's] name strike home” (1. 3. 41). The phrase “strike home” aptly describes the early modern state's increasingly interventionist role in policing domestic conduct.¹⁹ The “precise” Angelo's assumption of this role within the play would seem to align him with the Puritan magistrates whose “determination to shape a godly commonwealth,” in Slack's words, put them at the vanguard of the effort to enforce social discipline.²⁰

Yet the binary opposition set up at the start of the play between the Duke's reluctant, and Angelo's overzealous policing of domestic conduct is soon complicated by the Duke's own surreptitious policing of the “dark corners” of his realm. For it is the Duke's shadowy surveillance and manipulation of his subjects—a policy that is repeatedly defended within the play as a form of secularized “charity”—that perhaps best exemplifies the lengthening arm of the state in domestic governance and, in particular, its “growing use of poor-relief as a means of social control.”²¹ Ironically, the secularization of poor-relief following upon the dissolution of the monasteries and culminating in the Elizabethan Poor Laws (which became the model for the state's increasingly interventionist role in domestic governance), finds expression in Measure for Measure in a pre-Dissolution setting. In his disguise as a mendicant friar, the Duke may therefore extend the reach of the state into the “dark corners” and recesses of his realm, exerting control over subjects who had hitherto evaded its grasp, all under the rubric of monastic “charity” and pious poverty: “If thou art rich, thou'rt poor,” he preaches, “For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, / Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, / And Death unloads thee” (3. 1. 25-8). The subjects over whom the disguised Duke exerts the most complete and effective, but also the most coercive, control within the play are all placeless singlewomen. Each of these women represents a different kind of antitype to the figure of the housewife: the nun (Isabella); the unwed mother (Juliet and Kate Keep-Down); the prostitute (Kate Keep-Down); the economically dependent singlewoman (Mariana); the economically independent bawd and widow (Mistress Overdone).

In foregrounding Measure for Measure's singlewomen, I am intentionally moving against the grain of previous criticism, which has focused instead on its “broken nuptials” or failed marriages, thereby reproducing the period's positioning of marriage as a “primary category of difference.”²² Such critics might object that neither Mariana nor Juliet are single by choice; in both cases, their marriages fail, not because they end in separation, but rather (as was more common in the early modern period) because their marriage contracts are never successfully achieved in the first place.²³ To clarify the obstacles impeding marriage in the play, commentators have concentrated on the intricacies of spousals law. While such criticism has made an important contribution to our understanding of how the marriages in the play fail, it is nonetheless insufficient to explain why they do.

To comprehend the significance of the play's preoccupation with broken nuptials and its equally marked concern with missing dowries, we must explore the economic, as well as the legal, barriers impeding marriage during the period. The former, moreover, may provide us with a more dynamic view of spousals law than that elaborated by previous criticism. For while it is true that the law of spousals defined what constituted a valid marriage in England from the twelfth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, by the late sixteenth century, ecclesiastical courts were increasingly reluctant to consider such contracts valid in the absence of public solemnization in church and began to prosecute couples for premarital fornication with greater frequency, even in cases such as that of Juliet and Claudio, in which the couple had merely postponed public solemnization.²⁴ This is, of course, precisely what happens in the play; the couple decide to postpone public solemnization until such time as the dowry is forthcoming and are prosecuted for premarital fornication. The zeal with which such cases were prosecuted may be attributed, according to Ingram, Wrightson, and Levine, to the sharply increasing levels of poverty and illegitimacy during the period.²⁵ Church authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to premarital pregnancy, according to Wrightson and Levine, as long as “expectations of housing, a settlement, land or employment were met and marriage ensued.”²⁶ During the economic crisis of the 1590s, however, when such settlements were often not forthcoming, the number of marriages declined and officials began to prosecute such cases more assiduously.²⁷

Measure for Measure's preoccupation with the policing, prosecuting, and provisioning of singlewomen likewise seems to center on the threat illegitimacy posed to an increasingly paternalistic state and to a patrilineal property regime pressured by demographic change. This is perhaps most clear in the case of Juliet, who at the start of the play is incarcerated for conceiving a child out of wedlock. Significantly, it is Juliet's pregnancy that makes her visible, and therefore subject, to the state; her crime is quite literally written “with character too gross” (1. 2. 143) on her belly. In his explanation of why Claudio has been sentenced to death, Angelo obliquely blames Juliet's pregnancy: “What's open made to justice, / That justice seizes … 'Tis very pregnant, / The jewel that we find, we stoop and take't, / Because we see it; but what we do not see, / We tread upon, and never think of it” (2. 1. 21-26). As a dowryless, unwed mother, Juliet's pregnancy makes her an object of penal attention, for she has become an economic burden to the state: “What shall be done, sir, with the groaning Juliet?” the Provost of the prison asks Angelo, who responds, “Dispose of her / To some more fitter place; and that with speed … Let her have needful, but not lavish means; / There shall be order for it” (2. 2. 15-17, 23-25). Angelo's implied reference to Juliet as a “jewel” cast aside in the gutter points to the further economic threat her pregnancy poses to patrilineality: for in conceiving a child out of wedlock, she has thrown away the “jewel” of her patrimony. Almost as soon as she appears, this specter of the placeless singlewoman is whisked away, removed from view until the end of the play. The dilemma posed by her lack of social space and identity is marked within the play by the peculiar imprecision of the site to which she is removed, which is designated only as “some more fitter place.”

The Jacobean statute books were far less imprecise about designating the social space befitting unwed mothers: “Every lewd woman which shall have any bastard which may be chargeable to the parish, the justices of the peace shall committ such woman to the house of correction, to be punished and set to work, during the term of one whole year.”²⁸ By contrast, the punitive regulation of singlewomen in Measure for Measure is effectively invisible except when the object of such regulation is defined as a prostitute (Kate Keep-Down and Mistress Overdone are summarily hauled off to prison). At the start of the play, all eyes are on Claudio, not Juliet, as the culprit to be punished by Angelo. While Claudio is paraded in public as a criminal (“why dost thou show me thus to th'world?” he complains to the prison Provost [1. 2. 108]), Juliet is notably silent onstage. We are immediately informed that “within these three days his head [is] to be chopped off” (1. 2. 62), but no mention is made of Juliet's punishment. When the Provost informs the disguised Duke of their situation, he makes this discrepancy clear: “She is with child,” he says, “And he that got it, sentenc'd” (2. 3. 13). The punishment of the father, rather than the mother, of the illegitimate child in Measure for Measure runs counter to contemporary legislation, which viewed “bastardy … as the exclusive responsibility of women and a sign of their promiscuity.”²⁹ Yet the inhabitants of the prison in Measure for Measure, who are described as former customers of Mistress Overdone's (4. 3. 1-20), are all men, impoverished gallants who have squandered their fortunes and who are therefore unable to keep familial households. A similar type is represented in a contemporary engraving, in which a singlewoman presents her “Bastard Child” to its father, a destitute gallant, who replies: “O pre'thee Wench, lett mee alone, / for I protest, all's spent and gonne.” The financial ruin of his household is metonymically figured by the decay of his household stuff, by the shattered status-objects that surround him: cracked urns, broken tobacco-pipes, smashed goblets, strewn playing-cards, and so on. These objects of luxury likewise figure his moral dissolution, suggesting the vices of drunkenness and gaming, in addition to the lechery evoked by the swaddled child he spurns. With no wife to “keep” his household stuff, the image implies, his home is bereft of both subjects and objects; his only companions are the mice that scurry across his floor, gnawing the scattered remains of his elite identity.

Although Juliet temporarily resides in the prison at the start of the play, she is kept there just long enough to confess to the Duke that her offense, in spite of her more lenient treatment, is “of heavier kind” (2. 3. 28) than Claudio's, even though the sin was “mutually committed” (2. 3. 27). Thus, while the play refrains from staging the forms of punishment meted out to singlewomen who conceived bastards during the period, it nevertheless suggests in more subtle ways their greater culpability for this crime, and works to instill this notion in them, thereby ensuring future self-discipline. Women were more vulnerable to punishment for bastard-bearing, of course, because paternity was always open to doubt in a way that maternity was not. The double standard regarding extramarital sex likewise found support in the commonplace misogynist notion that women provoke men to intemperate lust. This notion is woven throughout the Angelo / Isabella narrative, most famously in Angelo's “Is this her fault or mine? / The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most” (2. 2. 163-64) speech, but later lent support by Isabella's plea for Angelo's life: “I partly think / A due sincerity govern'd his deeds / Till he did look on me” (5. 1. 443-44). Contemporary writers were quite aware of this double standard, and were at pains to justify its legitimacy by explaining the cultural stakes of the ideological overvaluation of female chastity: namely, the security of a patrilineal social order and property regime.³⁰

It is the threat of undermining patrilineal property transmission that determines which singlewomen are subject to penal regulation in Measure for Measure and which are not. It is only the prostitute and the bawd who feel the full weight of Angelo's newly instituted “proclamations.” The play's other singlewomen are all protected from this fate by their removal to another scene (Isabella to a nunnery, Mariana to a moated grange, and Juliet to some “fitter place”); they are thus protected from being branded as singlewomen by the law (branding was quite literally the punishment set aside for masterless women who were arrested in the period). For to be interpellated within this category was to be immediately confused with a prostitute or “lewd woman,” and therefore to become disqualified as a guarantor of patrilineality. This risk is particularly clear in the case of Mariana: as soon as she leaves the moated grange and confesses to being “neither maid, widow nor wife” (5. 1. 181), she is accused of being a “punk” (5. 1. 180). The Duke must then prove that she does not belong to this category, by insisting, “I have confess'd her; and I know her virtue” (5. 1. 524). When Isabella leaves the sanctuary of the nunnery, she is likewise confused with her vulgar other (prostitutes were known as “nuns of Venus”) by Angelo, who offers her her brother's life as payment for her sexual favors.

Yet if what characterizes the play's singlewomen at the start of the play is their impoverishment, and hence unvendibility on the marriage market, how can their status as guarantors of patrilineal property transmission be at issue? The ideological ruse of Juliet's, Mariana's, and Isabella's impoverishment, I would maintain, is that, like the Duke's, it is “usurped” (Lucio accuses the Duke of “usurp[ing] the beggary he was never born to” [3. 2. 90]). For unlike Kate Keep-Down or Mistress Overdone, they are all clearly designated as being of elite status. Isabella and Claudio, we are informed, “had a most noble father” (2. 1. 7). Mariana's elite status is likewise emphasized when her brother Frederick is described as “noble and renowned” (3. 1. 219). Juliet, as we have seen, has a dowry. It is merely being withheld by certain “friends” (presumably her dead father's executors). From this perspective, the “poverty” of the play's female protagonists appears to be nothing more than a romantic fiction (including star-crossed lovers and a shipwreck), a temporary obstacle impeding marriages that appear all the more miraculous when they are achieved. In this sense, the play's impoverished gentlewomen both evoke and efface the very real dilemma posed by the growing population of impoverished singlewomen.

My analysis of the play's treatment of singlewomen has thus far focused almost exclusively on the state's punitive function, as represented by the “severe” statutes enforced by Angelo. Yet the play suggests by its outcome that such severity is not the most effective form of governance; in the end, it is the Duke's surreptitious surveillance and manipulations of his subjects, not Angelo's enforcement of draconian statutes, that achieve order in the state. In his disguise as a mendicant friar, the Duke extends the reach of the state, under the rubric of pious poverty and charity, into the “dark corners” of his realm, exerting control over subjects who had hitherto evaded its grasp. Arriving at the prison to begin his surreptitious survey of his subjects, the Duke describes his purpose to the Provost in the following terms: “Bound by my charity, and my bless'd order, / I come to visit the afflicted spirits” (2. 3. 3-4). The subjects over whom the Duke exerts the most complete and effective, but also the most coercive, control within the play, as Lucio suggests, are all singlewomen; his male subjects are far less receptive to his “charity.” Although Claudio claims that the Duke has prepared him spiritually for death when the latter visits him in prison, he nevertheless moments later begs his sister impatiently for news of a reprieve, (“Now, sister, what's the comfort?” [3. 1. 53]), so that when she leaves the Duke must once again insist, “tomorrow you must die; go to your knees, and make ready” (3. 1. 168-69). Even more resistant to his “charitable” coercion, however, is Barnardine, who responds to the Duke's announcement, “Sir, induced by my charity … I come to advise you,” with a simple refusal, “Friar, not I” (4. 3. 49, 52). Lucio's resistance to the Duke reaches the level of outright slander.

Kiernan Ryan has argued that such forms of resistance have been insufficiently acknowledged by previous criticism and, more provocatively, that such acknowledgment reveals Measure for Measure to be a “utopian” play, rather than a dystopian dramatization of “the transition from a culture in which power asserts itself through spectacular, public displays of punitive violence, to one which secures subjection by subtler strategies of surveillance.” Ryan does not dispute that the play dramatizes such strategies of power, but argues that through the resistance of characters such as Barnardine, it “subject[s] them to a lethal critique” (Barnardine is thus “the key to Measure for Measure,” he claims).³¹ While I agree with Ryan's claim that it is important not to ignore the forms of resistance to the Duke's disciplinary regime within the play (although describing it as “utopian” seems a bit wishful), I think it is equally important to point out that the state meets with less resistance—or, more precisely, less audible forms of resistance—in its singlewomen than it does in its single men.

The goal of the Duke's surreptitious strategy of surveillance and suasion with respect to the play's impoverished singlewomen is quite simply to remove them from this category by transforming them into propertied brides. First, he works to instill self-discipline in his female subjects by persuading them that they bear primary responsibility for the crime of bastardy. As we have seen, the purpose of his interview with Juliet before she is removed from prison is to make clear that her crime—despite Angelo's more stringent punishment of Claudio—is “of heavier kind than his” (2. 3. 27-29). Juliet proves an eager recipient of the Duke's counsel, promising, “I'll gladly learn” (2. 3. 23) when he offers, “I'll teach you how you shall arraign your conscience” (2. 3. 21). She not only immediately confesses the truth of his estimation of her greater culpability and “repent[s] it,” she reassures the Duke that her repentance results not from a “fear” of the repercussions of her act, but simply because the act itself was “evil” (2. 3. 29, 34-35). The quid pro quo for the singlewoman's provisioning by the state within the play would appear to be her ideological interpellation as one who bears greater (or, within the culture at large, total) culpability for the crime of producing illegitimate subjects, and thereby her implied future self-discipline; immediately thereafter she is removed from the prison to “some more fitter place.” Juliet's interpellation as a criminalized singlewoman is thus only temporary; her reputation and property are restored, and her child rendered legitimate. In the end, Juliet's status as a singlewoman is effectively erased.

The trajectory traced by Mariana likewise transforms her, through the agency of the Duke, from a placeless singlewoman to a propertied bride. At the start of the play, Mariana epitomizes the singlewoman's lack of social space or identity. Residing—in what has become perhaps the most memorable of all liminal, literary spaces—“at the moated grange” (3. 1. 265), Mariana, like Juliet, is removed to the margins of a society in which sexually ambiguous singlewomen had no place. Mariana herself calls attention to her lack of social identity at the end of the play, when she appears, veiled, for her interrogation by the state's governors. Her veiled face, she makes clear, signifies her lack of identity; for until her putative husband hails her, she remains unclassifiable within what were the only socially recognized and legitimated categories of female subjectivity in the period—maid, wife, and widow:

DUKE:
Is this the witness, friar?
First, let her show her face, and after, speak.
MAR.:
Pardon, my lord; I will not show my face
Until my husband bid me.
DUKE:
What, are you married?
MAR.:
No, my lord.
DUKE:
Are you a maid?
MAR.:
No, my lord.
DUKE:
A widow, then?
MAR.:
Neither, my lord.
DUKE:
Why, you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife!
LUCIO:
My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow nor wife.
DUKE:
Silence that fellow!

(5. 1. 169-82)

The Duke's bald statement that a woman is “nothing” if she does not fit into the categories of maid, widow, or wife recalls Isabella's earlier remark that a woman in this situation is better off dead: “What a merit were it in death to take this poor maid from the world!” (3. 1. 231-32). While Isabella knows Mariana to be a “poor maid,” the rest of the world does not; as an impoverished singlewoman living alone, her sexual reputation is highly vulnerable, as Lucio's insinuation that she must be a “punk” or prostitute makes clear. Mariana's putative promiscuity is cemented when Angelo “pretend[s] in her discoveries of dishonour” (3. 1. 227), thereby removing her from the category of maid and effectively rendering her unmarriageable.

The potential threat posed by the figure of the placeless and unclassifiable singlewoman is distanced by Mariana's removal to the liminal enclosure of the “moated grange.” During the five years of her seclusion there, Mariana is “bestowed … on her own lamentation” (3. 1. 228); her “brawling discontent” (4. 1. 3) is turned inward. Mariana's self-reflexive, female subjectivity is in a sense the opposite of the internalized oeconomy of the disciplined housewife; for it is not domestic order, but rather disorder that she has internalized, not rule, but “violent and unruly” (3. 1. 243) passions that arise from her status as an impoverished singlewoman. Unlike Desdemona, Mariana is not content to “beshrew” herself for her mistreatment and slander by Angelo; rather, she “brawls,” if only inwardly, against her mistreatment, silently professing her “discontent.” Yet the audience is only briefly allowed to glimpse this unruly, internalized oeconomy; for whereas the merry wives' self-discipline wards off spousal intervention, the melancholic Mariana's internalization of her disorderly discontent is quickly resolved by the intervention of an increasingly paternalistic state.

In certain respects, Mariana bears closest resemblance to a widow, mourning the loss of her husband. The figure of the widow was less threatening to the social order than that of the never-married singlewoman, according to Amy Froide, in spite of the fact that many of them lived alone, choosing not to remarry: “Widows had a public and independent place within the patriarchal society, singlewomen did not.”³² Froide's observation applies only to propertied widows, however; for impoverished, propertyless widows, like unwed mothers, placed a significant burden on parish poor-rates.³³ In the play's final scene, the Duke seeks to transform Mariana into a propertied widow. Having married her to Angelo, he immediately orders the latter put to death and designates Mariana as the recipient of his property: “For his possessions, / Although by confiscation they are ours, / We do instate and widow you with all” (5. 1. 420-22).

In the next breath, however, the Duke makes clear that Mariana is not to remain a propertied widow, but is to use her newly acquired estate to remarry or, in his fiscal terms, “To buy you a better husband” (5. 1. 423). As satirical representations of propertied, “merry” widows in the period make clear, while such women may have had a “public and independent place” within early modern culture, their sexual and economic independence was itself perceived as threatening and subject to pervasive criticism. In Measure for Measure, however, this criticism is deflected onto the figure of Mistress Overdone, who, having been widowed nine times, chooses to remain single and earn her living as a brothel- and alehouse-keeper. Her economic and legal vulnerability as a widow is nevertheless emphasized from the start, when she complains of her “poverty” (1. 2. 76), only to learn of Angelo's “proclamation” dictating that her house “must be plucked down” (1. 2. 89). Because Mistress Overdone may be classified within the socially proscribed categories of “punk” and bawd, however, the play does not hesitate to send her off to prison. As a “poor gentlewoman,” however, Mariana faces a different destiny; she is preserved at the moated grange until such time as she may be repositioned as a wife and keeper of (male) property.

It is the Duke's restoration of the play's propertyless singlewomen as propertied brides that appears to balance the scales of justice within the play. At a rhetorical level, this balancing is reflected in the reciprocal, chiastic exchange of value that marriage represents in his final cautioning of Angelo: “Look that you love your wife: her worth, worth yours” (5. 1. 495). What is elided by the ideal equality of “worth” that marriage represents in the Duke's utterance, however, is the wife's loss of propriety under coverture. In marrying Angelo, Mariana effectively forfeits many of the rights in Angelo's property that she would have enjoyed as his widow. Isabella is likewise transformed from singlewoman into wife, at least within the balancing rhetoric of the Duke's “measure for measure”: “Dear Isabel, / I have a motion much imports your good; / Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline, / What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine” (5. 1. 531-34). She is thereby enjoined to renounce the female oeconomy outside of marriage that the nunnery represents. The ruse of Measure for Measure's solution to the problem posed by the figure of the placeless singlewoman is that marriage represents a reciprocal exchange of value or “worth” between husband and wife and that this exchange “imports” the wife's own “good.” From this perspective, the play's narrative works effectively to ensure that property never remains in the hands of its placeless singlewomen; Isabella's dowry is mentioned only at the moment she is poised to marry an earthly, rather than a spiritual, bridegroom.

Notes

1. The compound term “singlewomen” is likewise deployed in a recent volume of essays edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide entitled Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). This groundbreaking volume has made a significant contribution to our understanding of various aspects of the predicament of singlewomen living in early modern Europe, and my discussion in what follows is deeply indebted to several of the essays contained in it.

2. See Maryanne Kowaleski, “Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective,” pp. 52-53 and Amy M. Froide, “Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England,” pp. 236-37, both in Singlewomen, ed. Bennett and Froide. On the high percentage of men and women never marrying (between 10 and 20 percent of the population) see E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 258-60; on women remarrying less frequently than men and the higher number of widows than widowers, see also Jacques Dupaquier et al., eds., Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past, Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Historical Demography, Nuptiality and Fertility: Plural Marriage and Illegitimate Fertility, Kristiansand, Norway, September 1979 (London: Academic Press, 1981).

3. Froide, “Marital Status,” p. 237. I am indebted to Froide for the terms “never married” and “ever married.”

4. Ruth Mazo Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” in Singlewomen, ed. Bennett and Froide, p. 127.

5. Froide, “Marital Status,” p. 237.

6. See Amy Erickson, “Introduction,” in Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Erickson (1919; New York: Routledge, 1992), p. xxxv.

7. See Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” p. 131.

8. See Froide, “Marital Status,” pp. 241-43, 254-55.

9. On employment opportunities for singlewomen see ibid., pp. 243-52.

10. Erickson, “Introduction,” p. xxxvii.

11. Tim Wales, “Poverty, Poor Relief and the Life Cycle: Some Evidence from Seventeenth-Century Norfolk,” in Land, Kinship, and Life Cycle, ed. R. M. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 380.

12. Ibid., pp. 360-61.

13. See Vivien Brodsky Elliott, “Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status, and Mobility, 1598-1619,” in Marriage and Society, ed. Outhwaite, esp. pp. 90-91.

14. On the various forms of punishment legislated by the vagabond acts, and for an instance of a “masterless woman” sentenced to be hung as a repeat offender, see E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (1900; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 70. Only just over half as many singlewomen on average were arrested under the vagabond acts as single men (in Salisbury in 1598-1638, 171 singlewomen were apprehended as compared with 343 single men; Beier's study of eighteen counties lists 246 singlewomen and 483 single men). Yet this number, according to Beier, may in part reflect the fact that vagrant males “were feared more than females and greater efforts were made to capture them.” A. L. Beier, “Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England,” Past and Present 64 (1974): 6. For Salisbury figures see Paul Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598-1664,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 27 (1974): 366. A significant number of “masterless women” received punitive attention by authorities. The 1572 statute was at pains to include women under its purview: “all and every person … being whole and mighty in body and able to labor, having not land or master, nor using any lawful merchandize, craft or mystery whereby he or she might get his or her living, and can give no reckoning how he or she does lawfully get his or her living” (my emphasis). Nevertheless, scholars frequently assume a male subject in discussions of vagabondage. Paul Slack thus complains that previous “historians have seldom been able to penetrate the haze of rhetorical abuse to see the vagabond as he was, to define his status, or assess the significance of his mobility. … The first problem for the historian … is to know who the vagrant actually was, to define his status” (my emphasis). While Slack does a great deal to demystify the category of the vagabond, that category is still presumptively male in his own rhetoric. See Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy,” pp. 360-62. A. L. Beier's important study of the subject is likewise titled Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985).

15. Cited in Leonard, English Poor Relief, p. 313.

16. In response to the increasingly pressing problems of poverty and vagrancy during the last decade of the sixteenth century, some seventeen bills were exhibited in the 1597-98 Parliamentary session, including proposed legislation for the “erecting of Houses of Correction and punishment of rogues and sturdy beggars and for levying of certain sums due to the poor,” for the “necessary habitation and relief of the poor, aged, lame, and blind in every parish,” for the “relief of Hospitals, poor prisoners and others impoverished by casual losses,” for “the better governing of Hospitals and land given to the relief of the poor,” for the “extirpation of Beggary,” “against Bastardy,” for “setting the poor on work,” and “for erecting of hospitals or abiding and working houses for the poor.” See Leonard, English Poor Relief, p. 75.

17. My discussion of the social significance of the poor laws here is indebted to Paul Slack, “Poverty and Social Regulation in Elizabethan England,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).

18. Ibid., p. 222.

19. See Joan Kent, “Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulations of ‘Personal Conduct’ in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 46 (1973): 41-71.

20. Slack, “Poverty and Social Regulation,” p. 237. This view is taken by Ronald B. Bond in “‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered’: Thomas Becon's Homily Against Whoredom and Adultery, Its Contexts, and Its Affiliations with Three Shakespearean Plays,” Sixteenth Century Journal 16, 2 (1985): 190-205.

21. Slack, “Poverty and Social Regulation,” p. 238.

22. A recent exception to this trend is Theodora A. Jankowski's discussion of the “queerness” of Isabella as a virgin who “repudiates” marriage in Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 170-77. On “broken nuptials,” see note 16 above.

23. According to Martin Ingram, “cases concerning the formation of marriage, not marital breakdown, normally constituted the bulk of matrimonial litigation in the English ecclesiastical courts.” Ingram, “Spousals Litigation,” p. 36.

24. Ibid., p. 54.

25. Ibid., pp. 54-55, and Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (1979; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 127.

26. Indeed, as many as one-third of the brides studied by Wrightson and Levine were pregnant prior to marriage. Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety, p. 128.

27. Ibid., p. 133. Both Ingram and Wrightson and Levine attribute this shift to widespread poverty brought on by the crisis and to a “growing hostility towards bastard bearing” occasioned by an “explosion of illegitimacy.” Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety, pp. 127, 131; see also Ingram, “Spousals Litigation,” p. 54.

28. Cited in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith, Bastardy and Its Comparative History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 73. See also the discussion of this statute in Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 19.

29. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, p. 19.

30. Thus, for example, the misogynist in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Gaspar Pallavicino, argues that chastity is “more needful” for women than for men “in order for us to be certain of our offspring” (in Hoby's translation, “continencie was thought more necessarie in them [women] than any other, to have assurance of children”). See Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (New York: Anchor, 1959), p. 189, and The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby (1561; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1948), p. 177.

31. Kiernan Ryan, “Measure for Measure: Marxism Before Marx,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, Accents on Shakespeare Series (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 231, 235, 237.

32. Ibid., p. 237.

33. In spite of the fact that, in Erickson's words, “for a substantial number of women, widowhood meant poverty,” the plight of the impoverished widow has been largely ignored by early modern scholarship. Erickson, “Introduction,” pp. xxxvi-xxxvii. Although B. A. Holderness observes that “Destitute or insolvent widows and old maids [sic] almost certainly outnumbered those who had property to live upon or savings to invest,” he excuses his “neglect of their plight” in his study of widows in pre-industrial society with the assertion that “the poor widow … is less important as a historical phenomenon than her wealthier contemporaries.” B. A. Holderness, “Widows in Pre-Industrial Society: An Essay upon Their Economic Functions,” in Land, Kinship, and Life-Cycle, ed. Smith, p. 428.