SOURCE: Lechter-Siegel, Amy. “Isabella's Silence: The Consolidation of Power in Measure for Measure.” In Reconsidering the Renaissance, edited by Mario A. Di Cesare, pp. 371-80. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992.

[In the following essay, Lechter-Siegel traces Isabella's movement from articulate, rational speech to submissive silence, contending that the change in her discourse reflects the Duke's increasing control of social, political, and religious power in his realm. She compares the Duke's consolidation of power in Measure for Measure with the model of governance set forth by James I in his Basilikon Doron (1599).]

In act 1 of Measure for Measure, the novice Isabella first appears on stage in obedience before a religious authority of whom she requests a life of severe asceticism. In Isabella's first major speech, she makes closely reasoned pleas for the Christian principle of mercy. By contrast, in act 5 Isabella appears in supplication before a secular authority and first makes emotional and then poorly reasoned pleas for the secular principles of justice and equity. In the final scene, the novice, who had requested a cloistered life of chastity and severe simplicity, anticipates a public life of marriage and courtly opulence. A character who is first described to the audience as an eloquent and persuasive speaker is, in the final moment of the play, silent.

What transpires between acts 1 and 5 to bring about this reversal? Can we view Isabella as a developing dramatic character whose desires change from the beginning to the end of the play? Many critics imply that we can and argue that this alteration is a happy development brought about under the Duke/Friar's tutelage and testing. Some critics argue that Isabella receives a “moral education”: she realizes that she was too severe at the start in refusing so resolutely to show mercy for her brother by sacrificing her chastity.¹ Other critics argue that Isabella receives a sexual education: Anne Barton, for example, argues that “beneath the habit of the nun is a passionate girl afflicted with an irrational fear of sex which she has never admitted to herself.”² Similarly, many see the Duke's marriage proposition as a felicitous ending: Bullough notes, “Isabella yields and thereby proves herself too valuable to the world to immure herself in a convent.”³

The problem with all these views, it seems to me, is that they are value judgments imposed from outside based on the critic's assessment of moral, or sexually healthy, or socially beneficial behavior and that they do not consider the ending in terms of Isabella's own behavior and expressed desires. If we consider these, there seems to be nothing in the play which leads us to conclude that she gains a new moral or psychic awareness or that her desires change from the beginning to the end. She never considered the concept of mercy to require that she commit a mortal sin, nor does her final plea for mercy at the end encompass that idea. And there is no hint, in word or deed, that Isabella develops any burgeoning awareness of her own sexuality. Finally, in the end, she does not willfully “yield” to the proposition of marriage; rather, in the face of command masquerading as a proposal, Isabella is silent.

Thus, if we cannot see Isabella as a developing dramatic character for whom the ending is a satisfactory resolution, we must look for the function of her character and the significance of the resolution elsewhere. I suggest that we see Isabella less as a character than as a representative of certain ideas. I am in agreement with Marcia Riefer, who has traced the process by which Isabella becomes increasingly directed by the patriarchal control of the Duke until her voice is “literally” lost.⁴ Riefer persuasively argues that the anomalous ending represents “the incompatibility of sexual subjugation with successful comic dramaturgy.”⁵ I would like both to build on and to shift significantly the focus of that position by arguing that the Duke/Friar represents not generalized patriarchal control, but rather historically specific Jamesian-style control as James I outlines his concept of absolutist authority in the Basilikon Doron. In this context, Isabella can be understood to represent two specific challenges to Vincentio's absolutist position. First, in her adherence to religious authority, Isabella resists the secular control of the state; and second, in her adherence to virginity, she resists the social control of the Duke as both a private and public patriarch.⁶ Further, as a highly articulate spokesperson of these ideas, her rhetoric is especially threatening to the state. If we understand Isabella in this way, we can understand her “development” as a process of containment whereby the challenges she represents are eliminated in the play's resolution.

Such a reading is based on already extensive scholarship which argues for the interrelationship of Measure for Measure, the Basilikon Doron, and James I and which maintains an identification of the Duke/Friar with King James.⁷ First, I wish to add to this scholarship by arguing that the Basilikon Doron can be read as James's program for consolidating religious, secular political, and social power and that Measure can be read as a parallel text in which the same program is reproduced. Second, I wish to show how the process of containment is reflected in the Duke's ability to transform and to control Isabella's speech.

James opens the Basilikon Doron with a sonnet which defines his divine right style of rule. It begins:

God giues not Kings the stile of Gods in vaine,
For on his Throne his Scepter doe they swey:

(3)⁸

This idea is echoed again when he urges his son “to know and love that God … for that he made you as a little god that sit on his Throne, and rule ouer other men” (12).

James's program for the consolidation of religious, secular political, and social power in a divine right monarch is benignly couched as advice to his son on the proper behavior of a king in his three roles of good Christian, of good ruler, and of model virtuous social being—roles which correlate to the three areas of monarchal power. I would argue that it is by the consolidation of power through the use of these three roles that James attempts to establish his absolutist position, and it is further by the elimination of all challenges to this consolidation that James seeks to sustain this position. The treatise also reflects James's perception of the obstacles to this consolidation and his extreme anxiety over these.

Because the Renaissance notion of sovereignty demanded that all people must obey the sovereign without question unless his demands directly contradicted God's orders,⁹ it is natural that it was the power of the church (whether Anglican, Protestant, or Catholic) which would pose the greatest threat to a monarch who saw a special divinity in his rule. In the Basilikon Doron, James seems to perceive the challenge to his divine right position coming from two sources: the first threat comes from those who would accuse him of insufficient religiousness; and the second comes from religious leaders who would assert the priority of their authority over the monarch's.

His greatest anxiety is over the Anabaptists who show “contempt for the civil Magistrate,” and who advocate that “Christian Princes … be resisted.” These kind of men, James writes, “I wishe my Sonne to punish, in-case they refuse to obey the Law, and will not cease to sturre up rebellion” (7). The divisiveness created by the Anabaptists furthermore increases the power of the Catholics (Papists) to challenge the authority of the state (7, 8). James exhorts his son to suppress the power of church leaders in a language which dramatically conveys both the extent of his anxiety and his absolutist stance: “as well as yee represse the vain Puritaine, so not to suffer proude Papall Bishops … so chaine them with such bondes as may preserve that estate from creeping to corruption” (24) [emphasis mine].

James begins the second book of the Basilikon Doron with an image which marvelously suggests the consolidation of religious and secular control in the person of the king: “But as ye are clothed with two callings so must ye be alike careful for the discharge of them both: that yee are a good Christian so yee may be a good King” (18). “Clothed with two callings” describes the Friar/Duke of Measure who is literally so clothed, and thus by his person contains both appeals to independent religious authority (made by Isabella) and claims of independent secular authority (made by Angelo). The Duke/Friar has not only to contain these competing elements, but also to reintegrate them into society through marriage, and he arranges these marriages through the third role James describes in the Basilikon Doron—his social role as both private and public patriarch of the realm.

In the Basilikon Doron James notes that a good king acts, in relationship to his subjects, “as their naturall father, and kindley Master” (22). In this role, James would undertake the arrangement of marriages as an absolutist strategy of social control in order to consolidate his political position.¹⁰ In Measure, Duke Vincentio is, of course, the quintessential arranger of marriages. Also, James's remarks on marriage and the choice of a wife in the Basilikon Doron reflect how the double-edged quality of the new Protestant conception of marriage allowed the private and public patriarch to assume more direct power over women than he previously had. The Protestant marriage gave for the first time in history priority to married chastity over Catholic asceticism and virginity.¹¹ While many have seen this as a happy development for women, others have realized that, to the degree that the power of the priest was diminished, to an equal degree, the power of the family patriarch was increased.¹² In the Duke's proposal to Isabella after his dramatic unhooding by Lucio, Shakespeare provides a compelling visual representation of this very transformation from the priority of virginity to the priority of married chastity and of the quite literal transference of power from the priest (or friar) to the husband.

As a natural father, James could claim to be a Father to the realm more convincingly than could Elizabeth claim an analogous personal leadership role before him. The Duke in Measure for Measure uses marriage in the end to contain all subversive elements in the society, to suppress any challenges to his divine right position, and, in good comedic fashion, to reintegrate everyone back into his society—creating a union directed by a monarch who has gained control through the consolidation of his secular political, religious, and social roles.

Finally, I would like to suggest that in the Basilikon Doron, James perceives the threat to his control expressed through “slander.” Those who would accuse him of irreligiousness or question his religious authority he accuses of “famous libels,” “iniurious speaches,” and dishonorable “inuectiue” against all Christian princes (7) and maintains that the “malicious lying tongues of some haue traduced me” (13). His anxiety is so great that he advises his son, again in absolutist language, that the “remedie” for “vnreuerent speakers” is to “stop their mouthes from all such idle and vnreuerent speeches” (27). Although it is Lucio who most persistently represents the threat of slander, and it is Lucio's mouth which most obviously will not be stopped, Isabella too threatens and eventually does slander Angelo. Because her rhetoric challenges the power of the state, the Friar first directs, then effectively stops, her speech.

To reiterate, I have argued that Isabella challenges the Duke/Friar's absolutist position in two ways. First, by invoking religious authority over secular (in her arguments to the Duke's representative, Angelo), she challenges the secular political control of the state; second, by choosing virginity, she resists the social control of the monarch as patriarch of the realm. Now, I would like to argue that the play enacts the containment of those challenges and that the process of containment can be traced by following Isabella's changing discourse: first, Isabella generates reasoned arguments which challenge the state; next, under the Duke/Friar, her language is directed by the state; and finally, her speech is contained by the state.

In the early scenes of the play, Claudio says of his sister, “she hath prosperous art / When she will play with reason and discourse / And well she can persuade” (1.2.184). The first time we see Isabella she stands before a nun of whom she requires not a lesser, but a stricter restraint within the already strictly ascetic order of St. Clare. Further, we learn in this scene that once Isabella enters the order she must take a vow of silence forbidding her to speak to and be looked upon by men at the same time. Interestingly, while Isabella will freely admit to the imposition of silence in obeisance to religious authority, she will, in the meantime, use her arts of language brilliantly in the next scenes to challenge and inadvertently threaten secular authority.

In her first encounter with Angelo, Isabella challenges his secular authority by using logical appeals which show proficiency in close reasoning and the ability to make clear distinctions. She presses her case by making eight reasoned pleas. Each time she makes an argument based on Christian principles, Angelo counters with an argument based on secular legal authority. Thus, a dialectic movement is set up between these two sources of power. Finally, Isabella audaciously challenges Angelo's position by daring to project herself (woman and novice) into the role of the head of state: “I would to heaven I had your potency, And you were Isabel” (2.2.71). This bold assertion is based on her sense of power as a follower—and perhaps to a certain extent as a representative—of religious authority. In her final pleas, Isabella challenges the very legitimacy of secular authority itself, deploring the tyrannous exercise of power by “proud men dressed in a little brief authority” (2.2.118). Having reminded him that his authority is not absolute (an argument that implicitly interrogates the Jamesian absolutist position), she tells him to look inside himself. This argument inadvertently leads to Angelo's realization that her words have compelled him to love her and to his (quite literal) loss of control. There is thus a correlation suggested here between loss of sexual control and loss of political control. Both the content and manner of Isabella's speech threatens the control of the representative of the state, and the rest of the play is concerned with containing that threat. Importantly, between Isabella's and Angelo's first and second meetings the Duke/Friar makes a brief appearance which seems to have little dramatic purpose. However, his appearance can function as a visual synthesis of the religious/secular dialectic, and thus it rehearses the ultimate consolidation of religious and secular power in the person of the monarch at the end of the play.

In her second meeting with Angelo, Isabella is forced from the offensive position of challenging secular authority to the rhetorically weaker defensive position of resisting that authority's attempts to possess her sexually. Again, the dialectic is resumed with Angelo invoking the authority of the state in order to propose that Isabella exchange her virginity for her brother's life, while she invokes the religious principle that death is better than eternal damnation. Her integrity of speech is maintained when Angelo suggests she respond in a more “womanly” way; she answers, “I have no tongue but one …” (2.4.139). When Angelo presses further, she threatens slander: “Sign me a present pardon … / Or … I'll tell the world aloud / What man thou art” (2.4.152-85). But Angelo's retort that no one will believe her suggests that the punishment for the slanderer is rhetorical powerlessness: “you will stifle in your own report and smell of calumny” (2.4.158-59). This scene signals the beginning of the process by which Isabella's strength of speech is undermined.

When in the next scene the brother whom she trusts implies that she should submit, her rhetoric breaks down to a vituperative and aggressive hurling of epithets. This change suggests a breakdown of what one critic has called that “strong self” constituted by her rhetoric.¹³ We might assume that Isabella, fleeing from Claudio, is rushing back to the convent when the Duke/Friar suddenly appears before her and bids a word. She responds, “What is your will?” (3.1.152). Humiliated by the forces of secular authority, she is anxious to cleave to religious authority, and when the Friar suggests a plan, she consents: “Show me how good father” (3.3.238). At this point in the play we see not a development of Isabella's personality but a shift in her position from one of powerful and articulate resistance to secular authority to (though unbeknownst to her) submission to it. From now on the Duke/Friar maintains control over Isabella by making her believe Claudio is dead and then by scripting a scenario which requires her to announce publicly that she is a violated virgin—a remarkable request considering both her integrity of speech (“I have no tongue but one”) and her vocation of chastity. As Riefer points out, despite Isabella's reluctance “to speak so indirectly” (4.6.1), she gives over rhetorical control when she vows to the Duke/Friar, “I am directed by you” (4.3.137).¹⁴

In act 5, Isabella's rhetoric demonstrates a changed relationship to the state. Whereas the use of close reasoning in support of mercy describes her first encounter with Angelo, here she is making a pathetic appeal for justice—the secular principle she renounced in act 1. Regaining her capacity for reasoned argument, however, she presses her charges against Angelo with careful distinctions and analogies once again: “'tis not impossible / But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, / May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, as Angelo …”(5.1.52-55). Ironically, her strong discourse constitutes slander, and the Duke—consistent with the Jamesian absolutist position—must contain the slander by imprisoning Isabella. This is a very interesting moment, for here we see the Duke constructing a threat to secular authority (in the role consigned to Isabella), and then through his consolidated secular/religious authority containing that threat. It will be marriage, not imprisonment, that is the final mode of containment; but, I would argue, the imprisonment of Isabella makes the final solution of marriage seem benevolent by contrast.

This same process of constructing the threat in order to contain it occurs again when Vincentio re-presents himself on stage as the Friar who slanders the Duke. Here he constructs a challenge by religious authority, not only to secular authority (as was the case with Isabella's challenge), but to divine right monarchy. Again a dialectic is played out between the “Friar” and Escalus (5.1.305) in which the Friar claims religious authority is not subject to monarchy (“The Duke / Dare no more stretch this finger of mine than he / Dare rack his own. His subject I am not” [5.1.313-15]). The Friar's challenge, which so compellingly echoes the threats James perceives from churchmen in the Basilikon Doron, is once again contained by Escalus, who accuses the Friar of “slander to the state” and orders his imprisonment.

At this point, Lucio unhoods the Friar to expose the Duke. At last, the consolidation of religious and secular power in the person of the Jamesian divine right monarch is visually represented in this brilliant coup de théâtre. Angelo confirms his divinity: “I perceive your Grace, like power divine” (5.1.369). But what of Isabella to whom he entreats, “Come hither, Isabel, / Your friar is now your prince”? When secular power (embodied in Angelo) was re-presented as religious power (embodied in the Friar) Isabella bent to its will. But after she cleaved unto religious authority, that authority re-presented itself once again as divine right absolutist authority. This visual transformation, suggestive of a magician's sleight, brilliantly conveys how Isabella comes under the sway of the state. That she comes under its sway is demonstrated in her final plea for Angelo.

In this plea, Isabella argues for mercy, but instead of grounding this argument on Christian principles as she had earlier, she now grounds it on the secular principle of equity: “His act did not o'ertake his bad intent / And must be buried but as an intent / That perish'd by the way” (5.1.450-54). While secular law makes a distinction between intent and action, theological law does not; an argument by Christ would see Angelo's transgression as a serious violation of God's law. Furthermore, Isabella's argument is illogical, for Angelo did not only intend to engage in illicit sex, but, in sleeping with his fiancée, he actually did the very same thing Claudio did. Isabella's inability to make that distinction, when her forte all along has been the ability to perceive distinctions, represents the final dissolution of that “strong self” constituted by her rhetoric.

In the final consolidation of power, the Duke uses the Jamesian social role of patriarch in order to reintegrate his citizens into society through marriage. But the Duke's use of marriage is an absolutist strategy which can be at variance with individual desire. Lucio makes this clear when he tells the Duke, who directs him to marry a whore, that he'd rather be whipped: “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (5.1.522-23). The Duke replies, “Slandering a prince deserves it” (5.2.524). That the imposition of marriage is an absolutist strategy in this play, in contrast to most Shakespearean comedies, is suggested by the fact that of those who are married off in the end, fully half—Angelo, Lucio, and Isabella—do not desire it.

The problematic “deus ex machina” ending which troubles many critics becomes singularly appropriate if the play is understood as one about “ideas” more than about “characters” and about specifically Jamesian ideas—as these are articulated in Basilikon Doron—of consolidating secular political, religious, and social power by ruling (as the Duke/Friar does) in “the stile of Gods.” The very contrivance of the ending, wherein the events do not seem to evolve naturally and dramatically from the desires of the individual characters, but rather are imposed from without (by a kind of god from a machine), suggests the very style of authoritarianism and absolutism which, I have maintained, the play is “about.”

Isabella's silence at the end of Measure for Measure has provided a challenge for theatrical directors of the play. Jonathan Miller's National Theatre production had Isabella turn away in horror at the Duke's proposal of marriage;¹⁵ by extreme contrast, another recent production had Isabella throw off her veil in a celebratory and liberating gesture. While Miller's interpretation is consistent with Isabella's “dramatic character,” it contradicts the play's movement toward comic resolution. On the other hand, the second interpretation, while true to the play's movement towards resolution, is so totally contrary to Isabella's character that it altogether lacks dramatic veracity. Shakespeare gives us neither Miller's nor any other response from Isabella. He gives us silence. It is “silence,” argues Pierre Macherey, that “the critic must make speak.”¹⁶ Isabella's silence speaks most convincingly, I believe, as an expression of the Jamesian Duke/Friar's successful containment of voices which challenge his absolutist claims to authority. However, containment does not imply any simple or comfortable acquiescence by those voices. Rather, speechlessness can also be interpreted as a refusal to assent positively to the control of an “other.” It is for this reason, I believe, that Isabella's silence reverberates in our minds long after the play is done.

Notes

1. Jonathan Dollimore, “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure,” in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 87. Dollimore, in his footnotes, points to the many critics who see Isabella as too severe in refusing Angelo's bargain.

2. Anne Barton, “Measure for Measure,” in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974), 546. Barton further argues that finally “Isabella arrives at a newer and juster knowledge of herself.”

3. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), 2:416.

4. Marcia Riefer, “Instruments of Some Mightier Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 157-69. Riefer's argument, to which I am indebted, maintains that the Duke assumes the comic role of dramaturgical control previously assumed by females in Shakespeare's comedies and that deprived of this comedic leadership, Isabella comes under the control of the Duke. Riefer's emphasis is on genre.

5. Ibid., 158.

6. For a fuller and more recent discussion of how the choice of chastity represents an “alternative sexuality” to the dominant patriarchal forms represented in the play, see Susan Carlson, “‘Fond Fathers’ and Sweet Sisters: Alternative Sexualities in Measure for Measure,” Essays in Literature 16 (1989): 13-31.

7. For a discussion of how the play reflects James's theatrical style, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), 230-39. For a discussion of how the actual language as well as the principles of kingship of the Basilikon Doron are reflected in Measure, see David Lloyd Stevenson, The Achievement of Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure” (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), 134-66 and Elizabeth Pope, “The Renaissance Background in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey 2 (1949): 66-82. For a discussion of how the play challenges the paternalistic and patriarchal notions set forth in the Basilikon Doron, see “Talking Back to the King: Measure for Measure and the Basilicon Doron,” College Literature 12 (1985): 122-34.

8. See The Political Works of James with an introduction by Charles McIlwain (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 3-52. All quotations from the Basilikon Doron will be from this edition, and the page number will follow the quotation in parentheses.

9. Elizabeth Pope, “The Renaissance Background,” 71.

10. Leonard Tennenhouse, “Representing Power: Measure for Measure in Its Time,” in Stephen Greenblatt, ed. The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 152-53. Tennenhouse compares Elizabeth's attitudes toward arranging marriages with James's.

11. Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975), 3-5, 22-24, 32-33, 41-48, 55.

12. Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theatre in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 188.

13. Dusinberre, 224.

14. Riefer, 164.

15. Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 71.

16. Pierre Macherey in Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 35.