SOURCE: Lyons, Charles R. “Silent Women and Shrews: Eroticism and Convention in Epicoene and Measure for Measure.” Comparative Drama 23, no. 2 (summer 1989): 123-40.

[In the following essay, Lyons maintains that Isabella's transformation from volubility to silence is a reverse image of the metamorphosis of Ben Jonson's Epicoene from submissiveness to stridency. He contends that both Measure for Measure and Epicoene demonstrate the eroticism of female silence and the power women possess when they are objects of male desire.]

In Jonson's Epicoene, the silent “woman” attracts Morose through “her” reticence to speak; but once this couple undergo the false marriage ceremony, her silence metamorphoses into verbal pyrotechniques that rival those of Mistress Otter whose aggressive speech sets the measure of what a theatrical shrew should be. Jonson's play exploits the comic potential of the conventional shrew as this improvised female joins forces with the newly organized Collegiates, described by True-wit as women who “crie downe, or vp, what they like, or dislike in a braine, or a fashion, with most masculine, or rather hermaphroditicall authoritie” (I.i.78-80).¹

In Measure for Measure, Isabella speaks freely, articulately, aggressively until the final moments of the comedy when the Duke declares his intention to marry her. Whereas the comic plot of Jonson's comedy requires that marriage open up the floodgates of Epicoene's speech, the prospect of marriage to the Duke silences Isabella. At least the text forbids her character's verbal response to that possibility for reasons of theatrical economy, ideology, or inadvertence. Both comedies, despite their differences, enact a process in which the sexuality of a male character may invest a female character with power as an object of a desire that, in some sense, commands the masculine figure; and both plays appear to eroticize silence as the condition of the submission of the female. As well, these texts represent situations in which highly articulate female characters challenge the arbitrariness of male figures of authority. In each of these comedies, female speech and female silence threaten the peace of the dominant male society. Both plays conflate the functions of erotic silence and aggressive speech in their “heroines.” That is, these comedies exercise a typology of character in which the freedom to speak transforms the female into a variation of the shrew and a woman's silence carries an erotic charge.

The conventional characterization of the shrew, which may suggest the figure of Noah's wife, is principally a creation of dramatic language; a female character is a shrew more because of what she says than what she does.² In any case, from the model sketched by the Wakefield Master to current pactice, the shrew assumes a temporary authority over the male by claiming that privilege in strident raillery. Of course, our present sensitivity to the representation of gender insures that any discussion of these issues will be replete with argumentative dangers and rhetorical snares. With some degree of caution and tact, I intend to discuss a group of phenomena that manifests itself in these two plays. I suggest that different conventions of depicting comic characters compete with each other to complicate and discomfit our response and to insure that both comedies provide highly equivocal experiences. While I think that this equivocation seems more acute at the end of the twentieth century, I suspect that both of these plays disturbed many in their audiences in the early seventeenth century.

Commentary on Measure for Measure marks its problematic status and offers a series of judgments that isolate widely different aspects of the text as the source of our difficulty to interpret it. While several generations have identified the text as a problem play, few agree upon the nature of the problem. Epicoene has a far less troubled history, undoubtedly because, until the final moments, the play proceeds as a relatively straightforward urban comedy of wit rather than shifting among different sub-genres of comedy as Measure for Measure does.³ In Jonson's comedy, which appears to use comic conventions more purely than Shakespeare's, a single figure—Epicoene—operates first as an erotic object that stimulates male desire and then as an image of the shrew who threatens male authority. The ending of the play, of course, dissolves its conventionality. The shrew here is not tamed but revealed to be a male as well as the instrument by which the nephew gains power over the uncle and his money. In Shakespeare's many variations of the theatrical conceit in which the boy actor maintains a delicate balance between sexual roles, the comic resolution depends upon the continued illusion or game of the young boy as the representation of the female. The witty epilogue of As You Like It exposes the ironies and complications of that convention at the same time in which it plays upon the androgyny of both actor and character. That is, the epilogue does not demand that the persona of its speaker shift from that of the female Rosalind to the male boy actor, but rather that the personae of both should be encompassed. As Phyllis Rackin writes,

To be successful, the play must win both sexes with a playful androgynous appeal that is most appropriately expressed by the ambiguous figure who no longer has a single name or sexual identity, combining in one nature Rosalind, Ganymede, and the boy who played their parts.⁴

The epilogue continues the illusion of Rosalind's character and plays self-consciously with the boy actor's and the spectators' awareness of his sexual identity. The revelation at the end of Jonson's comedy exploits the convention of the boy actor but ties it to the physical reality of the boy actor whose androgynous nature is dismissed as trickery—both within the plot of the play and in the game of theatrical representation. If this boy appears as an androgyne, that appearance is temporary; soon he will be “of years,” sexually mature, fully a man, and well able to do a man's office with the women. Part of the theatrical surprise here is Jonson's conceit of tying his play to the convention of the boy actor and writing a comedy that does not require that either performer or audience sustain its operative fiction through the final moments of performance. If the sexual ambiguity of the young boy playing Epicoene has fooled its audience as well as Morose, the text insures that the balance between the feminine and masculine that allowed the deception will be solved by puberty in the near future. And by implication, we would extend the same speculation to the imminent sexuality of the boy actor himself. Just as surely the epilogue to As You Like It functions antithetically as it inhibits speculation about the present or future heterosexual behavior of the actor playing Rosalind.

Like Epicoene, the ending of Measure for Measure confounds convention with surprise when the Duke announces his intention to marry Isabella. Here, at the moment at which the central male figure determines the fate of the principal female, the text simply elides the woman's response. In Measure for Measure the Duke's announcement of his intention to marry Isabella surprises both spectator and heroine. He has not spoken before of a desire for marriage in general or a sexual interest in Isabella in particular, and the declaration itself violates key aspects of character that the text has marked in previous scenes. The language of the play refers to the ascetism of both Vincentio and Isabella. Whereas other characters in Measure for Measure articulate their desire clearly, neither Vincentio nor Isabella speak of their sexuality in terms other than denial. We are familiar, for example, with the Duke's reference to his “life removed” during the past eighteen years and with Isabella's statement of preference for “a more strict restraint” among the sisterhood of St. Clare. There is no possibility that we shall forget the energy of Isabella's rejection of Angelo's proposal that she purchase her brother's life with the gift of her body, and we remember the strength of her denunciation of her brother when he reopens the question of her submitting to Angelo's scheme. “Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die: / More than our brother is our chastity!” (II.iv.184-85) continues to ring in our ears.

When we read the play, we follow the text closely as it rushes from the Duke's declaration in line 491 of Act V, Scene i, to the conclusion of the comedy forty-eight lines later. That speed diverts us from thinking about the absence of Isabella's response and, undoubtedly, accounts for the relative lack of commentary on this omission. In these remaining lines Vincentio quickly directs Angelo to love Mariana and economically details Lucio's punishment as both imprisonment and marriage to a bawd. In the theater, however, our surprise at the Duke's declaration is compounded by the fact that the previously articulate woman remains silent from this point to the end of the play. Because there is neither time nor motive to move Isabella from a central position, she remains a significant presence in the spectator's field of vision, and the Duke's surprising declaration will direct our focus to Isabella. Consequently, the visible presence of the silent figure prevents the kind of occlusion the text enacts. A production of the play cannot elect to omit the character's response because even if the actor playing Isabella presents a totally neutral expression, that opacity may be interpreted by the spectator as either willing submission or masked aggression. Whatever physical gesture the actor makes will constitute a response that informs the resolution of the comedy—either cementing or fragmenting the patent conventionality of the ending, depending upon how the spectator interprets the actor's behavior.

Recall that the Duke couples his declaration to Isabella with the act of pardoning her brother for the crime of fornication:

If he be like your brother, for his sake
Is he pardoned; and for your lovely sake
Give me your hand, and say you will be mine,
He is my brother too. But fitter time for that.

(V.i.489-92)⁵

The postponement of discussion to the “fitter time” for Isabella to “say [she] will be [his]” provides some rationale for her silence. That is, the Duke postpones her speaking to a later and, possibly, more private occasion. The conventional reading of her silence assumes her submission to the authority of the Duke. Robert Egan's production at the Mark Taper Forum in 1985 emphasized Isabella's stoic movement from the authority of the Church to the authority of a personified figure of Eros who governed the Duke. That is, she accepted, with resignation but not joy, her movement into a secular reality of both politics and sexuality. This performance emphasized her renunciation of a previous decision to spend her life as a nun, and in this production Isabella's final act was to remove her crucifix, place it downstage center, and then follow the others who had already exited into the ducal palace. Such a physical gesture filled in the silence of the text with a clear representation of Isabella's response to Vincentio's surprising declaration. In this interpretation, Isabella's gesture signified submission to Vincentio; but the Duke, in turn, was under the direction of the problematic sexual energy that directed the behavior of those he attempted to manage. Through her submission to the Duke, Isabella surrendered to the authority of Eros who governed him.

Measure for Measure dramatizes two instances in which the physical presence of Isabella, dressed in the garments of the novitiate, appears to stimulate the erotic desire of a man who has previously isolated himself from sexual relationships. The attraction toward Isabella that Angelo and Vincentio experience re-directs their declared intentions, radically changing their perception of themselves. Her appearance before Angelo engages his own sexuality in sensations that he claims he has not experienced before, and, on the basis of that newly perceived desire, he shifts allegiance from an ascetic code of behavior to its opposite:

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue. Never could the strumpet
With all her double vigour—art and nature—
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite. Ever till now,
When men were fond, I smiled, and wondered how.

(II.ii.185-92)

Angelo begins this soliloquy with the question: “What's this? What's this? Is this her fault or mine? / The tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha?” (II.ii.168-69). Of course, his argument quickly denies her culpability, and he moves into the metaphor of Isabella as “the violet in the sun” corrupted by himself as the sun-quickened carrion. However, the act of posing the question clarifies that he conceives her physical presence as the source of the energy he feels within his own body. In the final scene the text returns to the notion that Isabella shares the guilt for his arousal. When Mariana begs Isabella to plead for Angelo, she requests that the young woman merely illustrate her willingness to support her cause by kneeling with her—“say nothing; I'll speak all” (V.i.435)—but, of course, Isabella does speak. Her argument acknowledges the stimulus of her physical presence as a component of Angelo's sin:

                                                                                I partly think
A due sincerity governed his deeds,
Till he did look on me. Since it is so,
Let him not die.

(V.i.442-45)

Isabella's claim that Angelo's desire generates from his visual perception of her acknowledges the erotic authority of her body, its power to engage the sexuality of another. In II.iv the text of Measure for Measure provides her with a less self-conscious awareness of her body as she asserts her preference for self-flagellation over sexual submission:

                                                            were 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.

(II.iv.100-04)

In this speech, Isabella's lines take up the concrete image of her physical person that Angelo's language defines: “You must lay down the treasures of your body” (II.iv.96). As she performs the role of suppliant on Angelo's behalf in the final scene, she identifies this body as the visual provocation that disrupted his previous ability to control his deeds. Within the appealing naïveté of a mimetic reading, it is possible to mark this acknowledgement of her unwitting participation in Angelo's sin as a representation of Isabella's own increasing forgiveness, her own growth in grace. On the other hand, we need to acknowledge the possibility that the text uses Isabella here to modulate the spectator's perception of Angelo and, with some degree of subtlety, to shift part of the responsibility for the destructiveness of his sexuality to the female whose presence stimulates it.

At the end of the comedy, we assume that Isabella has also provoked the sexual desire of the Duke. The director of Measure for Measure and the actor playing the Duke must make a decision about the specific point at which Vincentio decides to claim Isabella for himself. The text displays Angelo's consciousness and reveals the processes in which he responds to Isabella. His language self-consciously examines his desire as a psychic and physical phenomenon. Does his dramatized response function to prefigure the Duke's reaction to the young woman? When Isabella presents herself to these two men, she enacts the role of a suppliant. What is the relationship between the language that forms the limits of Isabella's chosen role and her physical presence as an erotic stimulus to the sexuality of both Angelo and the Duke?

In those instances when Isabella attempts to persuade these men to enact some form of forgiveness—first for Claudio and then for Angelo—neither character seems particularly responsive to her rhetoric. Angelo rejects the logic of her argument; and, within the game the Duke plays in the last scene, he declares her suit “unprofitable” (V.i.452). And yet Isabella's presence, as a theatrical figure and as an agent in the sexual dynamics of this performance, is both physical—displaying the temptation of the body—and verbal. While the plot does not allow Isabella's petitions to be convincing, her pleading provides the occasions for their male listeners to see and hear her as the principal object of their perception. These arguments focus their attention and allow the physical and intellectual energy of the female character to play itself out in a type of theatrical performance. Isabella plays the role of the suppliant for these males in power self-consciously. Her pleas are virtually theatrical in the sense that she deliberately exercises rhetorical positions that counter her own ethical sense. That is, the ideology that the text supplies her relates more directly to the ascetism that Angelo voices in the early moments than it does to the justification of either the lovers or the later Angelo. Measure for Measure enjoys the irony in which Isabella's youthful voice of restraint must speak in behalf of those whose behavior manifests use. These acts of supplication function as plays-within-the-play, and the persona that stimulates their listener is an artifice. Isabella's rhetoric is not successful as argument, but her performance of the suppliant clearly excites the deputy she addresses, and, less obviously, her pleading for Angelo either initiates or reinforces the Duke's desire. Her physical presence releases a force that redirects the desire of these two men even though its sexuality manifests itself inadvertently. Isabella attempts to influence these men by the power of her rhetoric, but they assign a different kind of authority to her as an eroticized object that is given privileged status by their desire. As Angelo invests the suppliant with sexual value as the object of his lust, however, he compromises his tenuous hold on political authority. And, as we learn later, the Duke both sustains that authority and, eventually, controls the behavior of the suppliant. However, the Duke's eventual claim on Isabella may embody his own submission to the authority of her sexual presence.

Within the distribution of energy, power, authority in this play, sexuality dominates. Sex motivates almost all the behavior represented. Sexually generated disease threatens the city, and the only commerce we hear about is the trade of the brothel. Isabella's commitment to her asceticism, like Angelo's new dedication to lust, has the intensity of the naïf, the untried, but, unlike Angelo, she does not have the political freedom or power to exploit it and therefore becomes the victim of the male sexuality she stimulates. However, Mistress Overdone, the female antithesis to Isabella, does recognize the power that male sexuality invests in the female and trades upon it in skillful commerce. In the disposition of characters, Isabella occupies a center position flanked by the patient suffering of Mariana, who out griseldas Griselda, and the cynical intervention of Overdone who exploits male sexuality in active entrepreneurship. The mutually enjoyed sexuality of Claudio and Juliet, emphasized at the beginning of the play, gets shifted out of range of our attention as the comedy develops its interest in less reciprocal eroticism.

Epicoene, as well, plays upon the male's vulnerability to the female, and hence implements a comic politics in which male desire temporarily endows the female with a special kind of authority. Morose's extreme need for silence—humor theatricalized into mania—makes him vulnerable to a particular kind of female image, the silent woman. This exaggerated idiosyncrasy makes it possible for him to be duped into marriage with the fictitious woman and then, when the metamorphosed wife destroys his silence, be tricked into distributing money to his nephew by the promise of escape from the false marriage. While the conceit of the comic trick bases itself most obviously on the mania for silence that characterizes Morose, the appeal of Epicoene plays upon both that idiosyncrasy and its correlation with Morose's less explicit sexual desire. His basic sexual need, “his itch for marriage,” conflated with his lust for quiet, both eroticizes and temporarily empowers the false silent woman. She, however, is the instrument of those who would gull him. Unlike Isabella, she is not a “real” presence but a creation of Dauphine's imagination and the skill of a youthful impostor. But, like Isabella, this boy/woman must perform a role contrary to his nature. This behavior, his female identity as both ingénue and shrew, constitutes a more obvious play-within-a-play than Shakespeare's more subtle representation of Isabella's performances as a suppliant. Epicoene is not a real character but, rather, only a mask. Consequently, the fact that Epicoene's value and power in the sexual situation derives primarily from male desire is more obvious than the corresponding phenomenon in Measure for Measure. Jonson's comedy represents the fictitious Epicoene as a creation by a man to trick another man by exploiting a man's knowledge of sexual need, manic idiosyncrasy, and the fear of women.

Throughout this discussion I have played with analogies and differences between these two comedies, and at this point I would like to return to a point of connection that I suggested but did not develop in the early paragraphs. In terms of the conventions of character, we see the metamorphosis of Epicoene from submissive ingénue to shrew; and even though we know that this transformation is a fiction within the terms of the plot, we enjoy witnessing the character's freedom to speak aggressively and to punish the figure of Morose who functions as the comedy's senex iratus. With greater subtlety, Shakespeare's text exercises some of the same conventions of character. Apologizing to Edward Dowden, who celebrated Isabella as Shakespeare's most perfect woman, I suggest that the characterization of Isabella also incorporates aspects of the shrew.⁶ The increasingly aggressive nature of her petitions to Angelo, her railing at Claudio, and even the potentially smug sophistry of her final speaking for Angelo align her with the kind of aggression that informs the comic shrew. Consider, for example, the vitriolic bombast of her response to Claudio's suggestion that offering up her chastity to save his life may be a virtuous act:

                                                                                                    O, you beast!
O faithless coward, O dishonest wretch,
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest to take life
From thine own sister's shame? What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother played my father fair,
For such a warpèd slip of wilderness
Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance,
Die, perish!

(III.i.137-45)

Dowden attempted to transform the particular rhetoric of these lines into the statement of an abstract ideal in a clever but unsuccessful attempt to persuade us that Isabella is not railing at Claudio. The speech is a tirade worthy of Mistress Otter, as Isabella attempts to deny her brother as the son of her father. The stridency of these lines aligns with the comic import of Isabella's stated wish that the restraints of the convent might be more strict. Perhaps we should think more seriously about two aspects of the characterization of Isabella: first, the extremity of her ascetism and the spleen of her condemnation of Claudio may inform the comedy of the play, and, second, our response to her speech may also include pleasure in the license of her speech as it counters authority by mimicking authority.

The resolution of this peculiar comedy may include the male enjoyment of the metamorphosis of Isabella, a development that mirrors, in reverse, the transformation of Epicoene. That is, the Duke's declaration may transform the novitiate from a mixed female character who incorporates both the erotic and the shrewish and reconstitute her as a silent, purely erotic figure. The text establishes the idea of the silent woman as an erotic figure in the Duke's description of the sexual event in which Mariana will substitute for Isabella. He sets up the co-ordinates of this deception in his instructions to Isabella:

Go you to Angelo, answer his requiring with a plausible obedience, agree with his demands to the point; only refer yourself to this advantage: first, that your stay with him may not be long; that the time may have all shadow and silence in it; and the place answer to convenience.

(III.i.245-50)

The rendezvous takes place in the dark secrecy of Angelo's garden, “circummured with brick” (IV.i.27), as a fulfillment of his fantasy, ostensibily with the woman he desires but within the form of an anonymous encounter. Framed within the comedy as the trick to catch Angelo's evil, this keystone of the plot teases the audience with its provocative description of an erotic encounter in darkness and silence, an encounter that is purely sexual and that isolates itself within the illusion of an absence of both history and consequence. It may be that the Duke's sexuality is re-awakened as he articulates the scheme, and this may be a viable point at which the director and actor may place his decision to transform Isabella into his own silent woman. His description puts forward the story of a sexual adventure which, while it may expose Angelo's crime, presents a variation of the pure, unthreatening eroticism of a fantasy fulfilled.

Jonson's comedy plays with two threats to its society of young men: the aggression of the Collegiates, their usurpation of male prerogatives of speech and judgment, and the power of the conventional senex iratus who will not release the money and its attendant power and pleasure to his younger relative. The comedy also, at a more sophisticated level, plays with the threat provided by male desire for the female by impersonating the female with a male. Moreover, the play disenfranchises the aggressive, hermaphroditical collection of females by showing that the boy can out-shrew them in their attempts to usurp a male-like authority. Even though we never see the actual persona of the boy who performs Epicoene, we witness his sequential empowerment: from passive female to shrew to male. The projection of the young boy's future as illicit lover to the Collegiates, however, is ambiguous. Is he to be the exploiter of their sexuality or the hired instrument of their pleasure?

In the kind of misrule that comedy embodies, the allowed freedom of the Collegiates is liberating even for a male audience, especially since that freedom operates within strict restraints. Even male spectators can enjoy the temporary and limited exercise of power by a group that suffers a certain disenfranchisement. However, it is appropriate to note that the spectator's pleasure in watching a performance of this play is, fundamentally, a male pleasure. No “real” female character threatens the authority of the young men by provoking their sexual desire. Dauphine manipulates Morose's desire to his own advantage and, as well, in this manipulation exercises control over this threat. In some sense, the depiction of all the “real” women of the play as shrews defuses the sexual power the females hold over the males by restricting their energy primarily to the aggression of language. In terms of the description of the Collegiates with which I began these remarks, to be a shrew is to appropriate the language and behavior of the male or, at least, to function hermaphroditically. In that sense, Epicoene, as woman, incorporates the verbal authority of the male as a kind of artificial male or hermaphrodite; but, within the theatrical reality of the play, the character is a male imitating a female who appropriates aspects of the male in an impersonation of belligerent femininity. The play exercises a game in which a boy is able to succeed unequivocally as a shrew, to be revealed, and thereby to defuse the threat of the complicity of women as a sex. That is, to be a shrew is to incorporate aspects of the male in an “unnatural” exchange of sexual characteristics; and, as an authentic male, Epicoene can enact the persona of a shrew better than the “real” women. As the most erotic female in the scene, this young male appropriates the “natural” power of the women represented even though the principal male figure who is caught in the erotic appeal of the androgynous boy who plays the silent woman is himself the foolish senex iratus.

As noted above, both comedies conclude their conventional action with a radical surprise that disrupts expectation. Measure for Measure ends with the focus on the potential marriage between the formerly ascetic Duke and the novitiate Isabella. When Epicoene exercises the typical comic device in which the identity of the young woman is revealed, the text conveys the knowledge that this character is hired by Dauphine early in the play but delays the revelation of the final comic conceit, the hidden gender of Epicoene, until the final moment. Like the comedies of the Restoration that it anticipates, The Silent Woman exercises a wit structure; and its playfulness derives from the manipulation of ignorance by those who have knowledge. We enjoy witnessing the operation of Dauphine's trickery as it exploits the ignorance of the rich Morose who is blinded by his particular mania. As in almost all comedies of this kind, the wit of the younger generation accomplishes a redistribution of family wealth and celebrates the triumph of an economy of expenditure over an economy of frugality. The complicity of young males is strengthened by appropriating the heroine into that group as another male.

Jonson's comedy is atypical, however, in that the revelation of Epicoene's male identity removes the possibility that Dauphine will receive the conventional bounty of both money and heroine.⁷ The absence of a real heroine who would align with Dauphine or even with Truewit skews the conventionality of the comedy. In the essay cited above, Rackin states that “in Epicoene, where reality is social, gender is an ineluctable reality; instead of celebrating androgyny, the play indulges in homophobic satire.”⁸ I would identify Jonson's comedy as misogynist, but not unequivocally homophobic. The play trades in strictly defined gender differences and curiously isolates its young heroes from heterosexual relationship except by allusion. In addition, Epicoene makes the women of this world creatures of ridicule, hermaphroditical in their usurpation of male prerogatives, estranged in satire both from the men of the play and the men of the audience. Jonson's play celebrates the complicity of men, and the order restored at the end of the comedy forms itself through this bond among men. Dauphine seems happy enough to have gained control of the money he desired and the respect of his friends. Unlike the conventional ending of comedy, Epicoene contains the dissolution of the false marriage and proposes no other, and the community of men solidify their position. The boy whom Dauphine uses to play Epicoene is welcomed into this male society as a kind of initiate, and Truewit suggests that within the year he will be sufficiently mature to perform as a “visitant,” a surreptitious lover within the circle of women.

While the play suggests that these women will be susceptible to his adolescent erotic appeal, the newly strengthened society of young males seems strangely invulnerable to the heterosexual disturbance that beset the young men of conventional comedy. The play celebrates male solidarity and defers its most provocative reference to heterosexual activity until its heroine turned hero completes puberty. As John Gordon Sweeney III writes in Jonson and the Psychology of the Public Theater:

Jonson's aggression toward women in this play serves two psychological ends: first, it is a confession, an acknowledgment of the fear suppressed in the earlier plays, that women are really nasty characters; second, to portray them as nasty is revenge against them, not just for their malignancy but also for their rejection of males. And it is this bitter admission of his own hostility toward females that softens the male-to-male conflict and admits homosexuality as an acceptable activity. One might say there is a system of psychic compensation at work here—women being what they are, men must stick together.⁹

Here the only representation of a desirable female disappears into the authentic presence of the boy actor; and the male hero gains his financial reward independent of the female who conventionally accompanies this gift. Power and pleasures play themselves out exclusively within a tightly unified group of young males.

At the beginning of Measure for Measure, the Duke's retreat in favor of the younger Angelo promises an opening to a typical structure in which the social world of the comedy would reconfigure itself around the greater vigor, wit, and liberality of the younger generation. The obvious senex iratus withdraws and authorizes his younger substitute who then appropriates the arbitrary exercise of law that usually characterizes the older male in comedy. In the guise of the Friar, the Duke plays the role of the crafty servant, and then reveals his identity and claims the young woman. The situation in which the younger male and the surrogate father compete for the young woman is a staple of comedy. How many comedies, however, bestow the woman upon the older man? Measure for Measure tricks us by reversing the conventional conclusion to the Oedipal competition before we even recognize there is one. The comic complications are not knit up in the three arbitrary marriages that end the play—none of which is the result of “a sympathy in choice” (MND I.i.141) or promises “mutual entertainment” (I.ii.142). In a rapid disposition of loose ends, the Duke compels Angelo to marry Mariana, Lucio to marry a bawd, and Isabella to marry him. He efficiently dispatches Angelo and Mariana offstage where their marriage is performed within the space of twenty lines which the Duke uses to comfort Isabella who grieves, ostensibly, over the fictitious death of her brother. On the basis of earlier assertions, we may assume that these forced marriages will please Mariana, the bawd, and the Duke while thwarting the desires of Angelo, Lucio, and Isabella. The mutuality of the relationship between Claudio and Juliet has faded from any significant focus, and the young woman is curiously absent from this scene. The three other marriages, as noted above, are arbitrarily forced and unpromising. The final exit displays the departure of estranged individuals rather than a reconstituted community of happy lovers who would embody the comedic fantasy in a festive dance within the ducal palace.

Measure for Measure does, however, exploit the intricate connection between sex and money that provides a part of almost every comic structure. And yet, even that convention is disrupted here when the Duke reclaims the administration of Vienna and bestows the heroine upon himself, not the young man. He proposes to distribute wealth to Isabella if she acquiesces: “if you'll a willing ear incline, / What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine” (V.i.535-36). Two points demand to be made in a gloss on this statement: (1) This exchange is dependent upon Isabella's listening, not speaking; and (2) it is an exchange, not a gift. Since Isabella has no capital other than her body, in this marriage she will give up her desires for both poverty and chastity in trade for the combination of the Duke's wealth and a new identity. The Duke makes no demands for any other form of dowry—an exception in the series of sexual transactions in the play. Recall that Claudio and Julietta have deferred their marriage until her dowry—in the hands of friends—has been propagated (I.iii.133-41) and also that Angelo refused to proceed with marriage to Mariana when “her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister” (III.i.217-19).

Whereas the Duke in Shakespeare's play manages its action even more overtly than the efforts of Dauphine and Truewit in Epicoene, events here are more subject to accident, coincidence, arbitrary substitution, and surprise. We witness his manipulation, not confident that it will be successful, uneasy because we have no sense of his motives. Even more significantly, at the end of the comedy, we learn that the Duke, like Angelo, is subject to the potentially destructive, if natural, energy of lust—the appetite that has brought Vienna to the point of corruption that begins the play. His lapse of authority has provided the license for unrestrained sexuality, and at the close of the comedy, he, like Angelo, is now subject to desire for Isabella, and Isabella remains trapped within the constraints of the identity that his desire imposes upon her. While she may maintain some authority over the Duke as the stimulus to his desire, she is silenced by him.

Epicoene acknowledges the power of the female when she stimulates the sexuality of a male by using that power in the comic manipulation of Morose; but Jonson's comedy isolates its company of young men from that vulnerability by excluding females who would arouse their desire and threaten their authority. The play exercises a clear hostility to women both in the representation of the shrews and in the absence of those females who would provoke the desire of its young male characters. Measure for Measure acknowledges the power of the female in its graphic display of Angelo's comic peripeteia and also, less unequivocally, in the Duke's possible submission to the erotic appeal of the same female. More subtly, the language of this comedy positions the energy of sexual attraction in opposition to authority and restraint and offers no mediation between a self-destructive feeding—“like rats that ravin down their proper bane”—and an equally destructive fast. Whereas this comedy opens its space to erotic females, it also, in my opinion, mediates Isabella's threat by incorporating aspects of the shrew into the representation of her character. That mediation may well be an act of hostility related to Jonson's misogyny in the depiction of the Collegiates in Epicoene. Still the possibility of Vincentio's submission to the erotic presence of Isabella at the end of Measure for Measure may not only acknowledge the erotic power of her female body and keen intellect; it may promise that the Duke, like Morose, will be subject to the re-transformation of his silent bride into a shrew in the post-performance future. Isabella's silence may be a temporary condition. As noted above, both Claudio and Angelo have deferred marriage on the basis of delayed or lost dowries, while the Duke finds Isabella herself to be sufficient commodity independent of dowry. That fact may represent an acknowledgement of her power or authority in the sexual dynamic; but the absence of the conventional relationship between the achievement of sexual desire and money—in a play in which sex and finances have been intricately mingled—contributes to the peculiarity of the final scene of Measure for Measure.

In recent years scholars have speculated on the sexual significance of males performing female roles in the Athenian and Elizabethan theaters. Rackin's explication of the epilogue of As You Like It demonstrates the possibilities of that speculation. At the same time, I suggest that it remains highly problematic to build hypotheses about the ways in which the original spectators used their awareness that all the women in the plays were performed by males. The arguments of John Styan and Sue-Ellen Case mark antithetical readings of that convention. Styan asserts that “Shakespeare's tranvestism … revealed femininity by emphasizing the differences of mind and behaviour between man and woman, helping us to see something as familiar as sex in a fresh light. …”¹⁰ Sue-Ellen Case asks us to read the practice of the transvestite performances of the boy actors as the implementation of homoeroticism in which the presence of the female character functioned only as an aesthetic occasion that licensed sexual interaction between males.¹¹ Her argument, of course, asks us to read Shakespeare's texts as an unequivocal endorsement of the conditions of their original performance; and her discussion occludes the possibility that certain tropes that refer to the convention may, in fact, contend with the convention. The text of Antony and Cleopatra demands that the actor playing the fascinating Egyptian queen voice the anxiety that this character “shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness / I'th'posture of a whore” (V.ii.215-17).¹² In a complex theatrical strategy, these lines foreground the problematic nature of the convention at the same time in which the performance makes its most stringent demands upon the actor. However, reading the practice of the transvestite actor through the text or the text through the practice, at this removed point, remains a difficult theoretical exercise.

What we can claim, of course, is that this convention must have amplified the comic value of the basic conceit of Dauphine's trickery and also that it must have made Measure for Measure even more equivocal than it seems today. Our increasing sensitivity to theatrical representations of gender will compel us to continue to re-examine the conventions of comedy, their typical and idiosyncratic variants within the historical situation of their original production, as well as to use the plays as vehicles for contemporary performance. My intention here is to suggest that in the hurlyburly of conflicting and disparate conventions of comic character and action, the sexual politics of plays like Measure for Measure and Epicoene will not be easy to sort out either in scholarship or in the theater.

Notes

1. Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), Vol. V.

2. The Wakefield Master's re-writing of the Noah play provides an important prototype. This character does answer her husband's physical abuse with her own, but the humor of her character derives more from her sharp-tongued antagonism to Noah's project.

3. In the “Examen of the Silent Woman” Dryden claims that its “intrigue … is the greatest and most noble of any pure unmixed comedy in any language” (“An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” in Selected Works of John Dryden, ed. William Frost [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1953], p. 367 [italics mine]).

4. Phyllis Rackin, “The Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA, 102 (1987), 36.

5. The text of Measure for Measure from which I quote in this paper is that of The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

6. Edward Dowden claims that Isabella's strength allows her “to accept pain and death for herself rather than dishonour,” and so she can accept that fate for “those who are dearest to her.” He continues by identifying the tirade in III.i, which I quote in my text a few lines below, as the manifestation of her indignation against some abstraction of disgraced manhood (Shakespere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art [1875; rpt. New York and London: Harper, 1900], pp. 73-74).

7. Rewarding the hero with both the female he wants and her fortune provides a comic conflation of desire from Plautus and Terence onwards. Consider some of the Shakespearean variations: Bassanio presented with both Portia and her fortune; Sebastian selected by the rich Olivia; Florizel, who marries a shepherdess who is actually a princess. Congreve, in both Love for Love and The Way of the World, exploits this combination of sexuality and money.

8. Rackin, “The Boy Heroine,” p. 31.

9. John Gordon Sweeney III, Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press 1985), p. 120.

10. J. L. Styan, Shakespeare's Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 42.

11. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 21-27.

12. Phyllis Rackin uses this trope to another purpose in an essay that demonstrates the ways in which Cleopatra's variety displays the emptiness of the Roman world; see her “Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 201-12.