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Law and Sexuality in Measure for Measure
Ian Ward asserts, “perhaps the most subversive portrayal of sexuality can be found in
Measure for Measure, a play within which Shakespeare aligns the related questions of
sexuality, the public and private sphere of government, and the inherent and defining
questions of law and morality” (83)
...

I argue that female sexuality is a vulnerable but powerful way of establishing intimate
relations because it entertains transactional value
...
I sketch
the historical and contextual background of marriage law in early modern England, plumbing
the three constituting elements of a valid marriage—the precontract, the solemnization, and
the consummation
...
I
show how the problems of defining female sexuality arise from the futurity of marriage
promise, which entices Juliet and Mistress Kate Keepdown in Measure into carnality, thereby
being rendered into whoredom
...
The complex commingling of marriage
law with premarital and extramarital intercourse, commercial sex, adultery, and intended
rape informs this play, and Shakespeare shows the discrepancy between common law and
canon law (made by ecclesiastical authority) regarding supervision of sexuality
...
The centrality of female sexuality
produces tensions between authority and anarchy, justice and equity, death and reprieve,
women’s marginalization and empowerment
...
The problem of this play derives from
“not merely how strictly the authorities ought to regulate sexual behaviors, but how that
behavior is to be defined and interpreted,” because “the material terms […] constru[ing]
sexuality may be entirely inadequate to an accurate understanding and evaluation of erotic
desires and behaviors” (Maus 169)
...
Angelo’s and Isabella’s arguments center on the classification of a
woman merely through “external warrants” (2
...
144), which is “as [their] complexions are, /
And credulous to false prints” (2
...
135-36)
...

However, the application of the law is vulnerable to human judgment, which is often
inflected with impartiality and impulses
...

However, as Judith Butler points out, women’s identity and sexuality are determined by the
fluid and constitutive “process of signification” as a discursive process (141- 45)
...
[…] Law is the art of governance by rules, not just by an automated machinery
of enforcement” (Posner 109)
...
4
...

As Eagleton points out, “the law is not simply repressive, a negative prohibition placed upon
the will; what is desired is precisely what is most strictly tabooed, and the taboo perversely
intensifies the yearning

My first chapter critiques the inability of the Duke’s tripartite judgment of Mariana’s identity,
“you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife” (5
...
196), Mario DiGangi’s model of
virgin/wife/whore, or Valerie Traub’s integrated paradigm of maid/wife/widow/whore
to define female sexuality
...
M
the following two chapters focus on how theory and practice of common law and canon law
respond to the regulation of female sexuality
...

In exploring the law’s conflicting decrees and practice in relation to commercial sex and
premarital sex, I argue that both Angelo and the law’s indifference to sexual desire cripple
the law’s power of calibrating sexuality
...
Zelizer’s notion of “the purchase
of intimacy,” which deals with how people and the law manage the mingling maintenance
of intimate personal relationships and transactional activities, to justify the bed-trick in this
play
...


The third chapter deals with how the Duke emerges as a paternal leader in Vienna, shifting
his enforcement of the law from unprincipled leniency to humane equity by arranging four
marriages at the end of this play
...
What
constitutes a valid marriage plays a major role in defining whether a woman is a wife, whore,
widow, or singlewoman
...
I relate marriage problems in Measure
to the incompatible legal models of Elizabethan marriage contracts: verba de praesenti (“I
do”) and verba de futuro (“I will’’)
...
In describing the arrangement for Mariana’s assignation
with Angelo, Isabella indicates that: There have I made my promise, upon the Heavy middle
of the night to call upon him
...
’ (4
...
31-32, 40-43, 70-72)
The darkness and the short stay are stock situations in a bed-trick, but Isabella indicates that
Mariana should plead for Claudio’s life as she leaves, even going so far as specifying that the
voice she uses should be “soft and low,” conjuring up a submissive and silenced female
image who “yield[s] up [her] body to [Angelo]’s will
...
4
...


ANGELO: I will bethink me
...
ISABELLA: Hark how I’ll bribe you:
good my lord, turn back
...
(2
...
169-73) Isabella means that if Angelo exonerates Claudio,
she would “bribe” him “[n]ot with fond sicles of the tested gold, / Or stones whose rates are
either rich or poor/ As fancy values them, but with true prayers” (2
...
175-77)
...
The morally charged word “bribe” complicates Isabella’s
initial purpose of “pleading,” thereby commercializing and sexualizing her plea which in turn
reverses the power structure between her and Angelo
...
Once she offers Angelo a bribe, however, she is entitled to negotiate with a sexual
transaction, because he is “that way going to temptation, / Where prayers cross” (2
...
186-87)
...

In this sense, she purchases her private bond by the economic transaction of her body, which
she later identifies as the “gift of [her] chaste body” (5
...
112)
...


Measure exposes the challenge for both Viennese citizen and the rulers to perpetually obey
temperance, acting on the principle of moderation
...
Punishing illicit sex is for authorities an
essential imperative in law enforcement, promotion of morality, and restoration of public
order
...
4
...
(2
...
1-4) As the sluggish enactment makes the law “[b]ecome more
mocked than feared; […] /And liberty plucks justice by the nose” (1
...
28-30), Angelo deems
Claudio’s penalty as his first case of capital crime
...
He discreetly
alludes to the possibility that Angelo will, or has, or would, fall prey to his sexual desire too
...
(2
...
9-17) Escalus’s notion of human frailty foregrounds the
predicament of law enforcement in the face of sexual impulses
...
In this regard, like Claudio, the Puritan Angelo, though unshakably pursue sexual
abstinence, cannot resist his own sexual impulse: “Our nature do pursue, /Like rats that ravin
down their proper bane,/ A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die” (1
...
13-15)
...
I not deny, The jury passing on the prisoner’s life, May in the sworn twelve have
a thief or two Guiltier than him they try
...

(2
...
18-23) In Angelo’s declaration, he obscures a line between being tempted and actually
committing a crime
...
The unintentional but revealing
blunder foreshadows the slippage that permits Angelo’s sexual harassment of Isabella
...
This moral flaw
rationalizes Angelo’s sexual pursuit of Isabella
...
Lars Engle argues that this sort of negotiation recurrent in the
play is “universal” in the sense that “systems of restraint give way to human desire” (93)
...
2
...
This personal negotiation serves as “mitigation,” “the
consequence when desire encounters a system of moral restraint like the Ten Commandments
or Vienna’s anti-fornication statute” (Engle, “Measure for Measure” 93)
...

The way that Angelo treats Claudio’s case deviates from the actual law in early modern
England
...
Bond points out that adulterers in sixteenth-century England actually
only “experienc[ed] a humiliating, but comparatively light punishment” (199)
...
As
Thomas Becon deplores in his homily on whoredom, “this vice […] is counted no sin at all,
but rather a pastime, a dalliance, but a touch of youth: not rebuked, but winked at; not

punished, but laughed at” (qtd, in Ingram 154)
...

Exploring illicit sexual behaviors among the nobility in early modern England, Johanna
Rickman observes that all the bills introduced into the Parliament to ban fornication failed “in
1534, 1549, 1576, 1601, 1614, 1621, 1626, and 1628” (23)
...


THE BED TRICK

first discuss two types of pre-marriage contracts: per verba de praesenti (“I do”) and per
verba de futuro (“I will”)
...
Since Elizabethan marriage consists of three parts—the contract, the
solemnization, and the consummation, with solemnization stipulated to precede
consummation Claudio, Lucio, and Angelo consummate before the solemnization, which
brings Juliet, Mistress Kate Keepdown, and Mariana disgrace
...
At the end of
this chapter, I discuss problems and merits of the Duke’s enforced marriages
...
53 Marriage legitimizes
sex and restores reputations to Shakespeare’s defamed females, Juliet, Mariana, and Mistress
Kate Keepdown
...
As Nancy Mohrlock Bunker points out, “each female has her own
circumstances to reconcile, since Mariana was not unchaste but abandoned, Juliet has been
unchaste only with her betrothed, and Kate was unchaste with a man who promised to marry
her” (88-89)
...
J
...
As the Sokols point out, Peter Lombard and the Parisian
school of canonists put forward two forms of a marriage contract: per verba de praesenti (“I
do”) or per verba de futuro (“I will”) (17)
...
Nothing more was needed
...
However, a contract formed by words of
future consent could be dissolved by mutual agreement unless it had been followed by

consummation, and if unconsummated would not take priority over a subsequent
consummated contract
...
(17)
In the consensual model, a marriage formation takes effect under the contract “made by the
two consenting parties, and by them alone
...
55 However, as
the Sokols claims, this consensual model “created a wholly legal, yet not a wholly licit,
marriage;” despite its validity, marriage by spousals alone was “viewed as an offence by both
society and Church law” (14)
...
These provisions in practice infuriated ecclesiastical authorities,
resulting in the enforcement of the council of Trent (1563), which invalidated marriages that
were not performed in public before a parish priest in canon laws among Catholic Europe and
continental Protestant countries; After the passage of Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage act (1753),
England also changed its canon law to invalidate clandestine marriage (Cardell ed
...
In this sense, considering their sincere intention of marrying, Claudio’s and
Juliet’s premarital sex actually legitimizes their union
...
When Isabella, a Catholic novice nun, first
hears from Lucio that Claudio was incarcerated for impregnating Juliet, she immediately
responds, “O, let him marry her” (1
...
52)
...
2
...


At the end of Measure, the Duke arranges marriages between the troubled couples and
proposes to Isabella
...
He
strives to regulate sexuality with the mixture of common law and canon law, using marriage
as a retroactive solution to fornication
...
As Wentersdorf comments:
Hence, Angelo is guilty not merely of ordering Claudio’s punishment for an act which he
himself subsequently intends to commit, expecting to do so with impunity
...
In basing his judgment on a civil statute
and ignoring the ancient but still valid canon law (valid, that is, in England), Angelo grossly
violates the principle of equity
...
1
...
Isabella’s

silence in response to the Duke’s proposal makes it hard to ascertain how she takes it
...
Despite
Mariana’s effort to plead with the Duke’s mercy, Angelo “crave[s] death more willingly than
mercy,” insisting, “Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it” (5
...
500-501)
...
He claims, “Marrying a punk,
my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (5
...
545)
...




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