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The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization,
is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become
modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the terrorists is
technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on its makers.
If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board
the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without
which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream. (Rushdie)
What makes Rushdie's comments worth quoting here is not their endorsement
of a certain approach to world conflict. It is the clear and explicit
articulation of "secularist-humanist principles" as a set of
ideals, and distinctively modern. It is a commonplace of intellectual
and cultural history that the depoliticization and privatization of religion
- the evacuation that Rushdie seductively calls its "restoration"
to the personal sphere - is a defining characteristic of modern Western
political thought, a trait emerging in the Reformation's repudiation of
papal authority and passing through further transformation in the Enlightenment's
rejection of religion as a rule for social organization. In that tradition,
religion becomes a matter of personal belief that extends into practice
only insofar as it does not significantly disrupt or interfere with the
lives of others. While that extent is inherently somewhat problematic,
religion is not seen as a valid mechanism of overall social control.
As a generalization about history, of course, this idea has been challenged
in recent years by scholars who detect a process of "desecularization,"
or a reemergence of religion in world affairs. (Berger et al) But as an
ideal, it has been challenged by individuals and groups seeking to reassert
the dominance of religion ever since the secular model emerged. In the
1980s, for instance, organizations like the Christian Coalition obtained
considerable visibility and influence in United States politics. And even
as these words are written, major media are reporting surges of activity
by conservative religious groups in the US. Often invoking patriotism
as a subtext in the wake of the September attacks, churches and other
groups are fighting for such measures as re-instituting school prayer
and posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings. Franklin Graham,
son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, called Islam "a very evil and
wicked religion," a remark he later recanted; and the head of the
Southern Baptist Convention asked its 16 million members to pray that
Muslims convert to Christianity. Such activities are examples of "reasserting
Christianity as America's dominant religion." (Glanton)
What it might mean for Christianity to be the dominant force in a society
is the focus of a recent book by renaissance literary scholar Debora Kuller
Shuger. Shuger's Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred
and the State in "Measure for Measure," looks at that subject
through the unusual lens of a Shakespeare play. The book is not "about"
Measure for Measure, Shuger pointedly insists, but rather uses the play
and its principal source "as a basis for rethinking English politics
and political thought circa 1600." (Shuger, 1) The rather long historical
moment surrounding that point is the period in which modern political
thought begins to take shape as a discourse separate from religion. But
Shuger looks at this period not as a transition from religious to secular
but as a clash between competing visions of a still-Christian state, with
one of the main points of contention being the troublesome relation of
private morality (especially sexuality) to public authority. In Measure
for Measure, with its duke disguised as a friar bent on saving a man sentenced
to death for pre-marital sex, she finds evidence of an "extended
cultural debate" (47) about the nature of Christian community.
Notwithstanding her disavowal of writing "about" the play, Shuger's
book requires a considerable amount of close reading in order to substantiate
her analysis. It will be suggested here that her reading is rather selectively
closer on some points than others. Yet it is an interesting and important
book, and not only for what it reveals about the period of which she is
writing. It is one of two very recent books that dwell extensively on
theological issues and religious practices as subtexts of Shakespeare
plays. The other is Stephen Grenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory, a lengthy
and detailed study linking Shakespeare's theatrical fascination with ghosts
- most notably, the senior Hamlet - with the Protestant repudiation of
Purgatory as a place where souls endure severe but finite punishment until
prayers and "indulgences" by the living help them on their way
to Heaven. (2001) "Religion matters," Shuger writes at one point
(71), where her specific reference is to understanding Tudor-Stuart political
thought. But the statement has deeper resonance. These books call attention
to the historical and lingering importance of religion in cultural and
political matters, an importance that does not end at the turning points
of centuries. As she remarks in her introduction, noting the sometimes
eerie similarities between the subject matter of her book and events occurring
as she wrote it in the late 1990s, with a US president being impeached
for sexual involvement with a woman not his wife, "the Protestant
Left of Tudor-Stuart England has discernible affinities to the Protestant
Right of Contemporary America." (4)
Different Wrong Sides
In 1552, the great Protestant clergyman Hugh Latimer delivered a sermon
in which he related an anecdote about having visited a pregnant woman
in prison. The woman had been convicted of murdering one of her children,
though she maintained that the child had died of natural causes, and was
sentenced to be executed after giving birth. Latimer came to believe her
story, interceded on her behalf with King Henry VIII, and obtained a royal
pardon for the woman. But rather than immediately telling her, he withheld
this information until she had given birth and her execution was near.
Latimer then found that the woman, though innocent of the crime, still
feared damnation because she had not been "churched," or gone
through the Catholic version of Jewish purification rituals following
childbirth. Latimer did not believe the ritual necessary for salvation,
so he and a colleague explained this theological error to the woman and
set her thinking right. "Only when the poor prisoner adopted this
doctrinal point and agreed that she could go to her death unchurched and
still receive salvation did Latimer produce the royal pardon and let her
go." (Greenblatt 1988, 129-30.)
Whether Shakespeare knew this story is uncertain. Yet some of its motifs
- a clergyman visiting a pregnant woman in prison, working to secure a
pardon for a person condemned to death, and then concealing the pardon
until a crucial moment of revelation - would become key components in
Measure for Measure. Like Latimer, the play's protagonist seems determined
to bring salvation to other characters, but only after they have waited
and learned enough to earn it.
Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, which gives Shakespeare a free creative
hand with the friars and nuns banned in England. Vienna's ruler, Duke
Vincentio, has absented himself and appointed a deputy, Angelo, to act
in his stead. The central plot concerns the plight of a young man, Claudio,
who has been sentenced to death for fornicating with his lover, Juliet,
who is pregnant and now also imprisoned. Asked by Claudio's sister, Isabella,
to spare her brother, Angelo replies with what has come to be called in
the critical literature the "monstrous proposal" - that he will
do so if she will have sex with him. Isabella refuses, because she is
postulated to a religious order and thus determined to preserve her chastity
at all costs, including her brother's life.
Into this crisis the Duke inserts himself in an effort to save Claudio,
and also, it will turn out, Angelo and others as well. Yet he does not
do so by simply commuting Claudio's sentence or removing Angelo from authority.
Instead, the Duke's strategy is an elaborate mosaic of deception and manipulation.
He disguises himself as a friar in order to gain privileged access, not
only to certain places like the jail, but also to the thoughts and feelings
of other characters. He enlists Isabella in a scheme in which she pretends
to accept Angelo's offer, but when the appointed time comes for their
assignation, her place is taken in bed by Mariana, the woman whom Angelo
had once promised to marry but then abandoned when she lost her dowry.
When Angelo reneges on his promise of mercy and calls for Claudio's head,
the Duke deceives him by sending the head of a pirate who has died in
prison and who happens to resemble the condemned man. Keeping Claudio's
reprieve a secret from Isabella, the Duke persuades her to forgive Angelo
for the execution that has not actually taken place. Then, after revelation
of the Duke's identity and nature of his scheme, the play ends with a
flurry of forced marriages and improbable pardons. Not only is Claudio
ordered to marry Juliet, which presumably isn't much punishment, but Angelo
is ordered to marry Mariana, and a local loudmouth and general ne'er-do-well
named Lucio is ordered to marry a prostitute whom he has gotten with child.
And in perhaps the two most surprising turns, the Duke pardons a convicted,
unrepentant and perpetually drunk murderer whom he was willing to see
executed only moments earlier; and then, after helping Isabella to preserve
her chastity from Angelo, the Duke informs her that he wants to marry
her himself.
That neither Barnardine nor Isabella responds to these rather astonishing
developments might be said to prefigure some audience and critical reaction.
"We never can be certain as to just how we ought to receive the play."
(Bloom, 359) It was Shakespeare's last comedy, written just before the
intense tragedy Othello, and it has commonly been classified as one of
his "problem plays" partly because of the way "it stretches
- some would say shatters - the normal limits of comic form." (Maus,
2021) But there is another important reason for critical discomfort with
the play, Shuger suggests. While there is not much doubt about Angelo
as a villain and hypocrite who punishes people for what he craves and
does, the characters ranged against him "do not seem to be on the
right side, but rather a different wrong side." (Shuger, 35)
Sentencing a young man to death for having sex with his girl friend must
strike a contemporary reader or audience as a bit harsh, not to mention
"strange," an adjective that Shuger frequently favors in calling
attention to aspects of the play. That is all the more so in light of
the couple's having been "pre-contracted," a state regarded
by many then as endowing sexual rights. Indeed, Shakespeare himself may
have so regarded it, as his first child was born just five months after
his marriage. (Maus, 2021) Yet while the law Shakespeare inscribes in
Vienna's books may be of questionable historicity, scholarship has shown
that many Puritans did indeed favor the death penalty for fornication,
adultery, and other forms of extra-marital sex. (Shuger, 9) And it is
Claudio himself who is given an early speech providing a rationale for
that severity. Never a particularly attractive or likable character, he
explains human sexual behavior in rather less than romantic terms. While
being paraded down the street in chains in order add humiliation to his
punishment, he is asked why he is in custody. "From too much liberty,"
he replies, with that word carrying a sense of personal looseness or lack
of control rather than political freedom.
As surfeit is the
father of much fast,
So every scope, by the immoderate use,
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that raven down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die. (1.2, 104-10)
This image likening human sexual behavior to rats compulsively gobbling
down poison is not the stuff of which Romeo and Juliet was made. But
then this is not Romeo and Juliet. Conspicuously absent from this play
is the dynamic that drives many other Shakespeare comedies, in which
sexual desire ultimately leads to marriages that at least potentially
offer both individual fulfillment and social stability. In Measure for
Measure, there is hardly a kind word to be heard about sex. It is like
drugs in late twentieth-century America, as Shuger notes in a nice analogy:
"it turns people into criminals." (37) Sex represents what
is base in human nature, and it leads to what is corrupt in society
- streets full of prostitutes and pimps, and a lecherous leader who
uses his power to sate the desires he punishes in others. "Once
carnal desire comes unhinged from the institution of marriage, it begins
to seem subversive of personal and civic order." (Maus 2022) What
Claudio in chains tersely articulates, then, is a kernel of philosophical
anthropology underlying the belief that human beings must somehow be
tightly controlled. The word somehow probably should be emphasized,
since what separates the two approaches to that subject in the play,
as represented by Angelo and the Duke, concerns not the necessity for
the control, but rather how it is to be best accomplished.
The play's principal source is George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra
(1578), which also tells the story of a condemned man, an official's
"monstrous proposal" to provide leniency in return for sex,
and a ruler who finally brings justice to the scene. Yet here, as in
most Shakespeare plays, it is equally important to notice how the source
alterations or additions to the source story. The entire Friar-Duke
charade is an addition, for instance, as is the character of Barnadine,
the perpetual drunkard and murderer who is pardoned at the end. Also,
the cause of justice ion Whetstone's play is not carried out quite so
single-handedly by the king, but is abetted by other characters who
appear to have some moral agency; the condemned Andruglio, for instance,
is freed by a jailer. Finally, Shakespeare's play essentially dispenses
with overriding social justice concerns that are important in Whetstone's,
and shows instead, an insistent preoccupation with individual lives.
Administering God's Laws
In keeping with a New Historicist approach, Shuger also draws attention
to what might be called the deep sources of the play. Those include
two key works of Puritan political theology, Martin Bucer's De regno
Christi (1550) and Richard Baxter's Holy Commonwealth (1659). As the
date makes clear, the latter work obviously was not in any sense a source
for Shakespeare. Yet the envisioning of a Puritan theocracy at that
date helps make Shuger's point that, "although the Reformation
eventually led to the privatization of religion and the secular state,
its short-term effect was nearly the opposite." (43) For what was
envisioned was not the secular state that would develop, but rather
a Christian society purified of its relics and shrines and transubstantiated
hosts - its indulgences in a sense of that word that surpasses its reference
to the practice of selling tickets out of Purgatory. "On the eve
of the Restoration," Shuger notes,
Baxter holds on
to the Puritan vision of a "theocratical policy,' where state and
church have become "altogether or almost the same," where
princes administer "God's laws," where prosperity matters
less than "the honor and pleasing of God, and the salvation of
the people" - in short, a holy commonwealth, which Baxter, like
Bucer, equates with the "reign of Christ on earth." (Shuger,
43)
Translated into a Christian polity, the Puritan vision is all-encompassing
of human lives, and is highly punitive. It is a discipline based on
rules and regulations (Shuger, 49). The vision is presented in one of
the other works to include a "monstrous proposal," Thomas
Lupton's Too good to be true (1581). Lupton's version reverses Shakespeare's.
Whereas Shakespeare's begins with a harsh judgment and ends with pardons,
Lupton's begins with a plea for mercy and ends with justice in the form
of the judge being sentenced to death by the ruler. It is plausible
to think that Shakespeare knew Lupton's work. Shakespeare's title is
taken from the same chapter of the Gospel of Matthew as the "golden
rule" central in Lupton's work. The relevant Shakespeare passage
is "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that
you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the
measure you get." (Matt 7:1-3) The golden rule comes from Matt
7:12: "So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to
them; for this is the law and the prophets." (New Oxford) But whatever
familiarity Shakespeare might have had with the Lupton text, what is
important is that his work constitutes such a conspicuous counter-narrative.
In Puritan political theology, law has a central function, and that
is "to impose sacred order on human society." (Shuger, 21)
This emphasis on law is typically traced to the Torah of the Hebrew
Scriptures, and Puritan writings often explicitly refer to laws being
handed down directly by God. Yet the Bible is famously in-explicit and
terse to the point of vagueness on the subject of sexual morals, with
which Puritan polity and Shakespeare's play are deeply preoccupied.
In this area, Shuger shows that Puritanism's debt to classical sources.
Specifically, the proposals of Bucer are taken from Plato, and especially
from the Laws, the philosopher's last and longest dialogue. To be sure,
Plato does not view law narrowly as a system of requirements and prohibitions;
it rather embodies the highest of personal and societal ideals. But
Plato's text is deeply concerned with sexual regulation. It is, Shuger
suspects, "the first text in the intellectual history of the West
to restrict permissible sex to married, reproductive intercourse - and
to make this sort of sexual regulation one of the state's primary tasks."
(11)
Shuger thus traces this tradition emphasizing public control of private
lives from Plato to the Puritans. With historical hindsight, it is possible
to say that there was a significant change of course at that point,
and that the successful counter-narrative turns out to be the modern
secular state. Yet Shuger invites readers to view Measure for Measure
as a forum for a fairly intense debate about the nature of Christian
community in the long wake of the Reformation. In that context, the
duke and his deputy represent separate and conflicting strains of thought
in late Elizabethan England.
That Angelo represents a Puritan strain is suggested by his own professed
strict adherence to law, specifically on sexual matters. "It is
the law, not I, condemn your brother," he tells Isabella. (2.2,
82) And the frequent descriptions of him as "precise" link
him to the "precisians," or Puritan rigorists. (Maus, 2023)
Puritanism, as religion and as society, entails strict enforcement of
laws. Puritans "were marked by 'a distinctive preciseness or scrupulosity
about their own and other people's moral conduct,' a determination 'to
impose godly behavior upon all residents,' and 'a willingness to use
physical punishment…to enforce proper conduct.'" (Shuger 11, quoting
from Peter lake, "Puritan Identities," Journal of Ecclesiological
History 35 [1984]: 112-23. The Duke provides an alternative to his deputy.
Mixta Persona
First performed in 1604, Measure for Measure is often regarded as a
compliment to the diffident James I, after the more extroverted Elizabeth
he replaced. That the play's ruler retires from view can be seen as
a mirror of the monarch's less visible role. But James had no particularly
modest view of his position. In Basilicon Doron he wrote to his son
about being mixta persona, or both priest and layman (Shuger, 59). Such
a person is mixed, James told Prince Henry, "betwixt the ecclesiastical
and civil estate: for a king is not mere laicus, as both the Papists
and Anabaptists would have him, to the which error also the Puritans
incline over-far." (Shuger, 59)
"By asserting the king's priestly aura in the teeth of papal and
presbyterian claims that rulers, whatever their temporal eminence, are
mere laypersons and hence subject to the church, the passage underscores
the link binding the sacral/sacerdotal kind of high Christian royalism
to the urgent post-Reformation contest over whether the state should
or could be the primary bearer of the sacred." (Shuger, 59)
The Duke's undercover
work as a friar is interesting and important in that connection - though
not only in that connection. That one of his tactics involves deceiving
Angelo (and Isabella) into believing that Claudio has been executed
links him in a curious way to the real friars in at least two other
Shakespeare plays. One, of course, is Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet,
and the other is Friar Francis in Much Ado About Nothing. One thing
that all three friars have in common is that each devises a plan in
which the solution to a pressing problem is creating the pretense that
someone still living is dead. Friar Lawrence prepares a potion that
induces a forty-two hour deathlike state in Juliet. Friar Francis in
Much Ado suggests that false rumors about the wrongly accused Hero dying
of shame will help bring her slanderers to their knees. And Friar Duke
serves up an impostor's head on a platter in order to make convince
Angelo that the condemned man is dead.
The plays where friars freely roam, wheel, and deal are set outside
Protestant England, where religious orders had been eliminated before
Shakespeare's time. Yet that he returns to this motif of friars exercising
power over life and death suggests the playwright's perception of the
powerful hold these figures still possessed on the popular imagination.
As Greenblatt has persuasively argued (2001), the vividly drawn ghosts
in Shakespeare offered his audiences a powerful way to connect emotionally
with the dead, with whom an important channel of contact had been officially
severed by the Protestant rejection of Purgatory. Although Protestant
theology also stripped the pastor of the power to transform bread and
wine into sacrificial body and blood, Shakespeare's friars afford audiences
the opportunity both to identify with, and distance themselves from,
the beliefs and practices of an essentially supernatural clergy. While
Friar Francis' idea of spreading rumors about Hero's death seems an
almost superfluous addition to a plot that could have survived without
it, there is no question about the dramatic centrality of Juliet's simulated
death. And the fact Friar Lawrence's scheme leads to the real death
of the young lovers - yet also apparently achieves his goal of making
peace between the families - illustrates sharply how thoroughly and
ambiguously the blessings of priestly power are mixed.
In Measure for Measure, in contrast, Friar Duke appears to have virtually
no limitations on his power to bring his plans to fruition. Because
of his determination and ability to assert control over the lives of
his subjects, "Some critics see him as a version of God, 'like
power divine,' as Angelo declares in the final scene.'" (Maus,
2026) The clause "critics see him" implies that the perception
requires considerable interpretive insight. In fact, while the Duke
never calls himself God, it seems clear that he understands a ruler
as representing the deity's intention and carrying out divine will.
That is concisely communicated midway through the play in two lines
that may constitute the most important couplet of the work:
He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe. (3.1, 481-82)
The second line outlines the duke's mission of mitigating punishment
not only with mercy but "holy" instruction; the first summarizes
his identity. As Shuger says, the "friar's robes seem to disclose
rather than disguise the nature of his authority." (36)
Shuger's book helps make a certain kind of explicit sense of that couplet
and of the Duke's actions. It is a sense that derives directly from
the understanding of sacral monarchy espoused by James, who acceded
to the throne shortly before the play was produced. It is an understanding
of the king as that mixta persona, as both layman and clergy, both civil
and spiritual leader: "Kings therefore, as God's deputy-judges
upon earth, sit in thrones…not as laics…but as mixtae personae…being
bound to make a reckoning to God for their subjects' souls as well as
their bodies." (quoted in Shuger, 110) Here, then, is a portrait
of the monarch as "king of souls." Thus, "The Duke embodies
and enunciates what seems to have been the dominant understanding of
monarchy circa 1600." (Shuger, 71)
The linked themes of responsibility and reckoning for souls are expressed
in related remarks by the Duke near the beginning and end of the play.
When he meets with a real friar to arrange his disguise, he alludes
to the excessive "liberty" cited by Claudio as the cause of
his offense, yet he attributes the consequences not to his subjects'
animal nature, but more to his own failure to control them. Though there
are "strict statues and most biting laws," they have been
"let slip," he says, and "'twas my fault to give the
people scope."
Now, as fond fathers
Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch
Only to stick it in their children's sight
For terror, not to use, in time the rod
More mocked becomes than feared: so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;
And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose,
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum. (1.3, 19-31)
As for the reckoning, that is brought into play in the bitterly comic
scene in which the condemned murderer Barnardine adamantly refuses to
go to this death because he is once again too drunk to be prepared for
it. The duke sends him back to his cell and offers this gloss:
A creature unprepared, unmeet for death;
And to transport him in the mind he is
Were damnable. (4.3, 59-62)
As Shuger observes, one claim being made in those lines is that Barnardine
would be damned if executed without proper preparation. But another
is that the duke would be damned if he allowed that to happen. "This
second claim makes the civil magistrate responsible to God for his subjects'
souls." (Shuger 109)
Whereas the "precise" Puritan Angelo sees his duty as strictly
enforcing the law in the form of punishing wrongdoers, Shuger finds
in the Duke a penitential model of Christian community. The object is
to move wrongdoers to an increased appreciation and understanding of
their sins so that at least their souls might be saved. Thus, for instance,
the Duke initially plans to let Barnardine be executed and his head
substituted for Claudio's, and abandons that plan only when the murderer
proves too drunk to proceed. This provides one avenue to understanding
the duke's relentless manipulation of other characters, the way he "forces
virtually all of the major characters to face dreaded punishments -
before he pardons everyone." (Greenblatt 1988, 133)
The End of Anxiety
One way of characterizing the duke's actions would be the management
of "salutary anxiety," as Stephen Greenblatt does in a discussion
of that strategy in the theater and public policy as well as religion.
As a theatrical strategy, it "is brought to a kind of perfection
by Shakespeare," especially in the tragedies (Greenblatt 1988,
134) Outside the theater, King James and other monarchs used the strategy
to maintain civil authority:
Public executions and maimings were designed to arouse fear and to set
the stage for the royal pardons that would demonstrate that the prince's
justice was tempered with mercy. If there only fear, the prince, it
was said, would be deemed a tyrant; if there were only mercy, it was
said that people would altogether cease to be obedient. Similarly, religious
anxiety was welcomed, even cultivated, as the necessary precondition
of the reassurance of salvation. (Greenblatt 1988, 137)
Measure for Measure seems to be set in a society where people have "ceased
to be obedient." Accordingly, the duke's plan calls for what late
twentieth-century jargon might term "optimal anxiety effect."
Claudio, for instance, is left in the dark about plans to save him and
repeatedly told to prepare for death; Mariana's pleas for Angelo's life
are repeatedly rebuffed before he is spared; and in perhaps the most
interesting instance, Isabella, is pointedly though temporarily deceived
about her brother's fate. Muses the duke:
…I will keep her ignorant of her good,
To make her heavenly comforts of despair
When it is least expected. (4.3,101-04)
With the possible exception of the duke's claim to bear "the sword
of heaven," perhaps no aspect of his behavior has aroused more
suspicion and even outrage than his manipulation of Isabella. One of
the more colorful examples comes in a massive book on Shakespeare written
in 1998 for a popular audience by professional academic curmudgeon Harold
Bloom. In especially fine form, sublimely disgusted, Bloom calls Measure
for Measure "a masterpiece of nihilism" in which "every
stated or implied vision of morality, civil or religious, is either
hypocritical or irrelevant….I scarcely see how the play, in regard to
its Christian allusiveness, can be regarded as other than blasphemous."
(Bloom, 359, 363) And the core of the corruption is found in Duke Vincentio,
whose entire charade Bloom reckons an elaborate scheme to seduce and
possess the virginal Isabella - whom Bloom amazingly calls Shakespeare's
"most sexually provocative character." (365) Although "Angelo's
sadomasochistsic desire for the novice nun is more palpable than the
Duke's lust," Bloom hisses, "the difference between the two
is in degree, not in kind." (365)
Interestingly, perhaps tellingly, Shuger is silent on the subject of
the duke's last-minute marriage proposal to Isabella, saying only, "I
have nothing to say about whether Isabella accepts the duke." (6)
What she focuses on in the interaction between those two characters
is the duke's determination to coax forgiveness for Angelo from Isabella
before he will publicly reveal (and thus sanction) Claudio's reprieve.
This he accomplishes by manipulating Mariana to recruit Isabella in
the cause of pleading for Angelo's life after his malfeasance has been
exposed. When Mariana suggests that her husband might be one of those
men who "become much more the better/ For being a little bad,"
Isabella replies with remarks that suggest she might have been reading
Bloom. For she essentially attributes responsibility for his actions
to herself:
I partly think
A due sincerity governed his deeds,
Till he did look on me. Since it is so,
Let him not die. My brother had but justice
In that he did the thing for which he died.
For Angelo,
His act did not o'ertake his bad intent….(5.1, 430-45)
From the fact that Isabella has been kept unaware of her brother's true
fate, a reader might plausibly infer that the duke has been creating
an emotional indebtedness that will set her up for his proposal. But
his real motivations, Shuger insists, are "the hope that Isabella
will come, of her own accord, to side with forgiveness" - itself
a Christian virtue - and also the hope that Angelo, if spared, might
yet reform. (100)
In a larger context, Shuger weaves the play's entire "bed trick"
sequence - Mariana substituting for Isabella in Angelo's garden shed
- and its consequences into a thoughtful discussion of the concept of
equity in law. One long chapter of Shuger's book is a densely informative
examination of the English courts and justice systems of the era, and
it is immensely valuable quite apart from its connection to Shakespeare's
play. What it focuses on are both the principle of equity as an approach
stressing the uniqueness of certain cases as against the generalizations
of common law, and also the evolution of the chancery as an alternative
to the common law courtroom as a venue for handling such cases. Courts
of chancery and equity are now firmly established jurisdictions in the
United States, but the influence of church tribunals and other religious
factors probably is not well enough known. Shuger's work helps to correct
that.
She points out, for instance, the important role of clerics in development
of equity courts. "The fact that so many of the men who developed
the basic principles and procedures of English equity were clerics meant
that equity, as contemporaries recognized, was a specifically Christian
justice system." (88) And the religious origins of some legal principles
and practices clearly have left certain marks on the later secularized
systems of justice. Citing legal historical scholarship, she observes
that the general presumption against executing insane people - a presumption
that has recently been eroding - derives from the fact that such an
execution would deprive the defendant of the chance for a soul-saving
confession. "This rule, which survives in most western legal systems,
originally rested on theological considerations…." (113)
Viewed in relation to the play, the important thing to notice about
English equity is that it developed in response to perceived defects
in the common law. Of course, how those defects were perceived often
depended on the position of the perceiver. As early as the fourteenth
century, the common law was being criticized as a system too rigid and
inflexible to respond to many situations. Thus, "The transformation
of Chancery from an administrative department into an equity court began
in the late fourteenth century, when petitions addressed to the Council
alleging that some defect in the common law the petitioner could not
get justice in the ordinary courts started being delegated to the chancellor."
(Shuger, 84) It proved a popular venue, with a caseload that quadrupled
during the latter half of the sixteenth century, and it was viewed as
"quicker, cheaper, not rule-bound, better able to unearth the truth,
more interested in fair play and moral right than legal technicalities."
(Shuger, 85)
What this points to, obviously, is a "not rule-bound" venue
in which the person presiding has extraordinary power, including the
authority to ignore or override existing laws, in order to determine
what is morally right and in the best interest of everyone. The rationale
for this was partly theological, since, under sacral kingship, the king's
"duty is to enforce not the law of the land but the higher justice
of God." (Shuger, 77) Of course, the king did not personally preside
in Chancery Court or its criminal counterpart, Star Chamber, except
on rare occasions, but the duty and the power extended to his deputies.
This is a responsibility that the play's deputy, Angelo, explicitly
refuses to take on - or seriously When Isabella pleads for her brother's
life, Angelo points to the law and insists that he is a mere instrument
with no more power than the ink in which the law is printed:
It is the law, not I, condemn your brother.
Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,
It should be thus with him. He must die tomorrow. (2.2, 82-84)
That Angelo later reveals both his hypocrisy and his dishonesty, by
negotiating the law away in a deal that he does not even keep, does
not alter his status as a "precise" representative of a rule-bound
Puritan version of Christian community. When Isabella suggests that
Angelo condemn "(Claudio's) fault,/ And not my brother" -
in other words, that he condemn the sin but not the sinner - the deputy
scoffs at such an idea:
Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it?
Why, every fault's condemned ere it be done.
Mine were the very cipher of a function,
To fine the faults whose fine stands in record,
And let go by the actor. (2.2, 35-41)
What the duke's actions then construct as an alternative is the model
of a penitential rather than penal Christian justice system. While he
pointedly ignores the law requiring execution for fornication, it is
the bed trick that is really the pivotal maneuver in bringing all the
parties to the point where he wants them in the play's strange climax.
Even if he were not successful in saving Claudio for some reason, that
character's real death could result in the same forgiveness by Isabella
as the death pretense. Without the bed trick, however, the duke could
not elicit Mariana's testimony to get Angelo called on the carpet, and
thus try to provide for her as well as offer the deputy the chance of
repentance. An understanding of those interconnections is important,
because the Duke does, after all, deceive many people about many things.
But that is fair play under principles of equity, which recognized the
rightness of dolus bonus, or "the good trick," as a tactic
for achieving the ends of justice. "Like canon and (civil) law,"
Shuger notes, "equity thus seems to have recognized the possibility
of legitimate deception…." (94)
Equity also recognized "slanderous accusations against good and
upright justices" as a very serious offense. (Shuger, 94) And that
is what brings the play's colorful character Lucio under ducal jurisdiction,
so to speak. If Lucio has some vocation other than being a "burr"
(4.4, 165), he certainly does not pursue it very aggressively. Besides
continually disrupting the Duke's somber proceedings of revelation and
justice administration at the play's end, Lucio slanders the Duke, lies
about the alter-ego friar, and then insults the Friar-disguised Duke
to his face as a "bald-pated lying rascal" with a "knave's
visage" and a "sheep-biting face." (5.1, 344-48) Even
Bloom, who maintains Lucio is "saner than anyone else on stage,"
finds that the character "rails on with an intent we cannot grasp."
(Bloom, 362)
Whatever his "intent," Lucio's railings against an important
official give the Duke cause to punish him. And his punishment is emblematic
of what happens to other characters. He is ordered to marry Kate Keepdown,
the prostitute whom he has impregnated and previously refused to wed.
Like Angelo, he declares death a preferable fate, but this is one time
that the Duke will not be budged. This concluding scene constitutes
one measure of the distance of Shakespeare's play from its principal
source. For whereas Promos and Cassandra's king is highly concerned
with broad issues of social justice, the Duke is a ruler who has been
taking confessions, urging repentance, and engineering an outcome that
will provide for wronged women and fatherless children, and perhaps
spiritually improve the men in their lives. In his role as king of souls,
"Duke Vincentio betrays an extraordinary concern for the well-being
of private individuals." (Shuger, 101)
Are these marriages made in heaven, to coin a phrase? To complain that
they are not, as much criticism emphatically has, is to miss the point,
Shuger argues. The point is the exercise of temporal forgiveness in
an effort to inspire spiritual repentance that will lead to salvation.
And that point is sharpened by the question of whether the worst wrongdoers
are capable of repentance or beyond hope. That directs attention to
another addition Shakespeare made to his source, the creation of the
perpetual drunkard and unrepentant murderer Barnardine. Can such a person
be reformed, or should he be eliminated from society before he contaminates
others? "From the Elizabethan era through the Civil Wars, Anglicans
split over the problem of the ungodly, over what to do with Barnardine?"
(Shugar, 123) Duke Vincentio pardons him.
To be sure, it's worth remembering that the pardon is not part of the
Duke's original game plan. At one point, he is perfectly willing to
have the convict executed and his head substituted for Claudio's, before
that scenario is subverted by Barnardine's persistent refusal to sober
up. Yet in the final moments of the play, the duke has the condemned
man brought before him and addresses him:
Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul
That apprehends no further than this world,
And squar'st thy life according. Thou art condemned;
But, for those earthly faults, I quit them all
And pray thee take this mercy to provide
For better times to come. (5.1, 474-79)
Viewed strictly in terms of the plot, this action is basically inexplicable.
Barnardine has only a few lines, no connection to other characters,
and no real personality traits other than "stubborn." But
one plausible way to explain his reprieve is as a demonstration of the
duke's conviction that the possibilities of repentance and salvation
can extend to a hardened felon as well as fornicators and manipulators,
and this radical model of forgiveness "implicitly repudiates the
Puritan disciplinary agenda of a purified Christian community on which
it rests." (Shuger, 124)
It is important to notice that the anti-Puritan alternative represented
by the Duke is by no means identical to the modern political discourse
that would eventually shape Western society. In contrast to Puritanism's
Platonic roots, which call for the imposition of a divinely ordered
template on civil society, the dominant tradition would become Aristotelian
thought, which legitimates the political as a realm separate from the
sacred, and Enlightenment ideology that would legitimate the private
as a realm separate from the public. In that respect, insofar as Shakespeare's
play is a certain vision of social organization, its envisioned society
is a close sibling to the Puritan Utopias of figures like Bucer and
Baxter. All are "visionary theocracies," as Shuger puts it,
with the big difference that the play experiments with a penitential
rather than penal model of Christian community. "The Friar-Duke's
Vienna is an attempt to imagine what Christianity might look like as
a political praxis." (Shuger, 131)
Out of Africa
Shuger's persistent pairing of Shakespeare's play with the Puritan texts
is instructive. For however suggestive Measure for Measure might be
of an alternative view of Christian community, and however consistent
with such a vision, certainly the work of drama lacks the fairly unambiguous
and programmatic quality of the religious tracts. Late in the book,
Shuger pauses to note this, acknowledging that her argument for an alternative
version of political theology relies on fragmentary evidence which does
not include texts comparable to the works of Bucer and Baxter. "If
there is a second version of political theology, one modeled on penance
rather than law-enforcement," she reflects, "one would expect
to find it explicitly articulated, and late sixteenth-century materials
provide no such articulation." (134)
Her response to this dilemma is to hypothesize that the penitential
line of thinking "went underground at the Restoration" (a
clause that actually occurs much earlier in the book, 41). The book's
final few pages then are devoted to explorations that take her from
England to Africa. There she not only finds roots of this alternative
view of Christian community in St. Augustine, whose views on the sordidness
of sexuality actually have made him a sort of patron saint of Puritanism,
but also its reemergence in post-Apartheid South Africa.
Augustine's writings actually figure prominently at two points in Shugar's
book . In one, a long passage from a Martin Luther sermon on hypocrisy
quotes a City of God story in which "great empires" are equated
with "dens of thieves." A pirate imprisoned by Alexander the
great complains, "I do this with a small boat, and I am called
a robber; but you do it with a huge fleet and are called an emperor,"
prompting Augustine to gloss, "thus the big thieves act as judges
of the little thieves." To Shuger, this lends theological depth
to the distinction between the duke and his deputy: "the big thief
who punishes little thieves is the negative counterpart of the sacral
ruler, the deputy of the the duke [sic]." (Shuger, 67-68) In the
other major reference to Augustine, Shuger relies partly on the bishop's
exchange of letters with Donatus, proconsul of Africa, about the treatment
of offenders to make this argument:
Virtually all of Augustine's writings on Christian polity center on
penitential justice. While Augustine never denies the state's right
and duty to punish offenses, he insists again and again that, for christians,
true justice seeks above all, the good of the offender; both in punishing
and pardoning, it endavors to heal the wrongdoer, to lead him to repentance
and to salvation." (Shuger, 135)
At this point, both Shuger's meaning and her strategy seem fairly clear:
It is possible to invoke a strand of venerable Augustinian thinking
in support of this penitential model of Christian community which appears
to have been, in the larger picture of the Christian (and Western political
tradition) basically the road not taken. But then she poses some questions
arising from the topics her book has explored:
Might penitential justice work? Not that those forgiven would always
repent, neither Augustine or the Friar-Duke expects that; but might
it work as an imperfect, risky, problematic system of temporal justice:
as an alternative to the penal system, as a method a state could conceivably
adopt to deal with real criminals? What would Christianity look like
as a political praxis? (137)
Now, Shuger has devoted much of her book to showing what that might
look like, inasmuch as that is largely how she characterizes the Viennese
regime of Duke Vincentio. But apparently because she does not want the
book to be "about" the play, she abruptly shifts gears and
responds to the question with a three-page italicized reproduction of
passages from and about Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings
in South Africa in 1997. The disjointed segments end with a passage
questioning "the imposition of a Christian morality of forgiveness
into a political process," at which point Shuger returns to an
authorial voice for a strikingly peculiar two-sentence conclusion: "I
do not know whether we should permit it. My point is simply that Measure
for Measure's version of Christian morality has in fact been imposed
on a political process - that it could work." (Shuger, 140)
It is very difficult to parse that last sentence. The part before the
dash certainly seems to imply that the Christian morality of Shakespeare's
play has been imposed on the political process in the South African
scenario just mentioned. But "that it could work," coming
after the dash, makes very little or at least very difficult syntactic
sense. The most plausible interpretation seems to be that the post-hyphenate
clause refers back to "my point" - that the play, in other
words, suggests that Christian morality could work, and that the South
African TRC hearings support that claim. If that is a more or less accurate
interpretation, then it converts Shuger's book from an analysis of early
modern political thought to an endorsement of a particular type of religio-political
community. There's nothing inherently ignoble or embarrassing about
such an endorsement, but it would seem to be more effective, as well
as more honest, if the conversion were openly confessed.
The murkiness of Shuger's last sentences underscore the point that it
is ultimately unclear what conclusions the author would like to see
drawn from this often interesting, informative, and engaging book. Her
identification of what has been called here the deep sources of Shakespeare's
play and the writings of his contemporaries is valuable and important,
and so are analytical strategies that often greatly illuminate that
period and how it is historically connected to others. She certainly
does show that ideals of a Christian society did not stop on a dime,
and that the modern secular state did not come into existence overnight.
As to her stated goal of using the play as "a basis for rethinking
English politics and political thought circa 1600," however, it
remains somewhat unclear just what specific implications or consequences
that rethinking is supposed to have.
Is the Duke Good Enough?
Shuger seems to hoist a flag of penitential justice as an alternative
to penal systems that emphasize imprisonment or other punishment. Yet
she does not mention alternatives that have been offered in recent years
in Europe and North America in the form of "restorative justice"
plans, which seek a non-punitive and balanced approach in responding
to offenders, victims, and communities. (Braithwaite, Cragg, Hadley)
Many models of restorative justice are explicitly Christian in origin
and foundation. Under normal circumstance, of course, it is hardly a
fair criticism of a book about Shakespeare's England to complain that
there are no references to twentieth-century criminology. Shuger, however,
alters those circumstances considerably with her last-minute invocation
of the South African scenario.
But to return to the century of Shakespeare, perhaps the most important
problem that Shuger has failed to deal with is one that she raises herself,
though she never acknowledges just how serious it is for purposes of
her own argument. It is what might be called the problem of the good
man. It arises from notions of sacral kingship giving a ruler power
unregulated by any earthly checks or balances. The core of Shuger's
concept of non-Puritan but still Christian community is not a set of
laws to be enforced or protocol or procedures to be followed, but rather
a godlike ruler. As Shuger herself notes, "The personalist emphasis
of sacral kingship makes it crucially important that the ruler be morally
good." (62)
Does Friar Duke fit that category? Shuger declines to comment. It is
not necessary to join in the blustering of someone like Bloom in order
to notice that the duke seems pretty devious and his motives sometimes
pretty murky. Shuger draws on a wide range of resources in her book.
She cites passages of dialogue consistent with the Duke understanding
himself as the ruler of a Christian community. Yet she cites no evidence
indicating that he is a morally good man, and she basically ignores
questions raising the possibility that he is anything but. She even
declares at one point that the play has an "anti-Machiavellian
topos" (38), a particularly curious claim to make about a play
with such an obsessively manipulative protagonist. She does not have
to vote for Duke Vincentio, so to speak, in order to argue for the relevance
of a non-Puritanical model of Christian community. But if he is not
the morally good man required for the job, then what, finally, is the
relevance of this character, or this play, for that argument? Not to
address such a central question is a serious shortcoming of the book.
In his op-ed piece, Rushdie stridently insists that "the secularist-humanist
principle" is the only alternative to violent religious fanaticism.
What Shuger seemingly wants to suggest is that there is a model of religious
community that is yet an alternative to the fanaticism of the Puritan-Religious
Right axis that she notes in her introduction. She seeks an illustration
in the "strange justice" (133) administered by a particularly
enigmatic ruler in a notoriously difficult Shakespeare play. When Shakespeare
himself manipulates anxiety in the theater, the purpose is to afford
the audience pleasure, Stephen Greenblatt notes, and the point is to
"give such delight that the audience will pay for it again and
again."(1988, 135) The fulfillment of Shuger's argument would require
showing that the Duke's manipulation truly leaves everyone better off.
If it does not, then the play might be more ironic commentary than illustration,
much less endorsement, of her theme. Shuger's reluctance to broach that
subject engenders the suspicion that Friar Duke might not be the right
man for this role.
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