One of the features of comedy, you’ll recall, is its reinforcement of social order. The heroes and heroines of comedy are reconciled with each other and with society; the happiness of individuals is inseparable from the well-being of the community. Collision of the interests and desires of individuals with the interests and will of the community is one of the fundamental conditions of both comedy and tragedy. The generic difference inheres in whether and how the clash of competing interests is overcome.
Tragedy is concerned primarily not with the collective happiness of societies but
rather the suffering of individuals. Marriage has a personal dimension, but
comic weddings by and large are public affairs: marriage is a social experience.
Obversely, while there is a collective dimension to suffering—the funeral is
social counterpart to the wedding—suffering and dying in tragedy are ultimately
individual experiences. Romeo and Juliet contains
in a single play these opposing tendencies: the lovers’ tragic isolation on the
one hand, the Capulet festivities and wedding plans on the other. The play seems
headed for a wedding, comedy’s reward. But this outcome is thwarted by
developments that ignite the powder-keg of civil unrest brimming below the
surface of Venetian society, the long-standing feud between two noble houses.
The lovers’ fate (they are “star-crossed,” after all) is to be
possessed of a desire which, whilst potentially healing and thereby comic,
remains permanently in collision with the collective (and in this case
destructive) will. We get a wedding, but it is officiated in isolation at Friar
Laurence’s cell, away from the larger community; and it celebrates a union that
is to be consummated only in death.
What about Measure for Measure? Though listed as a
comedy in the first folio, the play differs markedly from, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yes, the plot descends
into a set of mishaps and adversity and moves ultimately toward resolution
through that most comic of institutions, marriage.
But here, unlike in Dream, there is no motion from a
legitimate world of social order toward an alternative realm and back again—no
journey from Athens to a green world of magical topsy-turveydom. Everything
takes place in Vienna. Curiously, rather than flee the law and then return—as do
Hermia and Lysander in Dream—the heroes and
heroines of this play remain in place whilst the representative of law and
order, Duke Vincentio, is the one who leaves (or pretends to, supposedly on a
diplomatic mission). Abandoned by the ruling authority, the Viennese are
beholden nevertheless to the Duke’s deputy, Angelo. Rather than escape the
law in order to realize their desires, as do Lysander and Hermia in Dream, Claudio and Julietta, along with the rest of
the Viennese citizens in M for M, are subjected to
an even more rigorous enforcement of social norms and policing of sexual
behavior in particular. It is as though the peace-seeking Duke Theseus in Dream were to abandon his duties to Egeus, whose
strict adherence to the law, the “ancient privilege of Athens,”
leaves no room for the fickle and unpredictable inclinations of the flesh. Every
Jack would have his Gill (to borrow from Robin Goodfellow), but not the one s/he
wants.
For these and other reasons that will become apparent Measure for Measure is often called a “problem comedy”:
though adhering to convention in the end, the play fulfills comedic expectations
in ways that are less than satisfactory. Another way to think of it, however, is
as an experimental comedy. Duke Vincentio temporarily withdraws from his office
in order to observe what happens when a man who “scarce confesses / That
his blood flows” is left in charge, and to “see / If power change
purpose, what our seemers be” (1.3.51-54). This “fantastical Duke of
dark corners” (4.3.147) also disguises himself, spying on and manipulating
the other characters in order to stage a spectacle at once simple in its
apparent purpose—to demonstrate the compatibility of mercy and
justice—and filled with breathtaking surprises and improbabilities.
The Duke might be said in this respect to resemble a playwright who, having
written several masterpieces of comedic drama (Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, to name but three) has
grown weary of the form and aims to push it in some new as-yet-untested
direction. Might not Measure for Measure be the
result of this experiment? If so, what are we to call it? What generic label
suits it? Or perhaps searching for such a label is futile, a fool’s errand
for those who would save Shakespeare from the charge of having written what
Coleridge described as “a hateful work” whose comedic aspect is
“disgusting,” its tragic features “horrible,” and the
whole thing “degrading to the character of woman.” Is the play a
truly failed comedy? Or does it fail only in the sense that Hamlet was deemed by T. S. Eliot a failed tragedy?
Is it not possible that Coleridge, like Eliot, was unable to appreciate what
Shakespeare was trying to accomplish when he wrote plays that defied their
understanding of what drama should or could do?
The play raises two related issues: (1) the ethical, specifically Christian, problem of how to temper justice with mercy without compromising the law’s integrity; and (2) the political question of the state’s role in regulating sexual desire.
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you” (Matthew 7:1-3).
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is most notable for its endorsement of a radical approach to social responsibility and justice: love your enemies, forgive those who harm you, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, etc. Whereas justice requires balance, the repaying of deed for deed, the Sermon on the Mount advocates a justice that turns not on restitution but rather on forgiveness.
And yet Jesus’ warning against judging others contains paradoxically the promise that failure to heed the warning will not itself be forgiven; rather, those who judge will indeed be judged—and punished for judging.
The same paradox informs the Christian doctrine of the Atonement: rather than be
punished for our sins as we deserve, forgiveness is ours for the asking. And yet
such grace is possible in the first place only because someone else has suffered
the just consequences of our own moral transgressions. It is not, then, that God
simply forgives; rather, his just wrath is transferred from the deserving object
of his ire to an undeserving surrogate. God, in effect, punishes Jesus for the
sins of God’s creatures. Christian forgiveness, then, as radical as it is,
nevertheless turns on the notion that justice must involve restitution after
all, the so-called lex talionis or “law of
retaliation”: eye for eye, blood for blood, life for life, measure for
measure.
This paradox works well in the abstract realm of theological discourse. But how does one reconcile the imperatives of justice and mercy in the real world? In which cases should mercy rather than justice prevail?
This brings us to the second problem: the state’s role in regulating the sexual behaviour of its citizens.
Recall the confusion in Hamlet over the issue of
incest. Can a brother legitimately marry his widowed sister-in-law? According to
the list of prohibited marriages in William Clerke’s The
Triall of Bastardie (1594), the answer is no. But there was
disagreement about this. Henry VIII, for example, had married Catherine of
Aragon, the former wife of his brother Arthur. And there are biblical examples
advocating the practice.
In Shakespeare’s England, there was similar disagreement surrounding the issues of marriage, fornication, and bastardy. Longstanding tradition allowed that a couple was legally married by virtue of a private exchange of vows even if the Church of England typically preferred that unions be formally ratified. Marriage as an official procedure was more often intended to establish, advance, and protect social and economic alliances among families. Though marriage customs stipulating some form of public observance had long been statutory law in Shakespeare’s day, such laws were not always enforced.
Increasingly, however, the state saw the need to regulate both marriage and sexual behaviour in order to curb rising bastardy rates (the number of children whose claims to the rights and privileges of family connections were legally contested), and thereby to minimize disputes over the distribution of family dowries and inheritances. So the issue remained an economic one. And yet a perhaps unintended consequence of these developments was that marriage as a respectable social institution came increasingly to accommodate mutual attraction and desire—what historians call the “companionate marriage,” nowadays the norm in most Western societies. Marriage, rulers knew, ensures socio-economic stability. But what to do about the unruly inclinations and whims of the body?
Returning to the theological and political problems: perhaps this distinction is
misleading. (Notice that in M for M the offices of
minister and magistrate, priest and secular ruler converge on the person of Duke
Vincentio when he disguises himself as a friar.) As with other issues in
Shakespeare’s day, the political and religious aspects of human sexuality were
inseparable. To begin with, the mechanism through which the state cultivated
marriage as an institution was none other than the church. But there’s more.
Historians typically align the new zeal for state regulation of marriage with
puritanism—with those Christians whose concern was to reform what they saw as
godless practices, including marriage outside the church. Conversely, the more
traditional and relaxed attitude toward marriage is aligned with Protestant
England’s old religion—with those Christians who, if not crypto-Catholics,
nevertheless clung to traditions associated with the pre-Reformation era.
Measure for Measure, however, has both Roman
Catholic and Puritan elements. The play does not simply associate puritanism
with repression and Roman Catholicism with more charitable attitudes toward
human sexuality. It does not appear to be concerned with the question of which
confessional identity, Catholic or Protestant, is best. Indeed, Shakespeare
seems here to question whether any religious
perspective adequately accounts for the messy realities of sexuality and
desire.
Measure for Measure is an unsettling examination of
the efforts of church and state to regulate human sexuality: the desires,
impulses, and fleshly proclivities of the body—what Northrop Frye once called “a
boiling cauldron of blood and excrement.” If the secular ruler’s duty is to
maintain peace and order (remember Duke Theseus), religion in this play provides
the ideological basis for doing so. Magistrate and minister work to constrain
the body’s impulses, channeling its otherwise unbounded energies into socially
acceptable forms of expression.
And so while the play’s conclusion neatly celebrates the triumph of radical Christian forgiveness as a theological premise, it fails finally to articulate a viable political means of curbing behaviours thought harmful to the state. Why refrain from indulging the body’s desires if there are no adverse consequences for doing so?