Mamillius, the little boy of Leontes and Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, abruptly and prematurely dies. His death is a seeming result of his father’s hubristic defiance of the Oracle’s exculpation of Hermione, the loyal wife whom the jealousy-maddened Leontes accused of adultery. The servant who delivers the news says:
SERVANT: O sir, I shall be hated to report it!
The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear
Of the queen’s speed, is gone. [III. ii. 41-43]
Poetically, we can readily discern the rhymes "son/gone," "mere/fear," and "conceit/ speed," as well as the long "e" assonance in "mere/conceit/fear/queen/speed." But there is something more at work here than the homophonic sounds and words (and even more than the ever-plurisignificant immanence) characterizing Shakespeare’s workings. The very concept of "Mamillius" is at play – not only in the drama of The Winter’s Tale – but as an elemental symbol throughout Shakespeare’s works. Little "Mamillius," derived from the Latin, mamillia, for "nipple," – vulnerable in his pre-pubescence – cannot sustain the moral and familial desiccation brought on by the jealousy of his father, Leontes. The boy’s demise was adumbrated by Leontes’ vicious snipe at Hermione: "I am glad you did not nurse him" [II. i. 56]. Deprived of an emotionally nurturing affection between and from his parents, Mamillius, like a sagging teat, "straight declin’d, droop’d" and simply withered away. [II. iii. 14]
Female breasts provide a wide range of symbols in Shakespeare’s works. The Duchess of York in King Richard III disowns her nefarious son, Richard, and disclaims that he is the product of her milk: "Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit," [II. ii. 30] lending credence to the notion of Richard’s bestiality – seemingly a creature of canine origin ("carnal cur"[IV. iv. 56]) that – like an alpha-male – "Preys on the issue of his mother’s body" [IV. iv. 57]: a veritable "hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death." [IV. iv. 48]
In King Henry VI, Part 2, the banished Suffolk invokes a nipple to extend and explicate his sexual passion and angst for Queen Margaret:
SUFFOLK: If I depart from thee, I cannot live;
And in thy sight to die, what were it else
But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?
Here could I breathe my soul into the air,
As mild and gentle as the cradle babe
Dying with mother’s dug between his lips... [III. ii. 387-392]
The imagery here, "to die...in thy lap," in Elizabethan terms, strongly suggests orgasm. When coupled with an allusion to a nipple between the lips of a moribund baby, the orgasmic reference hurls shards of a psycho-sexual prism: the dug in the mouth evokes a penis in a vagina; the nursing allusion signals a reversion by Suffolk to the dependent helplessness of infancy (and sexual infantilism); the expiring child evinces lingering post-coital detumescence; the unnatural coupling of a dying baby and its mother mirrors the illicit coupling of Suffolk and the Queen; the "mild and gentle" ambience of a mother/child death tableaux reflects the agonizing resignation of the Queen in the face of a lover’s perpetual banishment. As in Romeo and Juliet, the eroticism of the lines draws its essence from thoughts and images of premature death and forced separation.
In contrast, Shakespeare in Cymbeline has Giacomo ingeniously employ his observation of a mole as a mini-nipple to disingenuously satisfy Posthumus that, upon a wager, Giacomo satisfied himself with the bodily treasures of Postumus’ wife:
GIACOMO: If you seek
For further satisfying, under her breast –
Worthy the pressing – lies a mole, right proud
Of that most delicate lodging. By my life,
I kissed it, and it gave me present hunger
To feed again, though full. You do remember
This stain upon her? [II. v. 133-139]
Immediately preceding these lines, Giacomo has described for Postumus the bedchamber of Immogen, Postumus’ wife. Thus, the exquisite reference to Immogen’s body/breast as the mole’s "most delicate lodging" persuasively signifies that – as with her bedroom – Giacomo has been invited into, and entered, such "lodging." The mole, protruding "right proud" as a nipple, is claimed to have been kissed by Giacomo and leads to a reference ("hunger/To feed again, though full") of sating one’s appetite and to a breast’s dual role as both sexual object and source of nurture.
But it is not only human female nipples that provide Shakespeare fodder for sensual fantasy. In As You Like It, Touchstone traipses into a thicket of nonsensical sexual metaphors when he weighs in on the subject (and objects) of love:
TOUCHSTONE: ...I remember when I was in
love I broke my sword upon a stone, and bid him take
that for coming a-night to Jane Smile, and I remember
the kissing of her batler, and the cow’s dugs that her
pretty chapped hands had milked; and I remember the
wooing of a peascod instead of her, from whom I took
two cods, and giving her them again, said with
weeping tears, "Wear these for my sake." We that are
true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal
in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly. [II. iv. 44-53]
Slang references to male genitalia abound in the passage ("sword," "stone," "peascod," "cods"), all directed toward the prostitute commonly (and descriptively) named "Jane Smile." Thus, the "pretty chapped hands" kneading a cow’s udders plainly evoke phallic implications. It is the brilliance of Shakespeare to throw this blotch of obfuscatory, obscene prose onto the canvas of As You Like It so as to brighten and deepen by contrast the evolving romantic relationship between Rosalind and Orlando. But it is not the only reference to animal teats in the play. Orlando rescues his brother from a crouching "lioness, with udders all drawn dry" [IV. iii. 114] – imagery that underscores the danger of a hungry, unsatisfied female (that plays on the supposed sexual vulnerability of men addressed thematically in the work).
In Macbeth, we see, too, the concept of breastfeeding employed by Shakespeare to portray the unnatural lust for power of Lady Macbeth:
LADY MACBETH: ...I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. [I. vii. 54-59]
The shocking brutishness of her declaration is enhanced by the ambiguity of the phrase "milks me," suggesting dairy husbandry as well as the act of nursing. (In a kind of parallel attribution, Shakespeare has Macbeth declare at the end of the play that he has become "cowed" by the revelations of MacDuff [V. viii. 18].) Lady Macbeth’s maternal perversity is furthered by her motherly dominance over her husband and by her symbolic allusions to lactation to criticize him: Macbeth, she says, "is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness" [I. v. 16].
As can be discerned from these examples (among many references throughout the plays), the extraordinary richness that Shakespeare derives from the female breast aids his artistic endeavor to flesh out our consciousness of human drama, while simultaneously fleshing out the drama of our human consciousness.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Much Ado About Nihilo: The poet’s roll in the hay becomes the poet’s role in the haze.
Shakespeare’s reflective observations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on those who practice the art and craft of poetry is oft-quoted, but – as with much of Shakespeare – deserves to be quoted again:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. [V. i. 12-17]
The initial imagery – an "eye, in a fine frenzy rolling" – evokes insanity and stupor. The twitching of the eye from earth to heaven and back again buttresses a notion of catatonia, but with just a hint that something more may be involved. Why "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven"? The prepositional phrases evince a kind of intermediary link between the gods and mortals, as if Mercury – both the messenger of the gods, and the god of thievery – was at work, stealing a bit of heaven and bestowing it upon the spirit-starved denizens of earth. But from there, the lines give way to a kind of excrescence – "forms of things unknown" are "bodie[d] forth" in a way that is reminiscent of a birth. The product – like a babe – is clothed and christened, i.e., given a "local habitation and a name." (We note, too, the coupling of the poet’s "eye" [Elizabethan slang for "vagina"] with the poet’s phallic "pen" results in the conception of the "forms of things," and does nothing to dispel this birthing imagery.)
And at first glance – given the referenced embassy between heaven and earth – the lines appear to bear witness to the metaphorical magic of poetry: a demiurgic creation – the work of a kind of intellectual demigod, conjured from a mix of celestial and terrestrial matter. Anyone but Shakespeare would have reveled in the complete and powerfully apt description of the poet and his art that this first impression imparts. But Shakespeare refused to relegate the lines (or the import and importance of poetry) to such a hybrid realm.
He knew the exposed vulnerability of the Demiurge – a subordinate deity whose creative force derives from, and influences, the material (corruptible) world. Macbeth obliquely invokes the concept early in the "floating dagger" scene in Macbeth when he inquires:
...art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? [II. i. 27-29]
A "false creation" – a product of an imperfect "god" (Man’s venal ambition) – leads inexorably to self-inflicted torture and death.
Prospero in The Tempest dabbles in a kind of enervating, demiurgic, "rough magic" [V. i. 50] that can even open graves and wake their "sleepers" [V. i. 48-49]. It is a kind of power that impels him in the end, with sad bravado, to resort to resigned renunciation (before, one suspects, his powers in the end overpower him):
...I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. [V. i. 54-57]
In contrast, Shakespeare has Theseus in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream describe the poet’s ability to give "to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name." This is well-beyond the power of the Demiurge. Indeed, it evokes the power of an omnipotent deity to create from nothing. It is the biblical God who created the world out of nothing, in contravention of Aristotle’s declaration "Ex nihilo nihil fit," (i.e., "nothing comes from nothing"). This apothegm, figuring so prominently in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is at the heart of Shakespeare’s description of the poet’s role. Lear’s Cordelia – a name that means "heart" – embraced the essence of nothingness to expose the corruptibility (in all its senses) of the material world. (Indeed, her spiritual protege, the Fool, like an "airy nothing," simply vanishes midway into the play.) Both Cordelia and the Fool represent love without redemption, a facet to which even Christian Love cannot ascribe, and leads the play (and the audience) to the brink of nihilism. The vast difference between King Lear and Macbeth does not restrain Shakespeare from leading us to the same eschatological terminus, as Macbeth declares with shattering resignation that Life:
...is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. [V. v26-28].
Apart from its philosophical import, the word "nothing" was a loaded term to the Elizabethans. The word was brimming with sexual significance (e.g., Hamlet obscenely tells Ophelia that "nothing" ["no-thing"] lies "between maid’s legs" [III, ii. 119-121]). The numerical symbol for zero played into the word as well, with "nothing" signifying "an-0-thing" ["n-o-thing"]. Moreover, after the Globe theater opened, Shakespeare referred to his playhouse as "this wooden O" (for Globe) in the Prologue of King Henry V and begged his audience to pretend that the stage was a vast kingdom by referring to a "crooked figure" and to "ciphers," (terms that meant "zero(s)" to the Elizabethans):
O pardon, since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work. [Prologue. Chorus. 15-18]
So, when the world’s greatest Poet speaks of the role of a poet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with Puck reminding us in the Epilogue that the play was not real, but only "a dream" – we might just be able to translate the description of poetry into a prismatic declaration: O, it’s really nothing after all.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. [V. i. 12-17]
The initial imagery – an "eye, in a fine frenzy rolling" – evokes insanity and stupor. The twitching of the eye from earth to heaven and back again buttresses a notion of catatonia, but with just a hint that something more may be involved. Why "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven"? The prepositional phrases evince a kind of intermediary link between the gods and mortals, as if Mercury – both the messenger of the gods, and the god of thievery – was at work, stealing a bit of heaven and bestowing it upon the spirit-starved denizens of earth. But from there, the lines give way to a kind of excrescence – "forms of things unknown" are "bodie[d] forth" in a way that is reminiscent of a birth. The product – like a babe – is clothed and christened, i.e., given a "local habitation and a name." (We note, too, the coupling of the poet’s "eye" [Elizabethan slang for "vagina"] with the poet’s phallic "pen" results in the conception of the "forms of things," and does nothing to dispel this birthing imagery.)
And at first glance – given the referenced embassy between heaven and earth – the lines appear to bear witness to the metaphorical magic of poetry: a demiurgic creation – the work of a kind of intellectual demigod, conjured from a mix of celestial and terrestrial matter. Anyone but Shakespeare would have reveled in the complete and powerfully apt description of the poet and his art that this first impression imparts. But Shakespeare refused to relegate the lines (or the import and importance of poetry) to such a hybrid realm.
He knew the exposed vulnerability of the Demiurge – a subordinate deity whose creative force derives from, and influences, the material (corruptible) world. Macbeth obliquely invokes the concept early in the "floating dagger" scene in Macbeth when he inquires:
...art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? [II. i. 27-29]
A "false creation" – a product of an imperfect "god" (Man’s venal ambition) – leads inexorably to self-inflicted torture and death.
Prospero in The Tempest dabbles in a kind of enervating, demiurgic, "rough magic" [V. i. 50] that can even open graves and wake their "sleepers" [V. i. 48-49]. It is a kind of power that impels him in the end, with sad bravado, to resort to resigned renunciation (before, one suspects, his powers in the end overpower him):
...I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. [V. i. 54-57]
In contrast, Shakespeare has Theseus in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream describe the poet’s ability to give "to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name." This is well-beyond the power of the Demiurge. Indeed, it evokes the power of an omnipotent deity to create from nothing. It is the biblical God who created the world out of nothing, in contravention of Aristotle’s declaration "Ex nihilo nihil fit," (i.e., "nothing comes from nothing"). This apothegm, figuring so prominently in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is at the heart of Shakespeare’s description of the poet’s role. Lear’s Cordelia – a name that means "heart" – embraced the essence of nothingness to expose the corruptibility (in all its senses) of the material world. (Indeed, her spiritual protege, the Fool, like an "airy nothing," simply vanishes midway into the play.) Both Cordelia and the Fool represent love without redemption, a facet to which even Christian Love cannot ascribe, and leads the play (and the audience) to the brink of nihilism. The vast difference between King Lear and Macbeth does not restrain Shakespeare from leading us to the same eschatological terminus, as Macbeth declares with shattering resignation that Life:
...is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. [V. v26-28].
Apart from its philosophical import, the word "nothing" was a loaded term to the Elizabethans. The word was brimming with sexual significance (e.g., Hamlet obscenely tells Ophelia that "nothing" ["no-thing"] lies "between maid’s legs" [III, ii. 119-121]). The numerical symbol for zero played into the word as well, with "nothing" signifying "an-0-thing" ["n-o-thing"]. Moreover, after the Globe theater opened, Shakespeare referred to his playhouse as "this wooden O" (for Globe) in the Prologue of King Henry V and begged his audience to pretend that the stage was a vast kingdom by referring to a "crooked figure" and to "ciphers," (terms that meant "zero(s)" to the Elizabethans):
O pardon, since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work. [Prologue. Chorus. 15-18]
So, when the world’s greatest Poet speaks of the role of a poet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with Puck reminding us in the Epilogue that the play was not real, but only "a dream" – we might just be able to translate the description of poetry into a prismatic declaration: O, it’s really nothing after all.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
You’ve got male! Shakespeare’s Sermon on the Mount.
Fragility of male sexuality is an overlooked theme in Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, overshadowed, as it is, behind the profoundly profane harassment of Isabella by Angelo, behind the meddling manipulation of all the personae of the play by the Duke, and behind the uncomfortably self-conscious chastity of Isabella. But make no mistake about it, the peculiar vulnerability of masculine sexual impulses are in full display in this drama, and it is clear that Shakespeare wanted us to ponder its implications.
As a ready example, consider Angelo’s imperative proposition to Isabella – conditioned on sparing her brother’s life – to "Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite" [II. iv. 160]. If this does not readily appear to uncover a masculine fault line, then we must remember that, at the time of uttering the proposition, nothing stood in the way of Angelo simply sexually accosting Isabella on the spot. She was left alone with Angelo, and his defense – in response to her protestation that she will proclaim to the world his licentiousness – would have been as effective against an accusation of assault as it would have been against her public disclosure of his illicit proposition: "Who will believe thee, Isabel?" [II. iv. 153]
But Angelo does not assault Isabella. He desperately needs first her "consent," no matter how coerced – no matter how contrived. Certainly her "consent," under the circumstances, promises to provide a romantic setting that is indued with all the warmth and affection as one would expect from one of those inflatable latex sex dolls. So why does he insist upon it? Clearly there is a sadistic power play involved, but there is also a kind of pathetic world of pretending desperately needed by Angelo. (We should not put it past the poly-liminal Shakespeare to be laughing in his hat at the notion of presenting the seeming perversity of Angelo – a character who is strangely compelled to create a pretend-world of consensual sex – while engaging us, the audience, in the pretend-world of acting and drama so as to provide such presentation.) We recognize – when we closely read – something oddly ironic about Angelo’s thought processes when he declares to Escalus that:
We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch, and not their terror. [II. i. 1-4]
This, from a character who has no qualms in making Isabella – by means of a counterfeit consent – an effigy upon which he may perch.
And when all is said and done, a kind of effigy is all he gets, inasmuch as Mariana, disguised by the darkened, "circummur’d" garden, acts as the surrogate for Isabella at the critical point of liaison. The "bed trick" provides an opportunity for Shakespeare to disclose still another (in)delicate facet of male concupiscence. After all, to borrow a line from Lucio, it is the rejected fiancée Mariana to whom the unwitting Angelo sightlessly and hurriedly "expresseth his full tilth and husbandry" within that garden. He only imagines that he has ravished the hyper-virginal Isabella. (It is not with a little irony that Mariana, utilizing the biblical verbiage of "knowing" for "having had sex with," declares at the trial scene that Angelo "knew me as a wife" [V. i. 229] in that darkened garden, even though he did not know with whom he was having sex.)
But how far did Shakespeare want us to go with that concept? How dark was the "circummur’d" garden? Instead of failing not only to distinguish the substituted Mariana for Isabella, could Angelo also have been fooled – if we unleash our imaginations and carry the notion to its logical extreme – by, say, a substituted and strategically-placed mince pie to receive the thrusts of "the rebellion of [his] codpiece" at the operative moment? And is the "comedy" elicited here the implicit fact that, under our imagined scenario, Angelo would not have known the difference between desideratum and dessert in sating his sexual drive? The idealized, but indiscriminate and (in reality) anonymous sex that excites the highly-placed Angelo is clearly meant by Shakespeare to be only a stone’s toss from the same kind of brief, fantasy-laden transactions that one would expect by the low-born customers in the brothels of Vienna. It’s as if Shakespeare was noting that, in many instances, male sexual drive in its most spontaneous sense is less about character and class, than about perceived opportunity.
Along with indiscriminate proclivities and self-delusional fantasies of consent, masculine sexuality in Measure For Measure also touches upon irresponsible parentage by sexually active men. Claudio, condemned for impregnating his fiancée, at no time laments the fatherless future that his "mutual entertainment"with Julietta will mean for his child. In fact, when his randy friend Lucio inquires whether Julietta is "With child, perhaps?" Claudio immediately replies, "Unhappily, even so." [I. iii.151, 153] Lucio shows himself no better in assuming a paternal role when he confides to the Duke that he, too, has fathered a child – with the prostitute, Kate Keep-down.– and adds, "but I was fain to forswear it; they would else have married me to the rotten medlar." [IV. iii.170-171], referring to the medlar fruit that was familiarly known by the Elizabethans to uncannily resemble female genitals. The degree to which Lucio has abandoned his duties as a father is tellingly and poignantly illustrated by the whorehouse madame, Mistress Overdone, who seeks to avoid a whipping by impugning her lubricious accuser and showing that she acted as a surrogate parent in his stead:
My lord, this is one Lucio’s
Information against me, Mistress Kate Keep-down
was with child by him in the Duke’s Time, he promised
Her marriage. His child is a year and a quarter old
come Philip and Jacob. I have kept it myself; and see
how he goes about to abuse me. [III. ii.192-197]
It should be noted here, parenthetically, that Lucio’s paternal shortcomings may give glimpse to an obscure and indirect pun by Shakespeare when he has the Duke and Provost discuss the proof of guilt against the accused (but hilariously alcoholic) murderer, Barnardine:
DUKE: It is now apparent?
PROVOST: Most manifest, and not denied by himself. [IV. ii. 138-139]
Thus, Barnardine does not deny his guilt is apparent, while Lucio denies his guilt as a parent.
In any event, other quirks of male sexual perception stand out in Measure For Measure. The compulsion by men to value female sexuality as a commodity runs steadily though the play. Prostitutes freely sell their corporeal wares, despite the rampant spread of venereal diseases that give rein to nervous jokes among the men of Vienna. And on another social plane, female sexuality (by way of marriageability) is tied inextricably to the value of a dowry – so much so, that the absence of a dowry results in the death sentence for Claudio for fornicating with Julietta prior to formal marriage rites. He was waiting, he says as his excuse, "for propagation of a dower/Remaining in the coffer of her friends" [I. ii. 147-148]. Additionally, we learn that Angelo earlier had rejected Mariana – according to the Duke – solely for the reason that her dowry had been lost at sea along with Mariana’s brother. [III. i. 212-222] Thus, Isabella speaks more generally than she intends when she admonishes her brother that when it comes to sex, the "sin’s not accidental, but a trade" [III. i. 147] – that is, a kind of commodity exchange, (or as can be said, a kind of "measure for measure" barter), in the eyes of men.
We see, too, that sex is discerned ambivalently by the conflicted males in Measure For Measure: on the one hand Claudio refers to it as a poison which "Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,/A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die" [I. iii. 129-130]; while the pimp Pompey admits that "Indeed it does stink in some sort" [III. ii. 27], but unless the government "mean to geld and spay all the youth" [II. i. 226-227], "they will to’t then" [II. ii. 229-230], because – as Lucio observes – "it is impossible to extirp it quite...till eating and drinking be put down" [III. ii. 98-99].
We must note also, as has often been observed, that the title to this play – a play undoubtedly focused on a myriad of uncomfortable questions of social and moral equivalence, commensurability, and justice – finds an easy fit with its source: Matthew 7:1-2. The title’s reference is, of course, to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again," i.e., measure for measure. And yet, we cannot put it past Shakespeare to be winking at us again. We must recall that in an earlier play, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare gave us our first glimpse of Romeo "underneath the grove of sycamore/That westward rooteth from this city side" [I. i.121-122]. The reference to the sycamore ["sick" + "amour"] was clearly to underscore the love-sickness plaguing Romeo (who, at that part in the play, was deeply pining for Rosaline, not Juliet). It has been suggested elsewhere, in the same vein, that Shakespeare – keeping in mind the significance of the term "mounting" (in its sexual sense), and the term "ague" meaning "illness" or "fever" – specifically coined the surname "Montague" for Romeo to again emphasize Romeo’s seemingly incurable love pangs: ["Montague" = "mo[u]nt" + "ague"]. Thus, given the recurrent observations regarding male sexuality by Shakespeare in Measure For Measure, we are compelled to speculate that the title was a way for Shakespeare to whisper laughingly to us that this play was, indeed, his "sermon on the mount."
As a ready example, consider Angelo’s imperative proposition to Isabella – conditioned on sparing her brother’s life – to "Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite" [II. iv. 160]. If this does not readily appear to uncover a masculine fault line, then we must remember that, at the time of uttering the proposition, nothing stood in the way of Angelo simply sexually accosting Isabella on the spot. She was left alone with Angelo, and his defense – in response to her protestation that she will proclaim to the world his licentiousness – would have been as effective against an accusation of assault as it would have been against her public disclosure of his illicit proposition: "Who will believe thee, Isabel?" [II. iv. 153]
But Angelo does not assault Isabella. He desperately needs first her "consent," no matter how coerced – no matter how contrived. Certainly her "consent," under the circumstances, promises to provide a romantic setting that is indued with all the warmth and affection as one would expect from one of those inflatable latex sex dolls. So why does he insist upon it? Clearly there is a sadistic power play involved, but there is also a kind of pathetic world of pretending desperately needed by Angelo. (We should not put it past the poly-liminal Shakespeare to be laughing in his hat at the notion of presenting the seeming perversity of Angelo – a character who is strangely compelled to create a pretend-world of consensual sex – while engaging us, the audience, in the pretend-world of acting and drama so as to provide such presentation.) We recognize – when we closely read – something oddly ironic about Angelo’s thought processes when he declares to Escalus that:
We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch, and not their terror. [II. i. 1-4]
This, from a character who has no qualms in making Isabella – by means of a counterfeit consent – an effigy upon which he may perch.
And when all is said and done, a kind of effigy is all he gets, inasmuch as Mariana, disguised by the darkened, "circummur’d" garden, acts as the surrogate for Isabella at the critical point of liaison. The "bed trick" provides an opportunity for Shakespeare to disclose still another (in)delicate facet of male concupiscence. After all, to borrow a line from Lucio, it is the rejected fiancée Mariana to whom the unwitting Angelo sightlessly and hurriedly "expresseth his full tilth and husbandry" within that garden. He only imagines that he has ravished the hyper-virginal Isabella. (It is not with a little irony that Mariana, utilizing the biblical verbiage of "knowing" for "having had sex with," declares at the trial scene that Angelo "knew me as a wife" [V. i. 229] in that darkened garden, even though he did not know with whom he was having sex.)
But how far did Shakespeare want us to go with that concept? How dark was the "circummur’d" garden? Instead of failing not only to distinguish the substituted Mariana for Isabella, could Angelo also have been fooled – if we unleash our imaginations and carry the notion to its logical extreme – by, say, a substituted and strategically-placed mince pie to receive the thrusts of "the rebellion of [his] codpiece" at the operative moment? And is the "comedy" elicited here the implicit fact that, under our imagined scenario, Angelo would not have known the difference between desideratum and dessert in sating his sexual drive? The idealized, but indiscriminate and (in reality) anonymous sex that excites the highly-placed Angelo is clearly meant by Shakespeare to be only a stone’s toss from the same kind of brief, fantasy-laden transactions that one would expect by the low-born customers in the brothels of Vienna. It’s as if Shakespeare was noting that, in many instances, male sexual drive in its most spontaneous sense is less about character and class, than about perceived opportunity.
Along with indiscriminate proclivities and self-delusional fantasies of consent, masculine sexuality in Measure For Measure also touches upon irresponsible parentage by sexually active men. Claudio, condemned for impregnating his fiancée, at no time laments the fatherless future that his "mutual entertainment"with Julietta will mean for his child. In fact, when his randy friend Lucio inquires whether Julietta is "With child, perhaps?" Claudio immediately replies, "Unhappily, even so." [I. iii.151, 153] Lucio shows himself no better in assuming a paternal role when he confides to the Duke that he, too, has fathered a child – with the prostitute, Kate Keep-down.– and adds, "but I was fain to forswear it; they would else have married me to the rotten medlar." [IV. iii.170-171], referring to the medlar fruit that was familiarly known by the Elizabethans to uncannily resemble female genitals. The degree to which Lucio has abandoned his duties as a father is tellingly and poignantly illustrated by the whorehouse madame, Mistress Overdone, who seeks to avoid a whipping by impugning her lubricious accuser and showing that she acted as a surrogate parent in his stead:
My lord, this is one Lucio’s
Information against me, Mistress Kate Keep-down
was with child by him in the Duke’s Time, he promised
Her marriage. His child is a year and a quarter old
come Philip and Jacob. I have kept it myself; and see
how he goes about to abuse me. [III. ii.192-197]
It should be noted here, parenthetically, that Lucio’s paternal shortcomings may give glimpse to an obscure and indirect pun by Shakespeare when he has the Duke and Provost discuss the proof of guilt against the accused (but hilariously alcoholic) murderer, Barnardine:
DUKE: It is now apparent?
PROVOST: Most manifest, and not denied by himself. [IV. ii. 138-139]
Thus, Barnardine does not deny his guilt is apparent, while Lucio denies his guilt as a parent.
In any event, other quirks of male sexual perception stand out in Measure For Measure. The compulsion by men to value female sexuality as a commodity runs steadily though the play. Prostitutes freely sell their corporeal wares, despite the rampant spread of venereal diseases that give rein to nervous jokes among the men of Vienna. And on another social plane, female sexuality (by way of marriageability) is tied inextricably to the value of a dowry – so much so, that the absence of a dowry results in the death sentence for Claudio for fornicating with Julietta prior to formal marriage rites. He was waiting, he says as his excuse, "for propagation of a dower/Remaining in the coffer of her friends" [I. ii. 147-148]. Additionally, we learn that Angelo earlier had rejected Mariana – according to the Duke – solely for the reason that her dowry had been lost at sea along with Mariana’s brother. [III. i. 212-222] Thus, Isabella speaks more generally than she intends when she admonishes her brother that when it comes to sex, the "sin’s not accidental, but a trade" [III. i. 147] – that is, a kind of commodity exchange, (or as can be said, a kind of "measure for measure" barter), in the eyes of men.
We see, too, that sex is discerned ambivalently by the conflicted males in Measure For Measure: on the one hand Claudio refers to it as a poison which "Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,/A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die" [I. iii. 129-130]; while the pimp Pompey admits that "Indeed it does stink in some sort" [III. ii. 27], but unless the government "mean to geld and spay all the youth" [II. i. 226-227], "they will to’t then" [II. ii. 229-230], because – as Lucio observes – "it is impossible to extirp it quite...till eating and drinking be put down" [III. ii. 98-99].
We must note also, as has often been observed, that the title to this play – a play undoubtedly focused on a myriad of uncomfortable questions of social and moral equivalence, commensurability, and justice – finds an easy fit with its source: Matthew 7:1-2. The title’s reference is, of course, to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again," i.e., measure for measure. And yet, we cannot put it past Shakespeare to be winking at us again. We must recall that in an earlier play, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare gave us our first glimpse of Romeo "underneath the grove of sycamore/That westward rooteth from this city side" [I. i.121-122]. The reference to the sycamore ["sick" + "amour"] was clearly to underscore the love-sickness plaguing Romeo (who, at that part in the play, was deeply pining for Rosaline, not Juliet). It has been suggested elsewhere, in the same vein, that Shakespeare – keeping in mind the significance of the term "mounting" (in its sexual sense), and the term "ague" meaning "illness" or "fever" – specifically coined the surname "Montague" for Romeo to again emphasize Romeo’s seemingly incurable love pangs: ["Montague" = "mo[u]nt" + "ague"]. Thus, given the recurrent observations regarding male sexuality by Shakespeare in Measure For Measure, we are compelled to speculate that the title was a way for Shakespeare to whisper laughingly to us that this play was, indeed, his "sermon on the mount."
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