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."