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Patriarchal Power in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
The ritual of male to male power-transition is an obvious theme in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Perhaps less obvious, but no less central to the aesthetic unity of the play, is the theme of patriarchal dominance. This theme coincides with the historical realities in England during the play’s composition: "it should be noted that Shakespeare composed the problem comedies at a key moment in England's history: the transition of power from a virgin queen to a sybaritic king, a moment that catalyzed latent tensions in the sex-gender system" (McCandless null12).
Part of the historical transition involved both a feeling of patriarchal “absenteeism” and a subsequent ambiguity of gender roles. “Elizabeth's successor, James, might plausibly be considered an absent father, given his predilection for reclusiveness and self-mystification. Like Elizabeth, he also unsettled gender distinctions: he was the powerful patriarch as pacifist and epicene courtier, doting on comely male favorites like Somerset and Buckingham” (McCandless null12).
Measure for Measure mirrors just such a social ‘crisis' in its rising action. The departure of the Duke signals both the trial-by-fire initiation of Angelo, who pleads “Let there be some more test made of my metal/Before so noble and great a figure/Be stamped upon it.” The resulting chaos which follows the departure of the trusted patriarch can be best summed up in the exchange between two minor characters the Clown and the Bawd. When the Clown remarks “Yonder man is carried to prison” referring to Claudio, the Bawd asks “Well, what has he done?” and the Clown’s reply is “A woman.”
This “crime” of having “done” a woman bespeaks to the full range of “crimes” in Measure for Measure, all of which, at root, partake of the destabilizing or corrupting influence of women; hence, forwarding the theme of the absent father. Both All's Well and Measure for Measure also register anxiety about paternal sufficiency, focusing to a significant degree on the figure of the ailing or absent father. Measure for Measure, written in the first year of James's reign, centers on the efforts of an ineffectual ghostly father to recover his potency, to enact a narrative of "the return of the patriarch." The uncertainty of his success perhaps reflects the shakiness of James's own efforts to affirm his paternal authority. (McCandless 2)
In fact, the play itself is somewhat disordered and chaotically constructed, lending further impetus to the theme of “feminine” engendered chaos and confusion. Throughout the play: deception, duplicity, disguise, and intrigue dominate the action and motivation; the play has reputedly “caused most readers the greatest sense of strain and mental discomfort'. This results, he claims, from an uneasy sense of paradox which prevails throughout; of conflicting 'truths' in the play whose antagonisms the text seems unable or unwilling to resolve” (Hawkes 64).
The “antagonisms” are largely directed against women. Likewise, the fragmentary or “disordered” motion of the play is best viewed as intentional, “readings that dismiss the play as flawed have largely been supplanted by others that see in those same flaws a different sort of key to the play: troubling aspects of characterization, plotting, and thematic consistency are now read as intentional violations of dramatic expectations designed to subvert the play's ostensible ordering principles” (Cohen 431).
The basic thrust of the play is to overturn the seemingly violent corruptions of the world-order in the Duke’s absence (which are due to the corrupting influence of women) by way of implementing a male-centered ethic and world-vision. A strong example of this is the dialogue between Isabella and Angelo when she begs him “Yet show some pity.” and he responds “I show it most of all when I show justice;/ For then I pity those I do not know” thereby forwarding a dispassionate, impersonal ethic of justice, one founded not on interpersonal (thus feminine) relationships, but on abstract (thus masculine) principles.
Women in Measure for Measure exist as a proxy by which male power and virtue is measured and sustained. Thus, nothing can be imagined as worse than “dishonor” for Isabella — to have sexual relations with Angelo –– not even death. She says to Claudio “O, were it but my life,/I’d throw it down for your deliverance/as frankly as a pin.” But of her “virtue” she reproaches him “Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?” because she knows that compromising her virtue is also Angelo’s way of asserting dominance over Claudio as surely, if not worse, than execution.
Throughout Measure for Measure the sexual morality of women as viewed through men’s eyes determines not only their status in society, but also the status of the men associated with them. When Lucio is made to marry his “whore” it would also seem that the Duke is not “primarily concerned with meting out justice for Lucio's whore. Rather, Lucio's foul lies about the Duke have so inflamed him that punishment of Lucio becomes the Duke's major thrust” (Haselkorn 51)
Measure for Measure demonstrates the transition of male to male power with an intervening period of instability and corruption or “falsehood” that, within the context of the play, or reconciled as being the vacuum where male power has been effaced or exiled. It is an idealization of male power"The world of this kind of romance obeys a rule of ideal equity, and, where a man is not (according to its conventions) to blame for what he has done, we may be sure that some favourable chance will intervene between the act and its natural consequence." (Lascelles 40)
Works Cited
McCandless, David Foley. Gender and Performance in Shakespeare''s Problem Comedies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Hawkes, Terence. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Cohen, Stephen. "From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure." Criticism 41.4 (1999): 431.
Haselkorn, Anne M. Prostitution in Elizabethan and Jacobean Comedy. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1983.
Lascelles, Mary. Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. London: Athlone Press, 1953.
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