Main Menu - HomePage - The Play "I'll Pray to Increase Your Bondage": Power and Punishment in Measure for Measure by David McCandless

The first and most striking instance of power and punishment in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is also the play's true beginning: At Angelo's command, Claudio is publicly disgraced, enchained, and paraded through the streets to prison. The preceding action--the Duke's inexplicable departure and hasty deputizing of Angelo, Lucio's scurrilous badinage about venereal disease‹amounts to a prologue. The punishment of Claudio, which manifests Angelo's "mortal" power, is the incident upon which the play's entire action turns. It seems to me absolutely crucial that this scene be staged in such a way as to heighten Claudio's humiliation: Lucio and his scruffy cohorts disport themselves in some sort of tavern/gaming den/house of ill repute. They and other customers are hastily diverted from their disreputable amusements by a steadily increasing rumble portending the arrival of a rowdy crowd. Suddenly they find themselves spectators to a shocking event: the public shaming of their friend Claudio.

This directorial choice necessitates excising or transposing the dialogue between Pompey and Overdone, but, to my mind, the resultant theatrical effect more than justifies the revision. Indeed, the director ought, I think to go further: Claudio is not only in chains but very nearly naked, as part of a ritual of mortification, which sharpens his shame and imparts particular urgency to his protest to the Provost, "why dost thou show me thus to th' world?" (1.2.116). An unruly throng accompanies him, some of them jeering and savoring his torment. From a second-level balcony, Lord Angelo himself watches Claudio's degradation with discernible satisfaction. The image ought to convey the extent to which Angelo succeeds in making a spectacle of Claudio, putting his mortified, fetishized body on public display, reducing him to the personification of an errant flesh that must be extravagantly punished, submitting him to a sadistic, voyeuristic gaze.1

I would like, in this essay, to assay the sadopornographic nature of the punishments in Measure for Measure, examining the process by which the play's central characters attempt to master sexuality by punishing representatives of their rejected sexual selves. This process parallels the aggressive displacement necessary to sadism as Gilles Deleuze defines it: The empowered superego's persecution of the feminized images of the rejected ego.2 Deleuze's account of sadism, in turn, coalesces with the feminist reading of pornography as a sadistic mode of representation through which men indulge fantasies of mastering women who embody their own discarded fleshly selves.3 Thus, in Measure for Measure Angelo enjoys a brief reign of authority during which he dominates a series of feminized surrogates forced to accept the status of his own mortified flesh: Claudio, Isabella, and Mariana. The final scene reveals, however, that Angelo has unknowingly functioned as the Duke's feminized surrogate, suffering a kind of public emasculation for falling prey to the female sexuality that the Duke, in his own strange way, aims to regulate.

The imagined staging of Claudio's punishment, then, works to foreground the play's sadopornographic drama. Claudio's tormentor, Angelo, cannot, strictly speaking, be called a sadist, primarily because, once incited by lust, he lacks the sadist's passionlessness: "the true sadist is self-controlled to the point of apathy. . . . Sade deplores the pornographer's Œenthusiasm.'"4 By Sade's standard, Angelo seems primarily a pornographer who enacts his fantasy of mastering a helpless "feminine" figure.5 That the "feminine" figure is initially a man only underlines his status as the pornographer's chastened double. Indeed, the persecuted Claudio could be said to function as a kind of male intermediary between Angelo and the person who comes ultimately to occupy the position of degraded "feminine" double: Isabella. The cataclysmic lust that Angelo unleashes against her proves that his severe, desexualized persona is a self-suppressing fiction. The sexual insurrection that he undertakes to defeat arises not simply in Vienna but within his own psyche. In mortifying Claudio, he not only punishes a criminal but pummels the principal adversary in his own psychomachia, forcing Claudio to play the villainous Flesh. He chastens Claudio's body in place of his own. He makes Claudio bear the cross of sexual guilt.

The sadopornographic spectacle of Claudio's degradation has ample historical sanction. In an influential essay, Carolyn Brown traces the play's excoriative imagery to the monastical practice of flagellation, which was celebrated as the most efficacious agency of penitence, breeding in anchorites a capacity for deriving pleasure from the infliction or reception of pain.6 As Brown points out, while monks and nuns frequently flayed themselves in private for bodily trespasses, they also regularly submitted to public beatings from their superiors that, as Brown says, "promoted both active sadism in the flogger and vicarious sadism in the spectators"‹turning the punishment of sinning flesh into public spectacle.7

Perhaps even more to the point, Shakespeare's society seems to have elevated sadism to a juridical principle. The exorbitant abuse of lawbreakers was a popular form of public entertainment. Chastised criminals were regularly submitted to a voyeuristic, sadistic public gaze. A Londoner on his daily rounds could amuse himself with a chained robber hanging in a gibbet, "a petty thief in the pillory, a scold in the ducking stool, a murderer drawn to the gallows on a hurdle."8 Executions, sometimes featuring grisly torture, were likewise turned into public spectacles. Foucault's description of such dramas as rituals for repairing a metaphorically shattered sovereignty seem as apposite to Shakespeare's England as to the seventeenth-century France that he surveys.9 As Foucault suggests, "the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and its intrinsic superiority."10 Angelo's public degradation of Claudio becomes the visible sign of the "excess" of executing a man for enjoying conjugal relations with his common-law wife. The absence of "measure" in Angelo's sentence is particularly telling, given the play's title, and recasts the Duke's threatened retribution at the end as "excess for excess."

In the sense that Claudio represents Angelo's fleshly double, he must be punished for doing willingly what Angelo abhors and can only be hoodwinked into doing: having sexual relations with the woman he has sworn to marry. On the surface, Angelo's dismissal of Mariana for reasons of "levity" seems simply a moralistic cover for a cold financial maneuver‹deserting a dowerless, hence undesirable, woman. On the other hand, Angelo's charge that his fiancée is unchaste may have a kind of psychological validity: Since he does not desire her or cannot permit himself to desire her, her unabashed and unextinguishable desire for him must seem frighteningly wanton and excessive. Thus, her loss of dowry frees him from marriage, from a perilous deliverance to a potentially devouring female sexuality. In short, in breaking his betrothal to Mariana, he averts emasculation.

Claudio, however, who reciprocates and fulfills Juliet's desire, who allows himself to become entangled with female sexuality, does not avert it‹at least does not in Angelo's eyes. So, in this imagined staging, Angelo turns Claudio's emasculation into a piece of street theater, a fetishistic sadopornographic spectacle, savoring the power of punishing a feminized weakling. Claudio in chains, semi-naked, paraded through the streets, is Claudio unmanned, forced to submit to the feminization of his body.

This image of youth and beauty degraded, of the body shamed, calls to mind the brutalized martyrs of early religious iconography (perhaps including Christ himself) as well as the chained and lashed goddesses of contemporary pornography.11 It may also call to mind the degraded god of Euripides' The Bacchae, Dionysos, who, disguised as a mysterious, polymorphous-perverse stranger, is likewise placed in chains and paraded through the city and forced to submit to the chastisements of the Angelo-like governor Pentheus, who ridicules his effeminacy. Pentheus' pose as omnipotent male authority, however, proves as shaky as Angelo's. Both men decide to give their sensual race the rein, Pentheus taking the masochist's route, wearing women's clothes and suffering the brutalizations of the very women he vowed to punish, and Angelo turning sadist and punishing the "feminine" forces that excite the urge to lose "masculine" control. According to Deleuze, "sadism is in every sense an active negation of the mother and an exaltation of the father who is beyond all laws."12 Thus, Angelo rejects Mariana, a figure of the mother (even her name has maternal resonance) and ascends to the position of father of the land, or at least ruthless enforcer of the Law of the Father, effecting a severity that, as later events confirm, counters a contrary pull toward the feminine. Angelo's punishment of Claudio thus achieves additional significance: Mariana's double, Juliet, the woman to whom Claudio succumbs, is visibly pregnant and hence explicitly maternal. For Angelo, Juliet is a groaning "fornicatress' whose pregnancy is proof of female corruption (2.223). The disguised Duke seems to ratify this reading of Juliet's pregnancy, characterizing her fetus as the "sin she carries" and contending that her crime‹refusing to repel the passion she ignites‹is greater than Claudio's (2.3.26-28), thus reading the female body as both sign and source of sin.13

Isabella so bedevils Angelo because she presents herself, albeit involuntarily, as a potential Juliet, an alluring female body that recalls him to his own. By stridently rebuffing his lecherous overtures, however, she makes him alone bear the burden of the sinful lust she arouses, impregnates him with "the strong and swelling evil of my conception" (2.4.7). In effect, she makes him the source of sin, turns him into Juliet, effectively effeminizing him.

By afflicting Angelo with desire, Isabella forces Angelo to retrieve the discarded creaturely self personified by Claudio. Indeed, when Angelo exclaims, "O let her brother live! / Thieves for their robbery have authority when / Judges steal themselves" (2.2.174-76) he makes the very concession Isabella labors so strenuously to extract: He and Claudio, the condemned fornicator, are kin. While such fellow-feeling has the effect of moving him momentarily to mercy, ultimately it breeds a vindictive desire to punish Isabella for having effected it. Beset by degrading lust, he stands in relation to Isabella as Claudio previously stood to him‹a wretched sinner, a damnable lecher contemplating a lofty and unassailable figure.

Far more provocatively than Claudio, Isabella represents a bodily "feminine" self that Angelo must reject and punish. She therefore takes Claudio's place as the object of Angelo's retributive violence. No sooner has he safely enchained and imprisoned Claudio than Isabella, figuratively speaking, enchains and imprisons Angelo. So he must, in turn, enchain and imprison her. She has made him feel her power; now she must feel his.

Isabella seems scarcely aware of the power she wields, at least initially. "My power," she protects to Lucio when he bids her "assay" it on her brother's behalf, "alas, I doubt," (1.4.75-77). Claudio, in fact, has already defined that power, telling Lucio

In her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect, Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade. (1.2.182-86)

The "speechless dialect" that "moves" (arouses) men is Isabella's sexual charisma‹her body language. The word "prone," connoting both recumbence and receptivity, suggests that Isabella's body speaks the language of sexual availability‹or is at least made to speak it.14 Lucio twice urges Isabella to assume a prone‹or at least kneeling‹position, first at the nunnery when extolling the efficacy of female "weeping and kneeling" (1.4.81) and secondly in Angelo's chambers when arresting her premature exit and admonishing her to "kneel down and hang upon [Angelo's] gown" (2.2.44). "You are too cold,' he reprimands her, implicitly requesting that she infuse her supplications with warmth and sensuality, that she be passionate as well as subservient. Lucio essentially asks her to "be a woman," anticipating Angelo's more menacing demand that she put on the "destin'd livery." Thus, when Isabella begins to work her will on Angelo and to weaken his resolve, Lucio exclaims, "O, to him, to him, wench! he will relent. He's coming; I perceive't" (2.2.124-25). Lucio calls Isabella, whom he formerly praised as "a thing enskied and sainted," "wench" and portrays the success of her appeal in language suggestive of sexual arousal. Angelo's proposition to Isabella, and Claudio's plea for her to comply, simply literalize the outcome of the metaphorical seduction she carries out.

Isabella's speechless dialect is, however, a male language, the only mode of signification that her body commands in a phallocentric economy. Thus, during her second meeting with Angelo, as she laments the weakness of women, Angelo "arrests her words" and declares,

Be that you are, That is, a woman; if you be more, you're none; If you be one (as you are well express'd By all external warrants), show it now, By putting on the destin'd livery. (2.4.134-38)

"Arrest your words" means not only "take you at your word" but "stop your words." Angelo wishes to deny Isabella the agency of speech, to make her words mean what he wants them to, constructing a lament for female weakness as an admission of sexual desire and therefore as a cue for propositioning her. He aims to confine her speech‹her signifying power‹to the speechless dialect of her body. The destin'd livery he urges her to wear is the mantle of sexual subjugation that replaces the nun's habit, which, to his great vexation, renounces the sexual availability that her speechless dialect signifies. To eschew this mantle of subjugation is to be "more than a woman" and therefore "none" (or "nun"). In Isabella's response‹"I have no tongue but one; gentle my lord, / Let me entreat you speak the former language" (2.4.139-40)‹one hears an echo of Hermione's protest to Leontes, "you speak a language I understand not." In Isabella's case, the complaint might more precisely be, "you make me speak a language I understand not." In a Lacanian context, the scene confirms the impossibility of female speech within a phallocentric system of signification.15

Angelo's determination to impose an image of "Woman" on Isabella takes on sadistic and pornographic dimensions. Indeed, he seems intent on enacting what Susan Griffin considers the quintessential pornographic fantasy: despoiling an idolized virgin.16 In accordance with this fantasy, Angelo seeks to demystify his own mystification of Isabella as exalted, unattainable goddess, to expose her as pure flesh, to affirm her essential sordidness.17 By attempting to defile the goddess remade in the image of whore, Angelo seeks to regain his "masculine" identify, to mortify the fleshly "feminine" self by mortifying Isabella.

Perhaps the most telling phrase of his first soliloquy, then, is "What is't I dream on?" (2.2.178). Angelo struggles not so much against sexual feeling in general as against the specific "dream," or fantasy, of debauching Isabella, a struggle that lies at the heart of his second soliloquy. Angelo assumes a position similar to Claudius's: He finds his prayers to heaven empty and unavailing. While he has not, like Claudius, done the dirty deed, he has apparently savored his sexual fantasy sufficiently to experience a racking guilt. Angelo's attempt to confess and repent his lurid dream seems only to intensify its imaginative rehearsal and further tempt its enactment, bringing to mind Barthes's observation that Sade's method for nurturing sexual fantasy closely resembles the spiritual exercise of Ignatius Loyola: Retreat, darkness, imagination, and repetition. This process "dictates" a pornographic text that demands enactment.18

Angelo's pornographic text betrays a tortured fluctuation between sadism and masochism. Masochism, according to Deleuze, reverses the dynamics of sadism, enacting the negation of the father and the exaltation of the mother, a submergence in the "feminine" and dismissal of the "masculine."19 The masochist fetishizes his female tormentor‹an image of the forbidden, desired mother‹symbolically surrendering the phallus to her and investing her with the power of law, achieving sexual pleasure by purging through pain the guilt that precludes it.20 As Deleuze puts it, the masochist de-sexualizes his relation with his tormentor in order to achieve re-sexualization.21

On the one hand, Angelo flirts with masochistic feminization. "This virtuous maid / Subdues me quite" he declares (2.2.184-85). Isabella subdues Angelo‹that is, subjugates and emasculates him. Desire for her has made him "fond" (2.2.186), he admits‹foolish and infatuated and thus potentially feminized like the "fond father" of a Duke whose "rod" is "more mock'd than fear'd" (1.3.23,26-27). She leads him to a longing for "levity," for an unmasculine loss of control: He would gladly let go of his "gravity," he confesses, in exchange for "an idle plume / which the air beats for vain" (2.4.9-12). One may read in this line a masochist's savoring of powerlessness, an unmanly coveting of vanity that invites "beating."

Moreover, inasmuch as the self-torturing Angelo elevates Isabella to the status of goddess‹who competes with God for his prayers‹and verbally flays himself for his forbidden desire, he implicitly assumes a masochistic posture.

When I would pray and think, I think and pray To several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words, Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, Anchors on Isabel; heaven in my mouth, As if I did but chew his name, And in my heart the strong and swelling evil Of my conception. (2.4.1-7)

The self-lacerating language suggests that Angelo might, in performance, actually flagellate himself during this speech, physicalizing the masochistic pose by excoriating himself at the feet of his (absent) goddess/mistress, enacting an enslavement derived from a guilt-inducing sexual vexation that can only be purged through pain.22

In imagining himself pregnant with his "conception"‹the sexual fantasy that Isabella has implanted‹Angelo evokes a parody of the virgin birth in which his God, Isabella, descends from on high and impregnates him, leaving him with the unwanted child of lust, the sin he carries.23 In Janet Adelman's resonant phrase, Angelo is "pregnant with his own sexuality," and Isabella is the inseminating agent.24

Angelo cannot, however, as the masochist must, desexualize the object of his desire, so his would-be masochistic self-mortification become autoerotic self-stimulation. His obsessive fixation on the sexual fantasy of ravishing his goddess clearly arouses him‹in concrete physical terms the "swelling" to which he refers can only be phallic. Since Isabella seems to have come to occupy the place of God, she has come, in Lacanian terms, to occupy the place of the Other, of ultimate truth or rather ultimate fantasy, the supposed end to which Angelo's vexatious, insatiable desire drives him.25 This Lacanian notion of drive‹ultimately beyond satisfaction as Angelo's case seems to prove‹tallies with Susan Sontag's treatment of pornography as an outlet for "high-temperature visionary obsessions," as the vehicle of a sexual passion "beyond love" and "beyond sanity" that aims at the "limits of consciousness."26

Yet Angelo elects not to confine himself to mystical autoeroticism, adhering instead to the Sadean imperative of enacting his fantasy, which, in the face of what he comes to believe is Isabella's deliberate provocation of a lust she refuses to gratify, shifts from masochistic to sadistic. "Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes / That banish what they sue for" (2.4.162-63), he demands, now believing her chastity to be a seductive affectation. Angelo begins to associate Isabella with the strumpet whore whose "double vigor" of "art and nature" (2.2.183) suggests a cunning enhancement of sexual appeal. Previously he measured Isabella's attractiveness in terms of her difference from the whore. Now he collapses the difference.

Earlier in the scene, Angelo essentially appoints Isabella a whore's fate in asking her to trade places with the "fornicatress," Juliet, pregnant with sin: "give up your body to such sweet uncleanness / As she that he hath stain'd" (2.4.54-55). Angelo, pregnant with his own sexuality, essentially asks Isabella to duplicate and thereby terminate his pregnancy. He aims to transfer the sin he carries to Isabella, make her pregnant‹if only metaphorically‹with a "staining" sexuality. He may, in dirtying her ("pitching his evil"), cleanse himself.

Angelo's strained, oblique courtship culminates in a proposition that becomes, once repelled, a vicious threat, a demand that Isabella satisfy lust or else accept responsibility for her brother's gruesome death:

Redeem thy brother By yielding up thy body to my will, Or else he must not only die the death, But thy unkindness shall his death draw out To ling'ring sufferance. (163-67)

Here Isabella's status as mortified stand-in for Claudio becomes explicit. If the violently aroused Angelo, giving his sensual race the rein, cannot brutalize Isabella, he will brutalize her brother by torturing him to death. Angelo openly avows that his violent passion for Isabella fuels his sadistic flaying of Claudio: "Answer me tomorrow," he tells her, "Or by the affection that now guides me most, / I'll prove a tyrant to him" (167-69).27 Angelo's lust, which he perversely calls love, transmutes into a sadistic urge to subjugate and inflict suffering. Isabella must "yield" to him, submit to his "sharp appetite." The violence of his language turns his vicious demand into the verbal equivalent of a rape. Here too the director may choose to physicalize the violence of the lines, staging the moment as an attempted rape, which Isabella manages to thwart.28 If Angelo, in his second soliloquy, fondles a fantasy that eventuates in his assault on Isabella, one might well invoke Robin Morgan's celebrated aphorism, "pornography is the theory and rape the practice." For Angelo, pornographic fixation begets sadistic enactment, the punishment of the threatening female who afflicts him with effeminizing desire.29

Critics have often noted that Isabella's first speech in the play expresses a request for "more restraint," a wish that the notoriously strict order of St. Clare were even stricter. What has been less noted is the peculiarity of the question that precedes the wish: "and have you nuns no farther privileges?" (1.4.1). It seems decidedly odd that a young woman coveting "farther stricture" should begin by asking after further privileges. Either she masochistically equates stricture with privilege or chafes under stricture but is shamed by Francisca's testy reply‹"are these not large enough?"‹into shamming a desire for more. 30 In either case, she seems ill-suited to the cloister, either balking at sexual renunciation or embracing it with a vigor that invites suspicions of sexual guilt, as though the severity of the restraint she covets matches the fervor of the passion she wishes to restrain. The actress Juliet Stevenson, who played a warm and sensual Isabella for Adrian Noble in 1983, seems to have favored the latter interpretation:

I think she recognizes her own sexuality and the need to apply strict control over it. I don't think she's frightened or surprised by it; she wants to dominate it. Hence her choice of the St. Clares. The severity of the order is, I think commensurate with the scale of those latent passions in her, which she feels must be harnessed, controlled.31

Isabella's chastity need not be reduced to a pathology, of course. But even if the urge to dominate her sexual impulses may be imputed to youthful self-excitement or monastic imperative, the extremity of that urge, coupled with the sexual corruptiveness of the patriarchal world she flees, tempt the conclusion that she must curb sexual drives that might otherwise propel her into the perilous territory of male sexuality.32 In a telling exchange, Isabella agrees with Angelo that women are "frail":

Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves, Which are as easy broke as they make forms. Women? Help heaven! men their creation mar In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail, For we are soft as our complexions are, And credulous to false prints. (2.4.124-30)

Isabella presents female sexual experience as a process of loss, as the breaking of chastity and the making of "false" forms‹the begetting of bastards.33 In Isabella's mind, it would seem, a woman's sexual experience is one of despoliation, impregnation, and abandonment, such as Juliet and Kate Keepdown actually suffer. Isabella's construct presupposes not only male rapacity‹men "break the glass" and "mar their creation" by using women‹but female wantonness. Men corrupt women because women are corruptible, receptive as well as vulnerable to sexual use. Isabella first refers to such women as "they" and then as "we." By implication she portrays herself as sexually susceptible, as though confirming that she would rather restrain her sexual impulses than pursue them into a ruinous encounter with a rapacious male. Rather than wear the harness of sexual vassalage, she seeks to harness her own sexuality. In this regard, she resembles Angelo and the Duke: She wishes to achieve "masculine" self-mastery, to disown the "feminine" self, to mortify the flesh. Her choice of the cloister, then, seems simultaneously an act of self-actualization, self-suppression, and self-defense.

If Isabella is a passionate young woman whose only outlet for passion in this patriarchal society is the impassioned championing of monastical chastity, then the task of winning Claudio's pardon, which soon becomes the task of "moving" Angelo, provides a new outlet, one that, far from submerging her in institutionalized masochism, provides for the temporary experience of power: Isabella dominates and sexually arouses the most dominant, seemingly most desexualized man in the land. The director and actress must of course establish the extent to which Isabella is conscious of her effect on Angelo. Certainly it seems plausible that she discerns Angelo's faltering resolve and enjoys the experience of wielding power and weakening his will. From the standpoint of performance, it is not only possible but desirable that Isabella actually harbor an unconscious attraction to Angelo, fueling her implorations with sublimated desire. Certainly Stevenson understood and played the scene as a sublimated sexual encounter, asserting that Isabella and Angelo "copulate across the verse."34 The text does not overtly substantiate Isabella's attraction to Angelo but, from the standpoint of performance, it is the strongest, most emotionally generative choice, the choice that sets up maximum conflict for Isabella. In fact, this attraction hardly seems implausible if one concedes to Isabella sexual impulses in conflict with her sexual renunciation and considers Angelo as a kind of alluring forbidden object.

In addition, Isabella hints at a subterranean sexual drive during her second interview with Angelo. "I am come to know your pleasure," she announces upon arriving (2.4.31), a perhaps guileless greeting that nonetheless registers a double sexual meaning, as though Isabella were acknowledging‹consciously or not‹the sexual undercurrents of their encounters. Isabella's most sexually charged pronouncement comes, however, when she finally begins to grasp the nature of Angelo's proposal:

were I under the terms of death, Th' impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies, And strip myself to death as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield My body up to shame. (2.4.100-4)

Once more we seem to be nearing the realm of pornographic sadomasochism: Isabella, in piercingly sensual language, imagines herself being whipped.35 She will not accept a whore's fate but will accept a whore's punishment, spurning the bodily violation of vindictive rape for that of punitive beating. This fantasy bespeaks a guilt-ridden compulsion to punish her own sinning flesh, to enact the penitential imperatives of a monastical conscience. Isabella may be sufficiently aware of her provocation of Angelo, appreciative of the power she thereby commands, sufficiently distressed by a sting of reciprocal attention, to feel that her own stimulated, errant flesh stands in need of corrective flaying. From one angle, Isabella employs the discourse of martyrology, drawing on legends and images of female saints cruelly tortured or killed. She reiterates, with martyrish intensity, her readiness to die on Claudio's behalf. On the other hand, the violently erotic imagery of her resolution links martyrology and pornography, associating Isabella and her tortured female saints with the tortured‹or in any case sadistically objectified‹women in pornography.36 As Griffin asserts, "the metaphysics of Christianity and the metaphysics of pornography are the same. . . . All the elements of sadomasochistic ritual are present in the crucifixion of Christ."37 On one level, at least, imitatio christi means to savor fleshly mortification. Perhaps, for Isabella as well as for Maria Magdalena of Pazzi and Elizabeth of Genton, self-mortification is the vehicle of a spiritual ecstasy imaged as sexual union with Christ the bridegroom. Certainly the erotic imagery of her "rubies" speech commingles flagellation with the sexual act. For Isabella as well as for Angelo, the mystic's ecstatic self-flagellation becomes linked with masochistic autoeroticism.

Isabella's vision registers as an autoerotic fantasy because the fantasized flagellator is simply an empowered aspect of the self, a personified superego, a cultural "masculine" self that inflicts punishment on the feminized body. Thus, Isabella savors in fantasy what her brother suffers in reality. Unlike Angelo, she does not mortify the flesh by persecuting a feminized ego-substitute but by submitting to the persecutions of a masculine superego-substitute. She takes the part not of flagellator but of flagellant. Indeed, she seems to accept the destin'd livery of "lack" that ensures her place in the sexual system, surrendering an active sexuality and embracing masochistic eroticism.

While Isabella's beating fantasy seems to confirm her predilection for mortifying or at least restraining the flesh, it does not, strictly speaking, qualify her as a masochist. She seems to covet a desexualized relation with a forbidden father figure, but not, like the masochist, as a means to resexualization, but as an end in itself. Initially Isabella seems to wish to identify Claudio with her father.38 Before telling him of Angelo's loathsome proposition, she protests that Claudio's acceptance of it "would bark honor from the trunk you bear, / And leave you naked" (3.1.71-72). If Claudio were to agree to his sister's despoliation, he would forfeit identification with his father. Thus, when Claudio protests his willingness to "encounter darkness as a bride / And hug it in mine arms" (83-84), Isabella exclaims, "There spake my brother; there my father's grave / Did utter forth a voice" (85-86). Claudio's momentary resolution would have the effect of saving Isabella from sexual violation and so links him with her protective father. On the other hand, when Claudio implores Isabella to satisfy Angelo's demands, he becomes not his father's but his mother's son: "Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair! / For such a warped slip of wilderness / Ne'er issued from his blood" (140-42). In so doing, as Adelman points out, Isabella implicitly protects her father from sexual contamination, as though needing to perpetuate the image of an idealized, desexualized father figure who will protect her from sexual defilement.39 One might even say that such a figure corresponds to God the father, illuminating another facet of her attraction to the nunnery.

Claudio's refusal to facilitate Isabella's desexualization, his suggestion that she might, for his sake, suffer Angelo's brutalization of her flesh, compels her to turn into a flagellator. Indeed, she verbally brutalizes him, transforms him, as did Angelo, into a personified corrupt flesh that must be mercilessly lacerated. In one sense, Claudio once more plays the part of Angelo's chastened surrogate: Charged with incest and thus made complicit in Angelo's assault on his sister, he suffers a vituperation that surely feeds on rage against Angelo even as Hamlet's chastisement of Ophelia channels disgust with his mother. In another sense, Claudio plays the part of Isabella's chastened surrogate, a whipping boy absorbing whatever guilt she feels for igniting Angelo's lust. She identifies Claudio with her own traitorous flesh and punishes him as a feminized ego-substitute, assigning him the role she had assigned herself in the fantasy of flagellation. Claudio now stands in relation to Isabella as Isabella does to Angelo.

Angelo stands in the same relation to the Duke: as scapegoated flesh-monger, mortified "feminine" self. The play's opening scene makes clear that Angelo functions as the Duke's double.40 He is portrayed‹and portrays himself‹as the stamp upon which the Duke's image is fixed (1.1.16, 48-50). "Be thou at full yourself," the Duke urges him (1.1.41, 43). Both men are reclusive ascetics ruled by sexual disavowal. Indeed, when Lucio, addressing the disguised Duke, praises him as one who, unlike the frigid Angelo, "had some feeling of the sport" which "instructed him to mercy," the Duke protests, "I have never heard the absent Duke much detected for women; he was not inclined that way" (3.2.119-22). The Duke implicitly prefers to be linked with Angelo, whom Lucio disparages as freakish ("not made by man and woman"), preternaturally cold ("his urine is congealed ice"), and impotent ("he is a motion ungenerative") (3.2.104-5, 110-12).

In addition, the Duke enters into intimate attachments with the women to whom Angelo is intimately attached: Isabella and Mariana. His desexualized disguise gives him access to their sexual lives. For Isabella, the Duke takes over the role of salvific father-brother that Claudio declined. He addresses her as "young sister" (3.1.151) and she twice calls him "good father" (238, 269). Indeed, Adelman calls the Friar/Duke the "embodiment of the fantasied asexual father who will protect Isabella from her own sexuality."41 At the same time, his friar's disguise affords him two covert intimate meetings with Isabella in a "dark corner" of Vienna's prison‹and we hardly require Pompey's direct linking of prison and brothel (4.3.1-4) to discern in these meetings an image of sexual tryst. The titillating effect of being alone (for the first time in his life, one imagines) with a young woman in secluded crannies of the prison could be made quite clear in performance, especially at the close of their second interview, when a leering Lucio cold discover them in some mildly compromising position‹touching, hand-holding, embracing‹that might discommode the Duke and set up Lucio's later insinuating line, "But yesternight, my lord, she and that friar, / I saw them at the prison. A saucy friar, / A very scurvy fellow" (5.1.134-36).42

Moreover, the text offers hints of the Duke's attraction to Isabella. When first intercepting her, he speaks of "the satisfaction I would require" and later, in the same speech, uses the word in its explicitly sexual sense, urging Isabella to give Angelo "promise of satisfaction" (3.1.154-56, 264). In addition, the Duke secretly (and voyeuristically) witnesses Isabella's excoriation of Claudio and appears to find the sensual fervor of her speechless dialect as provocative in rage as Angelo found it in supplication. Left alone with her, he extols the same chaste allure that exercised Angelo:

The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good. The goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair. (3.1.180-84)

From the Duke's perspective, Isabella exercises a sexuality free of corruption, uniting the chastity and beauty that Hamlet accuses Ophelia of having sundered. The Duke might say "get thee from a nunnery," especially since his later proposal of marriage requires such a displacement.43

On the surface, the Duke's proposal seems a far cry from Angelo's brutal proposition. Yet his wooing of a would-be nun could also be construed as an attempt to possess a self-possessed woman, to subdue a female force that subdues him. In one sense, the Duke's attempt to wed Isabella is analogous to taming a shrew: like the shrew, she demonstrates a willfulness and self-sufficiency, a daunting capacity for fearless raillery, a provocative "openness" that invites patriarchal enclosure.44 Until his proposal, the Duke seems determined to make Isabella feel as helpless as possible. He resolves to keep her ignorant of Claudio's survival in order, he says, "to make her heavenly comforts of despair / When it is least expected" (4.3.110-11). In other words, as befits the play's sadomasochistic dynamics, he will hurt her in order to please her, play God in order to secure her devotion, manipulate her into an indebtedness favorable to his proposal. "Give your cause to heaven," he instructs, overruling her urge toward masculine revenge ("O, I will to [Angelo] and pluck out his eyes" [4.3.119]) and recommending a retreat into iconic femininity (urging "wisdom," "patience," and "forbearance" [118, 124]). That he really means "give your cause to me" seems clear from his ensuing admonition that she seek "grace of the Duke" (4.3.119-36). The Duke seemingly deifies himself in order to justify the coercion of Isabella's will.

In the final scene, the Duke increases Isabella's helplessness, orchestrating the public besmirching of her honor. He manipulates her into unchaste public utterances that he scornfully censures, accusing her of madness and wantonness and thereby converting her defamations of Angelo's sexual perfidy into admissions of her own. He places her under arrest, and if, in performance, he also places her in chains, the stage picture recalls the mortified Claudio, the original image of the body shamed.45 As Angelo had threatened, her attempt to indict him redounds to her shame and makes her "smell of calumny." Having reduced her to absolute powerlessness, the Duke proposes marriage, seemingly consummating a careful plot to bind Isabella to him, to place her in the chains of a possibly unwanted wedlock.

With Mariana the Duke similarly achieve intimacy and mastery. Mariana testifies to their closeness by describing the Duke as "a man of comfort whose advice / Hath often still'd my brawling discontent" (4.1.8-9). The Duke, it seems, has repeatedly enjoyed intimate meetings with Mariana, the likely subject of which is her obsessive, unrequited passion for Angelo, which adds intrigue to his claim to have confessed her (5.1.527). His desexualized pose as father-confessor gives him access to Mariana's private life, sanctioning the disclosure of potentially titillating secrets. Barthes writes of Sade's fondness for inserting rituals of confession into his sadomasochistic orgies in order not only to "parody the sacrament of penitence" but to "illustrate the sadistic situation of the subject submitting to her executioner."46 Thus Mariana, whose thralldom to Angelo already suggests a desperate masochism, submits to the Duke, whose manipulations of her border on the sadistic. As with Isabella, he oversees the sullying of her honor by mocking the intimate testimony he himself elicits. Even after he drops his disguise, the Duke subjects her to further torments, marrying her off to Angelo and then commanding his immediate execution (5.1.377, 414-16).

The Duke essentially punishes Angelo for pursuing heedlessly the same ends that he achieves carefully, converting Angelo to the personification of a wayward flesh that must be disciplined‹a discipline that has distinctly oedipal reverberations. The Duke, whose "rod' is "more mock'd than fear'd," hands Angelo the phallus of cultural authority, gives him "all the organs / Of our own pow'r" (1.1.20-21), seeming to emasculate himself. In orchestrating the bed-trick, however, the Duke effectively emasculates Angelo, commodifies and feminizes his body, makes him an object of female sexual use. The Duke punishes Angelo as Angelo punished Claudio, similarly staging a piece of sadomasochistic street theater, publicly emasculating him for falling prey to the female sexuality whose clutches the Duke escapes. In assuming the role of a chastened sinning flesh, Angelo finally trades places not only with Claudio but with Isabella and Mariana, whose humiliation the Duke also stages. The Duke forces Angelo to enter the space of shame, the space of "the feminine."47 Unworthy to bear the sword of heaven or the rod of governance, Angelo must submit to the "mightier member" of the Duke, who confirms his utter powerlessness by wedding him against his will to a devouring (or at least overtly desiring) woman whom he has already rejected. Angelo, who sought to dominate one woman, must now submit to another.

Lucio similarly suffers consignment to an unwanted marriage as a punishment for fleshly transgression-‹specifically for recalling the Duke to his own flesh. Lucio, who "sticks like a burr" to the offended Duke, perhaps shares Angelo's fate because, to an extent, the Duke wishes to distance himself. Indeed, more than any other character, Lucio forces the Duke to confront his fleshly self‹albeit in the image of Lucio's slanderous caricature. The Duke undertakes to mortify Lucio's unruly flesh not by whipping him but by wedding him to a whore, yoking him to a degraded female sexuality that shames and emasculates him (5.1.508-18).

The Duke mortifies the flesh not only by mortifying Angelo and Lucio but by mastering Isabella. The Duke essentially asks Isabella to embody the "feminine" self that, projected onto his male double‹the weak and degenerate Angelo‹he disowns and depreciates. The Duke can embrace the "feminine" only by embracing a woman he would coerce into embodying it. The Duke consequently endeavors to disguise the coercions as miraculous deliverances. To the extent that he "resurrects" her brother and hopes to convert her gratitude into devotion, he offers himself as the God who, metaphorically speaking, was her original choice of husband, and, to the extent that he rescues her from sexual shame, not simply by exposing Angelo's perfidy and proving her innocence but by offering to marry her, he seems still to play the protective father figure who safeguards her chastity.48

Yet the Duke's manipulations may leave Isabella with feelings inhospitable to his pose as father-savior. Indeed, in one sense, the Duke tricks Isabella in much the same way that he tricks Angelo. Isabella thinks that she has enjoyed a kind of intimacy with one man, the desexualized holy friar, and discovers that, in fact, she has been intimate with another, the duplicitous and newly sexualized Duke. The Duke has known Isabella while she knew not that she ever knew him.

The Duke implicitly asks Isabella to function as the object of conquest and figure of closure for his oedipal narrative, which must end in his birth as both man and sovereign. The opening scenes of the play establish the Duke's need for initiation into manhood, linking his ineffectual governance to sexual disavowal. Having failed to wield the phallus with authority, the Duke claims that his "rod" is now "more mock'd than fear'd" (1.3.26-27), an image of both political and sexual impotence. He proceeds to undergo a phase of liminality, taking off his breeches and donning a friar's dress, aligning himself with women, circulating reports that he has died or entered a monastery, sending letters whose "uneven and distracted manner" and contradictory contents provoke Angelo to wonder if the Duke has lost his mind (4.4.1-5). These images of bisexuality, death, anti-worldly withdrawal, and witlessness are all aspects of liminality.49 Thus, from one angle, the Duke authors his own ritual of rebirth, passing through a phase of temporary "death" in order to give birth to himself as a man or, in this case, as an ideal sovereign who embodies ultimate masculinity, wielding the phallus magisterially in the final scene and maneuvering a seemingly unconquerable woman into a position of conquest.

To say that narrative is the production of Oedipus is to say that each reader‹male or female‹is constrained and defined within the two positions of a sexual difference thus conceived: male-hero-human, on the side of the subject; and female-obstacle-boundary-space, on the other Š narrative endlessly reconstructs [the world] as a two-character drama in which the human person creates and re-creates himself out of an abstract of purely symbolic other‹the womb, the earth, the grave, the woman.50

Isabella is not simply an erotic agent who must be mastered‹the personification of an erotic wilderness that the civilizing hero must tame‹but the symbolic other out of whom the Duke wishes to create himself, the redemptive "feminine" force who enables his paternity, restores his potency, and affirms his sovereignty‹in short, makes a man of him. In bedeviling Angelo and seeking to marry Isabella, the Duke simultaneously punishes one feminine double and seeks to possess another.

In the final scene, when Isabella brings suit to him, the Duke seems to have her where he wants her: On her knees, a prone, powerless, impassioned supplicant, utterly dependent upon him for deliverance. He then maneuvers her into a second posture of proneness when condemning Angelo to death, goading Mariana into a desperate plea that Isabella "take her part" and sue for his pardon. Earlier in the scene, Mariana presents herself as a kind of statue that can only be animated by Angelo's acceptance of her as wife:

He knew me as a wife. As this is true, Let me in safety raise me from my knees, Or else for ever be confixed here, A marble monument! (5.1.230-33)

The pose in which she proposes to freeze herself is that of the prone supplicant, or submissive wife. In taking Mariana's part, Isabella functions as surrogate submissive, assuming the statue's pose of eternal proneness. Mariana, on her knees before Angelo, essentially pleads for permission to become a subservient wife. When Isabella assumes the same posture before the Duke, she involuntarily elicits his permission, assumes the very position he may intend for her in marriage.

Indeed, when the Duke extends his hand to Isabella at the play's end, he implicitly hopes for one final and decisive assumption of the prone position on Isabella's part. Isabella of course says nothing in response to his proposal. Her silence has generated voluminous debate and multifarious performance choices, ranging from joyful, unhesitating acceptance to hostile defiance.51 Yet the complexity of the play seems to require a less simplistic resolution. Certainly Isabella's silence could signify resignation, as though the Duke had hounded her into mute submission. Yet is might also manifest resistance, evoking if not reenacting her original rejection of patriarchy, signified by the vow of silence she was poised to take at the nunnery. Her muteness may not signify the helplessness of an actress who has run out of lines, as Riefer suggests,52 but the resistance of a woman who no longer wishes to speak someone else's.

Ultimately of course, Isabella's speechlessness is ambiguous and open-ended, a mystery for every director and actress‹and critic‹to solve. In my view, Isabella's silence best supports an attitude of ambivalence and irresolution that returns her to the position she assumed when first forced to reenter the world of men: At war twixt will and will not. Her silence strands her between autonomy and patriarchal inscription and thus generates the unresolved tension that, in Teresa de Lauretis' estimation, attends the representation of female subjectivity, according to which an individual woman is both a woman and Woman, a subject in her own right forced to assume the status of object of male desire, forced to pay figure of closure in the Oedipal plot.53 Her resistance or non-reply to the Duke's proposal, her suspension of his patriarchal narrative, suggests that the subject-object contradiction "cannot and perhaps even need not be resolved."54 In sum, Isabella's silence signifies neither "yes" nor "no" nor even "maybe" but enigmatically manifests the impossibility of expressing an inner experience too complex, too female, to register meaningfully in a male economy of meaning. Once more, the Lacanian postulate of an impossible female language seems to come into play. Yet, in the theater, there is surely speech in Isabella's dumbness‹to steal another line from The Winter's Tale. Her speechlessness becomes itself a mode of speech, a dialect that cannot be silenced, even if it cannot be fathomed. Isabella herself, through the actress who represents her, remains a body that cannot be easily fitted to the destin'd livery, a mystery for every spectator‹and critic‹to solve.

NOTES 1 In my own production of Measure at University of California, Berkeley (April 1992), I staged the scene in precisely this way. 2 The sadist "has a powerful and overwhelming superego and nothing else. The sadist's superego is so strong that he has become identified with it; he is his own superego and can only find an ego in the external world Š when the superego runs wild, expelling the ego along with the mother-image, then its fundamental immorality exhibits itself as sadism. The ultimate victims of the sadist are the mother and the ego. . . . The sadist has no other ego than that of his victims" (Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil, Masochism, New York: Zone Books, 1989). 3 See, for instance, Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (New York: Harper, 1981) and Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women's Press, 1982). Pornography is an exceptionally complex subject. Even within feminist ranks attitudes toward it differ sharply. For instance, Linda Williams, who calls herself an "anti-censorship feminist" finds the attitude of Griffin and Dworkin and other Œanti-pornography" feminists to be needlessly prosecutorial and untenably utopian, arguing that "a whole and natural sexuality is an ineradicable part of human sexuality. See the opining chapter of her fascinating study of pornographic films, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 4 Coldness and Cruelty, 29. In an undergraduate Shakespeare class, I screened several versions of the eye-gouging scene from King Lear. The students unanimously agreed that the cruelest Cornwall was Peter Brook's Patrick Magee (who, fittingly, also played Sade in Brook's Marat/Sade) because he was so inhumanly passionless. 5I put "feminine" and "masculine" in quotation marks in order to make clear that I am using them to designate subject positions‹powerless flesh and powerful law‹rather than gender. 6 "Erotic Religious Flagellation and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 139-165. 7 "Erotic Religious Flagellation," 144. 8 L.A. Parry, The History of Torture in England (Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1975; [reprint, London: Sampson Low Marston, 1934), 41. 9 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 10 Discipline and Punish, 49. In a fascinating essay, Gillian Murray Kendall argues that, in Shakespearean drama, "the excessive violence associated with real executions accompanies instead the killings done by subjects against the state, by those using murder to gain political power," "Overkill in Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (Spring 1992): 34. 11 Beatrice Faust discerns a continuity between religious art and pornography: "It was only with Christianity that sex and aggression became hopelessly confused. Erotica was driven underground and sadomasochism‹with predominantly homoerotic overtones‹replaced it in the formally accepted visual arts. Beside the gentle image of the Madonna and her child we find the pieta, in which Mary cradles her son's mangled body, the crucifixions, stations of the cross, and multitude of martyrdoms‹often depicting languorous young men, less often showing beautiful women. The flagellation literature of the nineteenth century and the recent wave of violence in both pornography and television, may be seen as continuations of a long and sordid Western tradition. Perhaps secular sadomasochism developed to replace the declining religious art," Women, Sex, and Pornography (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 86. 12 Coldness and Cruelty, 55. 13 Janet Adelman connects the Duke's characterization of Juliet's fetus to his overwrought censure of Pompey: "in both instances the language of sexual origin and maternal dependence caries the weight of the Duke's disgust, as though the facts of conception and maternal nursery were in themselves enough to turn one away from life." Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 87-88. 14 Brown relates the "proneness" urged on Isabella to the flagellant's position and therefore to Isabella's pledge to "strip [her]self to death," "Erotic Religious Flagellation," 163-65. 15 See Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 144-45. 16 ŒOver and over again, the pornographer's triumph, the piece de resistance in his fantasy, occurs when he turns the virgin into a whore," Pornography and Silence, 22. 17 See Griffin, Pornography and Silence, 29-35. 18 Sade Fourier Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 145. 19 Coldness and Cruelty, 63. Deleuze contends that sadism and masochism are distinct phenomenon that have been inappropriately linked. He thus contests Freud's characterization of masochism as a manifestation of the death instinct that when turned against the "object" (the mother), produces sadism. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton), 48-49. 20 Coldness and Cruelty, 31-32, 76, 88-89. 21 Coldness and Cruelty, 104. 22 In my production at the University of California at Berkeley, the scene opened with Angelo's flagellating himself, suggesting that he had been at it for quite some time. 23 See Robert N. Watson's fascinating discussion of the many ways in which the play evokes the Virgin Mary as a shadow for both Isabella and Angelo, "False Immortality in Measure for Measure: Comic Means, Tragic Ends," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 425-26. 24 Suffocating Mothers, 93. 25 See Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 153-54. 26 "The Pornographic Imagination," in Perspectives on Pornography, ed. Douglas A. Hughes (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970), 112. Though Sontag's philosophical treatment of pornography seems to differ sharply from the ideologically driven critiques of the anti-pornography feminists, her implication that the pornographer ultimately aims at self-transcendence seems perfectly compatible with the feminists' view. The latter, however, associate this self-transcendence with a self-denial that casts women in the role of denied material self. 27 Brown makes much the same point in "Erotic Religious Flagellation," 158. 28 I so staged the scene in my production at the University of California at Berkeley. The scourge with which Angelo had beaten himself at the outset of the scene became Isabella's means of repelling his assault. Trevor Nunn also staged the moment as a near-rape in his recent RSC production. 29 Male dread of female power and of effeminizing desire springs from the association of femaleness with "lack." See Madelon Sprengnether's classic essay, "'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins United Press, 1980), 174-75. For highly illuminating discussions of Angelo's fear of female power and of effeminacy, see David Sundelson, Shakespeare's Restorations of the Father (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 91-92; Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies, 115; and Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 92. 30 For the first view, see Brown, "Erotic Religious Flagellation," 153; for the second, see Marvin Rosenberg, "Shakespeare's Fantastic Trick: Measure for Measure," The Sewanee Review LXXX (1972): 54. 31 Quoted in Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London: The Women's Press, 1988), 41. 32 This point figures very prominently in Maria Riefer's provocative essay, "'Instruments of Some More Mightier Member': The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure," in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Harold Bloom, ed. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 131-44. See especially 136-37. 33 The image recalls Angelo's characterization of Claudio's crime: Putting "mettle" in "restrained means" to make "a false [life]" (2.4.28-49)‹impregnating an unmarried woman and engendering an "unlawful" child. It also anticipates Isabella's later dread of giving "unlawful birth" (3.1.189-91). 34 quoted in Rutter, Clamorous Voices, 49. 35 For Harriet Hawkins, these lines seem "deliberately designed by Shakespeare to arouse Angelo as saint, sensualist, and as a sadist. And so, of course, they do," "ŒThe Devil's Party': Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure," in Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations. 36 Paul Tillich's wife, Hannah, describes his taste for pornographic slide shows depicting women lashed on crosses: "There was the familiar cross shooting up on the wall Š a naked girl hung on it, hands tied in front of her private parts. Another naked figure lashed the crucified one with a whip that reached further to another cross, on which a girl was exposed from behind. More and more crosses appeared, all with women tied and exposed in various positions. Some were exposed from the front, some from the side, some from behind, some crouched in fetal position, some head down, or legs apart, or legs crossed‹and always whips, crosses, whips," From Time to Time (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), 14. The image of a publicly revered theologian's privately exercising a sexual vexation that conflates religious and pornographic imagery seems chillingly apposite to Measure for Measure. 37 Pornography and Silence, 14, 68. 38 My reading of Isabella's father-fixation is heavily indebted to Adelman's account in Suffocating Mothers, 96-98. 39 Suffocating Mothers, 97. 40 Many critics note the extent to which Angelo functions as aspect of the Duke's self. See, for instance, Sundelson, Shakespeare's Restoration of the Father, 90, Alexander Leggatt, "Substitution in Measure for Measure," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 345-46, and Nancy S. Leonard, "Substitution in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1079): 296-97. 41 Suffocating Mothers, 98. 42 Something of this effect was apparently achieved in Michael Bogdonov's 1985 production at Stratford, Ontario. See Anthony B. Dawson, "Measure for Measure, New Historicism; and Theatrical Power," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (Fall 1988): 339. 43 The director and actor must of course determine the extent to which the Duke's desire ought to be evident to the audience. His proposal at the end will obviously be the more surprising‹even shocking‹if it is unexpected and inexplicable. On the other hand, an antecedent attraction could possibly make the proposal more troubling, especially if the attraction is mutual, if Isabella has developed a deep affection for the Friar‹or even a desire sublimated and sanctified by his status as fatherly rescuer. Seen in such a light, the Duke's proposal forces Isabella to face her feelings for him while violating the trust that enabled them. 44 See Charles R. Lyons for a fascinating account of Isabella's resemblance to a shrew, "Silent Women and Shrews: Eroticism and Convention in Epicoene and Measure for Measure," Comparative Drama 22 (1990): 123-40, especially 136-38. The notion of a female "openness" that invites "enclosure" I borrow from Peter Stallybrass's influential essay, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123-42. 45 The image may also recall the mortification of Pompey and Mistress Overdone, whose arrests were also turned into humiliating public spectacles in my production at University of California Berkeley. Isabella thus becomes linked with a fornicator, a bawd, and a brothel-keeper. 46 Sade Fourier Loyola, 145. 47 See Lynda E. Boose for a discussion of the homology of shame and femininity in the punishments of early modern England, "Scolding Bridges and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 179-213, especially 185-94. 48 Wheeler also ascribes to the Duke a strategy of rescuing Isabella from the public sexual shaming that he himself has staged, Shakespeare's Development, 129-30. 49 See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 95-107. 50 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 121. 51 For an illuminating discussion of the different ways directors have staged this final moment, see Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 63-93. For other helpful accounts of the play in performance, see Graham Nicholls, Measure for Measure: Text and Performance (London: Macmillan, 1986); Ralph Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 37-48; Michael Scott, Renaissance Drama and a Modern Audience (London: Macmillan, 1982), 61-75; Jane Williamson, "The Duke and Isabella on the Modern Stage," the Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 149-69; and Richard Paul Knowles, "robin Phillips Measures Up: ŒMeasure for Measure at Stratford, Ontario, 1975-76)," Essays in Theatre 8 (1989): 35-59. For a provocative discussion of the play's resistance to feminist performance, see Kathleen McLuskie, "The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure," Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 88-108. For a discussion of the possibilities of feminist intervention in performance, see Rutter, Clamorous Voices, 27-42. 52 "ŒInstruments of Some More Mightier Member,'" 142. 53 Alice Doesn't, 186. 54 Ibid., 153.

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