From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure - Critical Essay

Criticism, Fall, 1999 by Stephen Cohen

THROUGH MOST OF its critical history, responses to Measure for Measure have been of two types: those proffering a key that unlocks the play's notorious difficulties to reveal its unity and integrity, and those that find the play's unsatisfactory elements irreconcilable and thus declare it a failed or flawed work.(1) In the last twenty-five years, however, 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. Thus, in addition to formalist readings that either argue for the play's success as a romantic comedy or assign it to another genre that accounts for its apparent formal deviations, we have readings that explain the play's formal irregularities as intentional expressions of Shakespeare's dissatisfaction with the artificial constraints of generic convention.(2) Similarly, "old historicist" readings of Measure for Measure's Duke as a flattering portrait of the new king James I and his political theory and practice have been supplemented by readings that see the play's inconsistent or discomfiting moments as pointed subversions of its superficially positive portrayal of the Duke's (and James') competence and authority.(3)

In light of recent critical interest in literary texts' ideological orthodoxy or subversion, it is not surprising that historical readings of Measure for Measure have emerged, along with treatments of the play's perennially vexed generic status, as the most popular approaches to the play.(4) Given their popularity, however, it is all the more surprising how infrequently the two approaches have been brought together in efforts to account for Measure for Measure's troubling aspects. While New Historicism has emphasized the need to pay close attention to a text's social and cultural contexts, it has been slower to recognize the importance of literary contexts and to explore the complicated cultural work of literary forms.(5) Accordingly, attempts to historicize Measure for Measure's ambiguous formal status or to study the role of generic conventions in the play's indeterminate ideological work have been rare. Readings that do address both formal and historical issues tend to treat the play as an unproblematic example of a given genre and its cultural function; in so doing, they ignore or dismiss the play's history of ideological and generic undecidability.(6)

In what follows, I will argue that a closer examination of the interrelations between form and ideology in Measure for Measure reveals that the play is neither a straightforward nor a flawed nor a subversive instantiation of any single generic or ideological structure. Instead, like the period in which it was written, Measure for Measure is marked by the juxtaposition of two incompatible ideologies and their related dramatic forms. The play begins as a romantic comedy, but at the end of the second act both its ideological perspective and its formal structure undergo a metamorphosis; from this point on the play proceeds to its conclusion in accordance with the form and ideas of the disguised monarch play. This generic shift in medias res is not, however, entirely successful--and its failure is at the root of the play's notorious contradictions, incongruities, and frustrated expectations, which are the result not of the play's subversive intent, but of the conflicting imperatives of two genres fundamentally different in form and ideological function.

1

In 1603-1604, the likely years of Measure for Measure's composition, England after years of anticipation and anxiety finally saw the accession of its new king, James I. While the peaceful transition from Elizabeth to James was for the most part greeted with an enthusiasm born of relief, it was also the occasion of some unease, the nature and source of which is suggested in a remark of Sir John Harington's occasioned by one of James' first acts as monarch, the hanging of a thief captured during the new king's initial progress to London:

   Here now wyll I reste my troublede mynde, and tende my sheepe like an
   Arcadian swayne, that hath loste his faire mistresse; for in soothe, I have
   loste the beste and faireste love that ever shepherde knew, even my
   gracious Queene; and sith my goode mistresse is gone, I shall not hastily
   put forthe for a new master. I heare oure new Kynge hathe hangede one man
   before he was tryede; 'tis strangely done: now if the wynde blowethe thus,
   why may not a man be tryed before he hathe offended.(7)

Harington's lament neatly captures the rhetoric of romance with which Elizabeth figured her relation to her subjects, as well as the importance of conventional literary depictions of women to that rhetoric. At the same time, Harington's observation concerning the new king--its pointed question notably unblunted by rhetorical or literary conceits--voices both the perceived contrast between James and Elizabeth and the skepticism that such a juxtaposition of lost mistress and new master could inspire.