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Measure for Measure and the Problem of Popularityenlr_1098 32..57

In Memory of Huston Diehl

Several days before King James VI and I’s Royal Entry into Londonin 1604, he and Queen Anne, “for their recreation, and thinkeing to passe unknowne,” went in a coach to spy on the triumphal arches and stages that were built near the Royal Exchange.1 James’s formal entry into London, a ceremony in which the magistrates of the City ceded their power to the monarch, traditionally preceded the corona- tion at Westminster, but had been postponed a year because of the plague.2 The new King and Queen did not pass incognito for long. A witness reported that the “wylie Multitude perceiving something, began with such hurly burly, to run up and downe with such unreverent rashnes, as the people of the Exchange were glad to shut the staire dores to keepe them out.” James and Anne found not just refuge but also a model of civility inside the Exchange, where the merchants “stood silent” in the King’s presence,“modestie commanding them so to doe” (sig. B1v). The King “greatly commended” their “civill” sobriety and respect, and then sharply “discommended” the “rudenes of the Multi- tude, who regardles of time or person will be so troublesome” (sig. B2).

The source for this anecdote is a small tract entitled The Time Triumphant by Gilbert Dugdale. He interrupts his narrative in order to school his readers, whom he imagines as part of this “rude multitude,” on how they should behave in the King’s presence:

1. Gilbert Dugdale, The Time Triumphant, Declaring in briefe, the arival of our Soveraigne liedge Lord, King James into England, his coronation at Westminster: together with his late royal progresse, from the Towre of London throúgh the Cittie, to his Highnes manor of White Hall. Shewing also, the varieties & rarieties of al the sundry trophies or pageants, erected . . . With a rehearsall of the King and Queenes late comming to the Exchaunge in London (1604), sig. B1v.

2. For an overview of James’s Royal Entry, see James Mardock, “Londinium: The 1604 Royal Entry of James I” in Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson’s City and the Space of the Author (London, 2009), pp 23–44, esp. 24–30, 95–109.

© 2012 The Author(s) English Literary Renaissance © 2012 English Literary Renaissance Inc. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

And contrymen let me tell you this, if you h[e]ard what I heare as concerning that[,] you would stake your feete to the Earth at such a time, ere you would run so regardles up and downe, say it is [his] highnes pleasure to be private, as you may note by the order of his comming; will you then be publique, and so proclaime that which love and duty cryes silence to? this shewes his love to you, but your open ignorance to him; you will say perchance it is your love, will you in love prease uppon your Soveraigne thereby to offend him, your Soveraigne perchance mistake your love, and punnish it as an offence; but heare me—when hereafter [he] comes by you, doe as they doe in Scotland stand still, see all, and use silence. (sig. B2)

The problem for the multitude is how to properly communicate their love (a word Dugdale uses five times here) for James without offending him.While royal pageantry traditionally produced a celebratory mood, James’s predecessor, Elizabeth I, greatly intensified and extended the place of such affection in the body politic. Her pursuit of popularity and her encouragement of her subjects’ feelings of love engendered a sense of public intimacy with her—a sense of love that fortified her authority.3 It is exactly this participatory element—the people’s desire to crowd, cheer, and touch the monarch, or what Dugdale presciently calls “be[ing] publique”—that James finds offensive. In place of inter- active demonstrations of love, James wants stillness and silence, behav- iors that signify awe and deference to his majesty. Dugdale’s account of the King’s reaction to Elizabethan-style popularity concisely illustrates how James’s efforts to introduce into England an absolutist style of monarchy was felt not just at court and in Parliament, but also in his interactions with the “multitude.”

The problem of popularity is central to Shakespeare’s vision of poli- tics.4 Most of his princes recognize the latent power of the people and the potential for their rivals to harness that power. What makes his history plays so much more modern than the source material he drew upon is his elaboration of the theatrical, rhetorical, and sacramental techniques elite figures use to win popular favor, as well as their self- consciousness about their use of these techniques. And what made

3. See Doty, “Shakespeare’s Richard II, ‘Popularity,’ and the Early Modern Public Sphere,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010), 183–205.

4. An early seventeenth-century dictionary defines popular as “seeking the favour of the people by all meanes possible” and popularitie as “pleasing the people.” Robert Cawdrey, A table alphabeticall conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. (1604), sig. G5.

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his theater an interesting political space in its own right is that by dramatizing things such as how to win popularity, he taught his audi- ences how to analyze political situations and statecraft more broadly. So it is of little surprise that James’s encounters with his new subjects would spark Shakespeare’s interest. In the play he was preparing for the soon-to-be-reopened theater,Measure for Measure, he draws directly from The Time Triumphant:

and even so The general subject to a well-wish’d king Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offense.5

Measure for Measure presents a sustained exploration of monarchical popularity, one that goes well beyond Shakespeare’s paraphrase here of Dugdale.6 The play’s head of state, Duke Vincentio, does not like to “stage” himself to the people; the issue with popularity, however, is more complicated than a dispositional antipathy to appearing before crowds.The Duke’s primary motive, as many have argued, is to establish his authority in Vienna in more absolute terms. I argue that the devolution of his authority, and the terms in which he reconstitutes it, are best understood through the contemporary idea of popularity. From a monarchical perspective, the need to cultivate popularity means that the monarch must play a role for the people, and that even the people’s expressions of love and approval instantiate forms of political partici- pation and judgment that both breaks decorum and reveals the latent power of the people.That “popularity” suggested interference and too much access by non-elites is confirmed by the fact that in early modern England, the term could signify the strategies of winning popular favor and the act of making political arguments to the people.7 Early moderns

5. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays follow The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al., (Boston, 1997), 2.4.26–30. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

6. J.W. Lever’s “The Date of Measure for Measure” (Shakespeare Quarterly 10 [1959], 381–88) liberally quotes materials from 1603–1604 concerning James’s ascension (some of which I revisit below), and contests the critical commonplace that James’s dislike of the people was immedi- ately apparent. Unlike previous “King James” readings of the play, my emphasis is less on his attitude toward the people per se than his reaction to the English customs of “popularity” and the emboldened public produced by popularity.

7. Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), 274; Doty, 187–91.

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saw the step from the people’s cheering public figures to busying their minds with controversial issues as a very small one. The cheering and crowding that Duke Vincentio experiences when in public are very noisy and visible expressions of a more unwelcome set of behaviors: trading news and passing judgment about princes and government. Through these practices, Shakespeare sketches the formation of a public sphere of political uptake. I argue that a public formed around political news and gossip impinges on an absolute monarch’s authority and that, consequently, the Duke works to turn Measure for Measure’s proto- citizens back into obedient subjects. His goal is to make this noisy public “stand still, see all, and use silence.”

Like A Time Triumphant, then, Measure for Measure endeavors to tutor the “untaught love” of “the general subject” so as to avoiding giving the king further offense. In this it seems that Shakespeare not only takes a Jacobean stance on the problem of popularity, but also offers an elitist, courtly critique of the early modern public sphere. But the second half of the essay asks: what does it mean to dramatize the problem of popularity—as well as allude to James I’s own reaction to popularity—in the public theater? Shakespeare’s transfor- mation of topical political information into entertainment, combined with the democratizing effects of the public playhouse, undermine the play’s orthodox politics. As Michael Bristol writes, an early modern play that dramatizes royalty in a cultural marketplace “fun- damentally alters the character of the representative publicness of which it is the expression.”8 By drawing on recent news about James, and representing him in fragmented ways, Shakespeare instan- tiates the very kind of public political talk Duke Vincentio tries to eradicate. In its Globe performances, then, Measure for Measure retails the very thing it purports to discipline: news and analysis about politics.

James I’s progress to London attracted tens of thousands, both because of their joy at a new king and because of their relief that Elizabeth’s death did not immediately precipitate civil war. The people had feared that “their houses should have been spoiled and sacked,” and that “the

8. Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London, 1996), p. 60.

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kingdom would have been torn asunder.”9 Only in hindsight does a peaceful succession seem assured: his chief rivals for the throne either died or became less viable right before Elizabeth’s death, and the Earl of Essex’s fall smoothed an alliance between James and Robert Cecil.10

Accounts of James’s trip from Edinburgh to London focus on the “unspeakable nomber of citizens, as the like nomber was never seene to issue out upon any cause before” who came to see James.11 As the progress neared London, the people became “so greedy . . . to behold the countenance of the King that with much unruliness they injured and hurt one another, some even hazarded to the daunger of death.”12

Following the progress from Islington to Charterhouse Garden, John Savile noted that “the people that were there assembled I can compare to nothing more conveniently then to imagine every grasse to have bene metamorphosed into a man. . . . After his Magestie was come amongst the presse of the people, the shouts and clamours were so great, that one could not scarece heare another speake” (sigs. B2–B2v). Ben Jonson likened the people’s “bursting Joys” to “the Artillery / Of Heaven.”13 All the contemporary accounts of James’s progress and ascension note with wonder the size and joyousness of the crowds. These descriptions also serve the purpose of informally registering and disseminating popular consent for James’s sovereignty.Popularity was a publicly negotiated way of legitimating political power.14 That the currency here is “love” and

9. The first quotation is from a letter by Thomas Lord Burghley, the second by Sir George Carew. Quoted in Pauline Croft, James I (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 50.

10. Susan Doran,“JamesVI and the English Succession” in JamesVI and I: Ideas,Authority, and Government, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London, 2006), p. 42. Doran writes, “Thomas Seymour had died in 1600; William Stanley married into Cecil’s family; Lord Beauchamp had no interest in the throne; and Arabella Stuart ruined any chances she might have had with her erratic behavior in 1602 and 1603” (p. 42).

11. [Roger Wilbraham], The Journal of Roger Wilbraham, ed. Harold Spencer Scott, in The Camden Miscellany X (London, 1902), p. 56.

12. John Savile, King James his Entertainment at Theobalds, with his Welcome to London: together with a Salutatorie Poeme (1603), sig. A2.

13. Ben Jonson, “A Panegyre, on the Happy Entrance of James, Our Sovereign, to His First High Session of Parliament in This Kingdom, the 19th of March, 1603” in The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New Haven, 1975), ll. 152–53.

14. I have in mind here James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1985) and its application to early modern popular politics by historian John Walter. Scott argues that the terms of power, which are implicitly negotiated between authority and the subordinated, form “the public transcript,” which the people can use to hold authority figures accountable. Popularity became the key interface through which the Tudors had to legitimate themselves. For the application of Scott to early modern societies, see John Walter and Michael J. Braddick,

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not rational debate makes it no less of a negotiation. Nor was this negotiation settled by the initial goodwill of the people.

Indeed, even as the printed literature on the succession stressed the people’s joy, several aristocrats perspicaciously noted James’s reluctance to reciprocate their affection and mused on its potential negative consequences.Thomas Wilson wrote to Sir Thomas Perry in June 1603 that most subjects “approve all their Prince’s actions and words, saving that they desire some more of that gracious affabilitye wch ther good old Queen did afford them.”15 Similarly, Sir Roger Wilbraham noted in his diary in 1603 that Queen Elizabeth would “labour to entertayne strangers sutors & her people, with more courtlie courtesy & favorable speeches then the King useth.” He applauded the King’s “benignitie & ingenuous nature” yet worried that “the neglect of those ordinarie ceremonies, which his variable & quick witt cannot attend, makes common people judge otherwise of him” (p. 56).

Within a few years, tensions between James and the people concern- ing the customs of monarchical popularity became more visible.Vene- tian Ambassador Nicolo Molino explained in a report to the Doge that: “The king does not caress the people nor make them that good cheer the late Queen did, whereby she won their loves; for the English adore their Sovereigns, and if the King passed through the same street a hundred times a day the people would still run to see him; they like their King to show pleasure at their devotion, as the late Queen knew well how to do; but this King manifests no taste for them but rather contempt and dislike.The result is that he is despised and almost hated. In fact his Majesty is more inclined to live retired with eight or ten of his favourites than openly, as is the custom of the country and the desire of the people.”16 Molino presents the people’s desire for public expres- sions of reciprocal love as a deeply embedded feature of their political

“Introduction. Grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society” in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), pp. 3–7. For Walter’s exploration of how early moderns deployed grumbling, cursing, the shaming of elites, and petitioning, see his essay “Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England” from that collection (pp. 123–48).

15. Quoted in John Nichols, Progresses, Processions, and Magnificient Festivities of King James the First (1828), I, 188.

16. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in other Libraries of Northern Italy, Vol. 10: 1603–1607, ed. Horatio F. Brown (London 1900), X, 513.

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culture. They also want him to live “openly”; failing that, James is “despised and almost hated.” James’s “contempt and dislike” for the people became a central criticism in the biographies written in the 1650s. Arthur Wilson noted that James endured his entry into London “with patience, being assured he should never have such another”; however, in his future “publique appearances (especially in his sports) the accesses of the people made him so impatient, that he often dispersed them with frowns, that we may not say with curses.”17 Nonetheless, in his first speech to Parliament, James fondly recalled how “the people of all sorts rid and ran, nay rather flew to meet me, their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection, their mouths and tongues uttering nothing but sounds of joy, their hands, feet, and all the rest of their members’ gestures discovering a passionate longing, and earnestness to meet and embrace their new sovereign.”18 But that he would never again display himself in a public progress says more than James’s speech to Parliament.19 Dugdale’s, Wilbraham’s, and Wilson’s accounts all suggest that James’s resistance to “gracious affabilitye” toward the people was apparent very early in his reign.

“Good cheer” and “gracious affability” were key features of Eliza- beth’s public persona. James’s ascension revealed the degree to which Elizabeth had turned affection into a vital aspect of English statecraft. By using tropes of collectivity, country, and commonwealth, she drew on, rather than contested, the English people’s strong orientation to the “commonalty” as a political ideal. Her pursuit of popular favor legiti- mated her rule, although at the expense of fostering popular interest in matters of state. Kevin Sharpe argues that the Tudors “sold” themselves to the people, and by doing so, they “made themselves available to interpretation and so made readers and spectators of the scripts and spectacles of state into critics of government—or citizens.”20 Elizabeth’s avid pursuit of popularity developed in concert with (and contributed

17. Arthur Wilson, The History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James the First, Relating To what passed from his first Accesse to the Crown, till his Death (1653), sig. C3.

18. James VI and I, “A Speach, as it was Delivered in the Upper House of Parliament . . . 19 March 1604,” in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), p. 133.

19. As Curtis Perry argues in The Making of Jacobean Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), James’s refusal of subsequent appearances broke apart “reciprocal structure of Elizabethan royal performance” that tied prince and city together in strong bonds of “sentimental royalism” (p. 193).

20. Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy:Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2009), p. 18.

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to) an expanded access to political matters (through rumor, sermons, plays, printed polemics, and aristocratic self-staging) that suggests the formation of an early modern public sphere.21 As James quickly discov- ered, members of Parliament and the courts were apt to contest the king’s will on matters of law; such public points of conflict were followed widely by non-elites who were developing tastes in political news and “the state.” Political talk, made all the more attractive by the codes of secrecy that were supposed to shroud the state, enlarged what counted as matters of common concern. This terminology evokes Jürgen Habermas’ account of the eighteenth-century political publics which, by their embrace of Enlightenment principles and their exercise of the press, were able to critique and check political power.22 But what I am highlighting is a prior moment in this narrative, one in which the quality and depth of the arguments private people make about politics is less important than the fact that they are talking about the political sphere on a significant scale at all.23 The activity of this kind of political talk, which need not be antiauthoritarian for it to “count,” positions its participants not as extensions of the monarchy’s divine presence but rather as detached observers of the monarchy with individual uses of and interests in court news.

But for James, a vocal advocate of “free” monarchical authority, the public was an extension of the king’s divine presence.24 The expectation that he court the commons, a distinctively Elizabethan development, had to strike James as bizarre.As he writes in Basilicon Doron, popularity is unkingly: “Be not over-sparing in your courtesies, for that will be imputed to incivilitie and arrogancie: nor yet over prodicall in iowking and nodding at every step: for that forme of being popular, becometh better aspiring Absalons, then lawfull Kings.”25 “Lawfull Kings” need not

21. See Lake and Pincus, p. 274. 22. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a

Category of Bourgeois Society (1960), tr. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 1–56, esp. p. 27. See also Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002), pp. 90–96.

23. For an account of early modern publics that is less explicitly political in nature, see Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, “Introduction” in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (London, 2010), pp. 7–9.

24. For James’s scriptural defense of this position, see his Trew Law of Free Monarchies: Or The Reciprock and mutuall duetie betwixt a free King and his naturall Subiects (1598) in Sommerville, pp. 73–74.

25. James VI and I, Basilicon Doron (1598) in Sommerville, p. 54. “Jowking” is Scottish for bowing and bobbing.

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win their people’s love, especially if such winning demands gestures and movements that erode the distance between king and subject. So when he treated the people coldly during his Royal Entry, as Jonathan Gold- berg writes, James “displayed their subjection to his subjects, [and] showed them their need for him and his aloofness from them.”26 James’s distant demeanor signified his status as an absolute king, one not bound by the people’s favor nor bound to reciprocate their affection. James sought to restore the arcana imperii that had suffered erosion under Elizabeth’s too-public regime. The pursuit of popularity in particular was undesirable because it shifted too much influence to the people by positioning the prince as a performer and by tacitly acknowledging the latent power of the people. By rejecting Elizabethan popularity—both in terms of winning favor and of political discussion among private people—James implicitly argued that the people should cease to under- stand themselves as participants in a public sphere. It is a point that Gilbert Dugdale, who warned his readers of their too “publique” behav- ior, understood.

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Duke Vincentio has been read as a version of James since the eigh- teenth century.27 Positivist topical readings see the play as a product of royal flattery, although others have argued that the play critiques James.28 But there is little in the play’s topical content to suggest what Shakespeare “really” thinks about James or about politics. What is important is how he gives current political questions immediacy by infusing them, in albeit fragmentary and allusive ways, with recent events.29 Shakespeare seizes a specific aspect of James’s ascension—his

26. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore, 1983), pp. 31–32.

27. For an overview of topical readings, see Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 160–164. My reading of the Duke through the Jacobean style of absolute monarchy benefits from Goldberg’s analysis (pp. 231–41).

28. The most comprehensive topical reading remains Josephine Waters Bennett, Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York, 1966), pp. 78–124; for a representative anti-James reading, see Roy Battenhouse, “Measure for Measure and King James,” CLIO 7 (1978), 193–215.

29. Lake offers a comprehensive exploration of how the play is “organized around two issues of central concern to James”: “puritan and other schemes of reformation of church and commonwealth” and “issues of royal prerogative with respect to common and ecclesiastical law.” Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists & Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, 2002), p. 676.

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rejection of popularity—and links it to the related issues of news, political analysis, and slander. The play asks, how can a monarch effectively rule without cultivating popularity? The answer is enriched in how the play evokes some characteristics of James without reducing itself to literal events of his early reign.

At the same time, topical content—or what early moderns would have called news—also served the commercial interests of the theater. Paul Yachnin argues that for those excluded from elite circles, “the theater itself was a center of news in early modern London.” Limning the court and city, it “retail[ed] popular, inexpensive accounts of events which passed as inside information about court and government affairs.”30 Later Stuart drama such as Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (1619) and A Game at Chess (1623) drew explicitly from newssheets, so much so that the practice (and the fashion for news itself ) was mocked by Jonson in The Staple of the News (1625).31 Measure for Measure treats news as indicative of an unruly public, but well before news became primarily a print-house phenomenon, playwrights drew on reports and gossip from court and city to give their plays elements of novelty and time- liness. Undoubtedly, too, there was a distinct pleasure in recognizing allusions. Like Hamlet’s Murder of Gonzago, plays could be adapted to comment on contemporary local or national events through reference to events elsewhere, and actors almost certainly improvised lines that played off contemporary news that do not survive in playtexts. As Yachnin points out, theatrical news is hardly journalistic, nor would it have been news at all for courtiers (p. 186). But the incorporation of veiled political issues and highly charged political language into plays are concrete points of contact between the theatrical public and the world of “state.” News in plays both entertained and cultivated the political competency of playgoers. It is precisely the commingling of entertainment and insight that King Lear promises when he tells Cord- elia that we will “hear poor rogues / Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too— / Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out— / And take upon ’s the mystery of things / As if we were God’s spies”

30. PaulYachnin,“The House of Fame,” in The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), p. 183.

31. F. J. Levy, “Staging the News,” in Print, Manuscript, & Performance:The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus, 2000), pp. 252–78.

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(5.3.13–17). It is important to stress that the quality or depth of Shakespeare’s “news” is ultimately less important than the fact that such details, infused in the political techniques he dramatizes, provide a way for audiences to bridge the analysis of fictional characters to real public figures—or as Lear puts it, to see into “the mystery of things.” By incorporating timely lines about James’s reluctance to woo the people, Measure for Measure draws on what audiences had already heard about him, allows them to consider how “popularity” interpellates them as a certain kind of political subject, and prompts them to think about the consequences of his style of rule.

In the play’s opening scene, Duke Vincentio announces that he is leaving the city for an uncertain term and has put Angelo in charge. He refuses a public exit because:

I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes; Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement; Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it. (1.1.67–72)

Although he claims to “love the people,” for early modern Englishmen and women, such love was substantiated by public interactions. By disparaging anyone who does “affect” popularity, he casts his own indifference to showmanship as a mark of wisdom. His verb “stage” reveals that the Duke avoids this custom at least partly because of its overt theatricality.That their cheers make him feel less like an absolute ruler than a beloved actor is evident in his complaint about “their loud applause and aves vehement.” It is their noise that most disturbs him. Later, when he explains his plan to Friar Thomas, the Duke elaborates on his neglect of publicity: he has “lov’d the life removed, / And held in idle price to haunt assemblies / Where youth, and cost, witless bravery keeps” (1.3.8–10). Rather than figuring himself as the source of publicity in Vienna—the representation of God’s authority on earth, whose presence secures social harmony and animates all other social bonds and degrees—the Duke depicts himself on the periphery, one who yields public space to courtier and citizens for their own vain self-display. He merely “haunts” public gatherings. Absent, then, his punctual presence, Vienna has grown wild with “liberty,” which he freely admits stems largely from his own reluctance to punish law-

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breakers (1.3.29). His dereliction may be because punishments were highly public, spectacular displays that “stage” the Duke’s power—as well as expose him to the public discourse, both positive and negative, that he dreads.32 When he says the laws are “like an o’ergrown lion in a cave,” he uses an image of reclusion, one in which law is a metonymy for his embodied authority (1.3.22). He still sees himself in patriarchal terms, but as a “fond father” whose tools of discipline—“threat’ning twigs of birch”—have lost their efficacy by being displayed rather than used (1.3.23,24). His authority has become merely representational.

That punishments are forms of self-display for magistrates is estab- lished earlier in the play when Claudio demands to know why the Provost “[shows] me thus to th’ world?” and he is answered that it was “from Lord Angelo by special charge” (1.2.116, 119).Claudio personifies Angelo as “the demigod,Authority” whose warrant to shame offenders originates in “the words of heaven” (1.2.120, 122). In these lines he accepts the early modern orthodoxy on temporal authority. But when he speaks to Lucio moments later, Claudio thinks about Angelo not as Authority personified, but rather as an individual engaged in his own choreographed self-display before the city. Claudio surmises that his arrest showcases Angelo’s power: “that the body public be / A horse whereon the governor doth ride, / Who, newly in the seat, that it may know / He can command, lets it straight feel the spur” (1.2.159–62). “’Tis surely for a name,” Claudio concludes (1.2.171).These lines might also be applied to the Duke’s plan. In maintaining his privacy and let- ting the laws slide, the Duke has not made the “public”“feel the spur” in quite some time. Doing so now would only produce their hatred and anger, further confirming his view of them as an increasingly autonomous public whose existence is only nominally associated with his office. The people’s cheers signify less a re-presentation of that “demigod, Authority” than his place as a celebrity. Through the first three scenes of the play Shakespeare establishes the Duke’s primary motive, which is to restore the sacramental authority of his real presence (or what Habermas calls “representative publicity”) and that means dismantling the modes of discourse through which this public makes itself.33

32. For a discussion of the relation between punishment and “exemplary authority” in the play, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago, 1988), pp. 92–97.

33. Habermas, pp. 10–11.

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Shakespeare correlates the Duke’s alienated authority with the very practices that were constitutive of an early modern public sphere: namely, his subjects’ interest in news and (as we just saw with Claudio) their analysis of the actions of magistrates.The characters are not partisan debaters in a civil society, nor is the political analysis they do always very deep, but they do obsessively trade news with one another. The word “news” jangles throughout the play: Lucio asks the Duke, disguised as a friar,“What news abroad, friar? what news?” (3.2.82–83); Escalus asks the friar, “What news abroad i’ the world” (3.2.221); Barnadine asks Abhorson, “What’s the news with you?” (4.3.39); and even Duke Vin- centio, anxious to confirm that Angelo cancelled Claudio’s execution, asks the Provost, “Now, sir, what news?” (4.2.114).34 In addition to incorporating news into his plays, Shakespeare also draws attention to the desire for news itself. Although “news” does not always narrowly signify political information, these demands to know what is happening establish a society in flux, perhaps captured best by Mistress Overdone: “Why,here’s a change indeed in the commonwealth!What shall become of me?” (1.2.104–05).While Mistress Overdone reacts with apprehen- sion about the mutable commonwealth, others, like Lucio, arrogate social capital to themselves by being in-the-know about what’s happen- ing. Lucio claims to have learned by “the very nerves of state / His givings-out were of an infinite distance / From his true-meant design” (1.4.53–55).To know news is to represent oneself as a political insider. Access to news allows characters like Lucio (and Ben Jonson’s Sir Politic Would-Be) to inflate their prestige—in a manner, incidentally, not unlike the theater’s—by their intimated proximity to arcana imperii.

News makes politics public. Like rumor and report, news helps constitute a public sphere in which strangers connect to one another through a shared interest, probe into mysteries of state, and begin to form a sense of public opinion. Duke Vincentio sees the exchange of news as transgressive. His argument against news becomes clear when

34. The play’s second scene contributes especially to the play’s use of news: Lucio and two gentlemen discuss how, “If the Duke with the other dukes come not to composition with the King of Hungary, why then all the dukes fall upon the King” (1.2.1–3). Although Lever (pp. 386–88) and Marcus (pp. 186–93) provide ways of reading a reference to the King of Hungary in the context of 1604, these lines are most likely additions made by Thomas Middleton for a performance of the play in 1621. The strongest evidence for this is their close resemblance to a newssheet of 1621. Nothing in my argument relies on these particular post-1604 additions. But they do illustrate how playing companies continually updated plays with news. See John Jowett, “The Audacity of Measure for Measure in 1621,” The Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001), 229–47.

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Escalus asks him (while he is disguised as the friar) for the news. Not only does the Duke refuse to share news, his response critiques the concept of news itself: “None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness, that the dissolution of it must cure it. Novelty is only in request, and, as it is, as dangerous to be ag’d in any kind of course, as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accurs’d. Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news” (3.2.221– 30). A gloss: there is no news except that goodness is under assault, partly because people pursue what is new (“novelty”) rather than constant, universal virtue.Amidst pervasive distrust, the only bonds that remain between men are those of debt and credit (“security”).Yet this is always the state of fallen man: hence, “this news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news.”These verbose, universal, and timeless lines make the most sense when contrasted with a discourse that is concise, local, and immediate—that is, with news. That these lines are quite boring, then, is precisely the point. Not only is there, as far as everyday people are concerned, no such thing as news, but the people’s obsession with this “novelty” hastens the degeneration of society.35

The Duke’s critique of news is informed by his encounter with Lucio in the prison, an encounter that highlights the problem with a public that liberally discusses its rulers. At this point in the play the Duke, disguised as “Friar Lodowick,” has learned of Angelo’s proposal and has interviewed Isabella. He meets Lucio, who asks, “What news abroad, friar? what news?” and then again, “What news, friar, of the Duke?” (3.2.82–83, 86).When the Duke in turn asks for news, Lucio speculates on the Duke’s whereabouts before criticizing him:“It was mad fantas- tical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to” (3.2.92–94). He goes on to judge Angelo more severely, arguing that although he“dukes it well” and“puts transgression to it,”his juridical aggression merely compensates for his impotence (3.2.94–95, 111). Angelo, moreover, is unmerciful because, having been either “spawn’d” by “a sea maid” or between “two stock-fishes,” he lacks

35. However, the Duke’s next question for Escalus—“I pray you, sir, of what disposition was the Duke?”—baits Escalus into the kind of analysis of the ruler he has just criticized (3.2.230). The anxious question teeters uncomfortably between entrapment and the need to be flattered. Escalus notes him as “a gentleman of all temperance,” but pointedly changes the subject to Claudio’s impending execution (3.2.237).

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human feelings (3.2.108–09). Lucio ultimately contrasts the less-than- human Angelo with the all-too-human Duke.While Angelo is impotent and unfeeling, the Duke “had some feeling for the sport; he knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy” (3.2.119–20). Because of the Duke’s own lechery, Lucio argues that “ere he would have hang’d a man for the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid for the nursing a thousand” (3.2.117–18).Thus Lucio makes the Duke the foster father of all the city’s bastards and the patron of his subjects’ libertinism.Warming to his theme, Lucio goes on to describe the Duke as an unusually indiscriminate lecher who “would mouth with a beggar, though she smelt [of ] brown bread and garlic” (3.2.183–84). What especially galls the Duke is how Lucio claims access to privileged information: “Sir, I was an inward of his,” Lucio says. “A shy fellow was the Duke, and I believe I know the cause of his withdrawing. . . . [But] ’tis a secret must be lock’d within the teeth and lips” (3.2.130–32). In a line the affirms the Duke’s opinion of popularity, Lucio then says that the Duke is “a very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow” and that “I know him, and I love him” (3.2.139, 149).

Lucio fulfills every stereotype the Duke already held about the public: he passes salacious lies off as inside information, and he casts judgment on his prince. Lucio’s report wounds the Duke especially by singling out for mockery the very source of his pride—his “complete bosom” that is impenetrable to “the dribbling dart of love” (1.3.3, 2). The Duke vents his anger in a soliloquy:

O place and greatness! millions of false eyes Are stuck upon thee.Volumes of report Run with these false, and most contrarious quest Upon thy doings; thousand escapes of wit Make thee the father of their idle dream, And rack thee in their fancies. (4.1.59–64)

The “millions of false eyes” that follow his every move are not false because they intend to deceive but rather because they apprehend what they see falsely—which is why private people should not speak of politics in the first place. Yet to see him is to speak of him. These “volumes of report” (“report” here is a pun that unites news and noise) become menacing in the following lines, since “quest”—which as a noun meant an inquest but as a verb, the sounds dogs make while

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hunting—evokes barking dogs.36 The Duke likens the public, then, to a pack of dogs, and himself, to their prey. Like Ben Jonson’s epigram in which he finds that “the Town’s Honest Man’s” “loud” and “bawdy” talk is a great deal “of news, and noise,” so too does the Duke collapse news into mere noise.37 This noise, rooted in his subjects’ “idle dreams” of the prince, is an instrument of torture; their imaginative constructions of his life (their “fancies”) are the “rack” over which he is stretched.

The Duke’s pain may be connected to his repressed guilt about withdrawing from his official, paternalistic responsibilities to the com- monwealth. As Kenneth Gross notes, “The imagery suggests that these bruits and stories are like illegitimate children, not simply running free, but somehow seeking him out, making him their father, soliciting him to acknowledge a paternity not his own” (p. 37).The “volumes of report” thus turn into the more suggestively sexual “thousand escapes of wit” with dangerously seminal properties. Furthermore, the Duke’s latent incorporation of Lucio’s language (of bastard children) exempli- fies the infectious nature of slanderous language.38 Finally, it is important that the Duke responds to Lucio’s political talk in general terms that implicate all of Vienna, rather than particularly focusing on Lucio. In doing so he treats Lucio less as an individual than a synecdoche of the public itself. Later in the play, his ability to silence Lucio will become the proof of his ability to manage public voices more generally.

At stake in the Duke’s speech is an attack on the modes of discourse through which people talk of state, which is simultaneously a means through which people constitute a public. Although Angelo’s policing of sexual crime appears to follow a different agenda than the Duke’s attempt to quell news and slander, Shakespeare depicts both sex and speech as forms of public circulation with others. It is no coincidence that Lucio’s way of publicizing the Duke keys on sex.The Duke’s rage at Lucio originates just as much from being represented as a libertine “mouthing with” (kissing) women on the public streets, as it does from

36. OED, “quest” 5a and b. My reading of this soliloquy is indebted to Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago, 2001), pp. 70–71.

37. Jonson, “On the Town’s Honest Man,” in Parfitt, ll. 9, 10. Similarly, Rumor’s prologue to 2 Henry IV connects “noise” to “news”: he says his “office is / To noise abroad” the defeat of the Lancastrian army;“The posts come tiring on, / And not a man of them brings other news / Than they have heard from me” (Prologue, 29, 37–39).

38. Gross points out that according to early modern conceptions of hearing, in which words physically penetrate the listener, even the act of hearing this report implicates the Duke in the public circulation he seeks to avoid (pp. 69, 78).

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Lucio’s impropriety in “mouthing” (verbally publishing) the Duke in public. And because Lucio is a representative for the public (at least in the Duke’s eyes), it fits Shakespeare’s larger patterning of sex and publicity that he is also a notorious whoremonger, and that his punishment—to marry a prostitute—unifies in one sentence what the Duke sees as two degenerative forms of public circulation. Moreover, the sex tends to manifest itself visibly on the characters’ bodies, whether it be syphilis (Lucio and the gentlemen), pregnancy (Juliet), or arrest and humiliation (Claudio).The play’s metonymic link between sex and publicity is even more apparent in the negative.The Duke,Angelo, and Isabella fear the ways in which their interior subjectivity is made violable by sexual, discursive, and visual penetrations.39 They are each abstinent and use various strategies to remove themselves from public circulation.The Duke lives a celibate “life removed.” Angelo cultivates a public reputation for severe austerity, so much so that no one would believe he even has sexual desires. Isabella seeks admittance into a convent that—to illuminate again the play’s the tacit link between sex and discourse—prohibits nuns from speaking to men without the prioress’ supervision, and even then, requires that they can either show their face and be silent, or speak with their faces veiled.

But the link between sex and publicity is best revealed in the image that begins this essay: Shakespeare’s use of Dugdale’s description of James being quite literally “preased” by his own popularity. Lines about crowding a popular king hardly seem sexual. But consider the dramatic context: Angelo waits impatiently for Isabella and prepares to extort her. Angelo exclaims that his raging “blood,” which is collecting too much around his heart,“dispossess[es] all my other parts / Of necessary fitness” (2.4.22–23). In two successive metaphors, Angelo’s mind falls on images of crowds:

So play the throng with one that swounds, Come all to help him, and so stop the air By which he should revive; and even so The general subject to a well-wish’d king Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness

39. Relatedly, Mary Thomas Crane writes,“Just as sexual penetration is necessary to produce biological pregnancy and human offspring, linguistic and visual penetration are necessary to bring a human subject into being and to enable it to participate in discursive exchange.” Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, 2001), p. 171.

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Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offense. (2.4.24–30)

In the first metaphor the people are well-meaning passers-by who try to help a fainted man but instead further impair him by stifling his air through their crowding. In the second simile Angelo is not an anony- mous fainter but instead a “well-wished king” offended by his enthu- siastic subjects. Although he uses these similes of suffocation and crowding to depict an inward state (how sexual arousal affects his reason), his image of people crowding in public affirms a strong if unconscious association between sex and publicity. Angelo only risks propositioning Isabella when he feels comfortable that the laws against slander, joined with his puritanical reputation, will “stifle” her in her “own report” and make her “smell of calumny” (2.4.158–59). Yet his threat that she will choke on her words if she dares publicize his obscene proposal recalls his own simile of the fainted man whose “air” is “stopped.” His threat reveals his latent fear that he is the one who will be gasping for air in public.This is exactly what happens, near the end of the play, when Isabella publicly accuses him before the entire city and he finally endures public shame for his abuse of his authority.The Duke, Angelo, and Isabella fear the publicity of sex, and in Shakes- peare’s Vienna, their fears are wholly legitimate. Sex is “a dark deed darkly answered” that, pace Lucio, is repeatedly “[brought] to light” in the forms of public talk and disciplinary spectacle. Given Shakespeare’s treatment of sex and discourse as forms of public circulation, it is horrifyingly appropriate for Isabella and Angelo that sex would lead to the public exposure that concludes the play.

The Duke’s problem is that his authority is too dependent upon the customs of popularity. Were he to enforce the law like Angelo, he would be subject to wider slander than he already is. Despite his reluctance to “stage” himself to his subjects, in the play’s final act the Duke orchestrates an explicitly public and ceremonial gathering in which the city itself becomes his stage. The Duke’s letters instruct Angelo and Escalus to meet him at the city gates where they will formally “redeliver [their] authorities” to him (4.4.6). Moreover, the transfer back of power will be accompanied by a proclamation that “if any crave redress of injustice, they should exhibit their petitions in the

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street” (4.4.9–10). Shakespeare takes care to register the excitement and bustle generated by the Duke’s return. Friar Peter tells Isabella and Mariana that he has “found you out a stand most fit, / Where you may have such vantage on the Duke” (4.6.10–12); he hurries them along, since “Twice have the trumpets sounded; / The generous and gravest citizens / Have hent to the gates” (4.6.12–14).

The Duke stages his return, then, quite consciously a royal entry— the very kind of processional, public pageantry that Elizabeth I used so expertly to cultivate her popularity. But the Duke does so with a difference: while the successful Elizabethan pageant evoked love and cheering, the Duke’s produces awe and silence. James’s discomfort with progresses and pageants was that it produced him as a performer, who by demonstrating good cheer and interacting with his subjects, would win his people’s love.These kinds of appearances revealed his authority as negotiated, as legitimated by the people’s cheers. When the Duke says he does “not like to stage me to their eyes,” he highlights the unseemly theatrical aspect—especially his working for applause—of producing his authority. The difference in the last act is that he temporarily uses theatrical techniques to restore in public view his real presence.To put it more schematically, the theatrical serves as a thresh- old to the ritual.The representational realm of authority, sagging under the weight of the overly theatrical self-staging that produces mere popularity, is infused with the real presence that Angelo likens to “pow’r divine” (5.1.369).The Duke’s royal entry becomes not merely symbolic but a ritual process through which he can exercise unmediated sover- eign power: in this case, judging and sentencing the guilty, dispensing pardons, and even commanding marriages.

The Duke’s goal, then, is awe and silence, but to get there, he must first provoke the very public noise he deplores. The final scene is chaotic: the Duke (as Friar Lodowick) instructed Isabella to publicly accuse Angelo; but as the Duke, he mocks her petition and finally arrests her for a “blasting and a scandalous breath [that falls] / On him so near us” (5.1.122–23). Throughout the Duke’s questioning of Isa- bella and then Mariana, he is repeatedly interrupted by Lucio. The proceedings are punctuated quite literally by the Duke’s increasingly impatient demands for Lucio to be silent:“You were not bid to speak” (5.1.78); “Silence that fellow” (5.1.181); “For the benefit of silence, would thou were [drunk and insensible] too” (5.1.191); and “Sirrah, no more!” (5.1.214). The Duke needs Lucio to be silent because as M.

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Lindsay Kaplan argues, he is trying to reclaim slander as a discursive strategy the prince uses to police his subjects rather than the other way around.40 Kaplan’s reading can be developed a step further: after the Duke awkwardly slips away from the inquest and returns disguised as Lodowick, he blasts Vienna’s corruption:

My business in this state Made me a looker-on here in Vienna, Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o’errun the stew; laws for all faults, But faults so countenanc’d, that the strong statutes Stand like the forfeits in a barber’s shop, As much in mock as mark. (5.1.316–22)

Lodowick openly criticizes magistrates who, by failing to police “faults,” encourage their proliferation. Or as his shrewdly doubled metaphor puts it, “faults” boil over the “stew” (soup and brothel) into society generally. But the public criticism of magistrates is itself such a fault, and Escalus responds accordingly: “Slander to th’ state! / Away with him to prison” (5.1.322–23). As Kaplan notes, the issue is not the truth or falsity of the friar’s claim but rather the illegality of such public critique of the state itself (p. 18). For the Duke, “Lodowick’s” critique of Vienna articulates the very kind of public talk he wants to silence.

The Duke uses his role as Lodowick to take on the voice of the public—but only so that voice, the possibility of a critical public stance, can be made to disappear.And the moment in which that public voice is vanquished, when Lucio pulls off the friar’s hood, is the same moment of Duke Vincentio’s real royal entry. His subjects behold him not with meaningless “loud applause and aves vehement,” but with silent awe and wonder. Silence at an Elizabethan-style pageant would signify tacit resistance to the performance, but the Duke turns silence into a sign of awe. In doing so, he circumvents the customs of popu- larity, managing to stage himself without making audience participa- tion and applause the index of his success. Excepting a comment from Escalus about Angelo’s fall (which the Duke ignores) and Mariana’s and Isabella’s pleas for Angelo’s life (which the Duke expected and endorses), no one for the rest of the play speaks without his permis- sion. Even Lucio waits until he is addressed before speaking. In the

40. M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), p. 93.

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collective, subjected silence the Duke produces, he wields sovereign power. This power is made even more awe-inspiring for the on-stage characters when they learn that he has preserved Claudio’s life and Isabella’s virginity—thus thwarting Angelo from carrying out his own evil intentions. The ritual integrity of the royal entry, which should promote belief in his power rather than mere popularity, is restored. And so too is the Duke’s lost sense of real presence, which is instantiated in the sovereign performative speech acts through which he passes sentences, grants pardons, and commands marriages.41

The Duke’s pursuit of subjected silence extends beyond suppression of Lucio’s interruptions. He directly addresses six different characters— Angelo, Mariana, Claudio, Juliet, Barnadine, and Isabella—but then denies them opportunities to reply.These are the play’s famous “open silences.”42 Harry Berger reads these silences as a form of collective resistance to the “coerciveness of the Duke’s matchmaking and his monopoly over the instruments of Happy Ending.”43 However, as John Durham Peters argues, silence is only an effective tactic in the presence of an authority that seeks dialogue; such an authority justifies itself through negotiation with its subjects.44 But the last thing the Duke wants is more dialogue. He communicates with his subjects henceforth through “dissemination” instead. Because this model of communication imposes a fundamental inequality of power, one in which all speech originates with him, it is a fit strategy for someone attempting to assume absolute authority. Thus the other characters’ silence registers submission to his newly dreadful authority rather than protest. The collective silence suggests that the Duke’s royal entry reworks not only how the people understand him, but also how they understand themselves in relation to his authority.

The most troubling silence, of course, is Isabella’s after the Duke’s unexpected proposal. Recent political readings of Measure for Measure treat the marriage in allegorical terms. Conrad Condren describes Isa-

41. As Leah Marcus writes, the Duke becomes the Jacobean ideal of the lex loquens, the Roman “speaking law” (p. 178).

42. Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 63–96.

43. Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford, 1997), p. 364.

44. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air:A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago, 1999), pp. 33–62. Peters locates the origins of dialogue with Socrates and dissemination with Jesus of Nazareth.

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bella as “a personification of contemplative priorities” and the Duke as a robust example of the “active life”; their union evokes James I, whose new subjects hoped was the perfect blend of contemplative and active lives.45 For Julia Reinhard Lupton, Isabella is “the feminine allegory of the city itself,” and by marrying her, the Duke, previously estranged from Vienna, offers to “remarry the city.” Lupton argues that the Duke uses the royal entry to alter how his subjects relate to him by developing a civic and consensual, rather than monarchical and unilateral, articulation of power, and in doing so the play plots early modernity’s move from codes of “sovereignty” to “civility,” finally encapsulated by the Prince’s marriage to one of his subjects.46 The Duke’s marriage to Isabella, which, he notes, makes Claudio his brother, seems to open the Duke to civility by integrating him into the com- munity. Despite his promise for reciprocity—“what’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine” (5.1.537)—the Duke’s proposal, which strikes almost all readers and audiences as coercive, smacks far more of sovereign authority than a new era of civility.The most significant transformation of the play’s final act is not from sovereignty to civility, but from noise to silence—a phenomenal transition that, as the discourses around James’s succession attest, registers movement from what Dugdale called being “publique” to subjection. Rather than fostering rights of citizen- ship, the Duke repeals the discursive public that has developed during his reclusive rule. Isabella is the Duke’s choice precisely because, as one who has withdrawn from public life by entering a convent, she does not stand for the city.47 It is Lucio, not Isabella, who representsVienna—and with his proliferate and profligate discourse and lechery, the aspect of the city that he represents is its distinctively public features.

By reading Measure for Measure in the context of James’s distaste for popularity, the play’s “open silences” take on contemporary political resonance. Unregulated public talk—news that to the Duke is mere noise, no more substantive than dogs barking—is transformed into disciplined silence. Measure for Measure can be plotted as a move from

45. Conal Condren, “Unfolding the ‘Properties of Government’: The Case of Measure for Measure and The History of Political Thought,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, ed. David Armitage, et al. (Cambridge, Eng., 2009), p. 173.

46. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago, 2005), pp. 157–58.

47. Or if the symbology of the royal entry demands a literal feminine counterpart, she represents an ideal version of the city uncorrupted by public circulation—excluding, one might argue, her collusion on the bed-trick which was at the Duke’s behest.

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noise to silence in the public sphere, and to have a public sphere without noise is tantamount to not having one at all.The message is an apt one for Shakespeare’s audience who, as Dugdale put it, must learn to “stand still, use silence, and see all.”

Writing to Sir John Harington in 1608, Lord Thomas Howard com- pared Elizabeth’s and James’s approaches to dealing with their subjects: “Your Queene did talk of her subjects love and good affections, and in good truth she aimed well; our King talketh of his subjects fear and subjection, and herein I thinke he dothe well too, as long as it holdeth good.”48 Each monarchical style attempts to control how his or her subjects relate to the royal office as well as how the people are positioned in relation to high court politics. By dramatizing a head of state who cleverly upsets the English customs of popularity, Measure for Measure produces “fear and subjection” in place of political relations defined by “love and good affections.” That the first recorded perfor- mance of Measure for Measure was at Whitehall prompted Josephine Waters Bennett to argue that the play was written for court perfor- mance with an eye toward flattering James, the company’s new patron (p. 109). In a performance at court the Duke’s renewal of his authority, especially as it is connected to his triumph over slanderous public talk, would have pleased James. When the company played at court, they helped produce James’s representative publicity insofar as their theat- rical labor was animated by, and an extension of, his authority. No plays by the professional theatrical companies, however, were written expressly for the court; and although King James was the company’s patron, his sponsorship was more legal in character than economic or personal.49 The longstanding justification of the professional playing companies was to develop new plays, or keep others in repertory, for the court’s use.The companies’ real survival depended on their success in the market for cultural goods.They had their own popularity with audiences to worry about.The playing companies, whose patrons were both king and commoner, operated in a dual stance with respect to publicity. This point is important because what I want to argue now

48. Sir John Harington. Nugae Antiquae, being a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Papers, ed. Thomas Park (1804) 1, 395. See also Goldberg, p. 28.

49. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 119–29.

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is that the performance space greatly determined how Measure for Measure’s representation of authority would have been understood in 1604.

The Duke works to instill in the people a silence that signifies obedience to his absolute power.That silence,however, is ruptured when the audience applauds as he and the other characters leave the stage. It is not the Duke’s performance but the actor’s that is rewarded, and he has been “attorneyed” at the audience’s service, working for their “loud applause” from the beginning (5.1.385). Attending to the sound of applause is worth doing because it highlights the commercial condi- tions of professional theater, in which performance is not so much a commodity as “a service of a very dynamic and labile kind.”50 The play that most resembles Measure for Measure, the near-contemporaneous All’s Well that Ends Well, ends with an epilogue that explicitly calls for applause:

The king’s a beggar, now the play is done; All is well ended, if this suit be won, That you express content; which we will pay, With strife to please you, day exceeding day. Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts; Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts. (Epilogue, 1–6)

The invitation in the theater to participate by judging and giving thanks underscores how plays are a complicated form of service and labor. This epilogue also helps to explain why James (and the Duke) revolted so strongly against the customs of popularity. It made the theatricality of kingship too explicit, and to the extent that applause signified not just thanks but also approval, popularity subjected princes to the critical judgment of their audiences. By demanding silence in his subjects (and refusing to play the king in any more civic pageants), James sought to obliterate the theatrical model of a king’s publicity. The step from cheering during a progress and evaluating James’s response, and debating James’s claims about the king’s preeminence over English common law, is not so great as it might first appear.

In the epilogue to All’s Well, Shakespeare stresses the audience’s active participation in a reciprocally produced event. In doing so, he

50. Joseph Roach, “Vicarious:Theater and the Rise of Synthetic Experience,” in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, ed. W. B. Worthen with Peter Holland (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 120.

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suppresses the actual economics of playgoing in the play by presenting the players as the ones who “pay” rather than the playgoers. In place of a commodity exchange, he introduces terms closer to patronage and courtliness: the play is a “suit” submitted to “Your gentle hands.” The “reciprocal courtesy” of applause ennobles the audience.51 The enno- bling of the audience is one of the democratizing features of the playhouse.

With this language of gentility, Shakespeare effaces the degree to which the theater was actually the home to its own public, one in which membership was constituted not by rank but rather one’s willingness to pay admission and keep up with the punctual activities of the companies.52 The playhouse was a democratizing space because in it, private persons imitated the actions of kings and queens, and those roles were often infused with topical political content. By pro- ducing an intercitational field of real and virtual figures (in this instance a duke who resembles in several important details James I), Shakespeare’s theater blended aesthetic judgments with political ones. The democratizing aspects of the Globe—its codes of courtesy toward commoners, its ease of access, and its invitations to judge—oddly echo characteristics of early modern figures of “popularity.” These aspects also undermine the solemn instructions about popularity and publicity that Measure for Measure attempts to deliver.

My argument about the return to full-scale noise at the play’s end, if overly literal, is consonant with less visible ways in which Measure for Measure cultivates, rather than disables, an increasingly critical, political public.While theViennese citizens in Measure for Measure are amazed at the Duke, whose knowledge and exercise of authority seem “like pow’r divine,” Londoners at the play have witnessed the Duke’s considerable labor in achieving this effect of real presence, or in more theatrical terms, his production of the illusion of “pow’r divine.” By witnessing the Duke’s labor, the playgoing public can assume a critical distance from its effects, both in the fictional world of the play and perhaps in their own relation to monarchical authority. Thus even as Duke Vincentio labors to deform the public sphere of the play, Shakespeare works in the opposite direction: he invites his audience to consider how

51. On the audience as patron, see Alexander Leggett, “The Audience as Patron: The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), pp. 295–315.

52. See Paul Yachnin, “Hamlet and the Social Thing,” in Making Publics, pp. 81–95.

56 English Literary Renaissance

authority produces itself through fundamentally labored and theatrical (rather than metaphysical or divine) means. Consequently, Measure for Measure demystifies sovereign power even as it dramatizes an exercise of that power.53 What makes the play so effective, moreover, is its points of contact (however fragmented) with James’s interactions with the people—interactions that, especially early in his reign, were portentous for those forecasting how he would conceive of and exercise his authority. By using Dugdale’s timely pamphlet about James, as well as dramatizing the problem of a discursive public itself, Shakespeare traffics in the very kind of news and representation of a prince that Duke Vincentio condemns. Shakespeare’s play thus produces ways of inhabiting a public even as it concurrently offers an elitist critique of publicity.

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53. To put it in Robert Wiemann’s terms, the Duke’s reformation of the public occurs in the locus of the stage, which is firmly bound by the play’s characters and fiction, but the absolute subjection of this public unravels in the platea, the aspect of the theater associated with actors, the audience, and metatheatricality. See Wiemann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 73–85; and William Dodd, “Power and Performance: Measure for Measure in the Public Theater of 1604–1605,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996), 211–40.

57Jeffrey S. Doty

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