![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
“Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry?” – “I do; and bear the shame most patiently”. Thus begins one of the most overlooked dialogues in Measure for Measure. Hidden in what appears to be an irrelevant rhetorical exercise in penitentiary pedagogy is in fact a covert battle of semantic appropriation and dissimulation which has largely gone unnoticed by audiences and critics alike. This paper seeks to address this gap through a close reading of the use of equivocation in Measure for Measure, grounded in the linguistic and theological controversies of Early Modern theology. This paper suggests that whilst the practice of equivocation seems to be condemned by Shakespeare elsewhere, in Measure for Measure he explores the liberating potential of Jesuitical discursive practices as a subtle probing of the very nature of truth, and as a means of defence against an unjust authority.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Measure for Measure (2.3.19-20). All references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from the Riverside edition unless stated otherwise.
2 Matt 7:2: “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” All biblical references are taken from the Geneva Bible (1560).
3 The Papal bull “Regnans in Excelsis” (1570) excommunicated “[that] slave of enormities Elizabeth, pretended queen of England” (flagitiorum serva Elizabetha prætensa Angliæ regina) and forbade her subjects to obey her on pain of excommunication; this made Jesuits immediately suspect as potential hostile agents of Spain and the Papacy.
4 For an infamous example of this, see Navarrus Commentarius in cap. Humanae Aures, XXII. qu. V. De Veritate Responsi (679), Slater, Zagorin p.168, fn. 35, and Huntley:
[A] Spanish grandee seduced a rich young maiden by accompanying his promise of marriage with his own mental reservation that he had no intentions of matrimony. When he abandoned her, naturally he was sued by her family. But the great lawyer Navarrus won acquittal for his client on the plea of restrictio mentalis. This story frequently appears in anti-Jesuitical literature. But Navarrus himself says that he developed the doctrine from an incident in the life of St. Francis of Assisi. When the constabulary were chasing a poor wretch suspected of robbery, they asked Francis, "Did you see the thief? Which way did he go?" Francis, placing his hands in his sleeves, pointed with a hidden finger in the right direction but looking in the opposite direction said, "He went that way." Impelled by charity, St. Francis told the truth in the sight of God, though of course the police never caught their man (Huntley, 391).
5 The universal, implied rules of conversation that enable us to communicate what is not literally stated. See Davis (Citation2019).
6 See Slater (Citation1911).
7 On the strict requirement of the seal of confession, see Lea (Confession and Absolution): “It is a self-evident proposition that, if auricular confession is to be enforced, the penitent must be assured of the inviolable secrecy of his admissions of wrong-doing” (412). See also Aquinas, ST (Supp): Q. 9 Art. 4, which affirms the seal as essential to the sacrament.
8 Soto, lxxix
9 Navarrus, fol. 219r: “Una & eadem ratio potest componi ex diversis partibus, quarum aliae sint expresse vocales vel scriptae, & aliae tacitae & mentales: & quod ipsa tota sit vera, & partes eius separatae sint falsae & haereticae”. For a fuller discussion of the debate between Soto and Navarrus, see Tutino, “Nothing but the truth?”. For more on equivocation and Early Modern Catholicism, see Tutino, Shadows of Doubt.
10 See Tutino (135–8), and Zagorin. Broad mental reservation, or at least its mechanism (amphibology), did not escape controversy, either: Donatus names amphibology — in particular that arising from the grammatical conflation of nominative and accusative in report clauses — as the last in his list of the 12 Vices of Speech in his Ars Grammatica: Cum barbarismo et soloecismo vitia duodecim numerantur hoc modo, barbarismus […] amphibolia. (pag. 394, linea: 26).
Amphibolia est ambiguitas dictionis, quae fit aut per casum accusativum, ut siquis dicat “audio secutorem retiarium superasse”; aut per commune verbum, ut siquis dicat “criminatur Cato”, “vadatur Tullius”, nec addat quem vel a quo; aut per distinctionem, ut “vidi statuam auream hastam tenentem”. (pag. 395, linea: 20)
Thus when someone says that she was told “secutorem retiarium superasse” you can’t tell whether she heard that the secutor overcame the retiarius or vice-versa, because it’s a report clause and so both gladiators are mentioned in the accusative case.
11 See Innocent XI: A decree made at Rome, the second of March, 1679 condemning some opinions of the Jesuits and other Casuists (Propositions 26, 27). After this papal condemnation, no Catholic theologian has defended the lawfulness of strict mental reservations (see Slater, Citation1911).
12 For further reading on equivocation in Early Modern England, see Olga Valbuena’s Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (2003), and Janet Halley’s “Equivocation and the Legal Conflict over Religious Identity in Early Modern England” (2013).
13 Abbot, 4–5.
14 Puttenham, 266.
15 Ibid., 267.
16 Ibid.
17 See Garnet, 3–4. For more on Southwell’s trial see Devlin.
18 Morton, 47.
19 Ibid., 60.
20 Mason, 13. For more on the debates over equivocation in this period, see Tutino, and Carrafiello.
21 Garnet, 52.
22 Ibid., 46. Garnet says: M. Southwell, of blessed memorie, proposed this question at his arraignment at the barre unto his accusers, “that if the Queene upon a sudden insurrection were pursued by her enemies with intention to deprive her of her crown and life, and A. B., knowing where she was, was asked where she was, what must he do? He could not discover her, for that would be against his duty. If he denied that he knew, it would be a lie (which we all hold to be unlawful even for the saving of life). Or shall he deny it by some equivocation which avoids the lie ?” (3-4).
23 See Barker.
24 Pricket, image 6.
25 See Paul’s The Royal Play of Macbeth (1950); Huntley’s “Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation” (1964); Mullaney’s “Lying Like Truth: Representation and Treason in Renaissance England” (1980) which claims that “Macbeth is perhaps the fullest literary representation of treason’s amphibology in its age” (38); Scott’s “Macbeth’s — And Our — Self-Equivocation” (1986); Wills’ Witches and Jesuits : Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1995); and, more recently, Fahey’s Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification (2011); Miola’s “Two Jesuit Shadows in Shakespeare” (in Jackson and Marotti, 2011); Butler’s “Equivocation, Cognition, and Political Authority in Early Modern England” (2012); White’s Ambivalent Macbeth (2018) and Curran’s “That Suggestion: Catholic Casuistry, Complexity, and Macbeth” (2018).
26 Huntley, 397.
27 Curran, 14.
28 The sexualised language Macbeth uses in response to his first encounter with the witches in his aside in 1.3.127-142 is suggestive of seduction: “the swelling act”; “soliciting” (see OED “solicit”, v. 4c, 4d, 5b); “yield”; “unfix my hair”; “makes my seated heart knock at my ribs”.
29 There is evidence that a child delivered by C-section might be considered “not born”: the 13th-century Spanish St Raymond Nonnatus (“not-born”) was so called because he was cut from his mother’s womb when she died during childbirth. The Third Apparition similarly provides a helpful clue to explain the migration of Dunsinane Forest, in that he bears “a tree in his hand.”
30 Mullaney, 37.
31 Desper, 121.
32 Hamlet calls Ophelia: “the most beautified Ophelia” (2.2.109-10) – “beautified” meaning both “beatified” (a stage in the process of saintly canonization), and, conversely, made externally beautiful only by cosmetics, carrying connotations of falsehood and even prostitution: “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (3.1.143-4). Similarly, Hamlet rejects Claudius’ accusation “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” with “Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun” (1.2.67). The phrase “in the sun” is a sylleptic amphibology, as “sun” — acceptably, the sun of Royal favour that precludes melancholy — can also be heard as “son”, which both implies (less acceptably) that he has been made Claudius’ son more than he would like, and also acts as a reminder of his loyalty to his dead father, to whom he claims he is too good a son to forget.
33 While Doloff claims that the Gravedigger equivocates, he appears to be more of an “anti-equivocator”: equivocation relies on a manipulation of Gricean implicature, and the Gravedigger playfully refuses to abide by Gricean principles, taking everything literally instead and making sure the multiple meanings of words are understood, rather than concealed:
Clo. Faith, e’en with losing his wits.
Ham. Upon what ground?
Clo. Why, here in Denmark. (5.1.159-61)
34 Richard ironically reassures Clarence: “Well, your imprisonment shall not be long, / I will deliver you, or else lie for you” (Richard III, 1.1.114-115). This is identified as equivocation in Slights, p.109.
35 See Christofides, Citation2010. For more on equivocation in Shakespeare, see Christofides, Shakespeare and Equivocation (2008); McDonald; and Desper.
36 Kwan, 364.
37 See Davis.
38 In this very scene, Hamlet refers to female genitals as “nothing”: “That’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs.” — “What is, my lord?” — “Nothing”. (3.2.117-119). See also OED: “thing” n. 11c, which is slang for penis.
39 See pp. 129–142.
40 Ibid., 141.
41 Lever, “Introduction” xvii.
42 Hillman, 94. Scholars reading the Duke as a Christ-analogue include Knight, Coghill, and Battenhouse. See Lever, lvii.
43 As the Arden 3 puts it, “Duke Vincentio, once widely viewed as a wise, resourceful leader of his city, has slumped badly in the opinion polls over the past half-century” (57).
44 Kwan, Hypocrites, 238.
45 Beckwith, 73.
46 Ibid., 75. See pp 73–77 for a discussion of the Duke’s usurpation and abuse of the sacrament of penance.
47 For background on the complex Marriage plot in Measure for Measure, see Lever, “Introduction” liii-lv; Schanzer, “The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure” (1960); Hayne, “Performing Social Practice: The Example of Measure for Measure” (1993); Nagarajan, “Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals” (1963); and Braunmuller and Watson “Introduction”, pp 25–9 (2020). For background on Reformation perspectives on marriage, see Cressy: Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997); and Carlson Marriage and the English Reformation (1994). It is interesting to note that Shakespeare’s first child was conceived while he and Anne Hathaway were in a previously-witnessed troth-plighting or sponsalia per verba de praesenti, which is the same contract that binds Claudio and Juliet in the play, and which was considered valid for the legitimization of issue in Elizabethan England.
48 This is part of the essential theological machinery — the delicate dance of responsiveness — through which Catholic thought reconciled the ideas of divine omnipotence and human free will: the will initially turns towards God, God then chooses (or not) to respond with prevenient grace, the sinner then either accepts or rejects prevenient grace and (in the former case) is rewarded with sufficient or saving grace. The Catholic God woos the soul: the Calvinist one (as Donne famously put it in Holy Sonnet 14) “ravishes” it.
49 Beckwith, 60.
50 See footnote 9. For more on the public humiliation of sinners in Measure for Measure see Beckwith 68-9.
51 Lest we be thought to be importing 21st-century sensibilities here, it is worth noting that while there are several such gratuitous references to a female interlocutor’s “fairness” in the play, they are confined to the three characters most given to sexualising women: the Duke, Angelo and Lucio. See, moreover, the disturbing claim regarding the Duke’s regular, disguised visitations to Mariana, who calls him “a man of comfort, whose advice / Hath often still’d my brawling discontent” (4.1.8-9, emphasis ours). He boasts “I have confessed her and I know her virtue” (5.1.527). While on one level this language is penitential, on another level, “to know” means to be sexually intimate with (OED, “know”, v. 8), and “virtue” is a euphemism for a woman’s virginity (OED n. 2c). See also Hansen (57), which notes this statement’s “insinuating intimacy and hint of prior possession”.
52 OED, “shame”, n. 1c.
53 OED, “shame”, n. 3c.
54 Garnet, 52.
55 Ibid., 5.
56 OED, “as”, 24.
57 OED, “as”, 15c.
58 Regarding penance, see the Council of Trent:
[T]he liberality of the divine munificence is so great that we are able through Jesus Christ to make satisfaction to God the Father not only by punishments voluntarily undertaken by ourselves to atone for sins, or by those imposed by the judgment of the priest according to the measure of our offense, but also, and this is the greatest proof of love, by the temporal afflictions imposed by God and borne patiently by us. [italics added] (9.60). Juliet’s public shame and imprisonment would therefore be valid as the penance, or satisfaction, required by the sacrament.
59 Juliet’s suspicions of the “friar”s’ intentions may be exacerbated by awareness of the common late medieval topos of the “wantown and […] merye” friar who abuses the power of confession to seduce “faire wyves” (see The Canterbury Tales, A.208–224). Interestingly, Shakespeare’s genuine friars are not corrupt.
60 Canon 21 of the IV Lateran Council (1215-16) reads: “Let the priest … be discreet and cautious, so that skilled by practise "he may pour wine and oil" [Luke 10.34] on the wounds of the wounded, diligently inquiring into both the circumstances of the sinner and the sin, by which prudently he may understand what kind of advice he ought to give to him, and, using various experiments to save the sick, what kind of a remedy he ought to apply”.
61 The walled garden in which Vincentio repeatedly visits Mariana to confess her is an allusion to the hortus conclusus trope from the Song of Solomon 4:12: “My sister my spouse is as a garden inclosed [hortus conclusus], as a spring shut vp, and a fountaine sealed vp”, casting Vincentio in the role of the lover. Lucio’s accusations of Vincentio’s licentiousness in 3.2.110-117, 122-125, 175–180 (“he had some feeling of the sport”), while often dismissed as merely slanderous, cause such a violent reaction in the Duke as to suggest that they have hit the mark — he “doth protest too much”. Braunmuller and Watson also observe that while the Duke supposedly cares for individual souls, “he cares mostly about procreative bodies” (67).
62 Ophelia gently rebukes Laertes for this double standard when she warns him about showing her the “steep and thorny way to heaven, / Whilst like a puff’d and reckless libertine / Himself the primrose path of dalliance takes / And recks not his own rede” (1.3.48–5).
63 Greenblatt, 13–140.
64 See Greenblatt, 140.
65 Contrition is perfect sorrow for one’s sin because it has offended God, whereas attrition is a more imperfect sorrow, generated by a fear of consequences. Both are accepted as fulfilling the requirement for remorse in the Sacrament of Penance, but contrition is considered superior. See Hanna.
66 The Arden 3 editors observe that in line 35 “Juliet’s as is slightly ambiguous,” and point out that one of its possible meanings “hints at her resistance to the Duke-Friar’s interpretation of her intercourse and pregnancy as an unqualified or unquestionable evil.” (See Braunmuller and Watson, p.237, Fn. 35).
67 1.3.3.
68 For a discussion of Vincentio’s similarly sadistic treatment of Isabella in telling her that her brother has been executed, see Beckwith, 73–4.
69 See OED 5.a, “a member of a couple who live together or are habitual companions; a lover”. The word could also mean “spouse”, but the Duke’s use of it here clearly draws the legitimacy of their marriage into question, and permits him to pun on sense 2a (“accomplice”).
70 Greenblatt, 140.
71 See, for example, the OED definition of “Jesuitical”, a term also associated in the popular mind with casuistry, the subtle application of moral and legal principles to the intricacies of particular cases like, for example, the supposed “fornication” of Claudio and Juliet. But it would be hard to argue that Shakespeare’s sympathies were more with the “precisian” Angelo and his indiscriminate application of legal absolutes as opposed to the patient casuistry of Escalus in the case of the stewed prunes in Act 2 Scene 1 (or, indeed, with Juliet herself, being persecuted for conceiving her first child in the same circumstances as Shakespeare and his wife).
72 We are not suggesting that Shakespeare was a Catholic, but rather that he had an artistic and intellectual curiosity towards and appreciation of traditional Catholic thought and practice.