jeffrey s. dotyMeasure for Measure and the Problem of Popu.docx

jeffrey s. doty
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.
32
© 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.
33Jeffrey S. Doty
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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.
34 English Literary Renaissance
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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.
ii
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.
35Jeffrey S. Doty

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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.
37Jeffrey S. Doty
Renaissance Inc.
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.
39Jeffrey S. Doty
Renaissance Inc.
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.
iii
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.

41Jeffrey S. Doty
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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.
43Jeffrey S. Doty
Renaissance Inc.
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).
45Jeffrey S. Doty
Renaissance Inc.
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).
47Jeffrey S. Doty
Renaissance Inc.
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.
iv

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
49Jeffrey S. Doty
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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.
51Jeffrey S. Doty
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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.

53Jeffrey S. Doty
Renaissance Inc.
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.”
v
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.
Renaissance Inc.
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.
55Jeffrey S. Doty
Renaissance Inc.
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.

Renaissance Inc.
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.
west texas a&m university
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
Renaissance Inc.
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Tudor Queens
The idea of a female monarch was met with hostility in
medieval England; in the 12th
century Matilda's claim to the throne had led to a long and bitter
civil war. But the death of
Kdward VI in 1553 offered new opportunities for queenship, as
Helen Castor explains.

Exception to the Rule
I
t is ea.sy in the 21 st century to conjure up the
image of a powerful Tudor queen. For subjects
ofthe second Queen Elizabeth, her namesake
and predece.s.sor is an iconic cultural pre.sence
who looms even larger in the English historical
con.sciousness than her extraordinary father, Henry
'II1.1 lerein lies a problem.
We know that England was ruled by kings until
the second halfdf the 16th century, when the crown
Eliza Triumphans painted
by Robert Peake, c.1601.
passed to two queens, one of whom was among the
most successful and significant monarchs that
England has ever had. But in the first half of the 16th
century no one - not Henry VIII, not his children,
not his ministers, not his people - had any inkling of
what was to come. There was no twinkle in Eliza-
beth's eye to alert her contemporaries to the unimag-
inable prospect that Gloriana was waiting in the
wings. To understand the enormity ofthe challenges
Tudor Queens
that confronted Henry VIII's daughters, therefore, we
have to work hard to free ourselves from the coiling
embrace of hindsight.

For Henry VIII, as for his medieval forebears (not
that the artificial boundary between 'medieval' and
'early modern' would have made any sense to
contemporaries), the power ofthe crown was male.
A king was required to preserve order within his
kingdom by giving justice to his people and to
ride into battle to defend its borders against
external threat. Neither role was a job for ,,
a woman. A queen - a word derived
from the Anglo-Saxon cwén, meaning
the wife of a king, not his female coun-
terpart - was called upon to represent a
different facet of monarchy: bringing
feminine prayers for mercy and peace
to the masculine business of making
law and war.
This is why Henry VIII was so
consumed by his determination to father a
son. As only the second monarch of a fragile
new dynasty that had rescued England from
three decades of internecine confiict between York-
ists and Lancastrians, it was his duty and his destiny
to beget a glorious line of Tudor kings. Daughters
did not figure in his plans except as blushing royal
brides for suitably grateful European potentates.
There was good reason, then, for Henry's refusal
to contemplate the possibility that he might leave his
throne to a female heir - though women were not
explicitly barred from inheriting the crown in
England, as they were in France. There, on the
sudden death of Louis X in 1316, a pragmatic deci-
sion had been taken that the king's adult brother,
Philip, should succeed him in place of loan, his four-

year-old daughter, who was not only
female and a child, but also damaged
goods because her mother, Margaret of
Burgundy, had been imprisoned for adul-
tery. This piece of realpolitik was subse-
quently parlayed into a newly minted
'ancient' tradition, the Salic Law, by
which women were excluded from either
inheriting or passing on a claim to the
French throne.
Elsewhere, precedents more
favourable to female succession applied.
In Castile the reign ofthe 12th-century
Queen Urraca had helped to pave the
way for the accession to the throne three
centuries later of Henry Vlll's first
mother-in-law. Queen Isabella. Her
experience in turn served to fuel the
determination of her daughter, Henry's
rejected wife, Catherine of Aragon, that her
own daughter Mary was a worthy heir to the
English crown.
In England itself, however, history was not so
encouraging. The claim of Matilda, Henry I's
daughter, to inherit the throne on his death in 1135
had resulted not in the reign of England's first
female monarch but in 18 years of civil war, 'when
The seal of Matiida.The
claim to the English throne
passed from her father
Henry I to her son Henry il.
The King ofthe Franks

dictates the Salic Law
excluding women from the
French throne. A 15th-
century miniature from the
Chroniques de Saint Denis.
Christ and his saints slept', as Matilda's supporters
battled with those of Henry's nephew, Stephen of
Blois. The lesson learnt from that devastating
confiict was provisional and problematic. Matilda's
rights as her father's heir were vindicated in the
Treaty of Winchester that ended the war in 1153,
but only in the person of her son, who became king
as Henry IL
Royal women in England, then, could pass
the crown on to their male offspring. That
much was clear, not only from the
outcome of Matilda's doughty struggle,
but also from the English kings' claim
to the throne of France, a claim in
which Henry VIII believed as fiercely
as his predecessors and which derived
from Louis X's sister, Lsabella, the wife
of Edward II of lingland. Henry's claim
to England also depended on a woman:
his grandmother, the formidable Lancas-
trian heiress, Margaret Beaufort, who had
watched with grim satisfaction as her only
son was crowned in 1485 as Henry VIL
But if Westminster Abbey had not rung with

cheers at the coronation of Queen Margaret Beau-
fort, did that mean that women could not rule in
England? Luckily for Henry VIII, the outcome tif his
convoluted matrimonial career relieved him ofthe
necessity to face the question directly. His son
Edward - a slender, solemn and precociously erudite
boy, thanks to the finest humanist education his
father could provide - stood ready to succeed him.
It was not part of Henry's plan that he should die
while his heir was still a child. When Henry died in
1547 the new King Kdward VI was only nine and no
more capable of performing the functions of king-
ship than were his sisters. But, being
male, his incapacity was only temporary;
and his ministers, led first by the Duke of
Somerset and then by the Duke of
Northumberland, could govern in his
name while they waited for him to grow
to adulthood.
On the slight shoulders of this boy
rested Henry's hopes for the future ofthe
Tudor dynasty. Meanwhile, the old king's
will contained provisions that I lenry saw
as explicitly provisional - contingencies
in the unthinkable event that something
should happen to Edward before he
could marry and father sons of his own.
In that case, Henry declared, his own
blood should prevail and his daughters
should inherit his crown despite his
unwavering insistence, in other contexts,

that they were illegitimate. It was a tribute to
Henry's overwhelming personal authority that the
tacit contradiction between his daughters' bastardy
(which had been enshrined in statute law in the
1530s) and their standing as his heirs was not
challenged in his lifetime.
Edward, however, had other ideas. When the
young king sat down in early 1553, straining with a
^ R History'/ixiny | October 2010 www.historytoday.com
Tudor Queens
feverish cough that he was struggling to shake off, to
draft his own 'device for the succession', he had as yet
no children ofhis own to cloud the methodical
rigour of his logical mind. Unlike his father, he was a
fervent believer in the evangelical Protestantism to
which the Henrician Reformation had opened the
door in F.ngland. That meant that his half-sister
Mary - an equally fierce believer in the (.hurch of
Rome - was an unacceptable heir to his throne. More
than that, the scriptural emphasis of Protestant
theology raised questions about the entire prospect
of female sovereignty. Had not St Paul said that'man
is the head of woman'? How then could the rule ofa
woman he anything but unjust and unlawful?
Edward's 'device', therefore, provided for a new
descent ofthe English crown through a line of heirs
who, according to his specifications, would be both
Protestant and male. Here, however, reality failed to
match up to well-ordered theory. The extraordinary

fact was that, after Edward, there was no one left to
claim the title of king of England because all the
po.ssible contenders for his throne were female.
This unprecedented lack ofa king-in-waiting wasin part the
result of Tudor paranoia about the
dilute solution of royal blood that flowed through
the Tudor line itself. Henry VII's Beaufort claim
came via the illegitimate offspring of Edward Ill's
son, lohn of Gaunt; a ba.stard family who had later
been legitimi.sed by Act of Parliament but explicitly
excluded from the royal succession. Henry VIII's
dynastic claims were less tenuous, thanks to his
mother, Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of
Edward IV and sister ofthe murdered princes in the
Tower. But neither ofthe two Henrys would ever
admit th.tt her role had been more than that ofa
fitting consort for the 'rightful' Tudor monarch.
Meanwhile, both kings had engaged in a cull ofthe
surviving representatives ofthe Plantagenet blood-
line. Few of Elizabeth of York's royal cousins died in
their beds; some were cut down on the battlefield,
others on the block. Violence had brought the
ludors to the throne and violence now left them
unchallenged in po.ssession of it.
But this new dynasty was a young sapling
compared with the Plantagenet family tree and had
produced few boys to leaf its branches. Edward
himself had two half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth.
I lenry VIII's two sisters, Margaret and Mary, were
both dead. They had each left female heirs:
Margaret's granddaughter Mary, Oueen of Scots, and
Mary's daughter, Frances Brandon, Duchess ot
Suffolk, who had three unmarried daughters of her
own, Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey.

It was a profoundly unreassuring prospect; but at
least Edward's new prescriptions for the succession
had the benefit of clarity. His half-sisters, he
rea.soned, were not legitimate and his Scottish cousin
was not Protestant; which left his Grey cousins as the
means by which the crown would pass, after the
model ofhis great-grandmother Margaret Beaufort,
through the female line to rest on the male head of
one of their as yet unborn sons. In any case, for the
King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella, the parents of
HenryVlil's first wife,
Catherine of Aragon and
grandparents of Mary
Tudor, enter Granada. A
16th-century wooden relief.
ailing king,'not doubting in the grace and goodness
of God but to be shortly by his mighty power
restored to our former health and strength', the
claims to the throne ofthe Grey girls were merely a
safety net rather than an imminent political reality.
AT'et by May 1553 there was no longer any doubt
X that Edward was dying; tuberculosis had taken
hold. If the king still laboured under any delusions
about his prospects of recovery, the Duke of
Northumberland could not afford to indulge them,
since the twin imperatives ol safeguarding the newly
reformed Edwardian Church and securing the duke's
own political future were now matters of critical
urgency. At the beginning of lune Edward once
more took up his pen to amend his'device' for the

succession. Where the original draft spoke of the
crown descending to the unborn sons of Frances
Brandon's elde.st daughter - 'the Lady lane's heirs
male' - the king now altered the text to read 'the Lady
Jane and her heirs male'. With the addition of two
small words Jane Grey was named the heir to
Edward's crown. When FÀlward died on luly 6th,
1553, transformed by his illness and the noxious
treatments he had endured into a figure of grotesque
pathos, she became the first woman to be proclaimed
as England's sovereign.
Jane Grey's story - the tragic history of the nine-
days' queen - is now so familiar that it is easy to over-
www.historytoday.com October 2010 | Historyroiiu)' 39
Tudor Queens
look the complexity ofthe questions it raised for
contemporaries who had no way of knowing how
events would unfold. Seen from the pragmatic
perspective of an attempt to safeguard political and
religious continuity, Jane seemed the perfect candidate
to be Edward's successor: a fiercely devout adherent of
the same evangelical faith as Edward himself and
daughter-in-law ofthe Duke of Northumberland,
having hastily married his son, Cuildford Dudley, a
few weeks before Edward's death. But, viewed from
outside the corridors of power at Greenwich and
Westminster, her sudden elevation made so little sense
as to cause consternation and conñjsion. Even those
few of her new subjects who knew who she was
(something which the proclamation of her accession

on July 10th spent quite some time explaining) strug-
gled to understand why she should now be queen
rather than her mother, through whom her claim to
the throne was said to have come.
In fact, Jane Grey's theoretical claim to the crown
made sense not as part of any wholesale recognition of
female succession, but only as a lone anomaly through
whom the future rule of Edward's imagined line of
Protestant kings could be secured. That in turn would
depend on an acceptance that Edward had the power
to overturn his father's will and Acts of Parliament,
not to mention the more nebulous weight of prece-
dent, to impose his own vision of how England's
monarchs should be selected.
The gatehouse of St John's
College, Cambridge bears
the arms of Henry Vlll's
grandmother Margaret
Beaufort, who founded the
institution in 1511.
It rapidly emerged that such acceptance would not
be forthcoming. Legitimacy - as defined not by the
technical legal verdict on the circum.stances of her
birth, but by the English people's perception of her
status - lay with Mary, theelder of Henry VHI's two
daughters. As thousands mustered under her standard
at her castle of Hramlingham in Suffolk and support
haemorrhaged from the Duke of Northumberland's
regime, it began to be clear that the crown would
come to rest on the head of Queen Mary Tudor rather
than Queen Jane Grey.
With Mary's victory, the underlying question ofwhether a

woman could wear the crown in
England was settled, at last, by default: there was no
alternative. It had been Mary's sex that had compro-
mised her .standing in her father's eyes as his heir, but
the fitct that she was female could hardly now be used
against her by lane's supporters.
It could, however, be exploited to vituperative
efièct by those who reviled the Catholic faith that
Mary was determined to restore in England. Mo.st
resounding of all was The First Blast ofthe Trumpet
Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, unleashed
from Geneva in 1558 by the Protestant firebrand lohn
Knox. Female 'regiment' (or regimen, meaning rule or
governance) was'monstrous' (that is, unnatural and
abominable) because women were doubly subordinate
to men: once by reason of Eve's creation from Adam's
^ " HistoryTodny | October 2010 www.historytoday.com
Ttidor Queens
rib and again because of her transgression in precipi-
tating the fall from Eden. Therefore,'to promote a
woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire
above any realm, nature or city is repugnant to nature,
contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his
revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is
the subversion of good order, ol all equity and justice',
Knox ringingly declared, before elaborating several
thousand words of largely circular variation on that
pungent theme.
The polemics of Knox and his co-religionists were

an irritation to Mary, albeit one whose sting was
drawn by the fact that the hopes ofthe Protestant
cau.se in England were vested in her half-sister Eliza-
beth, who was also, more percipient observers noted, a
woman. But it was the presence of this heir of distress-
ingly different religious views - however much Eliza-
beth might, characteristically, be trimming her sails to
the prevailing winds at Mary's Catholic court - that
pre.sented the new queen with her most fundamental
challenge as a female sovereign.
Mary's subjects and her closest allies expected that
her first task as queen would be to marry. 'You will
point out to her,' the Holy Roman Emperor (Charles '
told his envoys in England,'that it will be necessary, in
order to be supported in the labour of governing and
assisted in matters that are not of ladies' capacity, that
she .soon contract matrimony with the person who
shall appear to her most fit from the above point of
view.' It is possible that Mary, as a devoutly conserva-
tive woman, agreed with this analysis; although she
later inlbrmed the emperor's amba.ssador that, while
she intended to love and obey her husband, 'if he
wished to encroach in the government ofthe kingdom
she would be unable to permit it'.
But the inescapable tact ofthe matter was that
Mary, at 37, did require a husband - and quickly - if
she were to give birth to an heir. That was a necessity,
because it was an intolerable prospect that her own
death should deliver the crown to Anne Boleyn's
bastard and England into heresy.
The difficulty was that husbands, as everyone
knew, had authority over their wives. If England's first
reigning queen took a husband, would her kingdom

acquire a king? That un.settling possibility persuaded
many of her subjects that their queen should marr)' an
Englishman, for fear, as the emperor ruminated, that
'foreigners, whom the English more than any other
nation abhor, would intertere with the government'.
However, Mary's response when a parliamentary dele-
gation put that proposition to her was unequivocal.
'Parliament was not accustomed to use such language
to the kings of England,' she told the unfortunate
Speaker trenchantly, 'nor was it suitable or respectful
that it should do so.' How could she love and obey a
man who was already bound in obedience to her?
Only outside her realm would she find a husband
whose status was commensurate with her own.
And so, on July 25th, 1554 Mary married a man
who was already a king: her cousin Philip of Spain, the
.son of the emperor who had .so forthrightly urged
marriage upon her. There are good grounds tor
thinking that Philip was the best ofthe limited choices
William Scrots' portrait of Edward VI, c.1546, whose 'devise for
the succession' of 1553 (below)
specified that future monarchs be both Protestant and male.
www.historytoday.com October 2010 | HistoryTodny 4 1
Tudor Queens
available to her, all of which were problematic in one
way or another. In fact, the treaty hammered out to
give effect to a marriage that was supposedly made
necessary by the limitations ofthe queen's sex went to
great lengths to prevent her husband from intervening

in the government of her kingdom. If her councillors
believed that she could not rule without a husband's
help, it was a principle they were eager to waive, it
turned out, if the hu.sband in question was Spanish.
Philip would have the title of king in England, but
none ofthe authority - provisions which protected
English interests and the independence of Mary's
sovereignty so efïectively that Philip privately vowed
that he held himself bound by none ofthem.
Yet still Mary found herself toiling to free herself
from the contradictions between being a woman and
being a sovereign. Eor all the uncompromising
drafting of her marriage treaty and for all Mary's
careful distinction between her private duty as a wife
and her public responsibility as a monarch, everything
that her subjects knew about the relative authority of
husband and wife served to fuel fears that her
marriage to Philip would subject England to Spanish
rule. He was now king of England and kings, they
knew, ruled. Queens, in general, did not.
It could have been different. Had one of Mary's
heartbreaking phantom pregnancies produced a living
heir England's ftiture might have lain in union with
Philip's territory ofthe Netherlands under the rule of
a Catholic monarch. Had she lived into her fifties, like
her mother and father, the Catholicism she had so
faithfully and forcefully replanted in her kingdom
might have taken deeper root. But in November 1558,
at the age of just 42, Mary succumbed to a virulent
bout of influenza and her crown passed to her 25-
year-old half-sister, Elizabeth, a woman who had been
blessed not only with a quicksilver intelligence, but
with the opportunity to observe at close quarters the

travails of England's first queen regnant before she
became its second.
Only six months after his First Blast had been
published, the accession of this Protestant queen
iVIary Tudor, Henry Viii's
sister, and her husband
Charies Brandon, in a copy
of a Tudor painting. Their
daughter Frances was the
mother of Lady Jane Grey.
The execution of Lady Jane
Grey (opposite top),
February 12th, 1554. A
woodcut illustration from
a 17th-century tract.
A painted genealogical
chart (opposite bottom)
tracing the Tudor roots of
Mary Queen of Scots c.1603.
Í2 History7bíí(7>' | October 2010 www.historytoday.com
Tudor Queens
confronted lohn Knox with the urgent need to execute
an undignified about-turn on the subject of female
rule. He wrote to the clearly affronted queen to explain
that he had not meant to include her authority, provi-
dentially ordained by God as it was, in his thundering
condemnation of all women rulers. Typically,

however, he could not resist the opportunity to offer
Elizabeth the benefit of his unsolicited advice: 'If thus
in God's presence you humble yourself, as in my heart
1 glorify ( Iod for that rest granted to his afflicted flock
within England under you, a weak instrument, .so will
1 with tongue and pen justify your authority and regi-
ment as the Holy Ghost has justified the same in
Deborah' - Deborah being the lone female Judge in
Old Testament Israel.
Elizabeth was not impressed. When Knox returned
from Geneva to Scotland in 1559, she would not let
him set foot on English soil, forcing him to brave the
more dangerous North Sea route to Leith. But she was
happy to adopt the proffered mantle of a biblical
Deborah; not the first of a new breed of female kings,
but a single providential exception to the rule of male
sovereignty.
Djftlcult though it may be, it is important toremember that
Elizabeth did not take the throne
as Ciloriana, but as a young woman whom everyone -
ministers, subjects, allies and enemies - expected to
marry and to marry soon for exactly the same reasons
as her sister had done. Instead, little by little, as year
followed year, she chose a different path: to exercise
power not by blazing a trail for female rule in general,
but by establishing herself as something unique.
Women were weak and unsuited to rule, that she
accepted; but by God's will she was different - more
than human, a goddess and an icon as well as a queen.
Of course the nature of her unique power meant
that, by definition, the Virgin Queen could not do the
one thing that was the sine qua non of kingship: to
pass on the throne to an heir of her own bloodline.

Instead she showed that symbolic power, deployed
with precision, intelligence and charisma, could be an
extraordinary weapon in the crown's arsenal; indeed,
one that has become the foundation ofthe crown's
endurance into the modern world. She did it to such
great effect that we have to work much harder than we
realise to read the story of female sovereignty
forwards, with all its uncertainties and possibilities,
rather than backwards from our knowledge of her
iconic end.
Helen Castor is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
and the author of She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England
Before Elizabeth, published by Faber and Faber this month.
Further Reading Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The
Problems
of Female Rule in English History (Palgrave iiacmillan, 2006);
Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens: Soadicea'sChor/ot
(Phoenix
Press, 2002); Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery
(Wiley-
Blackviiell, 2009); Judith Richards, Mary Tudor (Routledge,
2008);
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University
Press,
2004), available online to members of UK public libraries.
For further articles on this subject, visit:
www.historytoday.com/tudors
mwm
www.historytoday.com October 2010 | Histo 43

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