Feminist Analysis

...Isabella's only power could be in saying 'no', her 'no' to Angelo that she would not leave the world despoiled and soulless, 'no' to Claudio that she would sacrifice herself, 'no' to the nunnery that she had wished to enter or 'no' to the Duke's offer of marriage. Isabella's role ability to be self-determining was quite different from Portia's advocacy in The Merchant of Venice, for Isabella was the tool of the Duke, fulfilling his scripting. Her nun's garb should have ensured a neuter role, and she intended her pity and love for her brother to involve her in this world only so far as to counsel him in honour. Despite her self concept, two men of the world with power over her saw her as a beautiful sexual object to be acquired. Against this, Isabella's strength was in theological purity, going straight to the sense of the Gospels. We cannot cast the first stone. We must have mercy for others, because "he which is the top of judgement" had mercy on us. Because the censors usually eliminated the word 'God', references were oblique, but there could be no real substitution of 'Jove' or 'the gods' here where the sense was so very New Testament. Isabella was preaching to a society which had gone far in condemnation and execution in the name of religion; she was a beacon of clear light.

Portia actively sought mercy as the greatest response and carefully gave Shylock every option to release the bond which held him when she stage-managed the last-minute dramatic revelation, showing that he too could be forfeit. Significantly, the advocacy of both Portia and Isabella was the same: mercy must be applied to the law. Could a Duke's one gateway denouement be sufficient to create a system in which people would be good, or at least penitent at execution? In Merchant, Portia's double role was to be dutiful woman as well as vigorous actor in State affairs; she quivered with tension as Bassanio chose the casket, at need leapt and disguised herself, then combined feminine and legal roles in organising husband Bassanio into a real marriage. Conversely, Isabella was notable because she was always trapped and endangered, by affection for her brother, by revulsion against the deputy, by reverence and trust of the Duke.

Measure for Measure contained a correctional element in revealing that concupiscence spread through all layers of society, and that any solution was made complex by variations in honesty about sexuality. How could one administer justice that eliminated the exploitation, crime and disease associated with sexuality, when honest and loving people would be executed under the same system? What other economic viability would there be for prostitutes if the profession were outlawed? After all, the Duke had Isabella procure Mariana for Angelo. Shakespeare's achievement lay in showing the pervasive nature of the problem and the impossibility of untangling disasters by the application of an absolutist law.

The construction of Isabella as a nun, intercessor in prayer for those who would involve themselves in sexuality, intensified the case against exploitation by the powerful male. Antonio's "Who would believe thee?" still rings horribly true, as courts in the twentieth century wrestle with how much knowledge or assumption external to alleged rape should be admissible in evidence. In a study of Australian rape cases a hundred years ago, Jill Bavin-Mizzi found that rape trials were affected by gendered perceptions about a woman's reputation, and that women who had separated from their husbands, or who drank or risked walking in the street at night were less likely to be believed, even in their ability to recognise who had attacked them.i A woman able to be an advocate has been controversial for more than two hundred years after Shakespeare's time in some politically incorrect quarters. Margaret Thornton, in her "Women as fringe dwellers of the jurisprudential community", in Sex, Power and Justice, explained why women were not to be allowed into university as they would lose their 'feminine identity':
Thus, Mr MacDermott, trenchantly opposing the Victorian University Act Amendment Bill in 1875 suggested that it be retitled 'An Act to unsex the ladies of the colony'. Women's bodies needed to remain sexed in order to serve men. Hence, women's sexuality had to be confined to the private sphere where it could be controlled, preferably within a monogamous heterosexual relationship. There, it could neither exercise a disruptive effect on the public sphere nor be diluted to the disadvantage of men.ii

The viable alternatives for women to marriage in the fifteen hundreds were the nunnery, prostitution or widowhood, and by the time this play was performed the rise of Protestantism had severely curtailed women's opportunities in the religious life. Over the previous few centuries, some remarkable women had maintained an intellectual and literary life, some with political influence, due to the protection afforded by a religious vocation. Héloise's voice comes heartbreakingly down to us today, proclaiming her feelings as a human and demanding that her needs be recognised. In this historical context, Isabella's wish to enter a nunnery was less that of a lovely woman who wasted a choice about her sphere of activity, but the play's ending became a sweet tossed to those men in the audience who assumed that marriage to them was preferable to religion. Modern audiences are more likely to interpret a nunnery as withdrawal from life, and see the need for Isabella's involvement in the administration of compassionate justice, but families who had experienced the closing of Catholic nunneries would have had a more complex response to Isabella's choice at the end.

In the 1700s there was quite a different, censorious, judgement penned by woman critic, actress and poet, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox:
that Shakespear made a wrong Choice of his Subject, since he was resolved to torture it into a Comedy, appears by the low Contrivance, absurd Intrigue, and Improbable Incidents, he was obliged to introduce, in order to bring about three or four Weddings, instead of one good Beheading, which was the Consequence naturally expected.... This Play therefore being absolutely defective in a due Distribution of Rewards and Punishments; Measure for Measure ought not to be in the Title, since Justice is not the Virtue it inculcates; nor can Shakespear's Invention in the fable be praised; for what he has altered from Cinthio, is altered for the worse."iii
With Ms Lennox, the play failed to achieve its purpose, reminding us not to over-generalise about gender differences. Let there not be stereotypes. One good beheading. Perhaps in King Lear she found enough deaths....

...Jane Anger's urging women to "consider" our position has taken a long time to reach a fully public arena. Shakespeare's women paraded their contributions to the debate. The two characters who most actively transgressed men's orthodoxy for women's behaviour were Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, both women of power seen as problems of femininity. Assessed from their own points of view, they suffered a kind of character rape by male perspective in their chroniclers' accounts. They had been made by Holinshed and Plutarch to bear a weight of guilt for transgressing the 'womanly' model. On stage, each of these women was derogated in sexual terms, one for giving away sexuality, one for using it rather a lot. That each sought a political end, that each took control of her sexuality, and that each attained power for a time must be given due emphasis. That each was condemned as a woman as a travesty of womanly nature illustrated the difficulty for women of moving into action ungendered.

That powerful women were perceived as primarily sexual can be seen in the fate of Lady Macbeth, a persona who did all she could to burst out of the bounds of 'femininity', of womanhood. A political conniver and plotter of dark deeds, she manipulated her husband ruthlessly through the centuries, best staged as Shakespeare's milk-galling character who startled with the intensity of her portrait. Yet Lady Macbeth remained trapped in men's fiction. Macbeth had a wife, who had a name, a family history, a son and a more complete character than would suit Macbeth. How did she become a nag and a villainess who decried her sexual identification? How was it that her role reverted to wifely worrying by her end?...

... Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra were people who wielded considerable power. How it was wielded is a matter of fascination historically and dramatically, revealing the springs of human action. But each was reduced in stature to a being whose sexual attributes and appetites predominated as her major characteristic, her determinant. That determinant was enforced by the male chroniclers of historical legends who transmuted versions of the original lives. Shakespeare refleshed the received views into riveting paradigms fitting his role necessities. The lives we see prancing on the stage were not the women's view of their lives, not their choice or full scope. This is not to say that Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra are not splendid dramatic roles and that their focus should be altered to unbalance their plays. It is to say that women should be aware of how women and men are subtly influenced by selections made by men which suggest that we live in a world where men naturally predominate. There is little natural about a world where a woman must be foreshortened to fit. A woman who has to say that she is not a woman in order to act decisively and consistently is having words put in her mouth.

Audiences need to know that dominant assumptions about what women should be affected their role portrayal, and that even these assumptions varied across the period of Shakespeare's writing. Why could women be pert and strive successfully for a measure of self-determination in his Elizabethan plays, but be abused and killed in his Jacobean plays? Young audiences add to their awareness of gender roles with every play they study. How do we receive notions of what it is to be feminine, womanly, witty, intelligent? Are we in control of the assumptions; do we accept prevailing views of our identity? Performances revivify the plays each time, making significant choices and changes. One must ask why women have been regarded as primarily sexual beings and men as some kind of norm. The answer may be a very unsatisfying Darwinian one: our thinking has been structured in a way that has advantaged men and disadvantaged women, perpetuating a system which originated in hunting and warfare for one gender, gathering and childbearing for the other. Societies survived and expanded, and the whole prospered on the servitude and devotion of women. Petruchio did his bit, as did Isabella's Duke, so that protectionism was the right end and repository for women's identity and role. Yet in the next section Benedick will meet his match, and that paragon, Portia, will tactfully remain within the rhetorical framework of male supremacy, costuming her more able endeavours....


i Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995).


ii Margaret Thornton, "Women as fringe dwellers of the jurisprudential community", in Sex, Power and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 190.


iii Charlotte Lennox (née Ramsay), 1729 -1804, actress and poet,
Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900, An anthology of criticism, ed. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 17-18.