A Speechless Dialect: Gender and Self-Recognition

in Measure for Measure

Zenn Luis Martnez

UNIVERSIDAD DE HUELVA

In his essay of 1913 The Theme of the Three Caskets, Sigmund Freud discusses two
Shakespearean scenes in the light of their relevance to the constitution of a male subject of desire.
The scene of the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice (1597), and the love confessions of Goneril,
Regan, and Cordelia in King Lear (1605), allow Freud to undertake an analysis of myths and fairy
tales that ends up in the following conclusion: the three caskets and the three daughters stand for
three essential aspects of mans individual history as it is influenced by woman. Freuds final remarks
centre on King Lear:
We might argue that what is represented here are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a
woman the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him;
or that they are three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a mans life the
mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who
receives him once more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it
first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her
arms. (301)
In Freuds analysis, the three caskets become three daughters. These daughters undergo a further
symbolic transformation whereby they become three aspects of the Mother in a mans life. With
dying Lear as paradigm, Freud recounts mans individual history as one that moves from pre-Oedipal
enjoyment through the resolution of the Oedipus complex to a final, agonising mourning of the
Mother. Freuds reading of Shakespeares plots stage a drama of male subjects as they are affected,
haunted, and shaped by different representations of maternal females.1
At first sight, Measure for Measure (1604) looks like a reversal of this Freudian narrative. One may
think of its main plot as the story of one woman Isabella whose life is influenced and changed
by three men Claudio, Angelo and the Duke. Furthermore, this woman appears to have, in Janet
Adelmans phrase, fantasies of her own (Suffocating Mothers 94). In the attempt to shun these
fantasies, she has resolved to seek a more strict restraint/Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint
Claire (Measure 1.4.4-5). Isabellas ordeal to save Claudio from death sketches a womans
individual history as it is affected by three males: she progresses from innocent siblinghood with
Claudio to the threat of sexuality in Angelo, to end up in Vincentio, in whom, as if he were a male
version of Freuds Cordelia, three dimensions of maleness converge: in disguise as a Friar, he is a
Brother the innocent brother that Claudio the sinner has ceased to be; as the mature man that
undertakes agency in order to protect Isabella from Angelos sexual threat, he becomes a father-
figure; finally, he imposes upon her as a husband made in the image and after the likeness of a Father
that does not let her choose. In fact, Isabella never responds to the Dukes marriage proposal. He
speaks

1 For a detailed study of this issue in various Shakespearean plays, Measure for Measure included, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating
Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992) 76-103. See also Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet
and Measure for Measure (Drakakis ed. Alternative Shakespeares. London: Methuen, 1985).

183
184 ZENN LUIS MARTNEZ

Dear Isabel,
I have a motion much imports you good,
Whereto if youll a willing ear incline,
Whats mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
So bring us to our palace, where well show
Whats yet behind, thats meet you all should know. (5.1.537-42)
and so ends the play with no expectations of an answer. This dumbness is probably not so striking
if viewed as the imposition of an all-demanding Father: Isabella remains silent because she is not
even allowed to consent. A silent presence on stage is almost all she remains in the play, her agency
in Claudios release being just a mirage. As a matter of fact, the plays connections with the Freudian
plot of the caskets is not one of reversal but allegiance: in Measure for Measure three aspects of the
masculine subject, split into the three characters of Claudio, Angelo and the Duke, are tested against
the object woman. Hence, far from conveying an inversion of the archetypal plot, the play is but a
peculiar rendering of it. In a first stage, Isabella is to Claudio a kin who is not of necessity conceived
of as object of desire; later, she acquires significance as a sexual object for another man Angelo
in behalf of her brother; and finally, she becomes someone elses wife the Dukes. Contrary to
Lear, whose dependence upon the maternal female dooms him to a tragic telos, the tragicomic life of
man in Measure for Measure stages woman first as his kin, then as his whore, and finally as his wife.
In being all these at different moments along the play, Isabella remains there, herself being the three
silent caskets, only to be opened, read, and interpreted in turns by each man.
However, and unlike The Merchant of Venice and King Lear, Measure for Measure resists a reading
in the manner of mythical narratives or fairy tales. Claudio, Angelo and the Duke are not like
Arragon, Morocco and Bassanio, who find their lots written inside, awaiting a passive recognition.
The fates of Portias suitors have abided there for long; and they, like Oedipus, must simply come
across the occasion that brings their destinies to light. This is why The Merchant of Venice becomes a
suitable play for Freuds analysis. He can proceed in the same terms as he did with Oedipus Rex and
Hamlet: by analysing the mythos or narrative structure, the psychoanalyst recounts the history of an
individuals desire. This narrative belongs within the symbolic order, and in it the characters fates
are ordained beforehand.2 The moral fable in each casket tells them who they are. As opposed to this,
Measure for Measure compels their male characters first to invent and then to cope with their own
subjectivities. Only after they have taken a course of action shall they discover their own desires and
individual histories in Isabella. They learn to read their own character ethos in her. And
whatever that ethos consists of, it comes forth as a surprise. Anagnorisis is not in this play the
emergence of a passive truth already inscribed in a mythical narrative but an unexpected discovery of
self which derives from a specific course of action. That discovery makes Claudio and Angelo equal.
What remains of this paper intends to trace the sexual nature of Claudios and Angelos self-
recognitions as laid open by a passive and ignorant Isabella.

1
The first in opening the casket is Claudio. He has been sentenced to death by Angelos strict usage of
the law. As his own moral fable makes clear, his sin is lechery:

2 I use the concept of mythos or plot as Aristotle employs it in the sixth chapter of the Poetics. For Aristotle, mythos is the major
constituent of drama, as it prevails over ethos or character, and opsis or spectacle. Marc Shell has studied the relevance of plot
analysis in his account of sexuality and incest in Measure for Measure. See The End of Kinship: Incest, Measure for Measure
and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). The relevance of the Aristotelian concepts
to the psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare was first sketched by Lupton and Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in
Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). A review and an extension of their findings, as well as an application
to dramatic reception and the problem of incest in Renaissance drama, are undertaken in the first two chapters of my
unpublished doctoral dissertation Deseo y parentesco: Discursos del incesto en el drama ingls del Renacimiento (Universidad
de Sevilla: 1997).

Sederi VIII (1997)

GENDER AND SELF-RECOGNITION IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE 185

As surfeit is the father of much fast,

So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that raven down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die (1.2.125-129).
The conspicuous effect of this crime is the presentation on stage of his unchaste mistresss pregnant
body. His sin is therefore conception: But it chances/The stealth of our most mutual
entertainment/With character too gross is writ on Juliet (1.2.143-153). His remedy lies on his chaste
sister. Thus does he ask Lucio to request her intervention:

This day my sister should the cloister enter,

And there receive her approbation.
Acquaint her with the danger of my state,
Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends
To the strict deputy; bid herself assay him.
I have great hope in that, for in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect
Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art
When she will play with reason and discourse,
And well she can persuade. (1.2.173-84, emphasis added)
Two qualities make Isabella an ideal suitor: something she has and something there is in her. What
she has is rhetorical ability; however, what she has is just a circumstance of her real essence what
she is. And this essence is endowed with a mysterious nature: the oxymoron speechless dialect is
symptomatic of this mystery. In her youth Isabella possesses a language without words which excels
her own rhetorical skills. Claudios discovery of his sisters essence is of a nature that cannot be
glossed in intelligible language: it is something he sees as opposed to what he listens to and
understands as reason and discourse. And what is more important: it is something that Angelo shall
see too, since it will allow Isabella to make friends/To the strict deputy. Thus Claudio comes to
understand an essential trait of womanhood: first, there is a truth in woman that moves men; second,
that truth is an exclusive object of mans knowledge; and third, whatever that truth is, it is silent and
unspeakable. It does not belong to the symbolic order of language, since it contains that quality of
revealed knowledge which strikes the subject dumb, and which Lacan called the encounter with the
real.3 However, Claudios discovery is not any different from what other Renaissance dramatic
heroes discover in their women. Thus, for instance, Antonio in the Duchess of Malfi of Websters
play:

For her discourse, it is so full of rapture

You only will begin then to be sorry
When she doth end her speech
[] whilst she speaks,
She throws upon a man so sweet a look,
That it were able raise one to a galliard
That lay in a dead palsy, and to dote

3 For Lacan, the Real represents the unassimilable, that is, that which resists its entrance into the symbolic order of language. The
subject meets the Real through revelation or encounter in his continuous search for origin and cause. This encounter is however
a missed and elusive one, in the sense that what provokes cannot be assimilated within the symbolic order. See in this respect
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (53-69).

Sederi VIII (1997)

186 ZENN LUIS MARTNEZ

On that sweet countenance: but in that look,

There speaketh so divine a continence
As cuts off all lascivious, and vain hope.
(The Duchess of Malfi 1.1.189-200; emphasis added)
Be it desire or be it chaste thoughts what man wants to discover in woman, the symbolic order of
discourse is dissolved in a silent presence that speaks. Herods exclamation in Elizabeth Carys The
Tragedy of Mariam (1602-3) comprises a similar thought: Can humane eyes be dazed by womans
wit? (4.7.140). Wit does not construct woman as subject of discourse but as an object of the male
gaze. Woman can unwittingly move, persuade, raise, cut off, or daze mans desire; and
only man can get to know such powers. Isabellas speechless dialect does not belong in the
symbolic order of language, since that quality in her does not construct her as a subject of discourse
either. On the contrary, it prepares the male characters and spectators to perceive her as spectacle, as
the object of the gaze, in the Aristotelian dimension of opsis.4

2
Isabella remains ignorant of the reasons why her brother assigns such mission to her. She is reluctant
to acknowledge her qualities as they are perceived by others. Assay the power you have, demands
Lucio, to which she retorts: My power, alas, I doubt (1.4.76-7). With such reluctance she attends
her first interview with Angelo. There she must deploy her rhetorical weapons to plead for her
brothers life. The deputy is alert though, and manages to defend the rightfulness of the law against
Isabellas arguments. And when she discovers that mercy and emotions are not to prevail against
ordinance, she appeals to Angelos individual history:

Go to your bosom,
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
Thats like my brothers fault; if it confess
A natural guiltiness, such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brothers life. (2.2.138-43)
Isabella exhorts Angelo to ask his heart about its knowledge of natural guiltiness. And her words
obtain a first triumph over the deputy. Whatever Angelo finds there that resembles Claudios crime, it
urges in him a first aside of recognition: She speaks, and tis/Such sense that my sense breeds with
it (2.2.144-45). What he apparently finds is an effect of Isabellas words, and the sense in them.
However, there are two senses at stake here: such sense is the sense in Isabellas words,
whereas Angelos sense breeds produces, conceives, procreates as an effect of its coupling
with Isabellas.
For, whatever that sense may be, it affects and alters Angelos. Such sense may refer to what
Angelo finds in himself that is similar to Claudios crime the result of his reflection upon Isabellas
request. Or it may be Isabellas powers to change Angelos attitude that is, her prone and
speechless dialect, which moves men but is not to be found in her discourse. Angelos discovery of
such power and his being affected by them identifies him with Claudio, who, as we must
remember, entrusted to them the solution to his problem. In that respect, mans natural guiltiness is
nothing but his disposition to be moved, altered and affected by woman, who appears as the ultimate
source of corruption. As a result, his sense breeds conceives with Isabellas.

4 In this sense, Aristotles attempts to privilege the order of mythos over opsis would be reversed here. It is Isabellas mere
presence on stage that conveys a meaningful revelation to Claudio and consequently, to a male spectators gaze regardless
of the inexpressibility of his response to that speechless presence. Therefore, opsis belongs in the realm of the Real as this is
described in the previous footnote.

Sederi VIII (1997)

GENDER AND SELF-RECOGNITION IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE 187

The play, however, portrays an Isabella who is incapable of knowing her own powers. After her first
encounter, she thinks she has bribed Angelo with such gifts that heaven shall share with him
(2.2.149). In her views, her powers arise from prayers from preserved souls,/From fasting maids
whose minds are dedicate/To nothing temporal (2.2.155-158). Isabella is ignorant and therefore
innocent, as opposed to two men that seem to know too much of her. Angelos new affection to
Isabella is acknowledged by the deputy as the effect of such innocence:

Whats this, whats this? is this her fault or mine?

The tempter or the tempted who sins most, ha?
Not she, nor doth she tempt, but it is I
That lying by the violet in the sun
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than womans lightness? (2.2.164-173)
Mans sense is again at stake in Angelos soliloquy. Sense is his sensuality, but also his
knowledge. After this speech, which closes their first encounter, Angelo knows his guilt by learning
that he wants Isabella, and by realising that she remains ignorant. The position allowed to woman in
this soliloquy is interesting, since it does not match received expectations: the fallen Eve is not to be
identified with Isabella. She is not the temptress, because she is even deprived of a desire of her own.
It is Angelo who corrupts her modesty. The male subject bears the corruption. But even though he is
to blame, corruption is only understood as long as it has its source in what he has seen in a woman.
Angelo asks Isabella to return the following day so that she will be acquainted with his decision
about Claudio. This second encounter (2.4) places Angelo where we left him in the previous one: he
is still discoursing with himself, still trying to come to terms with his newly-discovered knowledge of
himself in woman. And he is still as confused as he was. He appears as a divided man, a self split in
two:

When I would pray and think, I think and pray

To several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words,
Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue,
Anchors on Isabel. Heaven in my mouth,
As if I did but only chew his name,
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception. (2.4.1-7; emphasis added)
When Angelo desires to pray and think, he thinks and prays the inversion being a way of showing
disorder by means of mental split. Besides, he discourses to severalnamely separate, divided
subjets. In fact there are two subjects the subject of his thought and the subject of his prayer. He
discourses not only to two separate subjects, but also severally, incoherently. That incoherence can be
explained by a rhetorical split, because his empty words do not accord with his invention.
Invention must be understood here in its rhetorical meaning, that is, as the first part of the rhetorical
art, the capacity of choosing the right loci comunes or commonplaces in a speech. Invention is the
sense, the subject-matter. On the other hand, his empty words correspond to rhetorical elocution
or the art of finding the right words to express ones sense or invention. Angelos mental disorder is
explained by a radical rupture of invention from elocution: Angelos elocution is voidhis empty
words on the side of heaven, whereas the invention is swelling, too full of woman. So Angelos
discovery is of a linguistic sort. Evil invention appears behind a false disguise of elocution to which
even Angelo fails to give credit. Angelo maps his own self in order to conceptualise that split: there is
his mouth, the external organ through which the elocution finds its representability; and there is his
heart. The polysemy of this last term allows the ongoing play with words: the heart is the seat of the
inmost thoughts and feelings; it is the realm of emotion and sensuality; it is also the mind, the seat of

Sederi VIII (1997)

188 ZENN LUIS MARTNEZ

the intellectual faculties: the understanding. This polysemy is strengthened by the next word:
conception which means his being conceived in the physical sense, his faculty to bear in the
physical sense as well, but also his ability to conceive in the mind, his intellect. The connection of the
two levels at which this discourse functions is in fact a matter of gender: Angelo has a conception of
Isabella in the intellectual sense, but this conception of woman reminds him of his conception in
woman the site of his imperfection, his corruption and his evil. This is the result of mans
perception of feminine speechless dialect, namely, the understanding that all men are made equal
as Claudio and Angelo are in their discovery of the source of all corruption. The speechless
dialect arouses his sinful desire, triggers his evil thoughts, and shatters the sense of his discourse
by reminding him of his origins: his being conceived by and in woman.
The end of Angelos soliloquy rounds off this complex process of self-recognition: Blood, thou art
blood./Lets write good angel on the devils horn,/Tis not the devils crest (2.4.11-16). These lines
seal Angelos recognition by means of an inversion of the emblematic mode.5 Angelo writes the
inscription good angel with a pun on his own name on the devils horn. Since he depicts
himself as a devil, the inscription angel only bears a paradoxical relation with the picture. The
crest is a device placed above the shield of a coat of arms, accompanied by an emblematic motto.
However, the emblematic crest is replaced with a grotesque horn here.6 In Angelos speech,
conception the realm of the female and the Lacanian Real marks the dissolution of rhetorical
unity and emblematic coherence, that is, the discourses that define masculine integrity in the
symbolic order. When rhetoric and emblematics can only prove Angelos false nature, but not his
completeness of self, the symbolic order collapses. At this point, only the Real in Isabellas
speechless dialect remains: as the thing that makes Angelo breed, it should be understood as the
origin of this collapse.
The new Angelo, who, like Claudio, has read in Isabellas speechless dialect his own guilty nature,
is the one that demands atonement by compelling Isabella to yield her virginity as the only means to
save Claudios life. The identification of these two male characters explains Claudios desire that his
sister accept the offer. It is now through Isabellas angry rebuke to her brother that the spectator
detects how equal Claudio and Angelo are:

O you beast!
O faithless coward, O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Ist not a kind of incest to take life
From thine own sisters shame? (3.1.139-142).
This is not the first time that the question of man-making is raised in the play. Man-making
is Claudios sin he has got Julietta with child. Illegitimate man-making that is, making
bastards is what is at stake along Measure for Measure, as Angelo lets Angelo Isabella know it:
Ha! Fie, this filthy vices! It were as good/To pardon him that hath from nature stolen/A man already
made, as to remit/Their saucy sweetness that do coin heavens image/In stamps that are forbid
(2.4.42-46). The bastard is a sign of falsehood, of the corrupted nature of conception.7 Now, as a

5 As a significant combination of inscriptio, pictura, and subscriptio, the emblem must always aim at conceptual coherence. The
expression emblematic mode is Peter Dalys (Literature in the Light of the Emblem 3).
6 The term crest in its emblematic sense also appears in The Taming of the Shrew (1593): KATHERINA: If you strike me, thou
are no gentleman, / And if no gentleman, why then no arms. // PETRUCCIO: A herald, Kate? O put me in thy books. //
KATHERINA: What is your crest, a coxcomb? // PETRUCCIO: A combless cock, so Kate will be my hen. // KATHERINA:
No cock of mine, you crow too like a craven. (2.1.220-25). The pun on crest founds its effect on the contrast between its
heraldic sense and its identification with the cocks comb, allowing a further sexual connotation as it depicts Petruchio as a
gelded male. The deconstruction of the emblematic sense undertaken by the grotesque image of the castrated beast parallels
Angelos speech, in which the beastly image of the horn turns emblematic coherence upside down.
7 See, in this respect, Marc Shells reflections on bastardising as the end of fornication in the plot of Measure for Measure: in
the play, making bastards becomes the ultimate symbol of the end of kinship, and consequently, of social organisation (The End
of Kinship 79).

Sederi VIII (1997)

GENDER AND SELF-RECOGNITION IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE 189

form of redress, Claudio will be made a man out of Isabellas fornication: as Angelos
conception had an origin in Isabella, so Claudios shall. They are made equal in conception, since it
provides them with a knowledge of mans corruption. And what is more, they derive the
acknowledgement of corruption from the same source: Isabellas speechless dialect. The
knowledge of this quality in her sister led Claudio to entangle her in the plot; its discovery by Angelo
makes her the object of his desire.

3
As a conclusion, the idea of being conceived in woman as the main source of mans corruption
becomes the symbolic appropriation that Claudio and Angelo make of their puzzled perception of
Isabellas speechless dialect. In order to master something they can see but cannot understand, they
narrate their recognition of self as a story that ultimately blames Isabella as an evil mother the
origin of their conception. First they perceive this mysterious feminine quality as spectacle or opsis: it
is the effect that Isabellas presence has on them. Second, that non-symbolic quality is presented as a
plot or mythos that undertakes a symbolic re-elaboration of the three caskets: the virgin Isabella of the
first casket becomes the potential whore of the second. This narrative step is re-written as a familial
plot that makes incest its main motif: the virgin sister of the first casket becomes the whorish mother
of the second, the feminine place of conception, the source of all corruption. Only a further comic
step will allow a resolution in the third casket: the Duke shall transform the whorish mother into an
obedient daughter and a faithful wife, who again will be represented as a speechless presence. But a
matter of space and time constraints will leave that third casket unopened this time, awaiting some
other occasion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adelman, Janet 1992: Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeares Plays.
New York, Routledge.
Aristotle 1932: The Poetics. Ed. G. P. Goold. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam. > Cerasano and Wynne Davies, ed. 1996: 43-75.
Cerasano, S. P. and Marion Wynne-Davies 1996: Renaissance Drama by Women. Text and
Documents. London, Routledge.
Daly, Peter M. 1979: Literature in the Light of the Emblem. Toronto, Toronto University Press.
Drakakis, John, ed. 1986: Alternative Shakespeares. London, Methuen.
Freud, Sigmund 1913: The Theme of the Three Caskets. > Freud 1974, vol. 12: 291-301.
1974: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. Trans. James
Stratchey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1974.
Lacan, Jacques 1978: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, Norton.
Luis Martnez, Zenn. 1997: Deseo y parentesco: Discursos del incesto en el drama ingls del
Renacimiento. Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, Universidad de Sevilla.
Rose, Jacqueline 1986: Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure.
> Drakakis, ed. 1986: 95-118.
Shakespeare, William 1994: Measure for Measure. Ed. N. W. Bawcutt. Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
1981: The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. Brian Morris. London, Methuen.

Sederi VIII (1997)

190 ZENN LUIS MARTNEZ

Shell, Marc 1988: The End of Kinship. Incest, Measure for Measure, and the Ideal of Universal
Siblinghood. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Webster, John 1991: The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. Elizabeth M. Bennan. London, A. & C. Black.

***

Sederi VIII (1997)