The City as a Vile Body

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2.2 The City as a Vile Body

Measure for Measure begins with a discussion between Duke Vincentio and Escalus, the ancient Lord. The Duke begins the play by saying that, in terms of

“government the properties” (1.1.3),³ Escalus knows more about the city and its government than he does. “Government” is one of the first words that appears in Measure for Measure. It becomes the key concept in the understanding of the play.

The Duke then tells Escalus that he relies on his knowledge of the city’s popular and social customs in order to govern it well,

The nature of our people,

Our city’s institutions, and the terms For common justice, y’are as pregnant in As art and practice hath enriched any That we remember. (1.1.9-13)

The Duke sees the city as an organism, which consists of the citizens, the social and political customs, and the terms of court. The organism, however, is presently in an ill condition due to “too much liberty” (1.2.118), as Claudio later admits.

Vienna is thus represented as a “vile body.” As the play goes on, it is revealed that the city as an organism goes rotten because moral degeneracy filled every layer of the society. Shakespeare employs illness and disease in the play as a series of metaphors for social illnesses. Representatives of each type of social illness from different social classes could be easily found in this play. The brothel houses run by Mistress Overdone is the representative of the lower kind of social disease. Lucio, upon seeing Overdone coming, exclaims: “Behold, behold, where Madam Mitigation comes! I have purchases as many diseases under her roof” (1.2.41-43). The term                                                                                                                

3 J.W. Lever, ed. Measure for Measure (London: Methuen, 1966). All subsequent references are noted

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“disease” has a twofold meaning. First, it means, literally, the sexually transmitted diseases that the brothel helps to spread. Secondly, it implies that the brothel house is the center for urban rascals, thus the source of chaos and disorder. The sexually transmitted diseases make the citizens wither away. Overindulgence in sexuality makes the society as a whole corrupt. The brothel stands for the root of social illness, the place that makes the organism of the city rot away. This is why “the houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down” (1.2.95-96).

Then comes Claudio, convicted of the sin of lust: “Our natures do pursue / Like rats that ravin down heir proper bane / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die”

(1.2.120-22). He describes the secular desire as something inevitable; something that he, driven by his “thirsty evil,” cannot help chasing after even if he knows it could be poisonous. Claudio gives us another example of social illness. For common people, lechery, which leads to premarital sex, is unavoidable. Moreover, Claudio’s sexuality was connected to the plague prevailing in the period. According to Kamps and Raber, Claudio’s confession was a reference to Rattus rattus:

While the Renaissance did not recognize the specific role of Rattus rattus in spreading plague bacilli via its fleas, the place of vermin like rats in

promoting unhealthful conditions was well known […] Claudio’s idea that sex is poison reflects a general sense that in Vienna (or London) sex is a generally unhealthy activity for both the body and the soul. (268)

Similar to the diseases at Mistress Overdone’s bawdyhouse, Claudio’s degeneracy is both physical and moral, which corrupts both the body and the soul. It threatens the order of the body politic.

Finally, the most covert but most fatal illness is the authority’s “hidden sore.”

Isabella, during her argument with Angelo, observes that “[b]ecause authority, though

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it err like others / Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself / That skins the vice o’th’top”

(2.2.135-37). She reveals that authorities also have to take the responsibility for current social illnesses because they make mistakes and fail to restrain their sexuality like common people, but due to their high positions, they tend to cover up their sin.

The sin of the authority is even more fatal than that of the commoners because the hidden sores are left unhealed, so they rot sooner.

The current issue, for the Duke, is how to cure the “vile body,” namely how to bring the corrupt city back to its order. As G. M. Kendall suggests, “Vienna’s Duke must contend with a whole city in which libidinous bodies undermine the laws and power of the head of the body politic” (36). During the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the government of a state or a city was commonly understood as the government of a body. The concept of the early modern body politic is clearly illustrated by E. M. W. Tillyard in his classic work, The Elizabethan World Picture.

Tillyard explains the correspondence between the heavenly world (macrocosm)—and the man (microcosm). The Elizabethans and Jacobeans saw the world in terms of a series of hierarchal links, which was understood as the Great Chain of Being. The order in the heavenly world corresponds to the one in the man, while both correspond to the political state, which is the “body politic.” As Tillyard notes, morality (and immorality) was also understood in these terms: “Morally the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, if taken seriously, must be impressive. If the heavens are fulfilling punctually their vast and complicated whellings, man must feel it shameful to allow the workings of his own little world to degenerate” (101). That is to say, the control of the human body is linked to the order of the heavenly world.

Similarly, the government of the state is also understood as that of the body, as

Tillyard continues to note: “the different functions in the state are made to correspond

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to different functions of the body …the state is an organism like the human body, and each part of the body must help the others and be helped by them” (103-04).

Shakespeare utilizes this thinking and employs illness and disease as a series of metaphors in this play. Thus, in Measure for Measure, the management of a corrupt state is compared to that of an ill body.

This system of correspondence also reveals the Elizabethan and Jacobean beliefs in “order” and “proportion.” As Gavin Alexander observes, “the pattern of this particular inherited system helps us to understand the connectedness in this period of different kinds of order and proportion—so that a well-constructed rhyme scheme could tell us something about human nature and glance at the secrets of the universe”

(599). However, the concepts of “order” and “proportion” often lead some to assume that the Elizabethans and Jacobeans readily submitted to discipline and regulation, though it is true that “the conception of order is so taken for granted, so much part of the collective mind of people, that it is hardly mentioned except in explicitly didactic passages” (Tillyard 17). Critics in the past thus tend to focus primarily on how the Duke cures social illnesses at different social levels, brings the state back to its order, and has the body politic function normally as he wishes. This type of analysis also perfectly fits in with the claim of some new historicists and cultural materialists that the early modern stage was the center of state power and dominant ideology.

The city as a “vile body” in Measure for Measure, however, both confirms and unsettles the early modern concept of body politic. On the one hand, the play

confirms the body politic by comparing the government of the state to the government of the body. On the other hand, it resists the dominant concept by maintaining the “ill condition” of the body. Vienna as a “body” remains “uncured” at the very end of the play. The social illnesses remain in the city despite the Duke’s attempt to cure them.

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Mistress Overdone continues her business at a hot-house. Pompey finds himself at home with his old customers in the prison. In other words, the prison does not reform the pimp. Instead, the pimp turns the prison into a “bawdyhouse.” Lucio, the

slanderous whoremaster, is not really “punished” by marrying the prostitute. The marriage symbolizes the continuance, instead of the containment, of the rascal’s sexual desire. The play starts with the city as a “vile body” and ends with its ill condition. Shakespeare subtly deploys disorder and disruption besides well-perceived order and pattern of the play. The play thus disturbs the early modern body politic by staging a “vile city” that remains ill through the very end of the story.