Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (review)

Debora Kuller Shuger's work is always enlightening, marked by acute intelligence and wide-ranging scholarship. Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure displays those qualities, especially for readers who recognize that the abundant documentation, explanations, and qualifications in the footnotes should receive attention as conscientious as the text itself demands. The persistently asserted burden of Shuger's argument as it touches on Shakespeare's play also appears accurate. All the major characters in Measure for Measure seem to believe that the regulation of sexual behavior and, more generally, the moral and spiritual health of Vienna's citizens are the business not simply of the church but of the state. This silent consensus indeed suggests that Shakespeare's play manifests ideas central to "political theology."

By this term Shuger means the framework of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes by which early modern people construed their political landscape. Few if any early modern observers adopted the secular understanding of politics familiar to us today. Deriving originally from Aristotle rather than Plato, the dominant modern notion of politics focuses in nonreligious terms on the entities through which power is distributed and effected. "Political theology," as Shuger extracts the idea from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents, concerns itself instead with matters that seem off the point today. Her authorities talk about "charity, penitence, forgiveness, and salvation ... godly magistrates, the sword of heaven, and Christ's kingdom" (42).

Although all the numerous early modern authorities on whom Shuger draws accept the idea that the state should meddle with people's souls, tensions become evident within that consensus. The broadest conflict developed, Shuger argues, between "Anglicans," who were devotees of "high Christian royalism," and "Puritans." Both groups believed that the divine presence was, or should be, resident in this world's "sacral loci." These are places "where the moral and spiritual substance of Christianity enters the political field and transforms it" and include not only "godly magistrates" (especially the monarch) but also courts of law, particularly the prerogative courts, Chancery and Star Chamber (45).

How does Measure for Measurefigure in this argument? Shuger cites few compatible earlier studies of the play, a sparseness that may be excused because she has not set out to interpret Measure for Measure. Instead her goal is to use the play's "obvious" features (6) as a guide to understanding the now-unfamiliar terrain of political theology. Descriptions of literary texts always incorporate elements that scholars have supplied rather than found, and Shuger's Measure for Measure, like anyone else's, inevitably builds her preconceptions into what she sees on the page. The play she examines in Political Theologies, its features more often assumed than explicated and defended, offers shaky ground for guidance, especially toward a goal as bold as "reimagining the history of early modern political thought" (13).

Shuger's first list of features obvious to all, given on page 6, begins to illustrate this. True, the duke does force two men to marry the women they have impregnated; Angelo does seek to enforce the laws with severe consistency; Vienna's law does make pre-marital intercourse a capital crime. By the end of the play, too, some readers or playgoers could agree that the "Duke cares about his subjects' readiness to die" (6). Given many modern readers' and playgoers' inclination to view the Duke as a self-interested, Machiavellian manipulator, this assessment of his motives is not at all obvious. Yet it anchors Shuger's construction of the play and anticipates her repeated but insufficiently tested claim that Duke Vincentio "gets it right"—executes, that is, a radically Augustinian vision of Christian justice by "pardoning, reconciling, and redeeming transgressors rather than punishing them" (137).

More broadly, however, does Shuger's list of...