Abstract
By his own confession, the Duke’s studiousness has damaged his fourteen-year reign. Specifically, it seems, his dukedom’s sex-laws have gone unenforced. He speaks to Friar Thomas of his failure to enforce these ‘most biting laws’, and while not actually specifying the neglected statutes as sex-laws here, his simile of the ‘needful bits and curbs to headstrong jades’ (‘jades’ is a better reading than the Penguin edition’s ‘weeds’) seems to imply that the kind of crimes involved are those of youth and wilfulness rather than viciousness. Likewise, the mention in the same speech [I. iii. 19–30] of ‘liberty pluck[ing] justice by the nose’ seems to indicate nothing more than sins of libertinism or impudence.
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© 1989 T. F. Wharton
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Wharton, T.F. (1989). The Neglect of the Dukedom. In: Measure for Measure. The Critics Debate. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20069-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20069-6_7
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