Abstract
In a famously difficult passage from the first act of Measure for Measure (1604), Claudio, who is being led away to prison for the crime of getting his betrothed with child, responds to Lucio’s query “Whence comes this restraint?” with a witty paradox:
From too much liberty, my Lucio. Liberty,
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 ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.1
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Notes
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1.2.114–22, ed. J.W. Lever (1966; rpt. London and New York: Routledge 1988). Subsequent references are to this edition.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 129–42
Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 88–115
Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 55–74.
Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana Press, 1976), p. 219.
For interpretations of the play in light of legal issues in Shakespeare’s England see Louise Halper, “Measure for Measure, Law, Prerogative, Subversion,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 13 (2001), 221–64
Stephen Cohen, “From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure,” Criticism 41 (1999), 431–64
Deborah Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 9–38
Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 160–211.
Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 219–37. See also Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, pp. 171–76, and Shuger, Political Theologies, pp. 30–33, for contemporary Puritanical efforts to criminalize sexual misconduct.
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Praefatio, Opera Omnia, II, p. ix. Cited in Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and Newtonian Science,” Church History 30 (1961), 436.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 13–48.
Lars Engle, “Measure for Measure and Modernity: The Problem of the Skeptic’s Authority,” in Shakespeare and Modernity, ed. Hugh Grady (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 85.
Robert Boyle, A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, ed. Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 36.
On the Judeo-Christian tradition of the legislating God and its challenge to Greek ideas of immanent laws of nature see Oakley, “Christian Theology.” On the emergence of the term “law” to describe physical regularities in nature see Jane E. Ruby, “The Origins of Scientific ‘Law,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986), 341–59.
Both these essays respond to Edgar Zilsel, “The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law,” Philosophical Review 51 (1942), 245–79.
See also J.E. McGuire, “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972), 523–41
Jon Miller, “Spinoza and the Concept of a Law of Nature,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003), 257–76
Friedel Weinert, “Laws of Nature, Laws of Science,” in Laws of Nature: Essays on the Philosophical and Historical Dimensions (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 3–63.
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 2.2.59–61, ed. J.H.P. Pafford (1963; rpt. London and New York: Routledge, 1991).
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 5.4.38, ed. J.M. Nosworthy (1955; rpt. London and New York: Routledge, 1988).
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Christopher Morris, vol. 1 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1963), pp. 154–55.
Francis Bacon, “A Confession of Faith,” in Francis Bacon, the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 108.
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© 2007 Elizabeth Hanson
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Hanson, E. (2007). Measure for Measure and the Law of Nature. In: Jordan, C., Cunningham, K. (eds) The Law in Shakespeare. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626348_14
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