Governing bodies tempering tongues: Henrician statecraft, subjects of governmentality and Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure'

This dissertation accepts Michel Foucault's premise that in England, as elsewhere in Europe in the early sixteenth century, "power of the pastoral type...suddenly spread out into the whole social body...[finding] support in a multitude of institutions" ("The Subject and Power," 783--84). What Foucault calls "governmentality" is concerned with a totalized population and aims to "conduct the conduct" of each individualized subject's thought, word and deed. I argue that William Shakespeare's last comedy---Measure for Measure---is intent on examining the techniques and ethical implications of the governmental arts and each chapter examines a different aspect of the 1520s and thirties in relation to both governmentality and Shakespeare's play.In the introduction I trace the critical fortunes of Measure for Measure, especially in relation to the rise of feminist criticism, and argue that Foucault's genealogical approach has much to offer a feminist analysis of the play in its time. Chapter 1 provides the historical context and describes the conditions of possibility that allowed pastoral methods to thrive. I argue that the individualizing processes are in fact dehumanizing and that Shakespeare's play describes such dehumanizing effects at the level of trope and scheme. Chapter 2 studies English humanism and argues that humanist discourse created the need for its own expertise, especially through its assumptions about both masculinity and femininity a new instrumentality of friendship and marriage serve the ends of governance. I argue that Measure for Measure is concerned with the disciplinary function of marriage as well and that the heroine Isabella continues to be censured by male critics as are feminist critics who would read outside of the subversioncontainment paradigm. Chapter 3 attends to the fortunes of Tudor women in general and to one woman in particular, the Catholic martyr Elizabeth Barton, the nun or Holy Maid of Kent. Executed for speaking against the King's divorce and remarriage, the case marks a shift in the juridical status of speech acts. At the same time, the government documents in her case file seek to discredit her by transcoding the events from the field of the spiritual and prophetical and onto the theatrical, thereby imbuing the theatre with great power. The play worries about the ethics of its own theatrical capacities as revealed, I argue, by what it refuses to represent. Finally, in chapter 4, I discuss a selection of Tudor "secular interludes" and argue that they suffer from a contradiction between their didactic and their theatrical imperatives. They produce a discourse in which sex and theatre are granted incredible power and thus undermine their own polemic. I conclude with a discussion of the institutional restraints on Measure for Measure, itself a Great Hall interlude in that it was performed by the newly created King's Men, at court, on St. Stephen's Day 1604.