Queer Shakespeare

Antisocial procreation in Measure for Measure

Procreation – particularly that which results from sex between ‘man and woman, after this downright way of creation’ – would seem to be one of the least queer topics that one could discuss (Measure for Measure, 3.2.100–1).1 The modern Christian Right has repeatedly invoked the ‘facts’ of human reproduction to justify the persecution of sexual minorities and the criminalization of practices that are not heterosexual and procreative. Given that procreative heterosex has been so effectively normalized, it is unsurprising and appropriate that queer and feminist scholars have focused on affirming the ethical and political value of practices that refuse the injunction to ‘bring forth fruit and multiply’ – most prominently, same-sex desire and attachment but also celibacy, masturbation, BDSM, prostitution and pornography. Perhaps most provocatively, Lee Edelman argues that the Christian Right might have a point in equating abortion with homosexuality, for it is precisely that equation which illuminates the pernicious effects of a ‘culture of life’. Pondering the ‘ideological truth’ revealed by the ‘common stake in the militant right’s opposition to abortion and to queer sexualities’, Edelman asks ‘Who would, after all, come out for abortion or stand against reproduction, against futurity, and so against life?’ The answer, of course, is the queer, who must demand not mere toleration or inclusion within the existing social order, but rather ‘must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such’.2 The queer, that is, faces up to the fact that the refusal to procreate does in fact threaten a social order built on an ideal of present self-sacrifice in service of a greater, always deferred good – one demanded above all of the pregnant woman whose body has ceased to be ‘her own’ and whose forfeiture of pleasure and autonomy is the logical conclusion of reproductive futurism.

In direct opposition to this ‘romance’ of reproductive futurism, Edelman celebrates in the sinthomosexual ‘something truly inhuman, something meaningless and mechanistic, that replaces volition and agency with subjection to the drive’, insisting that the ‘ethical task for which queers are singled out’ is ‘to embrace the impossibility, the inhumanity of the sinthomosexual’.3 Edelman brilliantly and rightly calls out the smug morality – expressed above all in political rhetoric that idealizes capitulation to ‘the fascism of the baby’s face’ – which has legitimated so much violence against sexual minorities.4 But, as Jennifer Doyle has noted, at times ‘Edelman comes awfully close to speaking from exactly the reproductive position he so forcefully challenges – speaking as Child cut from the body of the mother’, and ‘[t]hat subject position – generated via the separation of child from mother and the fantasy of autonomy generated in the cutting of that cord – is not anti-reproductive. It is the very gesture through which heteronormative patriarchal authority manufactures itself’.5 This is the fantasy of declaring the freedom of form from matter, mind from body, that, as feminist philosophers have long noted, has historically been framed in gendered terms.6

In this chapter, I want to place Edelman’s important challenge to reproductive futurism in conversation with recent new materialist work that stresses what Jane Bennett calls the ‘vitality’ of matter in order to ‘dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determinant, and organic/inorganic’.7 As Bennett argues in her discussion of stem-cell research, the ‘free and undetermined agency’ of matter – including that which eventually will become human ‘life’ – reminds ‘secular modernists that while we can surely intervene in the material world, we are not in charge of it, for there are “foreign” powers about’.8 Awareness of these ‘foreign powers’ allows us to reject a view of matter as inert stuff distinct from and subject to human rationality and autonomy. It also opens the way to revising a definition of nature as passive and inert, a view that has prompted many feminist theorists to privilege the virgin and the lesbian separatist as figures for the emancipation from the ‘nature’ to which women’s reproductive bodies have traditionally been consigned.9 As numerous queer, materialist and ecofeminist scholars have pointed out, a more productive path would be ‘to undertake the transformation of gendered dualisms – nature/culture, body/mind, object/subject, resource/agency, and others – that have been cultivated to denigrate and silence certain groups of human as well as nonhuman life’.10 This refusal of (post)modern disenchantment, as Bruno Latour has argued, entails a reparative relation not just to the material and technological worlds, but also to one’s situation in time: ‘“No future”: this is the [postmodern] slogan added to the moderns’ motto “No past”’. An acceptance of hybridity, Latour contends, entails ‘a rereading of our history’ by which ‘we discover that we have never begun to enter the modern era’ in which ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, self and other, past and future can be neatly distinguished.11

Accordingly, returning to past worlds may allow us to challenge many of the categories, both sexual and ontological, that we now take for granted. In recent years, medieval and early modern scholars have shown that a premodern archive makes available a range of perspectives that challenge the human exceptionalism upon which heteronormativity rests: Aristotle’s ensouled nature, Epicurus’s and Lucretius’s atoms, and Spinoza’s substance are but a few.12 In this chapter, I examine the materialist view of ‘life’ in Measure for Measure, a play which reminds us that modern sexual ideologies are built on a Cartesian split between passive body and active mind, intentional human subject and determined non-human object, that did not yet operate in early modern thought and that continues to be inadequate to address the complexity of ‘life’ today.13 In this notoriously troubling problem play, sex is relentlessly tied to the unintentional production of bare life (zoē) rather than the considered perpetuation of socio-political life (bios).14 As Mario DiGangi, drawing on Bennett’s concept of impersonal affect, has observed, the early modern period saw not only language and behaviour as ‘bawdy’, but also things, including bodily substances like blood, ‘which seems to operate independently of human appetite or subjectivity’.15 Building on these insights, I attend to sex, pregnancy and gestation, even more mysterious material events in the early modern world than they are now, which involve organs, substances and processes that act independently of conscious intent. The ‘rebellion of a codpiece’ is not only the act of fornication, but also the unpredictable activity of fleshly and fluid matter that continues after the sex act itself is complete (Measure for Measure, 3.2.110). Moreover, as Lucio’s sardonic speculation that Angelo is the offspring of ‘a sea-maid’ or ‘two stockfishes’ indicates, reproduction without sex could in fact be imagined as more conducive to a normative social order – one based on intentional, conjugal procreation – than ‘the downright way of creation’ (3.2.103–4, 101).16

Indeed, the ‘fundamental discomfort with the facts of human conception’ that Janet Adelman has identified in Measure for Measure may be at least as much a visceral reaction against the inscrutable formation of ‘life’ as a moral anxiety about sin or a socio-economic anxiety about lines of inheritance.17 The fleshly human is immune to the ideals and chronologies we would impose on it, and pregnancy is only one instance of a ‘congealing of agency’ across, inside and outside individual bodies that challenges the gendered, sexual and ontological hierarchies that modern thought takes for granted.18 This is not to argue that Measure for Measure endorses an exuberant ‘zoe-egalitarianism’ that acknowledges the ‘generative power that flows across all species’ and therefore ‘opens up unexpected possibilities for the recomposition of communities, for the very idea of humanity and for ethical forms of belonging’.19 Instead, the play’s depiction of procreation reminds us that, as Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird argue, ‘Recognizing the nonhuman in every trace of the Human also means being cognizant of the exclusive and excluding economy of discourses relating to what it means to be, live, act or occupy the category of the Human’.20 In this light, the deep pessimism about ‘human nature’ – its resistance to transcending or redeeming heterosex and its unintentional progeny – that we find in Measure for Measure can be instructive for a queer project of challenging ‘natural’ hierarchies and ontologies.

Despite its well-documented biblical references, Measure for Measure consistently desacralizes human life, depicting the human creature as little better than the inanimate matter – the dust – from which she or he came and to which she or he will return. In his guise as Friar Lodowick, the Duke expresses a materialist view of life as something dispersed and impersonal, counselling Claudio: ‘Thou art not thyself, / For thou exists on many a thousand grains / That issue out of dust’ (3.1.19–21). Humanity and dirt, organic and inorganic matter, are only momentarily distinguishable; the illusions of transcendence that the human creature entertains are shockingly temporary.21 This grim view of life is voiced in the postlapsarian punishment that ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the earth, for out of it wast thou taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return’ (Gen. 3.19) and the incantatory ‘Earth to earth, asshes to asshes, dust to dust’ from the burial service in the English Book of Common Prayer.22 Critically, however, the Duke leaves out the service’s subsequent assurance that material existence is not all, that we return to the earth ‘in sure and certayne hope of resurreccion to eternal lyfe’.23 In excluding this Christian consolation, the Duke does not so much suggest that there is no future beyond death as insist on an endless, irresistible future as matter.

Nor does the Duke’s surprisingly desacralized view of life (surprising given that in this scene he impersonates Friar Lodowick, ‘a man divine and holy’ [5.1.146]) hint at any miracle of birth or procreation. Generation and disease are equally uncontrollable processes:

thine own bowels which do call thee sire,

The mere effusion of thy proper loins,

Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum

For ending thee no sooner.

(3.1.28–32)

Here, it is difficult to distinguish not only between the human and the non-human, activity and passivity, but also between interiority and exteriority. What is inside the body (cells, tissue, blood, organs, instincts, diseases, embryos, fetuses) and what is outside (the loving kinsfolk that might help us, the hostile forces that might destroy us) are hard to distinguish. ‘Bowels’ and ‘loins’ are both the interior of the body, its entrails and reproductive organs, and the independent lives that emerge from their ‘effusion’, or excretion of fluids from their ‘proper’ origin – generation evokes the tumescence and leakiness of gout and rheum. ‘Life’, itself erratically personified in the Duke’s speech, consists of an assemblage of organs, fluids and infections that act apart from human intention. In the initiation as well as the ending of life, this speech suggests, ‘there are “foreign” powers about’, within and beyond the individual body.

The Duke’s emphatically materialist vision of human life as itself inextricable from an indeterminate network of substances – food, flesh, disease, offspring – reminds us that generation, no less than sex, may break down the social taxonomies we associate with human life even as it questions the borders between life and death. In both plot and structure, Measure for Measure depicts its various characters as part of a single network. These intricate relations are particularly evident in the non-human processes of pregnancy and disease with which individual human life begins and ends. By tracing representations of pregnancy in Measure for Measure, we can see that social spheres usually understood to be separate – marriage and procreation, on the one hand, prostitution and disease, on the other – overlap and inhabit one another.

Early on in Measure for Measure, the brothel is depicted as a source of contagion that connects persons of a range of social classes, along with the sexual mores that would appear to separate them. Lucio huddles with the two Gentlemen, joking about the ‘diseases’ they have ‘purchased’ in Mistress Overdone’s establishment, a conversation cut short by the news that Claudio is to be executed ‘for getting Madam Julietta with child’ (1.2.45, 71). Not only Lucio, but also the Gentlemen and Mistress Overdone appear to know Claudio well. Mistress Overdone is at once a widow who has been married nine times and a ‘bawd of eleven years’ continuance’ who ‘has worn [her] eyes out in the service’ (2.1.197–8, 3.2.190, 1.2.109–10). Elbow’s wife, ‘great with child’ and craving stewed prunes, turns up in a brothel where she is either propositioned or assaulted – we can’t tell – by the wealthy heir Froth.24 The ‘bawd born’ Pompey (3.2.66) is conscripted to assist the hangman Abhorson, a partnership that brings into focus the ideological significance of the triple pun that constitutes Abhorson’s name: conventional morality ‘abhors’ the ‘whoreson’ as a misformed life – one early modern meaning of abortion – that brings bios into uncomfortable proximity with zoē, political life with social death.25 And at the play’s conclusion Lucio is compelled to marry Kate Keep-down, a prostitute whose child he has fathered.

This last example has received little attention, with all critics that I know of accepting Lucio’s description of Kate as a ‘whore’ and a ‘punk’ as simple statements of longstanding fact (5.1.512, 518). I propose instead that what we can infer of Kate’s circumstances troubles the boundaries of this category. If Kate’s marriage to Lucio transforms her from ‘punk’ to ‘wife’, her pregnancy may have turned her from ‘maid’ to ‘punk’ (5.1.178–81). For Kate’s actual status – maid or punk? – at the time she conceived Lucio’s child is never clearly stated. Mistress Overdone claims that Lucio ‘promised her marriage’ (3.2.194–5). And in Lucio’s own account, he was brought before the Duke ‘for getting a wench with child’, paternity that he privately admits (‘marry, I did’) but publicly denies (‘I was fain to forswear it; / they would else have married me to the rotten medlar’ [4.3.170–1]). It seems unlikely that a paying client would promise a prostitute marriage: the whole point of prostitution is that men can have sex without marriage, commitment or progeny. It also seems unlikely, given the public shaming and harsh corporeal, carceral and economic penalties imposed on prostitutes, that a prostitute would take a client who has impregnated her to court in hopes of compelling him to marry her, more unlikely still that the court would rule in her favour if he acknowledged paternity.26 At the very least, Mistress Overdone’s account, along with Lucio’s own certainty that he would have been forced to marry Kate had he told the truth, suggests two things: 1) Kate did not have sex with Lucio as a prostitute – that is, in exchange for money, and 2) she had not slept with other men, as a prostitute or otherwise, for enough time before and after her encounter with Lucio that his paternity is unquestionable.

It is clear that Mistress Overdone has been taking care of Kate’s child, suggesting Kate’s own residence in her brothel, and nothing in Measure for Measure contradicts Lucio’s assertion that Kate is a ‘whore’ in the present tense of the play’s action, which takes place over a year after the child was born, probably about two after it was conceived (5.1.512).27 But it seems more likely that this status followed than preceeded her encounter with Lucio. In an early modern economy that afforded very few legitimate employment prospects to women, prostitution might very well have been the only option for sustaining Kate’s own life and that of the child that Mistress Overdone had been keeping.28 As Mairead Sullivan points out, ‘The Child, for radical feminists, cannot be simply rejected or refused, the child, itself, is already the figuration of a thwarted future’.29 Not every child is a Child, or a symbol of a new and better tomorrow. This is particularly true in the socio-economic world of Measure for Measure, where the creation of new life may subject women to literal disease and social and literal death. As bare lives to be preserved rather than political lives to be promoted, the play’s prostitutes and their offspring silently exist at the cusp of the human and the non-human in this play. Typically, these border figures have been read according to the comforting taxonomy of the ‘outbreak narrative’ described by Priscilla Wald, in which the ‘villains’ are women, homosexuals, the working classes, immigrants and inhabitants of the Third World, all figured as uniquely, ignorantly open to infection.30 Yet the shards of information that Measure for Measure provides about Kate’s history indicate the permeability of these modern epistemological and biological borders. At once marginal and central, spectral and insistently real, Kate – mother and prostitute, carrier of both life and death – registers the futility of a model of sexual hygiene that would definitely quarantine sex from love, health from disease, those who have futures from those who do not. Abject and dehumanized, the prostitute is one of those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, ‘were never meant to survive’ – but who persist in the traces (textual, biological) left by their contagious, unbounded bodies.31

Rather than accept Kate’s status as prostitute as inevitable, and the marginal lives of prostitutes as the natural outcome of illicit sex, I have sought to reconstruct the circumstances of the procreative sex that appears to have doomed her to the slow death of those outside the protective category of bios.32 What we can glean of Kate’s encounter suggests that attention to the processes, timelines and practicalities of procreation can trouble the normative definitions of healthy, virtuous sex that we bring to our encounters with past texts as well as present worlds. This is equally true of the one couple in the play usually understood to have practiced the loving, procreative sex that can be euphemized as reproductive futurism: Claudio and Juliet.

It is the very fact of Juliet’s untimely pregnancy – the presence, not the absence, of procreation – that not only reveals her relationship with Claudio but also threatens to sustain its illegitimacy. And not, as critics have tended to assume, because Angelo’s excessive zeal has divided a couple virtually en route to the altar.33 Rather, when we consider the advanced date of Juliet’s pregnancy, we can see that this procreative union, no less than that of Kate and Lucio, may have been inspired by inhuman appetite rather than ‘human’ love. As in that decidedly unromantic pair, the pregnancy resulting from the encounter between Claudio and Juliet is cause for shame and dismay, not joy in having unwittingly brought forth fruit, as we see in Claudio’s own account:

lucio	Is lechery so look’d after?
claudio	Thus stands it with me: upon a true contract
	I got possession of Julietta’s bed.
	You know the lady; she is fast my wife,
	Save that we do the denunciation lack
	Of outward order. This we came not to
	Only for propagation of a dower
	Remaining in the coffer of her friends,
	From whom we thought it meet to hide our love
	Till time had made them for us. But it chances
	The stealth of our most mutual entertainment
	With character too gross is writ on Juliet.
lucio	With child, perhaps?
claudio	Unhappily, even so.

(1.2.142–53)

Like Lucio, who ‘promised’ Kate marriage then ‘was fain to forswear it’ to avoid marriage to ‘the rotten medlar’ (3.2.171), or like Angelo, who ‘swallowed his vows whole, pretending in [Mariana] discoveries of dishonor’ (3.1.225–6), Claudio has offered marriage in exchange for something else: he confesses both Lucio’s desire for sex and Angelo’s desire for a dowry.

Claudio may have ‘got possession of Julietta’s bed’ in return for ‘a true contract’, or promise of marriage, but this promise was kept secret in hopes of ‘propagation of a dower’ – no one, including Isabel, seems to have heard of it. Unfortunately (‘unhappily’), Claudio and Juliet have propagated a child instead of a dowry. Now that ‘the stealth of [their] most mutual enjoyment’ has become legible pregnancy, writ large (or ‘gross’) on Juliet’s body, there may be little hope that more ‘time’ will bring Juliet’s relatives to favour the match. In fact, any time the couple has to legitimate their offspring – to parent a child rather than a bastard – has nearly run out by the start of the play. Claudio’s emphasis on Juliet’s size, along with the Provost’s reports that Juliet is ‘groaning’ in labour and ‘very near her hour’ and Angelo’s order that she be moved ‘To some more fitter place; and that with speed’ should turn our attention to the time that has passed between the procreative act and the present tense of the play (2.2.15–17). If Juliet’s pregnancy is far enough along that it is not only visibly obvious but also close to the moment of birth, then Claudio has had many months between his initial knowledge of the pregnancy and his arrest to honour the terms of his ‘true contract’.

One might object that it is silly to treat Juliet’s pregnancy as ‘real’ enough to count the months in which marriage might have taken place. After all, this is a fictional character. But the play gives us more evidence for this technical attention to her bodily state than for the romanticized past and present that are usually projected onto this couple. Given that Angelo was able to extricate himself from a more secure contract, one for which the dowry was determined and ‘the nuptial appointed’ (3.1.213), and given that Lucio successfully denied both paternity and promise of marriage in court, the overwhelming critical belief that Claudio will marry Juliet out of love responds less to what the play tells us of their relationship and more to the desire to isolate healthy from unhealthy sex. Isabella’s immediate response to the news of Juliet’s pregnancy – ‘O let him marry her!’ – accentuates Claudio’s foot-dragging even as it treats marriage as a pragmatic arrangement rather than an expression of love or virtue (1.4.49). In this light, the Duke’s order that Claudio ‘restore’ the woman he has ‘wrong’d’ is neither superfluous nor sublimating (5.1.520). The command aligns Claudio with the impersonal, anonymous desires of Angelo and Lucio, the other figures compelled to marry women they have ‘wronged’ – that is, to ‘restore’ these women to the human and political world of rights (3.1.199, 239, 5.1.505).

Claudio’s initial account of the cause for his arrest describes his and Juliet’s ‘most mutual enjoyment’ in the inhuman terms of appetite and disease that we have witnessed elsewhere in the play’s representations of sex. When Lucio initially asks him ‘whence comes this restraint?’ Claudio replies

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.

(1.2.125–30)

Claudio’s emphasis on excess here – ‘too much liberty’, ‘surfeit’, ‘immoderate use’ – suggests that he may already have had more than enough of Juliet, whose body is here compared to the ‘proper bane’ of rat poison. To ‘ravin’ is to devour voraciously, but also to plunder or prey. Juliet’s pregnancy does not so much redeem as expose this excess: the ‘teeming foison’ of her ‘plenteous womb / Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry’ (1.3.43–4). The redundancy of the metaphors with which Lucio describes Juliet’s pregnancy (‘teeming’, ‘foison’, ‘plenteous’, ‘full’) echoes the language of superfluity in Claudio’s own description, bringing life and death into close proximity through an impersonal, agricultural ‘husbandry’ in which procreation is natural but not sacred.

Yet to simplify this relation (or those of Lucio and Kate, Angelo and Mariana) as one of predatory male appetite and victimized female innocence would be to restore a moral order that is absent from Measure for Measure. Rather than blame Claudio for taking advantage of her youth or credulity, Juliet describes their relationship as one of shared creaturely corruption that is not the opposite of human ‘love’ but an inextricable part of it:

duke	Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry?
juliet	I do; and bear the shame most patiently.
…
duke	Love you the man that wronged you?
juliet	Yes, as I love the woman that wronged him.
duke	So then it seems your most offenceful act
	Was mutually committed.
juliet	Mutually.
duke	Then was your sin of heavier kind than his.
juliet	I do confess it, and repent it, father.

(2.3.19–29)

Critics have tended to focus on the Duke’s misogynistic charge of female guilt and his insistence on original sin to the exclusion of the rest of the conversation.34 What is significant about this passage, however, is not the Duke’s misogyny (though that is both undeniable and indefensible) but Juliet’s refusal to claim that she has been uniquely ‘wronged’ by sex. Like Claudio, she affirms the mutuality of their ‘most offenceful act’: she has ‘wronged’ Claudio insofar as she has participated in the illegal act of fornication. Whatever ‘love’ they feel for each other (and this is itself a loaded word, given Angelo’s proclamations of ‘love’ for Isabella and Mariana’s ‘violent and unruly’ – and humiliating – love for Angelo [3.1.251]) cannot be separated from the ‘injurious’ progeny that ‘respites [Juliet] a life, whose very comfort / Is still a dying horror’ (2.3.40–2).35 If Juliet’s ‘sin’ is ‘of heavier kind’ than Claudio’s it is because she literally bears its consequence: the progeny that far from sustaining her own (and Claudio’s) place in Vienna’s socioeconomic order, threatens to bring literal and social death to both of them through execution, through childbirth, through poverty, through ostracization. Juliet expresses no romantic ideal of the baby she is about to deliver as a child; it is a ‘sin’ and a ‘shame’ that exposes rather than redeems the inhuman appetite that created it. What Carol Thomas Neely has noted of Claudio and Lucio may be more generally true of human generation in Measure for Measure: it is ‘a grotesque embarrassment’.36 Procreation, in this sense, may be irreducibly antisocial insofar as it resists the meanings that humanity would impose on it. But what Adelman laments as a view of this new life as, in her artful phrase, ‘stinkingly dependent’ (or in Juliet’s words, ‘a dying horror’) may also offer a valuable challenge to the violent imposition of meaning that is reproductive futurism – and humanism more largely.37

In their introduction to a recent volume of GLQ on ‘Queer Inhumanisms’, Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen pose the question of the ethics of new materialist and posthuman theoretical perspectives: ‘why look away from the already overlooked or advantage the inanimate over the dehumanized?’38 One answer that they come to is that ‘Many of queer theory’s foundational texts interrogate, implicitly or explicitly, the nature of the “human” in its relation to the queer, both in their attention to how sexual norms themselves constitute and regulate hierarchies of humanness, and as they work to unsettle those norms and the default forms of humanness they uphold’.39 The non- or inhuman, that is to say, is useful to think with because it reminds us of the consequences of violent exclusion even as it evokes generative possibility.40 A materialist perspective on the reproduction of Measure for Measure can expand our understanding of queerness beyond a disembodied universality that refuses ‘every substantialization of identity’.41 Belonging to neither a ‘culture of life’ allegorized by the Child nor a death drive allegorized by the sinthomosexual, unwanted lives and the women who bear them do not so much refuse the future as underscore its extra-human dimensions. In accentuating the material, inhuman dimension of reproduction, Measure for Measure allows us to appreciate the difficulty of drawing a line between virtuous and shameful sex, even as it reveals the limitations of a queerness that would speak of sex, and of ‘life’, only in the present tense. Matter in the biological, ecological and evolutionary senses has its own history and its future, though not one that can be understood in teleological terms that privilege a normative version of the human.

Rather, ‘human’ ‘life’ is caught up in a material future, one of which procreation is only one manifestation – and one to which we cannot say ‘no’. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, earth to earth.