Biosecurity and Physical Distancing in Measure for Measure: Reading Shakespeare after a Pandemic
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This essay surveys the biopolitics illuminated in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. By contextualizing the play against the recent debates on state power and disease control among philosophers, this piece discusses Shakespeare’s representation of biopolitical governance. Like the Agamben-Žižek debate on the Covid-19 pandemic, Shakespeare’s drama discusses law, the state of exception, biosecurity, and governmentality—the kernel of biopolitics—in a time of the rapid dissemination of syphilis. Measure for Measure is Shakespeare’s most haphephobic narrative, revealing the way Shakespeare identified physical distancing and masking as a form of proper governance. By surveying the topic of disease control (both literal and metaphorical), this essay discusses the irony of biopolitics in Shakespeare’s imagination, where physical contact is ineluctable to maintain the population and community even when an epidemic is most rampant. The lingering irony of Shakespeare’s narrative of epidemic and juridical order is that establishing the constitutional body is not the deepest wish of power. Instead, the real agenda of the state is to maintain a prolonged (or perpetual) judicial exception or vacuum. Perhaps, the duke’s biopolitical control is successful, keeping the social distance necessary for epidemic control and sustaining the population by harnessing excessive sexuality. The paradox, nonetheless, is that this new order is feasible only when he suspends the legal system that he wants to establish. After all, Measure for Measure reveals that biosecurity is necessary to foster life and support the Viennese population, but its limit reaches extreme biosecurity acquired only by sacrifice.
Abstract
This essay surveys the biopolitics illuminated in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. By contextualizing the play against the recent debates on state power and disease control among philosophers, this piece discusses Shakespeare’s representation of biopolitical governance. Like the Agamben-Žižek debate on the Covid-19 pandemic, Shakespeare’s drama discusses law, the state of exception, biosecurity, and governmentality—the kernel of biopolitics—in a time of the rapid dissemination of syphilis. Measure for Measure is Shakespeare’s most haphephobic narrative, revealing the way Shakespeare identified physical distancing and masking as a form of proper governance. By surveying the topic of disease control (both literal and metaphorical), this essay discusses the irony of biopolitics in Shakespeare’s imagination, where physical contact is ineluctable to maintain the population and community even when an epidemic is most rampant. The lingering irony of Shakespeare’s narrative of epidemic and juridical order is that establishing the constitutional body is not the deepest wish of power. Instead, the real agenda of the state is to maintain a prolonged (or perpetual) judicial exception or vacuum. Perhaps, the duke’s biopolitical control is successful, keeping the social distance necessary for epidemic control and sustaining the population by harnessing excessive sexuality. The paradox, nonetheless, is that this new order is feasible only when he suspends the legal system that he wants to establish. After all, Measure for Measure reveals that biosecurity is necessary to foster life and support the Viennese population, but its limit reaches extreme biosecurity acquired only by sacrifice.
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