Shakespeare and the Tragicomic Possibilities of Absolute Justice
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Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is concerned with the contradictions arising in a system of justice over which the monarch claimed absolute, sovereign power. Critics have discussed how the play explores the ideological tensions between the competing judicial principles of the common law, equity courts, and royal prerogative. Deborah Shuger, on the other hand, has demonstrated the profoundly religious character of the play’s representation of absolute justice, which is found to be irreducible to the absolutist/constitutionalist debate that will dominate the political discourses of the later seventeenth-century. Using Shuger’s work as a starting point, I argue that Measure for Measure explores the fundamental uncertainty inherent in the idea of absolute justice as it is found in the writings of James I. Although its ostensible purpose was to bolster the official claims of the absolute monarch and the state’s law, the idea of absolute justice could be appropriated to provide a powerful critique of the established regime, precisely because it was part of a discourse that depended so crucially on the ultimate authority of God, which was presumably reflected in the moral integrity of the monarch, his deputy-judge on earth. Thus the idea of absolute justice, even as it supported the official ideology of the absolutist state, could lead to multiple perspectives of justice which may or may not lend support to a particular monarchical regime. This paper is an attempt to connect this moral uncertainty inherent in the idea of absolute justice to the generic undecidability of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies. In a discussion of the genre of revenge tragedy through Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I attempt to show how the thematic tensions between justice and mercy correspond to the genre’s tragic and comic possibilities. Just as Measure for Measure’s tragicomic tension is shaped by the figure of Vincentio as self-proclaimed divine monarch, I argue that at the center of the thematic/generic tension of these plays is the shaping presence of the figure of the revenger who seeks to embody his own particular vision of absolute justice.
Abstract
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is concerned with the contradictions arising in a system of justice over which the monarch claimed absolute, sovereign power. Critics have discussed how the play explores the ideological tensions between the competing judicial principles of the common law, equity courts, and royal prerogative. Deborah Shuger, on the other hand, has demonstrated the profoundly religious character of the play’s representation of absolute justice, which is found to be irreducible to the absolutist/constitutionalist debate that will dominate the political discourses of the later seventeenth-century. Using Shuger’s work as a starting point, I argue that Measure for Measure explores the fundamental uncertainty inherent in the idea of absolute justice as it is found in the writings of James I. Although its ostensible purpose was to bolster the official claims of the absolute monarch and the state’s law, the idea of absolute justice could be appropriated to provide a powerful critique of the established regime, precisely because it was part of a discourse that depended so crucially on the ultimate authority of God, which was presumably reflected in the moral integrity of the monarch, his deputy-judge on earth. Thus the idea of absolute justice, even as it supported the official ideology of the absolutist state, could lead to multiple perspectives of justice which may or may not lend support to a particular monarchical regime. This paper is an attempt to connect this moral uncertainty inherent in the idea of absolute justice to the generic undecidability of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies. In a discussion of the genre of revenge tragedy through Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I attempt to show how the thematic tensions between justice and mercy correspond to the genre’s tragic and comic possibilities. Just as Measure for Measure’s tragicomic tension is shaped by the figure of Vincentio as self-proclaimed divine monarch, I argue that at the center of the thematic/generic tension of these plays is the shaping presence of the figure of the revenger who seeks to embody his own particular vision of absolute justice.
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