The Law Made Flesh: St. Paul's Corinth and Shakespeare's Vienna

This essay explores parallels between Shakespeare's Vienna and Corinth as it appears in Paul's letters. First Corinthians presents marriage as the solution for sexual license, a remedy the Duke also employs. Furthermore, the license of both cities seems to result from uncertainty about whether the law is still in effect. Shakespeare presents rival theories of the law through the Duke and Angelo. The Duke's approach of suspending the law, while merciful, tolerates the presence of unreformed elements in the city. The play's vision of society, while anti-puritan, is also indebted to Paul's letters to the church at Corinth. ********** In Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal exults in his success at carousing with the men of Eastcheap; he brags to Poins that they "tell me flatly I am no proud jack, like Falstaff, but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy" (2.4.11-12). (1) Hal is delighted he can "drink with any tinker in his own language," giving Poins an account of the vocabulary he has acquired. Among the curious terms he has collected, "Corinthian" stands out. In context it implies only an unpretentious bonhomie, but the Oxford English Dictionary notes an obsolete meaning current from 1575 into the late nineteenth century: "A wealthy man; a profligate idler; a gay, licentious man; also, a shameless or 'brazen-faced' fellow." The ancient city of Corinth might have been familiar to the denizens of Eastcheap from the two letters Saint Paul wrote to the church there, letters that are unique for the clear picture they offer of the problem of distinguishing between liberty and license in an apostolic community. Those with more formal education would also know Corinth's reputation for luxury and sexual excess and its status as an important trade center and the site of the temple of Aphrodite. This is the impression of the city Calvin presents in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, which was published in an English translation in 1577. He observes that "at Corinth those vices raigned with the which Citties of Mart are woonte to be replenished, as with Luxurie, pryde, vanitie, nicenes, covetousness insatiable, and ambition: they had also so invaded the Church itselfe, that discipline was almost out of place" (*4r). Several problems that troubled apostolic Corinth are remarkably similar to those plaguing the Vienna of Measure for Measure; unrestrained sexual license most obviously, but also the ambiguities of marriage contracts and questions about the scope of personal liberty disturb both cities. Numerous critics have identified biblical references in the play and demonstrated its clear concern with the interpretation of the Bible. (2) Its most important biblical allusion is its title, which refers simultaneously to the Sermon on the Mount's instruction to judge others mercifully and to the lex talionis of Mosaic Law. (3) Critics have also demonstrated the particular link between Paul's letter to the Romans and Measure for Measure, identifying one of the letter's key themes in Isabella's argument for mercy despite Claudio's transgression of the law, and tracing the Duke's conflation of royal and divine power back to Paul's insistence that Christians are still subject to secular authority as another "minister of God" (Rom. 13:4). (4) I want to suggest that Paul's letters to the church in Corinth, and particularly 1 Corinthians, exercised an influence on the play as well, since Paul's comments about the community there offer the most fully realized portrait of a church in crisis in his letters. First Corinthians focuses on the practical question of social discipline and addresses a community that has lost its bearings with regard to the law. Likewise, Vienna is vexed by a general lawlessness, but the solution lies not in imposing harsh laws, but in granting unwarranted mercy to malefactors. Measure for Measure opposes a theory of the law that emphasizes its transcendent, inhuman impartiality, and presents instead an understanding of the law that accommodates the frailty of human flesh. …