"There Is Our Commission": Writing and Authority in Measure for Measure and the London East India Company.(Critical Essay)

The parting instructions that begin Measure for Measure are strikingly cryptic. The Duke is copious with maxims but short on particulars. His opening speech to Escalus is incoherent:

 
   Of government the properties to unfold 
   Would seem in me t'affect speech and discourse, 
   Since I am put to know that your own science 
   Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice 
   My strength can give you. Then no more remains 
   But that, to your sufficiency, as your worth is able, 
   And let them work. (I.i.3-9) 

Let what work? Something is missing, editors explain: "There is ... wide agreement that a lacuna exists after sufficiency, or, less probably, after able."(1) Yet the text is dramatically effective as it stands. In this scene the Duke refuses to articulate details his deputies expect to hear. They are confused, and his "haste may not admit" elaboration (I.i.62). Ill-informed, in his absence they must act in his place. That the commands are unclear, I submit, not only sets up Angelo to enforce the law to his own "precise" (I.iii.50) temperament, but also foregrounds a structural problem of imperial deputation: persons acting in another's person must improvise. Even given a detailed script, they could not follow it but would find themselves accountable for their own decisions in predicaments unforeseen by the authorities whom they serve.

Performed the same year the name "Great Britain" was coined, Measure for Measure (1604) interrogates, among other things, imperial concerns. Jonathan Dollimore finds that Vienna's mechanisms of surveillance demonize sexuality in order to legitimate authoritarian repression; Leah Marcus suggests that the Duke's eventual sway represents the "victory of unlocalized law" over older local jurisdictions. Examining dialectics of subversion and containment, Dollimore takes Vienna as a figure for the authoritarian State, Marcus, for London under imperial Jacobean control.(2) I want to widen the frame around such readings by applying the Duke's troubles with Vienna not so much to empire's arrival in London as to its projection outward from London. In this application, elisions in the Duke's instructions might correspond to a central power's ignorance of the circumstances its agents encounter abroad.

I

To set problems of deputation and surveillance in Shakespeare's Vienna against analogous difficulties in the London East India Company, chartered 1600, at managing agents and effecting far-flung designs, freshly historicizes the play and underscores ironies in Britain's early imperial endeavor. What I mean to pursue might be termed not cultural poetics but "cultural logistics," a phenomenon quickened and magnified by the expansion of world trade. The phrase draws attention to the ways that human and mechanical forces are mobilized in the achievement of concrete social tasks. In logistics, intentionality meets materiality. How is it that work gets done: that particular goods and services are produced, laws conceived and enforced, theaters built in London, colonies planted in the New World, corporate profits secured in the East Indies? What social and personal motives conjoin in the execution of such initiatives? How do various groups, and individuals, formulate--and against what impediments, if at all, do they implement--their strategies and policies?

To frame such questions marks my endeavor to bring "cultural poetics," with its textual emphases, closer to "cultural materialism," which more rigorously postulates that material and discursive practices hold dialectial--mutually constitutive--relations.(3) By analyzing discursive structures that stipulate political relations and monitor material traffic; by juxtaposing such discourses to practical developments in their fields of reference; and by examining such structures and processes as they "circulate" in theatrical representations, one may explore cultural-materialist dialectics. Theaters in particular play out such dialectics both in-house, embodying fictions, and relative to the social worlds from which, as reflective institutions, they draw audiences.