The Displacement of Violence. 'Measure for Measure', Legal Discourse and Violent Imagery

The ‘outbreak’ of violent imagery in the early Modern era goes, quite paradoxically maybe, hand in hand, with important developments in forensic rhetoric, which gives prominence to procedural and discursive tools, at the expense of proof by physical means like torture. Jody Enders, in her study on the ‘Medieval theatre of cruelty’ claims that classical rhetoric – after Quintilian – and torture reached a point of contradiction, only to be solved by the ‘theatricality’ of legal procedure. Lorna Hutson, in her research about law and mimesis in Renaissance drama, develops further the ‘mental’ techniques the theatre experimented with and which contributed to this ‘discursive turn’ in legal matters and specifically in forensic rhetoric. Both Medieval and Renaissance theatre provided thus an experimenting ground for ‘cleaning’ the courtroom from too violent experiences and images.
This observation is of course not unrelated to a Foucauldian concept of secularization and transformation of Western society according to a biopolitical paradigm. But the very open and perceivable confrontation between an abundancy of the imagery of physical violence and the parallel evacuation of violence from the forensic stage – courtroom, execution place, etc. – deserves some special attention. The issue is whether the ‘theatrical shift’ in the early Modern legal discourse has any relationship with the specific changes in visual culture, particularly the representation of violence. The next question is of course whether this (hypothetical) shift also redefines the relationship between violence (as a physical reality) and law (as an official monopoly on violence) as they are present in the public domain, in public culture.
Provisional answers start from a dramaturgical analysis of William Shakespeare’s so- called problem play (or is it a comedy?) 'Measure for Measure'. The play deals with surreptitious or repressed sexual violence, and with the unwanted consequences of this behavior by framing them, implicitly or openly, in a forensic or legal discourse, thus transforming physical aggression into a discursive battlefield. A legal discourse operates as a surrogate for actual images of violent debauchery, most outspokenly represented in the character of Angelo in 'Measure for Measure' – lawgiver, judge and hypocrite.

Publication year:2020

Keywords:William Shakespeare, Legal Theory, Rhetoric, Violence, Dramaturgy

Accessibility:Open