Every True Man's Apparel - Shakespeare on the "Mystery" of Criminal Punishment
by
L Joseph Hebert
Every True Man’s
Apparel: Shakespeare on the “Mystery” of Criminal Punishment
Act 4, Scene 2 of Measure for
Measure opens with one of the most morbidly comical episodes in
Shakespeare’s blackest comedy. A brief exchange between a jailor, a
prisoner, and an executioner exposes their profound philosophical
differences over the nature of crime and punishment, and ends with a
statement purporting to be a logical “proof” of the executioner’s
view of his own trade, a proof which is actually presented in the
form of a riddle. At first glance, the shadows of Shakespeare’s
gallows humor are further darkened by the obscurity of this hangman’s
“mystery.” Yet a careful consideration of the meaning of this
macabre exchange and its enigmatic conclusion sheds light not only on
Shakespeare’s intentions in the scene and the play, but also on his
understanding of the nature and legitimacy of the law’s use of
punishment to enforce its regulation of human actions in general, and
sexual conduct in particular.
The scene begins with the
Provost—Vienna’s head jailor—negotiating with Pompey, “a
notorious bawd” (pimp) recently imprisoned for his lifetime of
crime. “Come hither, sirrah,” says the Provost. “Can you cut
off a man’s head?” Pompey responds with characteristic
equivocation:
If the man be a bachelor, sir, I can, but if he be a married man,
he’s his wife’s head, and I can never cut off a woman’s head.
Though the Provost takes this as yet
another of Pompey’s evasive “snatches,” the reply is actually
rich with connections to the unfolding themes of the drama.
To begin with,
Pompey’s reply is part of a series of quips which together
constitute a stubborn defense of his former way of life combined with
a critique of the law that condemns it. Pompey here admits to the
Provost that he has been “an unlawful bawd time out of mind,” and
declares himself “content to be a lawful hangman” in commutation
of his sentence. Yet prior scenes have established that Pompey
believes prostitution to be the fulfillment of a natural and
irrepressible urge, rendering the law against it arbitrary and hence
illegitimate in his view. “What do you think of the trade, Pompey?”
Lord Escalus had asked him. “Is it a lawful trade?” “If the law
would allow it, sir,” he had replied, bragging to himself that “the
valiant heart’s not whipped out of his trade” (Act 2, Scene 1).
In addition to questioning the basis of the law, Pompey repeatedly
alludes to its apparent cruelty. In this instance, if he accepts the
Provost’s bargain, Pompey’s first execution will be that of
Claudio, a young man condemned to death for getting his fiancée with
child. By cutting off Claudio’s head, the law will indeed be
inflicting grave harm on his would-be wife and offspring (compare Act
2, Scene 2). In his own mind, Pompey the bawd seems humane by
comparison to such a law!
What are we to make
of Pompey’s self-serving barbs? Are we simply to dismiss them as
the rationalizations of a wicked man? Shakespeare has in fact put us
on guard against Pompey’s tactics from the beginning of the play,
with his reference to “the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea
with the ten commandments, but scraped one out of the table”—“Thou
shalt not steal” (Act 1, Scene 2). For the same reason a pirate
will not condemn robbery, a mercenary is reluctant to pray for peace,
and a pimp loathe to admit the harms of fornication and adultery.
This impression is confirmed by libertine Lucio, who strongly echoes
Pompey’s defense of sexual promiscuity as natural and harmless—“a
game of tick-tack”—yet who admits to suffering from venereal
disease and to having abandoned a child he fathered with a “rotten
medlar” (Act 1, Scenes 2-3; Act 4, Scene 3).
On second thought,
however, the sanctimoniousness of the pirate, the pimp, and the
playboy—an attitude that in its smug dismissal of sexual morality
has all but become the rule in our day—demands an adequate
response. If it is true, as St. Thomas Aquinas holds, that human law
must embody natural law, and that natural law is found in our innate
and reasonable instincts for survival, procreation, and social
harmony (Summa Theologiae, I-II 94.2, 95.2), then it may not
be immediately clear to everyone how the law can deprive a man of
life on account of procreative acts. Indeed, the Provost himself
seems to doubt the complete legitimacy of the law he enforces. Not
only does he question Claudio’s sentence, deeming his sins light
and Claudio himself “more fit to do another such offense / Than die
for this” (Act 2, Scenes 2&3), but when faced with the
executioner’s disdain for Pompey the pimp, the Provost exclaims “Go
to, sir, you weigh equally: a feather will turn the scale.” As the
very name of the executioner—Abhorson—suggests, the coercion
employed by the law in the regulation of sexual conduct can appear
abhorrent and illegitimate even to law abiding citizens who despise
the conduct being regulated. Yet Pompey’s apprenticeship to the
executioner provides an opportunity to reflect more deeply on the
reasons why law employs force in the punishment of such vices.
Ironically, Pompey’s initial
self-excusing answer to the Provost already contains the seeds of an
account that will confirm his guilt and justify his punishment. In
referring to the married man as head of his wife, Pompey is alluding
to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians:
Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because the
husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church.
. . . Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and
delivered himself up for it: That he might sanctify it, cleansing it
by the laver of water in the word of life: . . . that it should be
holy, and without blemish. . . . This is a great mystery (μυστήριον,
sacramentum); but I speak in Christ and in the church
(Eph. 5.22-33).
In his
sanctimoniousness, Pompey claims to respect the Christian doctrine
that a married man is head of his wife, but in his pomposity he
ignores the nature of marriage and the harm his profession does to
it. On the plane of nature, marriage is an institution promoting the
common good by binding the pleasures of begetting children to the
duties of nourishing and educating them (ST Sup. 41.1). On the
plane of grace, marriage is a mystery or sacrament signifying
the union of Christ and His Church, with both unions being ordered
toward the sanctification of their members. By facilitating
fornication and infidelity, Pompey helps to prevent the formation of
or weaken the existing bonds between husband and wife, thereby
undermining the common good and contributing to evils such as
disease, poverty, ignorance, and a whole train of vices that
follow—then or now—more or less directly from these. By plying
his trade, then, Pompey does in a very real sense “cut off a
woman’s head,” time and again!
Abhorson, despite the contempt in
which the Provost holds him, has complete confidence in the
legitimacy of his office. “A bawd, sir?” he says when presented
with Pompey, “Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery.” After
joking about his “hanging look,” Pompey is provoked to ask, “Do
you call, sir, your occupation a mystery?” “Painting, sir, I have
heard say, is a mystery,” and since prostitutes “paint,”
pimping is a mystery, “but what mystery there should be in hanging,
if I should be hanged, I cannot imagine.” To Abhorson’s reply,
“Sir, it is a mystery,” Pompey demands, “Proof?” Abhoson
gives the following “proof”:
Every true man’s apparel fits your thief. If it be too little for
your thief, your true man thinks it big enough. If it be too big for
your thief, your thief thinks it little enough, so every true man’s
apparel fits your thief.
What are we to make
of this mysterious answer? To start with its surface meaning, note
that Abhorson’s “proof” parodies a logical syllogism. The
argument presupposes a thief who robs a true (honest or law-abiding)
man of his clothing, and holds that in all such cases the stolen
clothes will fit the thief. After all, clothes can only not fit by
being too little or too big. Yet if they are too little, the proof
claims, then they are “big enough”; if too big, they are “little
enough”; hence they are always at least approximately the right
size. Of course, the major and minor premises here depend on
different perspectives: clothes too little for the thief are a “big
enough” loss to the honest man; clothes too big for the thief are
of “little enough” gain to him. For comically obvious reasons,
therefore, the “proof” is invalid.
What then is the meaning, for Abhorson
or for Shakespeare, of this “proof” of the mystery of the
executioner’s occupation? On closer consideration we see that the
argument is actually a riddle which requires us to consider the
symbolic significance of its terms. The riddle focuses on the
distinction between the law-abiding and the law-breaking man, just as
the scene before us raises the question of what differentiates the
“unlawful bawd” from the “lawful hangman.” The argument holds
that “every true man’s apparel fits your thief,” meaning that
the goods the law allows the law-abiding man to enjoy would equally
befit the lawless—or that, as Pompey holds, the distinction between
the lawful and lawless is arbitrary. In fact, Pompey himself had used
the image of clothing to make his case about the groundlessness of
law:
‘Twas never a merry world since, of two usuries (business
practices), the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed, by
order of the law, a furred gown to keep him warm (Act 3, Scene 2).
Quite literally, then, Pompey believes
that the “true man’s apparel”—the “furred gown”—would
fit the “thief” (or pimp) at least as well as it fits the “true
man.”
To prove the
mystery of his profession, then, Abhorson has restated his opponent’s
case so as to expose its fatal flaw: the fallacy—so often committed
by Pompey—of equivocation. As we have noted, Pompey’s
rationalizations of his illicit trade seize upon the partial and
apparent goods—especially the pleasures—it serves, while ignoring
its many harms; likewise, his jabs at the law focus on its obvious
pains while ignoring the greater and truer goods it protects. In
other words, Pompey’s edifice of self-justification rests upon an
equivocation between more and less comprehensive conceptions of good
and bad. In pointing this out as he does, Abhorson helps us to see
that natural, human, and divine law are grounded in a higher and more
complete reason than that motivating criminals, so that crime in
general, and pimping in particular, can be defended only by confusing
false with true conceptions of the human good.
As Duke Vincentio
remarks on witnessing Pompey’s arrest, the punishments of law serve
not only to encourage and protect the “true man,” but also to
provide the criminal himself with “correction and instruction,”
which “must both work / Ere this rude beast will profit.” The
same Duke, at whose instigation the vices of Vienna are being weeded
out in this play, will pardon Claudio, who is willing to marry the
mother of his child, and require Lucio, though unwilling, to do the
same. The Duke understands, with Aristotle and Aquinas, that
punishment is remedial, and exists to habituate citizens gradually
(if sometimes forcefully) in the practice of virtue by regulating
outward actions (N. Ethics II.3; ST I-II 96.2-3).
Though capital punishment in itself is certainly not be the best
means of accomplishing this goal, it does provide the law’s
ultimate sanction; and so Abhorson the executioner understands his
unpleasant office as a mystery in light of the order of natural and
supernatural goods the law protects and fosters. This too is a
mystery of which St. Paul speaks when he says of the one wielding the
law’s “higher powers” that “he is God’s minister to thee,
for good, . . . an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil”
(Rom. 13.1-4). Through the grim humor of this scene, Shakespeare
seems to confirm the executioner’s understanding of his “mystery,”
which is that of the law itself. Our own glibly antinomian age might
do well to ponder the implications of that wisdom.
