“The Sense of Death is Most in Apprehension” Law and Death in Augustine, Donne and Measure for Measure

In this paper, I would like to identify two legal terms concerning death that were common in early modern legal and artistic discourses and then discuss ways that these terms are used, and the emotions they produce, in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This discussion takes place within the Augustinian concept of the three stages of existence--before death, in death, and after death--which I will contextualize shortly. The first of these legal terms pertaining to death, civiliten mortuus, was used in Civil Law to indicate that a criminal convicted of a capital crime was considered dead at the time of conviction, not when he was executed (Clarkson and Warren 261). In England, once convicted or attainted of a capital crime, the criminal lost all rights and privileges, including the right to pass on his inheritance, and his estate reverted to the monarch or to the lord. Another term for death in early modern English law was mortuus saeculo, referring to the form of “secular death” which occurred when a man or woman entered a religious order. This form of death also affected inheritance procedures: once people entered religious orders, they were considered dead and their estates were passed on to their heirs (Clarkson and Warren 261). Despite Henry VIII’s closing of Catholic convents and monasteries during the early period of the Reformation, artistic representations of such religious institutions continued to appear in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century literature. Egeus’s ultimatum to Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example--“Either to die the death, or to abjure/ Forever the society of men” (1.1.65-66)--clearly equates death with life in a convent as does Hamlet’s rant that Ophelia should, “to a nunn’ry go” (3.1.139). Similarly, in his initial exchange with Isabella in Measure for Measure, Lucio calls attention to her saintly and immortal--i.e., posthumous, form: I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted, By your renouncement an immortal spirit, And to be talk’d with in sincerity, As with a saint (1.4.34-37) In the same play, when Duke Vincentio disguises himself as the Friar Ludovico, he is twice referred to as a “ghostly father” (4.3.48; 5.1.126). Augustine articulates his tripartite description of the imbrication of existence and death in Chapters 11-13 of The City of God. In Chapter 11, he considers “whether one can both be living and dead at the same time,” while in Chapter 13, he articulates the complex relationship between life and death: For as there are three times, before death, in death, after death, so there are three states corresponding, living, dying, dead. And it is very hard to define when a man is in death or dying, when he is neither living, which is before death, nor dead, which is after death, but dying, which is in death." (13.11) As we shall see, these two quotations from The City of God provide a basisfrom which to discuss the paradoxical concept that a person (or, metaphorically, a literary character) may be simultaneously regarded as living and dead. Moreover, this Augustinian perspective describes can be seen as the chronotope which informs Measure for Measure, as well as the teleological environment in which many of the play’s forensic exchanges take place. Measure for Measure represents Shakespeare’s most sustained attention to legal distinctions concerning death since, according to the definitions of civiliten mortuus and mortuus saeculo, most of the characters—Claudio, Vincentio, Angelo, Barnadine, Ragozine, Lucio, and Isabella, as well as Friar Thomas, Friar Peter, and Sister Francisca—are legally dead at one point or another in the play. The presence of so many “dead” characters in a single play not only deserves further attention, but it suggests that Measure for Measure may be regarded as Shakespeare’s most radical treatment of mortality in comedy.