The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood

Rating:
Summary: heavy but rewarding book
Review: It was Harold Bloom's recommendation (in SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN)that led me to this volume. Shell makes much of the "exchange" motif in the play: Among these exchanges, all proposed but not all carried out, we have (1) the rule of Angelo for the rule of the Duke; (2) head {Claudio's) for maidenhead (Isabella's); (3) head of Barnadine for head of Claudio: (4) head of Ragozine for head of Barnadine; (5) maidenhead of Mariana for that of Isabella. This pattern of exchange is the underlying structure for a thick argument about "taliation," a word consistently popping up in the book. This is a word unknown to many of us; we know the word, and the concept, by its derivative "retaliation." What is justice? What makes for a fair exchange?

Shell makes much of the point that (one often overlooked in study and performance of the play) that Isabella and the Duke first meet as (novice) nun and (false) friar; in other words, in the terms of institutional Roman Catholicism , they meet as Brother and Sister. A second hook on which Shell hangs much baggage (and here he sometimes gets obscure) is Claudio's release from Death Row. Shell sees this release, the "delivery" from death, as a regeneration akin to birth.

In the book's conclusion is a third point , one hardly more than broached, that invites further exploration. "Brother" Duke's proposal to "sister" Isabella breaks down Catholic monachism and gives support to Luther's incipient Protestantism. The play's concluding "open silence" is likely the most (in)famous in all of Shakespeare. (On the Open Silence stuff in the Bard, Phillip Macguire's book is the best study.) Does Isabella accept or reject the Duke's proposal of marriage? To take Shell's argument to its logical end, it would seem, ultimately, that Isabella should stop short of her final vows as a nun and that she instead become the flesh-and-blood bride of the Duke instead of the spiritual bride of Christ. That ending, is, of course, the one MM performance tradition favours.

For a non-intellectual, pop-culture statement of what (or so it seems to me, anyhow) Shell understands as "universal siblinghood", check out the final song of the 1968 album THE TWAIN SHALL MEET by Eric Burdon and the Animals, entitled "All is One."