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Maria Aristodemou, "Law and Desire in Measure
for Measure", Law and Critique IX/1 (1998), 117-140: Measure
for Measure is often referred to as a play about the concept of justice
and its relationship to mercy. However, in contrast to early critics' concern
with male definitions of power, kingship, politics and history, I aim to
address the concepts of justice and mercy as they pertain to issues of sexuality,
desire, marriage, the home and the mastered. By exposing and exploiting
the rhetorical excess and ambiguities in the text, I rebut interpretations
of the play as teaching that "law must be tempered with mercy"
or that marriage represents a just distribution of the constant exchanges
of bodies. I focus in particular on sexual transgression as a source
of resistance and social instability giving rise to surveillance; law's
policing of desire and the mutual dependence between desire and law;
on the role of women as objects of exchange and on possible signs
of female resistance in the text; and on contrasting images of marriage
from securing self-fulfilment, to an approximation of justice, to another
form of social control silencing men and women and guaranteeing hierarchical
divisions. The play ends with multiple weddings, but the frequent equation
of marriage with death hints at the possible end of desire and undermines
the conclusions that either justice has been achieved or that it will last.
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