The interplay of Isabella’s bodily integrity, verbal facility, and social circulation creates an interpretive crux for other characters in the play.92 Since virginity cannot be “with character too gross” writ on her body, as Juliet’s pregnancy is on hers, it at once holds no meaning and too many meanings (1.2.154). When Lucio greets her at the convent door, he names her as a virgin before adding a conditional: “Hail, virgin, if you be” (1.4.16). Though he withdraws his “if”—explaining that “those cheek-roses / Proclaim you are no less”—the physical sign of Isabella’s body is nonetheless not a reliable marker of either her sexual status or her religious position (1.4.16–17). Instead, Isabella depends upon speech and, as many critics have noted, prompts a series of misunderstandings when she refuses to acknowledge that her words may have multiple meanings. She suggests that she will bribe Angelo (with “true prayers”) (2.2.151), agrees to sin with Angelo (by begging Claudio’s life), and tells Claudio that he may live (condemning him to die when he accepts the conditions under which he could be saved). Throughout the play, then, Isabella’s language, like her body, prompts a recursive interpretive process: in order to understand what she means, we must continually reevaluate what she has said in light of what she is saying.93 At its most condensed, this appears as a fractured chiasmus: “There is a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice; / For which I would not plead, but that I must, / For which I must not plead, but that I am / At war ’twixt will and will not” (2.2.29–33). This is not a perfect example, because Isabella is not a perfect rhetorician. The slightly askew formal patterns of her language suggest reason under duress. Here, she creates a parallelism that flirts with chiasmus and anaphora: the repetition of “for which I” at the beginning of two lines and two seemingly parallel clauses (“would not plead”; “must not plead”) creates the impression of order, but the chiastic move of ending one line with “I must” only to have it reappear as “I must not” in the first clause of the next line suggests a rupture in parallel logic. The enjambment at the end of this second “for which I” line further disrupts the parallelism: by ending the line but not the sentence on “I am,” Shakespeare creates the momentary impression that Isabella herself is the vice for which she would not and must not plead. But the final line reveals that Isabella describes not her ontology but rather her current mental state, “at war ’twixt will and will not,” which points us back to what she “abhors” (will not) and “desires” (will) in the first two lines.94 It is no surprise that Angelo’s response is a curt “well, the matter?” given that Isabella circles around the substance of her petition in a rhetorical maneuver that we might, with Claudio, identify as a kind of “speechless dialect.”
This is not to suggest that Isabella is unskilled. Rather, her flexible use of rhetorical forms demonstrates the insufficiency of language to represent the conflicts and compromises of her position.95 When she turns her attention to her interlocutor, her strategy shifts, and chiasmus enables a swift dismantling of Angelo’s theory of a justice system based on the equivalence of crime (act) and punishment (law). “If he had been as you, and you as he,” Isabella argues, “You would have slipped like him, but he, like you, / Would not have been so stern” (2.2.64–66). The conditional Isabella proposes, in which Claudio (he) is Angelo (you) and Angelo (you) is Claudio (he), forces Angelo to consider another form of equivalence. By asking him to imagine himself as Claudio, Isabella unsettles Angelo’s precise sense not only of self but of justice. The second chiastic formulation in these lines—you would slip if you were like him, but if he were like you he would not be stern—suggests that equivalence is not a simple one-to-one relationship; instead, it requires evaluation and modification. Isabella’s language reveals an adaptable sense of self and world produced in part by her desire for a strict restraint; while what she means (in speaking and in signifying) is not always clear to her interlocutors, her rhetorical patterns establish structures of containment that she would translate from the walls of the cloister to the government of Vienna.
And Isabella’s arguments do effect change in Angelo, though not the change she desires. After encountering her, he finds himself trapped in chiastic formulations but unable to grapple with his fractured sense of self. “When I would pray and think,” he complains, “I think and pray / To several subjects” (2.4.1–2). Again, enjambment points us to a self divided: like Isabella, whose “I am” is torn between will and will not, what at first appears to be Angelo’s balanced ability to “pray and think” / “think and pray” is in fact torn between “several subjects.” Isabella negotiates her chiastic divide as a balancing act: she contains and represents multitudes. On the contrary, Angelo claims that his chiastic balance is fragmented into multiple subjects outside of himself—but in identifying heaven and Isabella, he reveals that in truth he is divided by “the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception” (2.4.6–7).96 Isabella prompts Angelo’s internal fragmentation and, in response, he attempts to pin her down to a single understanding of what it means to be a woman: “Be that you are, / That is a woman; if you be more, you’re none” (2.4.134–35).97 The obvious pun of none/nun suggests that to be a perpetual virgin is actually to be many things at once—and nothing at all. As more than a woman—akin, perhaps, to the Virgin Queen—Isabella simultaneously has no value in a system of social circulation predicated on marriage and sexuality and has a very clearly defined religious and social position. We might thus identify a chiasmus hidden within Angelo’s formulation, since to “be that you are” is, for Isabella, to be a nun. Angelo positions “a woman” as both more and less consequential than a vowed virgin: more in the sequential logic, wherein to be chaste and self-sufficient (more than a woman) is actually to be “none”—not a woman or anything at all; less in the chiastic logic, wherein a virgin is more than a sexed body and identifies as a nun. In responding to a woman who means more than he would like, then, Angelo’s language exceeds his control, demonstrating in miniature how early modern literature registers the meaningfulness of Catholic women.
Angelo’s inability to hold his words to a single meaning of womanhood follows directly from a conversation about female frailty on the one hand and creativity on the other. When Angelo suggests that “we are all frail” and that “women are frail too,” Isabella offers a simile that crystallizes the formal effects of Catholic women that I have been tracing in this chapter (2.4.121, 124). They are as frail, she claims, “as the glasses where they view themselves, / Which are as easy broke as they make forms” (2.4.125–26). Women may be easily broken, but they make forms just as easily, in a startling modification of the Aristotelian gendering of form (masculine) and matter (feminine).98 Isabella’s mirrors, like Spenser’s mirrors for Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene, are multiple and multiplying, but instead of proliferating virgins, Isabella describes both fragment and increase: the analogous relationship of breaking and making creates an image of a shattered mirror, endlessly producing and reflecting forms. As Slights and Holmes argue, in “yok[ing] women with mirrors through their shared ability to create forms,” Isabella simultaneously points to women’s frailty, sexual fecundity, and “their ability to fashion themselves.”99 I would further point out that the play, especially in Angelo’s response, reveals that the forms women make are not only their own or their children’s. The capaciousness of Isabella’s image leads to the chiastic fragmentation of Angelo’s language into the multiple meanings that I analyzed above—it leads to formal effects, in other words, that themselves suggest a broken mirror.
Measure for Measure ends in a flurry of chiasmus, from Isabella’s condemnation of Angelo100 to the Duke’s coupling of Mariana and Angelo: “her worth worth yours” (5.1.497). The final scene is particularly revealing of the “chiastic exchange in embodied experience” that James Knapp has identified in Measure for Measure,