In Shakespeare's time, church and state struggled to control sexuality. Most parishes had Bishop's or consistory courts that dealt with moral offenses—adultery, whoredom, incest, drunkenness, swearing, ribaldry, usury, and any other "uncleanness and wickedness of life"—in addition to heresy, blasphemy, and failure to attend church. Those Elizabethans who challenged the law faced a kind of double jeopardy: there were two legal systems, each with its laws, officers, trials and punishments. The ecclesiastical courts tried so many cases of sexual offenses that wags called them "bawdy courts." Offenses like prostitution and bastardy were heard by the justices of the peace; the flagrant adulteries of the upper class were dealt with by the Court of High Commission, the supreme ecclesiastical court, which had the distinction of never having found any defendant not guilty. The Church courts were empowered to investigate any reports of scandalous behavior. Constables could haul suspects before a magistrate, as the malaprop constable Elbow drags the bawd Pompey to justice on the suspicions of his wife in Measure for Measure, and they even had the power to break into houses suspected of harboring offenders. Minor officials, like the beadles or parish constables, spied out offenses, often at the prompting of neighbors. The accused were required to collect character references from distinguished, respectable neighbors, who, by the archaic standard of compurgation followed in the church courts, were called upon to testify not to the truth of an accusation but to the general belief in it. And the accused were expected to pay fees to the officers of the church courts whether they were found guilty or not. As we shall see, Shakespeare himself did not escape the long arm of the bawdy courts.

Those accused of "fornication"—pre-marital sex—could not escape punishment simply by marrying; sometimes couples were "presented," to use the technical term, because the early birth of a child proved that conception had taken place before marriage. The existence of a contract to wed did not automatically remove the offense, though it might mitigate the punishment. Offenders had to undergo penance and public humiliation: the pillory, or by standing, sometimes in a white sheet, before the congregation or in the market-place. Parents of illegitimate children usually received a whipping, "well laid on till the blood come."

Fornication was also common. Since in the canon law a promise to marry followed by sexual intercourse constituted a valid, though irregular, marriage, many couples, like Claudio and Juliet, felt they were "married in the eyes of God" once they were "made sure" by hand-fasting or formal contract and began to have sexual intercourse. Popular attitudes, though far from loose, were simply more flexible that those of the professional moralists. When marriage was, or seemed, assured, many, perhaps most, couples began to have sex. In a Somerset case a farmer reported a couple he caught in the act in "a plot of grass under a hedge." "When John and Hanna had almost ended what they were about, this informant stepped unto them and took John by the tail of his shirt and demanded of them why they were so wicked as to commit such a wicked act, to which John said that Hannah was his wife by promise and that he did intend to marry her the next morning at eight of the clock." No more than half the couples who contracted to be married were still virgins on their wedding night, and as many as thirty per cent of English brides were pregnant, including Shakespeare's own Anne Hathaway.

In the fall of 1582, the eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare and the twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway, the eldest daughter of a neighboring farmer, needed to get married. Normally the priest of their parish would proclaim the banns, an official notice of their intention to marry, on three successive Sundays or Holy Days in the parish church, so that anyone who knew of any impediment to their marriage, like consanguinity or pre-contract, could protest. But canon law forbade the publishing of banns in December and most of January, and Shakespeare, a minor, needed his father's consent. So late in November, two friends of the bride's family rode twenty-one miles to the bawdy court in the cathedral town of Worcester to secure a license exempting the couple from the marriage laws. For a substantial fee and a bond of £40, a very significant sum, the court allowed Anne, with her family's consent, to marry with only one asking of the banns. Despite her pregnancy the bawdy court described her as a "maiden," instead of using the more invidious term, "single-woman."

The church, however, frowned upon the practice of couples going to bed before they had gone to church, and the ecclesiastical courts often punished them with public penance. Puritan reformers especially railed against the practice. Miles Coverdale's sixteenth-century treatise on The Christen State of Matrymonye rebuked those 'handfasted persons' who were 'brought and laid together, yea, certain weeks afore they go to the church'. The Elizabethan Puritan Richard Greenham beseeched contracted couples 'to keep themselves chaste until the marriage be sanctified by the public prayers of the church; for otherwise many marriages have been punished of the Lord for the uncleanness that hath been committed betwixt the contract and the marriage." And Gouge called it "an unwarrantable and dishonest practice" for couples to "take liberties after a contract to know their spouse, as if they were married." Their stern rebukes were necessary because a significant part of the population still held that the contract was itself a binding and valid form of marriage and contested the reformers' insistence that it had to be sanctified in church.

At the same time prostitution and disease were rife. Prostitution was a crime. A Swiss visitor, Thomas Platter, admired how London authorities handled prostitution: "special commissions are set up, and when they meet with a case, they punish the man with imprisonment and fine. The woman is taken to Bridewell, the King's palace, situated near the river, where the executioner scourges her naked before the populace." Still, prostitution flourished, especially in the liberties. "London," Thomas Nashe wrote in his scandal-mongering pamphlet, Christ's Tears over Jerusalem of 1592, "what are thy suburbs but licensed stews? Can there be so many brothel-houses of salary sensuality and six-penny whoredom? . . . whole hospitals of ten-times-a-day dishonested strumpets have we cloistered together."

The poor and crowded suburbs with their stews and taverns were also an ideal breeding ground for plague. A severe outbreak killed 15,000 Londoners in 1593 alone; the City authorities closed the theaters between June, 1592, and May, 1594. Another in 1603 killed 36, 000, a sixth of the city, closing the theaters from March, 1603, to April, 1604 and led King James to issue a proclamation calling for the razing of houses and tenements in the suburbs of London, primarily as a precaution against the spread of plague by "dissolute and idle persons." The first play that Shakespeare staged once the theaters reopened in 1604 was probably Measure for Measure, his last and darkest comedy, in which a zealous magistrate orders that all the "houses of resort in the suburbs be pulled down" (1.2.98–99). The plague lingered. Another outbreak in 1609 killed 4,000 and closed the theaters again.

Thomas Nashe captured the terrors of the plague; his description in his picaresque novel of an outbreak in Rome in 1522 is no doubt based upon the one he lived through in London between 1592 and 1594.

Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveler (1594)

Despite his savage hatred of the Puritans, even Nashe interpreted the plague as God's judgment upon a wicked people:

There was another visible sign of God's retribution: the pox. Syphilis, probably imported from the New World by Columbus's men, first appeared in 1495 in Naples among a French army composed of Flemish, Swiss, Italian and Spanish mercenaries. In late summer, when the troops returned to their respective countries, they spread the disease all over Europe. Within a year the sexual means of its transmission was discovered and theories of its origin proposed. One ascribed it to the conjunction of five planets in the constellation of Scorpio, the sign believed to rule the genitals, in 1494. But many felt that the pox was a manifestation of God's wrath over sexual license.

The pox raged virulently through England as well. It was often fatal and afflicted its survivors with deep scars, which they often covered with patches of velvet. "Thou art piled for a French velvet," the First Gentleman brays at Lucio In Measure for Measure (1.2.33-4). To be "piled" or have a "French crown" was to have gone bald as a result of the pox. Others suffered from the "Neapolitan bone-ache."

The brothels and alehouses of the suburbs were frequently blamed as sources of the disease. In 1579, the pre-eminent Elizabethan surgeon, William Clowes, blamed the spread of the pox not just on the whores and bawds of the stews but on the sturdy rogues and vagabonds streaming into the suburbs [see the section on the Liberties in the Histories Contexts]:

These "lewd and idle persons," corrupting and weakening the nobility and gentry, threatened the entire realm. As far as preachers and pamphleteers was concerned, venereal disease was God's swift and painful punishment on those who made use of the prostitute's abominable services, a foretaste on earth of the torments of hell. Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses, gave it pride of place in his comprehensive and detailed list of the dread consequences of whoredom: "There is no such murderer on the face of the earth as a whore," Stubbes thundered.

Thus, many, especially the Puritans, pushed for harsher treatment of sexual offenses. Some called for a return to the Old Testament, in which adultery was punished by death. In Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), men and women guilty of pre-marital sex or "fornication" were forbidden to marry, and adultery was punished on the first offense by slavery and on the second by death. Erasmus, in his Praise of Matrimony (1518, translated 1536), recalled that the ancient Romans and Hebrews punished adulterers with death: "Doubtless," he concluded, "wedlock must needs seem a right holy thing which defiled cannot be repurged without man's blood."

For the Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes all sex outside of marriage was a sin, "damnable, pestiferous, and execrable." In his Anatomy of Abuses (1583) Stubbes proposed that all those who commit whoredom, adultery, incest, or prostitution should be "made to drink a full draught of Moses' cup, that is, taste of present death." He regretfully concluded that his fellow citizens, more merciful "than the Author of mercy himself," would never agree. Those convicted of sexual crimes, he urged, should at least "be cauterized, and seared with a hot iron on the cheek, forehead, or some other part" where all could see that they had been branded, "to the end [that] honest and chaste Christians might be discerned from the adulterous Children of Satan."

Even the moderate William Perkins, the most respected Puritan preacher of the time, pronounced that "the adulterer and adulteress by divine law should be put to death." "No man professing Christian religion," he insisted, "ought to take to himself in marriage a harlot, a defamed woman, or one that comes of infamous parents, though she be repentant." "A man as hath a concubine" might marry if he were to "renounce her and testify the same by true and unfeigned repentance" (Christian Economy, Chapter 5: "Of the Choice of Persons Fit for Marriage"). Several bills were introduced in Parliament to alter the law. None succeeded until 1650, after the triumph of Puritanism, when adultery was briefly made a felony punishable by death.

Measure for Measure, especially, reflects the Puritan campaign. The play asks what would happen if sexual offenses like fornication, adultery, and bastardy (Lucio's crime) were punishable by death. And Shakespeare is careful to identify Angelo with those Puritans calling for a return to the full rigor of Old Testament law. When the Duke calls Angelo "precise" he uses a term applied to Puritans by their detractors. One, the playwright John Webster, sketched the "character" type of "a Precisian" as rigorous to a fault and charged that his display of virtue masked hypocrisy.

John Webster, Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife. With Additions of New Characters (1615)

A character in Thomas Middleton's play, The Puritan (1604) says, "I'll sooner expect mercy from a usurer when my bond's forfeited, sooner kindness from a lawyer when my money's spent, nay, sooner charity from the devil than good from a Puritan." And the Duke's description of Angelo—

conveys some of the same doubt. A man who "Stands at a guard"—we would say "en garde"—"with envy" ("envy" here means the malice of others) is perhaps too concerned with his reputation. And because the word blood means "sexual appetite" as well as the bodily fluid in Elizabethan English, the Duke hints that Angelo refuses to acknowledge the sexual desire that is in everyone's blood.

The word reverberates throughout the play's descriptions of Angelo. To Lucio he is

When Angelo, still struggling against his passion for Isabella, first confronts the fact of his own hypocrisy, admitting that were it not for his pride in his reputation for severity he would gladly exchange the solemn black dress of the elect for a gallant's fashionable feathered hat,

and that high rank and the ceremonies of office merely

he finally acknowledges that sexual desire courses through his veins, too: "Blood, thou art Blood" (16), he says. Through the character of the hypocritical precisian Angelo, Shakespeare interrogates the Puritan campaign for the harsher punishment of sexual misconduct by surveying the judge instead of the judged. Crimes of the blood deserve mercy because blood flows in all of us, despite our protestations.

In Measure for Measure the stews and taverns of the suburbs reappear again as the nexus of sexual appetite and misrule. The second scene is located in this criminal underworld, among the bawds and whores. While it may express the protest of ordinary life and the body against authoritarian repression ("Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city," the bawd Pompey asks Judge Escalus [2.1.217–8]), sexuality seems mired in this dark world of prostitution and the pox.

Association with this demimonde of sexual corruption taints Claudio and Juliet. We first learn of Claudio's sentence from Mistress Overdone, and it's Pompey the bawd who informs us that his offense is "Groping for trouts in a peculiar river"(1.2.86); a "peculiar river" is privately owned, so Claudio's offense is figuratively a crime against property, poaching in another man's stream. Thus the distinction between sanctioned conjugal relations—Claudio's explanation that "upon a true contract / I got possession of Juliet's bed" (1.2.140–1)—and unsanctioned sexual license is blurred before it is made. All sexuality is associated with sin and disease, sin's consequence. As Claudio says,

BROKEN NUPTIALS

Only chaste, monogamous marriage, the completed marriage of the reformers consisting of parental consent and the approval of "friends," a public church wedding (what Claudio calls, sharply, the "denunciation" or declaration "of outward order"), and sexual consummation (which Angelo's marriage to Mariana lacks), escapes the indictment of sexual license in Measure for Measure. The play seems to investigate a spectrum of troubling sexual practices ranging from prostitution to the broken nuptials of Claudio and Angelo. In that investigation Shakespeare has interesting problems articulating the differences between prostitution and marriage.

Take Claudio and Juliet. Claudio argues that they are essentially married by the older standard that a hand-fasting or pre-contract, even a private contract, constitutes marriage:

Such cases of pre-nuptial fornication, discovered when the woman became pregnant before she was married in church, were common in Shakespeare's England; his own bride was six-months pregnant when they wed. And Claudio's mixed feelings of anger and remorse—he is both innocent and guilty—reflect the uncertainty over what constitutes marriage at the time. But Claudio's language is curious. He speaks of their sexual union with legal language: a "contract" gives him legal "possession" of her body, yet "stealth" connotes the guilty theft of sexual pleasure. He refers to the sanctifying of their marriage as a "denunciation"—in Elizabethan English, "a formal or public announcement"—of "outward order," a mere formality with nothing to do with his inner state or feelings (OED 4). And he uses "propagation," a word that means "procreation, reproduction," in a new, figurative sense of "increase," first recorded in this passage, not to refer to her pregnancy but to their wish to swell her dowry. To Claudio the legal and the commercial have become confused with the sexual and generative. He uses marriage for gain in a way uncomfortably like the use of sex for gain in prostitution. When his sister accuses him of saving his own life by selling her body,

Claudio's broken nuptials reveal that marriage is, as the reformers, said, not just a private decision between lovers but a public act conveying property rights as well as conjugal ones. This is clear in the case of Angelo's failed marriage. Mariana, according to the Duke,

should this Angelo have married, was affianced to her oath, and the nuptial appointed; between which time of the contract and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister. But mark how heavily this befell to the poor gentlewoman. There she lost a noble and renowned brother, in his love toward her ever most kind and natural; with him, the portion and sinew of her fortune, her marriage dowry; with both, her combinate husband, this well-seeming Angelo. (3.1.209–18)

But Shakespeare is unable to resolve the contradictions he has uncovered within marriage. The Duke promises Isabella that the "bed trick," substituting Mariana's body for Isabella's, will "compel [Angelo] to her recompense, and here, by this is your brother saved, your honor untainted, the poor Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled" (3.1.245–8). But the Duke's scheme makes him a bawd as well, promoting sex for money ("recompense"), and a scene in which Isabella actually solicits Mariana is too unseemly for Shakespeare to stage. Moreover, by "entreat[ing]" (4.1.68) Mariana to go to Angelo's bed, the Duke is endorsing that older view that a marriage is made, and conjugal rights conveyed, by the contract rather than the wedding service: