Abstract
이돈희 Tonhi Lee: Shakespeare and the Tragicomic Possibilities
of Absolute Justice Medieval and Early Modern English
Studies Volume 24 No. 2 (2016) 53-81
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is concerned with the
contradictions arising in a system of justice over which the
monarch claimed absolute, sovereign power. Critics have discussed
how the play explores the ideological tensions between the
competing judicial principles of the common law, equity courts,
and royal prerogative. Deborah Shuger, on the other hand, has
demonstrated the profoundly religious character of the play’s
representation of absolute justice, which is found to be
irreducible to the absolutist/constitutionalist debate that will
dominate the political discourses of the later
seventeenth-century. Using Shuger’s work as a starting point, I
argue that Measure for Measure explores the fundamental
uncertainty inherent in the idea of absolute justice as it is
found in the writings of James I. Although its ostensible purpose
was to bolster the official claims of the absolute monarch and the
state’s law, the idea of absolute justice could be appropriated to
provide a powerful critique of the established regime, precisely
because it was part of a discourse that depended so crucially on
the ultimate authority of God, which was presumably reflected in
the moral integrity of the monarch, his deputy-judge on earth.
Thus the idea of absolute justice, even as it supported the
official ideology of the absolutist state, could lead to multiple
perspectives of justice which may or may not lend support to a
particular monarchical regime. This paper is an attempt to connect
this moral uncertainty inherent in the idea of absolute justice to
the generic undecidability of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies. In a
discussion of the genre of revenge tragedy through Thomas Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I attempt to
show how the thematic tensions between justice and mercy
correspond to the genre’s tragic and comic possibilities. Just as
Measure for Measure’s tragicomic tension is shaped by the figure
of Vincentio as self-proclaimed divine monarch, I argue that at
the center of the thematic/generic tension of these plays is the
shaping presence of the figure of the revenger who seeks to embody
his own particular vision of absolute justice.
Keywords
absolute justice, equity, James I, revenge, tragedy, revenge
tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Measure
for Measure and The Tempest