SOURCE: Cacicedo, Alberto. “‘She Is Fast My Wife’: Sex, Marriage, and Ducal Authority in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Studies (1995): 187-209.

In the following essay, Cacicedo contends that Measure for Measure dramatizes the repression of feminine freedom by state authority via the institution of marriage.

Children who stand in little awe of their parents, and have even less fear of the wrath of God, readily set at defiance the authority of magistrates. … It is therefore impossible that a commonwealth should prosper while the families which are its foundations are ill-regulated.

—Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth

Feminist thought regards the sexual/familial organization of society as integral to any conception of social structure or social change. And conversely, it sees the relation of the sexes as formed by both socioeconomic and sexual-familial structures in their systematic connectedness.

—Joan Kelly, “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory”

I

In her...