4 - Slander for slander in Measure for Measure

Summary

Ultimately, Jonson and Spenser undermine the power of their critique of the state's assessment of poetry because their projects assume stable categories of right and wrong, virtuous and slanderous speech. As I demonstrate in chapter I, slander is by nature unstable and draws its power from the inaccessibility of truth and the indeterminacy of language. Their projects collapse not because the state succeeds in censoring their complaints – the texts are still available for us to read – but because of the faulty logic of the representation of slander in state–poet relations. Ideally, both poets imagine an enlightened monarch who allows her-or himself to be guided and corrected by the superior wisdom and virtue of the poet. Both understand the threat of slander to a settled state and seek to protect the ruler from such attacks. But when they perceive themselves as under attack when their ultimately benighted rulers reject their advice and critique, they defend themselves by defining these attacks as slanders. Once they transform from advocates of to adversaries against the state, they open themselves up to the same charge of slander they themselves employ, and the match ends in a draw or worse, since they have insisted on the absolute evil of slander that they have now become guilty of speaking.

Shakespeare manages to escape from this conundrum by radically reconfiguring the terms of the debate. As demonstrated earlier, the government was anxious to control for its own aims the theatre's power to criticize and expose; independent attempts to deploy this medium were distinguished as slanders.