In this essay I would like to think about Isabella, in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, as part of what I am calling a feminist ethics on the early modern English stage. Specifically, I am interested in ethical stands taken by female characters whose acts and points of view are in some sense repulsive but also compelling in light of certain moral questions or problems posed by their plays. Such stands retain an ethical force that is in conflict with other problematic or even brutal acts committed by the same characters that pose problems of interpretation or reception. Isabella is not held up to idealized forms of moral purity, then, in this essay. Rather, the moral rigidity that that slips into vengefulness that many scholars find troubling about her is held in tension with a larger ethical point she makes in response to a culture of female sexualization and objectification in Vienna. The central problem of her play—the ethical crisis created by men’s sense of entitlement to women bodies—requires a response that disturbs, that turns the status quo on its head. When viewed in light of the many other exploitations of women in the play, whether they are prostitutes or those to whom men are affianced, then a picture emerges in which Isabella acts against a systemic practice of female objectification at work in Vienna, not only when she refuses to consent to sexual blackmail but also when she refuses a response to the Duke’s proposal. In Measure for Measure Isabella emerges as parrhesiast, in Michel Foucault’s terms, speaking from a dramatic and political ethical center which, I argue, is feminist.
