Rape’s Hypothetical in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

Abstract

In a mostly faithful redux of the Ciceronian categories “who, what, where, with what help, why, how, when,” Edward Coke’s Institutes advise a plaintiff on how to make a credible complaint in a court of law.1 “[T]he count of the appellant,” he declares, “must comprehend these seven things: 1. The fact, 2. the yeer, 3. the day, 4. the hour, 5. the time of the king, 6. the Town where the fact was done, and lastly, with what weapon.”2 “[T]he fact” in this context is roughly synonymous to our modern word “crime,” and the last things to come are the place, “the Town where the fact was done,” and the “weapon.” But before that are the temporal markers proceeding from biggest to smallest: the “yeer” to the “day” and, finally, the “hour.” Coke’s gentle modulation of Cicero’s ordering suggests a subtle difference in priority—where Cicero places time last, Coke places it second only to the crime; where Cicero supplies only one time-related word, “when,” Coke’s formula gives four out of seven categories over to the identification and careful subdivision of time. Coke’s gloss on “Le jour” goes on to specify it in terms of diurnal rhythms and a composite of smaller hours: “the naturall day, comprehending both the Solare day, and the night also, containing 24 hours.”3 I take Coke’s language to indicate the new ways that common law was encouraging people to consider crime as an irruptive action taking place in a bounded temporality. Specifically, I argue that crime was imagined as occurring in a special and constrained interval of time approximate to the occasion, which was represented as an interruption in time’s “naturall” ongoingness in which “Solare day” predictably gives way to night.