The Measure of Sexual Memory

Abstract Chapter 5 explores the broader cultural legacies of English prostitution on the Jacobean stage. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), the chapter examines how that play makes dramatic use of the complex materiality and the epistemology of early modern whoredom, enabling an interrogation of the social and conceptual costs of the shifting historical relation between law and prostitution in early modern England. Examining acts of sexual memory and forgetting across four interrelated registers—in scholarly studies of the medieval ars memoria, in Measure for Measure, in modern editorial engagements with the play, and in other early modern textual practices such as English chorography, chronicle history, and state proclamation—the chapter argues for a new understanding of the play as one that intimately links its famed exploration of criminality, transgression, and social authority to the control of sexual memory. Construing sexual memory as an ongoing, collaborative, and contestatory process, Measure for Measure not only recalls the histories of English prostitution but participates in the very memory work that the play puts to the question.