Abstract

SEVERAL RESPONSIBLE scholars have written learned articles about the relevance of Elizabethan betrothal laws to the sexual and legal dilemmas that surround Claudio and Angelo in Measure for Measure. But they have not reached anything like a significant agreement about the betrothals. Quite the contrary. They have arrived at opposite conclusions. And the nature of their arguments raises some embarrassing questions about a whole school of Shakespearian scholarship that appeals to the Elizabethans for answers to questions that Shakespeare himself may purposely have left unanswered-or left unasked. Certainly the inevitable fate that awaits anyone who reads the whole series of articles concerned with Elizabethan Betrothal Laws and Measure for Measure is to be sent away more confused than he was before he read them. Davis P. Harding argues that there is no legal distinction between the play's two crucial pre-contracts (both, he says, were de praesenti betrothals). Never-