Sex, Death and their Associated Legal Undertakings in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Dhaaruni Sreenivas College

In French, la petite mortis an expression that literally means "the brief loss or weakening of consciousness" but usually refers to "the sensation of orgasm as likened to death." This phenomenon is probably not a revelation, given that every author of hackneyed romance novels references it in trite and often awkward sex scenes but the point is, it is not a novel singularity, originating in mid 20th century erotica but rather, the association of sex and death alongside the law is age-old and has existed even prior to the mid-Renaissance career of William Shakespeare. In the Vienna portrayed in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, sex is set to become highly regulated after a 14-year period of hedonism and wantonness and it falls to Angelo to enforce these rules. The brothels are about to be shut down in Vienna’s equivalent of Amsterdam’s red-light district, and a young man named Claudio is imprisoned, condemned to be put to death for engaging in unambiguously consensual sexual intercourse with his fiancé Juliet, who becomes pregnant. After this introductory chain of events, the play unfolds to reveal a complicated and contradictory juxtaposition of sex and death which is further intensified by the existence of the law which...