Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of ‘Order’ in Measure for Measure

Summary

I want to start with a tableau taken from the cheap print of the period. It features a condemned felon on the gallows performing a good death, repenting his (or her) sins, admitting his guilt and throwing himself on the mercy of God in Christ. All this takes place under the eyes of the attendant minister and the presiding magistrate, as well as of a large, socially mixed (popular) audience. In the murder pamphlets from which it is culled, this scene was usually represented as the culmination of a heavily stylized, providentialized narrative which had started with an initial, often demonically sponsored, temptation, continued with a lapse into some master sin or other and a consequent descent down a chain of sins which ended in an often morally or physically gross and disgusting murder. This led to the often providential, or even frankly miraculous, capture of the felon and was followed by the trial, condemnation and usually (but not always) more or less repentant death on the gallows of the perpetrator. Sometimes that death was a really good one, the felon having been converted to a true faith and a full and frank confession not only of the particular crime that had brought him (or her) to the scaffold but also more generally of his or her sinful course of life. When such happy endings occurred the credit went first to the secular magistrate who had allowed various clerics to insert themselves into the interstices of the judicial process and then to the ministers themselves who had conferred with the felon in prison, instructed and converted him and then taught him the outward forms of a good death, which he then performed on the scaffold.