ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the poetic complexity of this old-fashioned idea that law and order must be in balance with the freedom to make mistakes or to experiment. In our censorious age, the balance of political power is often tipped by social censure, spun in ideological webs by politicians and a punitive mass media posing as objective disseminators of information, supposing that information is objective if it emanates from authorities. William Shakespeare wrote at an acute moment in jurisprudential history. Classical natural law, including its mediaeval versions, was giving way to what Jrgen Habermas called rationalist natural law or the positivization of natural law. An important message against authoritarianism is openly articulated at the end of the play and makes a good summary of our essay. Ultimately, a rationalized, modernized, natural law had to move beyond both moral absolutism and pragmatic liberal prudence, because of the problems of doing justice so sharply pointed up in Measure for Measure.
