The Duke's hospitable return in Measure for Measure

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604) reveals the psycho-geographic importance of the city gates and their importance in the practice of hospitality. The Duke, his body disguised as a friar, demands his substitute Angelo to ‘meet him at the gates and redeliver our authorities there’ (IV.iv.4–5).1 When next the Duke appears at the beginning of Act Five, he is at ‘A public place near the city gate … in his own habit’ (V.i.0 SD). That is, his true body is revealed and his corporal significance transformed by coming into the city: he is returned as (sovereign) host by virtue of crossing the city threshold dressed as himself, instigating his interpellation as ‘royal grace’ (V.i.3) by Angelo and Escalus. The Duke’s deliberate ‘ceremonial entry’ at the gates, in Felicity Heal’s terms, had social precedent, and ‘these [ceremonial] gestures were as carefully contrived, and as sensitive to status, as any of those’ acts taking place in ‘the great household’.2 The city is thought of as an enlarged oikos (οικοσ, household), where the laws (nomoi, νομοι) of hospitality are readily applicable: the laws of the household (oikos nomos, economy) take hold in the city.