In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Lucio – a figure who embodies the volatility of informal public discourse – invents a series of sexual libels about the absent Duke Vincentio. As part of his distinctly carnivalesque string of slanders, Lucio refers to Vincentio as “the old fantastical Duke of dark corners.” One knows, in a general way, what Lucio means: that for all his august public authority, Vincentio enjoys the pleasures of the flesh overmuch in private. What interests me about the joke, though, is the way it imagines the unseen as automatically sexually suspect. The point is not that Lucio knows anything or even insinuates anything specific, but rather that, in a culture that imagined a link between public authority and moral transparency, hiddenness as such is always available for scandalous interpretation. King James, in Basilikon Doran, opined that kings should be careful “not to harbor the secretest thought in their mind,” and the idea behind this extreme-sounding formulation is that the rule of a good king hinges upon his total self-government. Inner life should be so rigorously ordered that passions and affections, rather than being allowed to fester in secret, are subjugated to the orthodoxies of public canons of virtue. Lucio's joke supplements the commonplace ideological fantasy implicit in James's remark, reminding us that this way of thinking about virtue generates, by a kind of structural imperative, the suspicion that unseen aspects of the lives of rulers might be outlets for their ungoverned passions.