Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a work of extraordinary imaginative power. Its influence on postmodern Shakespeare criticism can hardly be exaggerated. For a time in the 1980s and 1990s it was impossible to open a collection of Cultural Materialist or New Historicist essays without finding an analysis of this Elizabethan play as a epitome of the carceral society, or that Jacobean play as covert legitimation of state violence through the production and containment of subversion. Through his gifted populariser Stephen Greenblatt, Foucault spoke to a generation of Shakespeareans in a way that no other analyst of bourgeois society had done before. In this chapter I'll discuss a classic Foucauldian reading of Measure for Measure that sees the play as a dramatic picture of a police state in-the-making where citizens are subjected to new forms of surveillance, and delinquent sexuality is produced as a way of justifying more punitive forms of social control. Does a presentist reading of this kind need to justify its claims by reference to the text itself with its structural parallels and contrasts, verbal patterning, biblical motifs, and other artistic devices by which meanings are generated? Probably not. If your ultimate purpose is not to recover unfamiliar ways of thinking, but to enlist Shakespeare as a spokesman for postmodern theories of culture, then there's no reason to be bound by the text. ‘Creative’ reading against the grain is a perfectly acceptable procedure in postmodern literary criticism. What is important, I shall argue, is to be clear about the difference between a presentist and an historicist approach.