Table Of Contenti
Introduction
Measure for Measure is Shakespeare's compelling meditation on law,
justice, and mercy in the fallen world. The play perplexes and disturbs.
Claudio faces death for breaking a law against pre-marital relations and
impregnating his fiancé. Does the state have any right to make such a law?
Should it regulate the sexual practices of its citizens? Does anyone ever
have the right to break the law? The magistrate Angelo promises to remit
the penalty if Claudio's sister Isabella, a novice in the order of St. Clare,
goes to bed with him. What is the right thing to do? What constitutes sin
and what constitutes virtue in such a predicament? Is Isabella's refusal,
"More than our brother is our chastity" (2.4.186) pride or humility?
Who should judge? The title, Measure for Measure, alludes to well-known
biblical passages on justice and mercy (Matt. 7: 1-2; Mark 4: 24; Luke 6:
38), but contemporary commentators were undecided about who should
mete out the requisite measure, God or the earthly magistrate.1 The play
dramatizes that crucial indecision.
Like other Shakespearean comedies, Measure for Measure depicts an
eros that drives lovers through courtships to transformed identities and
the promise of societal renewal in marriage, a process Northrop Frye
famously called the "mythos of spring."2 But this play darkens the mood
and departs from the pattern. No Berowne or Lysander falls giddily in
love, no Orlando pours out his feelings in verse, no Egeus tries to block a
daughter's romance, no Beatrice or Benedick flirts and teases, no Viola or
1 Elizabeth M Pope, "The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure,"
Shakespeare Survey, 2 (1949), 66-82; Stacy Magedanz, "Public Justice and Private
Mercy in Measure for Measure," Studies in English Literature, 44 (2004), 317-32.
2 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957).
ii
Rosalind puts on a playful disguise. The comedy begins with Claudio and
Juliet, already plighted and post-coital; "You know the lady. She is fast
my wife" (1.2.137). He is enchained and she is pregnant. Mariana pines
away at the moated grange, abandoned by her fiancé Angelo because she
lost her dowry (along with her brother) at sea: "His unjust unkindness,
that in all reason should have quenched her love, hath like an impediment
in the current made it more violent and unruly" (3.1.232-4). Angelo's
sudden passion for Isabella leads him to extortion, forced intercourse,
deception, an order for unjust execution, and perjury. And some of
the final marriages—those featuring the bridegrooms Angelo and Lucio
dragged to the altar—seem more like punishments than fulfillments.
The play focuses insistently on the seamy side of desire and sexuality.
A pimp who won't give up his trade, Pompey reports that all the brothels
in Vienna's suburbs are to be pulled down. (Those in the city are saved
by a "wise burgher" (1.2.94), presumably a customer himself.) Desmond
Davis's BBC version (1979) depicted prostitutes wailing in protest at
the subsequent eviction. Michael Bogdanov's 1985 production invited
the audience onstage to join the pre-performance revelry of thieves and
prostitutes in Mistress Overdone's smoky, transvestite jazz club. David
Thacker's 1994 BBC production opened with the Duke watching lurid
images of urban decay on a video screen. Pompey describes Claudio's
crime in a phrase that should win some sort of award for sexual euphemism:
"Groping for trouts in a peculiar [i.e. private] river" (1.2.83). Claudio
reflects more darkly on his actions and on the compulsive nature of sexual
desire in lines laced with bitterness and self-contempt: "Our natures do
pursue, / Like rats that raven down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil,
and when we drink we die" (1.2.121-3). The former prostitute now
a madam, Mistress Overdone has "worn [her] eyes almost out in the
service" (1.2.103-4); she has "eaten up all her beef, and she is herself in
the tub" (3.2.51-2), i.e. the sweating tub for venereal disease. We hear
of another prostitute, Mistress Kate Keepdown, whom Lucio promised
to marry, got with child, then abandoned: "I was fain to forswear it. They
would else have married me to the rotten medlar" (4.3.163-4). Lucio
here admits that he denied the child to avoid compelled marriage to the
prostitute or "medlar," i.e. a small brown apple with a prominent cavity,
eaten when overripe. For him the sexual act is predatory and appetitive.
It is characteristic of this gritty and challenging play that such ugly
iii
cynicism comes from the man who most beautifully describes human
sexuality elsewhere. Lucio reports Claudio's crime to Isabella:
Your brother and his lover have embraced.
As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. (1.4.40-4)
Lucio portrays human sexuality as part of the natural process that causes
blossom and harvest. Elsewhere he rehearses the speculation that the
cold and unfeeling Angelo "was not made by man and woman after this
downright way of creation" but instead spawned by a sea maid or "begot
between two stock-fishes" (3.2.92-3, 97). Eros may bedevil, bewitch, and
betray poor mortals, who variously prove unworthy of its great gifts, but
Lucio repeatedly asserts that sex creates life, especially human life. Various
mothers and children in the play, on and off stage, confirm his point.
The Duke uses the image of the baby beating the nurse as a symbol for
indecorum and the violation of natural order (1.3.30-1). Pompey himself
is "bawd-born" (3.2.62). Juliet, not merely pregnant but "groaning," "very
near her hour" (2.2.17-18), appears in 1.2 with Claudio, in 2.3 for her
interview with the Duke as Friar, and again in 5.1 for her reunion with
Claudio. She tells the Duke that she takes "the shame with joy" (2.3.36),
ambivalently referring to her public dishonor and (perhaps with a touch
of defiance) to her unborn child. Offstage Constable Elbow's wife, also
great with child, searches for stewed prunes and touches off the legal
confusions of 2.1. And Mistress Overdone, we discover as she is being
hauled off to jail, has played the foster mother, caring for Lucio's baby
herself: "his child is a year and a quarter old, come Philip and Jacob. I
have kept it myself (3.2.174-6). That the practitioner of such generosity
and charity is a woman diseased from a life of prostitution suggests the
difficulty of making moral judgments in this play.
Whatever else eros may be, these mothers and children suggest, it
results in procreation, the establishment of families, the constitution of
society, and the continuance of the race. Fathers, of course, matter as
much as mothers in this regard, but they are largely absent or negligent,
and this causes many problems. Pompey introduces the foolish gentleman
Froth as "a man of fourscore pound a year, whose father died at Hallowmas.
Was't not at Hallowmas, Master Froth." Froth responds, "All-Hallond
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Eve" (2.1.114-15) The brief exchange forces us to linger a bit on the
seemingly irrelevant memory of the dead father, who doubtless provided
Froth's sizable income and societal status but is now gone. The idle Froth
frequents brothels and taverns, eats stewed prunes, and gets in trouble
with the law. When Escalus pleads for Claudio's life, he affirms his
worth by referencing the paternal bloodline: "This gentleman / Whom I
would save had a most noble father" (2.1.6-7). In similar fashion, Isabella
approves Claudio's courage in face of death: "There spake my brother!
There my father's grave / Did utter forth a voice!" (3.1.86-7). When
Claudio breaks down and asks Isabella to save his life, she reverses the
terms of praise to condemnation: "Heaven shield my mother played my
father fair, / For such a warped slip of wilderness / Ne'er issued from his
blood" (3.1.141-3). Illegitimacy threatens the material and moral fiber
of the commonwealth. Good fathers provide children with familial and
moral identity, with bloodlines, means, property, and character.
So fundamental and significant a human activity as sexual intercourse
naturally appears eligible for supervision and, if need be, regulation. For
bad fathers like Lucio deny and abandon their children. The Duke, in fact,
compares himself to "fond [foolish] fathers" who threaten punishment but
never use it. His decrees, bound up like "threat'ning twigs of birch," are
only for show not for use; "in time the rod / Becomes more mocked than
feared" (1.3.23ff.). Chaos has ensued in Vienna: "liberty plucks justice by
the nose" (1.3.29). The negligent pater patriae, the father of his country,
charged with its welfare and moral formation, seeks to make amends by
trying on a different kind of fatherhood, that of the priest. Disguised as a
friar, he is called "father" no fewer than thirteen times in the play.
Clearly, this strange, disordered Vienna of troubled mothers and
absent fathers needs good laws and magistrates to protect and regulate its
citizens. But here inhumanly harsh law captures young lovers in its toils;
and here the magistrates sometimes make less sense than the criminals,
expanded into a colorful carnivalesque underworld in recent productions.
Pompey the pimp asserts the universality of desire and inevitability of
sexual activity, despite attempts at legal prohibition: "Does Your Worship
mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?" (2.1.207-8). "If you head
and hang all that offend that way but for ten year together, you'll be glad
to give out a commission for more heads" (2.1.215-17). A frequenter of
brothels and a fantastical rogue, Lucio, nevertheless, scores a palpable
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hit on Angelo, "whose blood / Is very snow-broth" (1.4.57-8); "when he
makes water his urine is congealed ice" (3.2.97-8) "Why, what a ruthless
thing is this in him, for the rebellion of a codpiece to take away the life
of a man!" (101-2). Lucio also speaks truer than he knows when he tells
the false and eavesdropping friar of the "fantastical Duke of dark corners"
(4.3.148). The law itself comes under critical scrutiny in 2.1, where
Constable Elbow brings Froth and Pompey before the magistrates. Here
the scene of arrest and judgment gets confused and chaotic. Misusing
words, Elbow arraigns "benefactors" instead of "malefactors," says "detest"
for "protest," thinks all good Christians should have "profanation," and
mistakes "respected" for "suspected." His brand of malapropism asserts
what it would deny and denies what it would assert, thereby delivering
a rich lesson on the law in practice. Theoretically the law may be divine,
lofty, and ethereal, a reflection of the eternal and unchanging decrees
of justice; but here in the fallen world it must be incarnate in human
language, written and spoken, and therefore be subject to interpretation,
manipulation, error, and collapse. Why else would anyone ever need a
lawyer? And, moreover, in the fallen world the law must be administered
by fallible human beings—the incommunicative Elbow, the impatient
and unfeeling Angelo (who leaves the scene in a huff hoping Escalus will
find cause to "whip them all," 125), and, yes, even the negligent and
absent Duke.
The issues of law, justice, and mercy receive full development in the
two great debates between Angelo and Isabella (2.2, 2.4). Approaching
Angelo, Isabella meekly agrees that vice "should meet the blow of justice"
(2.2.32) and accepts the "just but severe law" (45). But at Lucio's urging
she begs him to show her brother mercy, which adorns with grace "the
deputèd sword," and the "judge's robe" (65-6). Isabella bases her plea on
the theological assumption that all souls, including Angelo's, are stained
by original sin and redeemed by the mercy of Christ, who "found out the
remedy": "How would you be / If He which is at the top of judgment
should / But judge you as you are?" (80-2). Making the argument
personal, she repeatedly stresses Angelo's own human frailty: "If he had
been as you and you as he, / You would have slipped like him" (69-70);
"Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
/ That's like my brother's fault" (141-3). But admitting no weakness,
seeing himself not as an erring, flesh-and-blood human but as the "voice
vi
of the recorded law" (2.4.61), Angelo remains obdurate: "It is the law,
not I, condemn your brother" (2.2.85). Why should it matter if human
language is uncertain or magistrates flawed and fallible? The law is still
the law for everyone, no exceptions. "Were he my kinsman, brother,
or my son, / It should be thus with him," 86-7). To Isabella's desperate
reply, "Yet show some pity" (104), Angelo delivers this curt and crushing
response:
I show it most of all when I show justice,
For then I pity those I do not know,
Which a dismissed offense would after gall,
And do him right that, answering one foul wrong,
Lives not to act another. (105-9)
The logic is unassailable: administered impartially, the law protects the
innocent from the guilty and the guilty from themselves.
But Isabella is neither convinced nor silenced; she senses the spiritual
pride that motivates such pitiless rigor and lights into Angelo:
Oh, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
……………………………………………..
man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep. (2.2.112-14, 122-7)
Isabella attacks Angelo's moral certainty as a pose and suggests the radical
insecurity of every human soul, the "glassy essence," under heaven; she
compares the high and mighty Angelo to an angry ape, a ludicrous and
pretentious imitator of human action. The Puritan Angelo suddenly feels
exposed and vulnerable. "Why do you put these sayings upon me?" (138).
He wins the argument but loses the debate.
Whether Angelo's sudden passion for Isabella arises from this defeat,
vicious lust, long repressed sensuality, or a perverted love for her purity
and goodness, it drives the second encounter in 2.4. Angelo poses a
difficult question:
Which had you rather, that the most just law
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Now took your brother's life, or, to redeem him,
Give up your body to such sweet uncleanness
As she that he hath stained? (52-5)
Isabella's reply, "I had rather give my body than my soul" (56) reveals the
absolute ethical standards that define her universe. Shakespeare departed
from all his sources to portray Isabella as a novice preparing to take vows
of poverty, chastity, and obedience; for her sex means sin and sin means
eternal damnation. "Better it were a brother died at once, / Than that a
sister, by redeeming him, / Should die for ever" (107-9). But Angelo
rocks Isabella's world with a brilliantly disturbing question: "Might there
not be a charity in sin / To save this brother's life?" (63-4). Claudio will
repeat this argument: "What sin you do to save a brother's life, / Nature
dispenses with the deed so far / That it becomes a virtue" (3.1.136-8).
Exactly what sin would Isabella be committing if she accepted Angelo's
repugnant proposal and endured his embrace? Lust? Orthodox Catholic
theologians believed three conditions necessary for mortal sin: grave
matter, sufficient reflection, and full consent of the will.3 How could
a compelled Isabella be said to give free and full consent of the will?
Would a just and merciful God condemn Isabella to hell for sacrificing
her virginity to save her brother? Believing so, isn't Isabella re-making
God in Angelo's stern and merciless image? Aiming at the foundations
of Isabella's moral reasoning, Angelo and Claudio go on to invoke the
great Christian virtue of charity and the great commandment to love
one's neighbor as oneself. If Christ laid down his body to save his brother,
shouldn't Isabella do likewise? Refusing, insisting on the letter of the law,
no extenuating circumstances, no exceptions, Isabella ironically echoes
Angelo, whom she has just condemned for pride.
Isabella, however, answers Angelo's question, posed hypothetically,
"What would you do?" (2.4.98), with an equally brilliant defense of her
chastity and assertion of her values:
As much for my poor brother as myself.
That is, were I under the terms of death,
Th'impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield
My body up to shame. (2.4.99-104)
3 The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992, rev. 1997), paragraph 1857.
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Anachronistically misread as evidence of unhealthy repression or hysterical
fear of sexuality, this passage instead shows the complete transvaluation
of eros that every celibate strives for. The sensual language betokens
commitment to the spiritual truths that transcend earthly desires and give
clarity to her convictions: "Ignomy in ransom and free pardon / Are of
two houses. Lawful mercy is nothing kin to foul redemption" (112-13).
Right is right and wrong is wrong. Certain actions are intrinsice
malum, "intrinsically evil," as John Paul II wrote in a recent encyclical,
Veritatis Splendor (1993), and can never be ordered to God, regardless of
circumstances. In contemporary terms, as the Duke says later, Angelo
would violate Isabella's "sacred chastity" (5.1.406), a virtue embraced by
religious as a form of temperance in which reason chastises concupiscence
(Summa Theologica, II.ii.151). The virtue is out of fashion today but in
Shakespeare's day had the respect of Catholics and Protestants alike (see
Spenser, Faerie Queene, Bk. 3). Shakespeare's Isabella gives the lie to much
popular anti-Catholic polemic, which regularly accused nuns and priests
of hypocrisy and lust. In this play the Puritan, Angelo, is guilty of these
vices. Defending her chastity, Isabella harks back to an established axiom
of moral theology, non licet malum facere ut exinde bonum proveniat, "it is
not licit to do evil so that good might result."4 And in this play no good
can result anyway, as Angelo will break his promise and order Claudio's
execution.
Shakespeare further shifts our perspective and heightens the tensions
in the following meeting between Isabella and Claudio (3.1). Isabella
may make her moral decision ("Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother,
die," 2.4.185) in isolation, but she must here face her trembling brother,
a climactic moment that became a popular subject for later artists and
illustrators.5 After the Duke's strangely un-Christian and entirely Stoic
consolatio, the "Be absolute for death" speech (3.1.5ff.), Claudio shows
courage, to be sure, and a richly poetic eloquence: "If I must die, / I will
encounter darkness as a bride / And hug it in my arms" (83-5). But he
fears death:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
4 Catechism, paragraph 1756.
5 See Loyola College Measure for Measure exhibition and website,
www.loyola.edu/measure.
ix
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world. (119-27)
Probably drawn from Vergil and Cicero, this vision of the afterlife is the
closest Shakespeare ever comes to Dante, whose Inferno likewise has fiery
floods, regions of thick-ribbed ice, and viewless winds for the lustful. In
Canto V the pilgrim meets Paolo and Francesca, lovers trapped eternally
in the airy blasts, and is so moved with sorrow and pity that he swoons,
falling like a dead man falls, caddi come corpo morto cade (5. 142). There is
no direct influence here, but we see the same punishment and feel the
same imaginative sympathy for the less sinful lovers, Claudio and Juliet.
Not so Isabella. When Claudio begs her for life, she turns on him cruelly:
"O you beast! / O faithless coward, O dishonest wretch!" "Die, perish"
(138-9. 146). Whatever her moral convictions, Isabella's response seems
shrill and excessive, little resembling the charity enjoined throughout
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Caught in an intolerable predicament,
both characters suffer intense emotional and moral breakdowns.
Fortunately, Measure for Measure poses dilemmas that are not purely
philosophical or even moral but, after all, theatrical. In the playhouse
when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object, as the song goes,
"something's gotta give." Audiences always disagree about the right course
of action for Isabella, whether or not she should sacrifice her virginity
to save her brother, but they all agree in condemning Angelo for his
tyrannical abuse of power. Whatever one decides intellectually, no one
wants to see Isabella sacrifice her consecrated virginity to the cruel, lustful
magistrate. Counting on the unanimity of this response, Shakespeare
contrives a theatrical solution to the various legal and moral tangles of
the play—the notorious bedtrick, Mariana's secret substitution of herself
for Isabella. This redirection of eros significantly departs from the source
tales of Giraldi Cinthio (Hecatommithi and Epitia) and George Whetstone
(Promos and Cassandra and Heptameron).6 In all four of these versions the
6 See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare,
8 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-75), 2: 399-513.
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Isabella character actually goes to bed with the unjust magistrate, suffers
betrayal, then marries the offender to restore her "honor." Shakespeare,
however, invents Mariana, Angelo's unjustly discarded fiancé, and
imports from Boccaccio's Decameron Giletta's bedtrick, which Helena
uses in All's Well That Ends Well to win her reluctant husband Bertram.
This expedient from folk lore and romance avoids the forced intercourse
and compensatory marriage. The Duke succinctly enumerates the benefits
to Isabella: "by this, is your brother saved, your honor untainted, the poor
Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled" (3.1.243-4).
Despite such assurances, many have condemned the bedtrick as an
artificial, unbelievable, and morally objectionable solution to wrenchingly
realistic problems. But Shakespeare operates here in a recognized legal,
as well as literary, context. The laws governing betrothal and marriage
assigned a defining contractual value to sexual intercourse, which
validated and consummated the betrothals of those engaged de praesenti
(by a declaration) or de futuro (by a conditional promise).7 So, the Duke
argues, Mariana commits no wrong by substituting for Isabella but simply
reclaims her own promised spouse:
Nor, gentle daughter, fear you not at all.
He is your husband on a precontract;
To bring you thus together, 'tis no sin,
Sith that the justice of your title to him
Doth flourish the deceit. (4.1.68-72)
Theatrically speaking, the bedtrick satisfies audience desire for the
scaling of the deputy, i.e. his weighing in the scales of Justice. In the process
it quiets potential objections about error personae ("error of person"), a
legal impediment that could nullify the contract. On the simplest level
audiences enjoy the spectacle of Wily Beguiled, the victimizer victimized,
as the bedtrick gulls Angelo and renders harmless his predatory lust,
abuse of power, perjury, and attempted execution of Claudio. Moreover,
in a satisfying ironic reversal, the deception achieves some poetic justice
by making Angelo morally parallel to Claudio, the man he presumed to
judge and condemn for essentially the same offense, sexual intercourse
7 See Victoria Hayne, "Performing Social Practice: The Example of Measure for
Measure" Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 1-29; B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol,
Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
26-9.
Description:That from the seedness the bare fallow brings. To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb. Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. (1.4.40-4).
