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to Dr. Regan's Home PageIntroduction.
1. Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare problem comedies, grouped with All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida by many scholars. These three plays were written between 1600 and 1604, during the time of early tragedies like Hamlet and Othello, and are a departure from the world of romantic comedies like As You Like It and Twelfth Night. All three problem plays deal in bitter sentiments and disturbing behavior in their main characters. Their endings are problematic at best, with jarring closures that may leave audiences dissatisfied. Troilus and Cressida is one of the most savage satires ever written, debunking heroic ideals and romantic love at once, and its ending departs from the world of comedy altogether.
2. Measure for Measure is not so dramatic a break from the familiar world of Shakespearian comedy, yet its subject matter and its closure are disagreeable. Curiously, it is one of the two plays by Shakespeare that take up the idea of social justice (together with King Lear). Its angle on that topic is a depiction of authority abused, and human suffering caused by injustice. Both Duke Vincentio and his deputy Angelo are consumed by their own power, in quite different ways. Isabella shares none of the warmth or wit of Rosalind or Viola as a heroine. These main characters are supremely egotistical, and the result is a puzzling play.
Shakespeare is fascinated by the manipulator. His most frightening villains are master manipulators, like Richard III, Iago, or Edmund. Vincentio is not a villain, but he causes considerable pain because of his narcissistic approach to the situations he creates. He seems unable to acknowledge his mistakes and to deal with the consequences straightforwardly. His ego demands that he pass on responsibility and preserve his image. Closure is reached in the final scene in the form of a baroque script he stage manages to ensure his own stardom.
Interpretation: performance and the text.
3. Vincentio has the power of a Duke, but little idea of how to exercise it in a humane way. He has decided that Vienna has become dissolute, and cannot bring himself to enforce laws about vice which have long been ignored:
We have strict
statutes and most biting laws.
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds,
Which for this fourteen years we have let slip...
Sith 'twas my fault to give the people scope,
'Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them
For what I bid them do: (1.3.19-21,35-37)
He intends to leave the city and appoint his deputy Angelo to rule in his absence, although he seems to have a curious double purpose, to test Angelo:
Lord Angelo
is precise,
Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be. (50-54)
As we shall see, Vincentio is fond of testing people.
4. The first victim of the new regime is Claudio, condemned for fornication. His fiancée, Juliet, is pregnant; the wedding has been delayed in a dispute over a dowry. His only friend is a cynical frequenter of the taverns and brothels, Lucio. This seedy underworld is in sharp contrast to the stiff formality of the court, and is the target of Angelo's reform movement:
Claudio has internalized the criminal charge against him, and is racked with guilt:
Lucio.
Why, how now, Claudio! Whence comes this restraint?
Claudio. From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty.
As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die. (1.2.127-33)
The evident suffering of the young couple is to be repeated in cruelly manipulative ways by both Angelo and Vincentio, both intoxicated with their power despite their different sympathies.
5. Isabella is the nominal heroine of the play. Our first glimpse of her is a curious request she makes to the head of her famously severe order for "a more strict restraint" on her life as a novice. That apparent severity will create dramatic tensions when she agrees to sue to Angelo for her brother's life. Notable in this scene is a passage from Lucio, who has at least a humane response to the plight of Claudio:
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. (1.4.40-44)
In fact Lucio represents the human sympathy and vitality of the underworld he comes from, despite its vices. The contrast between Isabella and Lucio is marked in the interview scene with Angelo, where she is about to abandon her cause after a weak request until he urges her on:
Her eloquence begins to stir the deputy:
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder.
Nothing but thunder. Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splits the unwedgeable and gnarlèd oak
Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man,
Drest 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 make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
Lucio. [Aside to Isabella] O, to him, to him, wench! He will relent;
He's coming; I perceive 't. (2.2.111-26)
Angelo is so tightly wound that it apparently takes a supreme virtue to raise lust in him:
O cunning
enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue. Never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigor, art and nature,
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite. Even till now,
When men were fond, I smiled and wond'red how. (180-87)
6. Duke Vincentio, meanwhile, is lurking around the prison disguised as a friar. His presence seems to assure us that Claudio will be saved, but we are not prepared for his toying with the pain and despair felt by the young couple.
Juliet.
I do repent me, as it is an evil,
And take the shame with joy.
Duke. There rest.
Your partner, as I hear, must die tomorrow,
And I am going with instruction to him.
Grace go with you, Benedicite! (2.3.35-39)
Much worse than his manipulation (for reasons unknown) is the sexual blackmail offered to Isabella by Angelo:
Many readers find her response cold and self-righteous:
No earthly
mean to save him, but that either
You must lay down the treasures of your body
To this supposed, or else to let him suffer:
What would you do?
Isabella. As much for my poor brother as myself:
That is, were I under the terms of death,
Th' impression of keen whips I'ld 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.
Angelo. Then must your brother die.
Isabella. And 'twere the cheaper way:
Better it were a brother died at once,
Than that a sister, by redeeming him,
Should die forever. (2.4.94-107)
As Angelo presses her, perhaps goaded by the sexual imagery implicit in lines 101-102, she remains adamant, and after his exit her summation sounds like a rote aphorism rather than a human response. The original printing encloses line 184 in quotes, marking it as a formal "saying":
I'll to my
brother.
Though he hath fallen by prompture of the blood,
Yet hath he in him such a mind of honor,
That, had he twenty heads to tender down
On twenty bloody blocks, he'd yield them up,
Before his sister should her body stoop
To such abhorred pollution.
Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die:
"More than our brother is our chastity."
I'll tell him yet of Angelo's request,
And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest. (176-86)
7. An equally distressing scene centers around the Duke. In 3.1, in his disguise as a friar, he prepares Claudio for death. The scope of his manipulations remain unclear in this complicated scene, as he must intervene between brother and sister after Isabella tells Claudio that she will not save him by yielding to Angelo. Claudio first embraces the idea of death: "If I must die,/I will encounter darkness as a bride,/ And hug it in mine arms (82-84). But when he realizes that she could save him, his vision turns to the terror of death. Ironically, he evokes Dante's picture of Paolo and Francesca, illicit lovers, buffeted eternally by the winds of their passion:
Ay, but to
die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
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; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death. (117-131)
Isabella turns on him angrily when he asks her to save him, and the Duke has to intercede, coming out of his hiding place where he has been eavesdropping. He lies to Claudio that Angelo's solicitation has been merely a test of Isabella, reconciles him to death, and then proposes the famous "bed trick" to Isabella. Angelo has cruelly rejected his fiancée, Mariana, at the failure of her dowry; Isabella will promise an assignation with Angelo, then substitute Mariana. The Duke does all this with a straight face, and Isabella agrees, but Shakespeare certainly strains the credulity of the audience. Many find this scene to be "Camp."
8. The absurdity of Vincentio's conduct is brought out by the ridicule he endures from Lucio in the next scene. Lucio is certainly corrupt and sometimes callous (here to Pompey), but he has comic energy and a loyalty to Claudio which make him more likable to the audience than is the Duke.
Vincentio can only gasp out some lame phrases in his own defense:
No might
nor greatness in mortality
Can censure 'scape; back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? (3.2.185-88)
A moment later Shakespeare gives him a soliloquy in tetrameter couplets which sound smug and awkward:
He who the
sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go;
More nor less to others paying
Than by self-offences weighing.
Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking.
Twice treble shame on Angelo,
To weed my vice and let his grow.
O, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!
How may likeness made in crimes,
Making practice on the times,
To draw with idle spiders' strings
Most ponderous and substantial things?
Craft against vice I must apply:
With Angelo to-night shall lie
His old betrothèd but despisèd;
So disguise shall, by th' disguisèd,
Pay with falsehood false exacting,
And perform an old contracting. (262-82)
9. The bed trick performed, Angelo then double crosses Isabella and orders the execution of Claudio, forcing the Duke's intervention in the prison. Even in this good deed, however, Vincentio's conduct is suspect as he orders the execution of another prisoner whose head he may substitute for Claudio's, a man deemed unrepentant and "unfit to live or die" (4.3.61). He is saved from this cruelty only by the sudden death of a pirate who is a double for Claudio, yet even here is his cruel manipulation evident as he maintains to Isabella the fiction that Claudio is dead. Lucio is present to mock him at his exit.
10. All that remains is a long and complicated closure scene. Contrary to his earlier disavowals of popular acclaim, Vincentio proves himself an egotistical showman and manipulator as he reels in Angelo, unveils Mariana, produces Claudio, and even proposes marriage to Isabella. She has no lines in response to his offer, giving the director and actors great latitude in playing the final moment.
Shakespeare is fascinated by manipulators, whether in history (Richard III), comedy (Sir Toby in Twelfth Night) or tragedy (Iago). Vincentio's fixation with pulling the strings of the helpless people around him anticipates that master magician, Prospero, in The Tempest, who is also a figure for the artist. There, finally, Shakespeare identifies manipulation with artistic power.
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