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Introduction i 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 iv 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).
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