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). "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 v 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 vii

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. viii

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. x

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. xi with his fiancé. Appreciating this irony, the Chinese People's Art Theatre in Beijing retitled their production of the play Please Step into the Furnace (1981), an allusion to the corrupt Tang dynasty administrator who finally suffers his own prescribed punishment. So neat a theatrical solution to complicated human problems comes at a high price. It involves Isabella in some shady backroom shenanigans and compromising deceits, as many have noted. More important, it forces the Duke into a disturbing moral contradiction. Contrast his confident assertion above, "'tis no sin," with his assumptions during the interrogation of Juliet: "Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry?" (2.3.19). The Duke asks Juliet if the "most offenseful act / Was mutually committed" and to her affirmative response says, "Then was your sin of heavier kind than his" (26-8). What sin? Why doesn't Claudio and Juliet's "precontract" earn for them the same freedom as the more dubious one between Angelo and Mariana, legally broken years before for want of a dowry and invalidated further by the present scam? And what right has the Duke, pretending to be a friar, to pass religious judgments anyway? There are no easy answers to such questions, all raised by the enigmatic character of the Duke in his conflicting roles of ruler, intriguer, and friar. Shakespeare found precedent only for the first in the sources, which all feature a ruler who sorts out the problems and dispenses justice at the end of the play. The playwright greatly expands this character into an intriguer, giving him various reasons for leaving his post with the deputy in charge: the need for correction of his own negligence in enforcing the law; a love of the life removed; a desire to test Angelo and those in charge in his absence; a wish to keep his name free from slander when the laws are enforced. The discomfort aroused by such mixed motivations may increase when the Duke in friar's habit presumes to perform spiritual offices: he advises and confesses Juliet, Claudio, Barnardine, and Mariana; "to make her heavenly comforts of despair" (4.3.103), he tells Isabella that her rescued brother is dead. Consequently, critical and theatrical appraisals of the Duke have varied widely: G. Wilson Knight championed the allegorical reading of the Duke as a figure of God; William Empson articulated the modernist condemnation of him as an amoral manipulator xii

who treats "his subjects as puppets for the fun of making them twitch."8 Peter Brook's landmark 1950 production altered the text to present a simpler, more admirable character: he cut the exchange with Juliet, some of his conspiratorial speeches, some of Lucio's negative comments, the continuing deception of Isabella in Act 5, and the direct offer of marriage. In 1966 Tyrone Guthrie's production portrayed the Duke as divine figure of justice and mercy, the heavenly bridegroom. In 1970 John Barton defied this tradition by making the Duke's weakness a clear cause of corruption in Vienna. For such sins Peter Zadek's postmodern adaptation (Bremen, 1967) had the Viennese citizens finally murder the Duke and put Mistress Overdone in his place. Shakespeare's play, however, has the Duke preside over the grand concluding series of exposures and discoveries. His iniquity revealed, Angelo quickly confesses and begs for sentence and "sequent death" (5.1.373). The Duke orders him to marry Mariana and then passes judgment: "An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!" Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure, Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure. (410-12) These lines evoke the Old Testament, lex talionis, "law of the tooth," which stipulates equal punishments for crimes, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Ex. 21: 23-5; Lev. 24: 17-21; Deut. 19: 21). Since we know that Claudio lives, we may well wonder if the Duke will carry out the sentence or rest content with Angelo's complete exposure and humiliation. Mariana intervenes immediately: "O my most gracious lord, / I hope you will not mock me with a husband" (417-18). A conventional figure of unrequited love, Mariana grows beyond the prototypes in this tense, climactic, and surprising moment. She spurns the offer of money and a better husband: "O my dear lord, / I crave no other, nor no better man" (426-7). After five years of rejection, his public slander of her, and the experience of his lust for Isabella, she remains true, forgiving, and loving: "They say best men are molded out of faults, / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad" (440-2). In the

8 G. Wilson Knight, "Measure for Measure and the Gospels" (1930), The Wheel of Fire 4th edn., paper (1949; rpt. London: Methuen, 1970), 73-96; William Empson, "Sense in Measure for Measure" The Structure of Complex Words (1951; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 270-88 (283). xiii popular 1979 BBC version the dark-eyed Jacqueline Pearce makes this a serious, credible, and moving plea. Shakespeare draws on Italian dramatic traditions here, specifically on the donna angelica or costante, a woman whose remarkable love and faith rewards men better than they deserve and turns tragedies to happy endings.9 In a culminating ironic reversal, Mariana asks Isabella to grant Angelo the very mercy she once begged Angelo to grant her brother. Recognizing the significance of the moment, Peter Brook famously instructed his Isabella, Barbara Jefford, "to pause each night until she felt the audience could take it no longer." The break created "a silence in which all the invisible elements of the evening came together, a silence in which the abstract notion of mercy became concrete for that moment to all present."10 Finally kneeling, Isabella pleads for Angelo: Look, if it please you, on this man condemned As if my brother lived. I partly think A due sincerity governed his deeds Till he did look on me. Since it is so, Let him not die. My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died. For Angelo, His act did not o'ertake his bad intent, And must be buried as an intent That perished by the way. (5.1.445-54) In Giraldi Cinthio's Epitia, a probable source, the heroine plots revenge until she learns her brother is alive. Here, however, the quality of mercy in not strained. Fully believing her brother to be dead, Isabella shows her holiness and goodness in a selfless act of charity. The sage Doctor Samuel Johnson uncharacteristically misread this exquisite gesture of forgiveness and mercy: "I am afraid our varlet poet intended to inculcate that women think ill of nothing that raises the credit of their beauty, and are ready, however virtuous, to pardon any act which they think incited by their own charms."11 Far from succumbing to

9 Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 65-89. 10 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Athenaeum, 1978), 89. 11 Samuel Johnson, ed., The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1765), 1:378. xiv

flattery and foolish vanity, Isabella here practices the forgiveness urged in the New Testament, particularly the very passages invoked by the title of the play, Measure for Measure. Witness Matthew 7: 1-2, for example: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Geneva Bible , 1599). In the context of the preceding Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) the passage revokes the Old Testament lex talionis for the new love of love: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say unto you, 'Resist not evil; but whosever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also'" (Matt. 5: 38-9). The old law commands retribution, measure for measure; the new law advocates charity, love immeasurable. After this spiritual climax, the Duke calls for Barnardine and the muffled prisoner. At the unmuffling of Claudio, the motions of mercy gather force and effect Angelo's release: "your evil quits you well. / Look that you love your wife" (499-500). Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835-6), and many others, have objected: "Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape." "Measure for Measure is the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakespeare's plays. It is a hateful work."12 But the release represents the final triumph of New Testament caritas and the final rejection of the rigorous Puritanism that the "precise" (1.3.50, i.e "Puritan") Angelo embodies. For most moderns Puritans are cartoon characters, wittily summed up in the famous quip of the Baltimorean H. L. Mencken: Puritanism is the "haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy." But for contemporaries Puritans constituted a potent political and religious minority who accused the regime of laxity, pushed for strict reforms, and advocated harsh penalties for sexual misconduct. Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson wrote hilarious satirical portraits later—Tribulation Wholesome (The Alchemist, 1610) and Zeal-of-the- Land-Busy (Bartholomew Fair, 1614). Shakespeare gives us a more complex figure in Angelo but an equally devastating expose of Puritan hypocrisy.13

12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition: Measure for Measure, ed. George L. Geckle (London: Athlone, 2001), 80. 13 See Peter Lake, "Ministers, Magistrates, and Productions of 'Order' in Measure for Measure," Shakespeare Survey, 54 (2001), 165-81; Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001). xv

Measure for Measure culminates that exposure with a show of mercy that confutes the Puritan political program and its religious pretensions to godly zeal. The pardon of Barnardine, a character invented by Shakespeare, also shows justice tempered by mercy and resonates with contemporary significance. The murderer who "apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep" (4.2.131-2), Barnardine is supposed to substitute his head for that of his opposite, the innocent and fearful Claudio. But Barnardine refuses to assent to his execution: "You rogue, I have been drinking all night. I am not fitted for't"; "I swear I will not die today for any man's persuasion." He imperiously dismisses his captors and sweeps offstage: "If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward, for thence will I not today" (4.3.37-8, 53-4, 56-7). "What if we do omit / This reprobate till he were well inclined" (67-8), proposes the Provost, and suggests recourse to Ragozine, a pirate already dead, for the necessary head. Why does Shakespeare refuse to kill off Barnardine as the plot requires and instead invent this wholly superfluous complication? Certainly he may have belatedly decided that Barnardine's comic vigor and mock dignity unsuited him to play the victim to plot exigency; he is just too funny and irreverent for Abhorson's axe. But the Provost's use of the loaded theological term "reprobate," the Calvinist and Puritan word for a soul predestined to damnation, suggests other motivations. For Barnardine is Shakespeare's portrait of a reprobate, "insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal" (4.2.133-4), a "creature unprepared, unmeet for death" (4.3.61). But instead of simply consigning him to his divinely ordained damnation the Duke makes this surprising assertion, "to transport him in the mind he is / Were damnable" (62-3). The Duke here says that the execution of Barnardine and the sending of his soul to hell would not fulfill the divine plan, made before all eternity, but itself be a culpable act, one meriting damnation. So saying he decisively rejects the Calvinist theory of predestination and all its assumptions, and, as befits a friar, endorses a Catholic view of free will. Even Barnardine may hope for change and grace and salvation. The final solution is not Puritan rigor but Catholic mercy. As Duke he finally requites Barnardine his faults, tells him to provide for better times to come, and releases him to the instruction of a real friar: Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul xvi

That apprehends no farther than this world, And squar'st thy life according. Thou'rt condemned. But for those earthly faults, I quit them all, And pray thee take this mercy to provide For better times to come. Friar, advise him; I leave him to your hand. (5.1.483-9) The final sorting out includes also the exposure of Lucio, first sentenced to death for slander (probably a nod to James I's noted dislike of criticism) and then reprieved in another act of mercy: "Thy slanders I forgive and therewithal / Remit thy other forfeits" (521-2). Upon presenting Claudio to the assembly, the Duke surprisingly proposes to Isabella: "Give me your hand and say you will be mine, / He is my brother too" (5.1.495-6); and again at the end of the play: "Dear Isabel, / I have a motion much imports your good, / Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline, / What's mine is yours and what is yours is mine" (536-9). Though Shakespeare gives Isabella no answer to either offer, critics and directors have traditionally assumed her consent to a new life in marriage. Such an ending has been said to complete the New Comedic impulse to conjugal union, to illustrate contemporary social mores regarding property and status of women, and fittingly to conclude the spiritual education of the main characters. And so it may. In 1803 Sarah Siddons's celebrated Isabella, a model of religious purity and principle, fell to her knee in grateful acceptance of the proposal, only to be tenderly caught by the Duke, who kissed her hand. In 1983 Juliet Stevenson played Isabella without habit, as a young woman aware of her own sexuality but entering a convent as a positive choice for the world; after the long journey of the play she arrives at another place and, taking the Duke's hand, makes a different choice. But John Barton in 1970 presented an Isabella, Estelle Kohler, "wondering, puzzling about what she should do."14 Kohler's open-ended response, however, appeared to many as outright refusal. Some have made the rejection more explicit. Modern Isabellas pointedly refuse to take the Duke's hand and stalk off stage alone. In these

14 On Siddons see John Philip Kemble Promptbooks, ed. Charles H. Shattuck, 11 vols. (Charlotesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), 6: [68]; on Stevenson see Carol Chillington Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today, ed. Faith Evans (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26-52; on John Barton's production, Graham Nicholls, Measure for Measure: Text and Performance (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986), 77. xvii interpretations, she refuses a man who arrogantly attempts to recuperate her into standard comic framework, to impose a theatrical ending on a woman he has deceived and manipulated. After its first production in court (1604) Measure for Measure did not appear on stage until William D'Avenant's adaptation, The Law against Lovers (1662), which added Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing and omitted the lower comic characters; D'Avenant's Angelo was merely testing Isabella and Claudio. Charles Gildon's adaptation, sub-titled Beauty the Best Advocate (1700), likewise omitted the lower characters but added entr'acte interludes from Purcell's opera, Dido and Aeneas; Claudio and Juliet were secretly married, as were Angelo and Mariana. The play received liberal cuts and alterations throughout the eighteenth century (and the grand attentions of Sarah Siddons as Isabella) and fell into neglect in the nineteenth. In our century Bertolt Brecht (1936) and Charles Marowitz (1975) turned the play into disturbing parables about political power. Charlotte Lennox (1753-4) still speaks for many, albeit more wittily than most: "That Shakespeare made a wrong choice of his subject, since he was resolved to torture it into a comedy, appears by the low contrivance, absurd intrigue, and improbable incidents he was obliged to introduce in order to bring about three or four weddings instead of one good beheading, which was the consequence naturally expected."15 Modern critics have expressed their discomfort by resorting to the ominously vague label, "Problem Play." But perhaps the problem is not the play but, as Charlotte Lennox unwittingly reveals, our expectations, our desire for "the consequence naturally expected." Measure for Measure challenges such expectations by insistently upsetting conventional formulas. Life is simply too complicated for expected solutions and pat answers, legal, moral, and theatrical. In this Vienna as in our world people must struggle to understand and incarnate the great abstract ideals of Justice and Holiness. This struggle involves human beings in painful decisions, impossible dilemmas, and inevitable compromises. The Duke tries to restore order to the state he has neglected; Angelo tries to enforce a cruel law impartially; Escalus muddles through Elbow's incomprehensible complaint; Isabella discovers how hard it is to live virtuously outside of cloister, in the confusing, sinful, madness

15 Charlotte Lennox, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974-81), 4: 112. xviii of the fallen world. Below the spheres, language distorts; blood courses through the veins; emotions clash with intellect; weakness confounds the will. The seven deadly sins flourish alongside the four cardinal and three theological virtues, in others and in ourselves. Sometimes goodness must choose the lesser of two evils; sometimes the truth must hide behind delusion and deception. The play stands against Puritanism, understood as a powerful metaphor for simplistic moral absolutism, arrogant self- righteousness, and harsh judgmentalism; it does not endorse any other creed but instead advocates humility, flexibility, and mercy. As such it seems particularly timely in an age that frequently sees religious zealotry turn into destructive political force. George Bernard Shaw remarked that Measure for Measure, along with All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, shows that Shakespeare was "ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him."16 Surely that can be said of the twenty-first century as well.

16 Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, 2 vols. (1898; rpt. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Co., 1904), 1: xxvi.

Measure for Measure

Editors (Text, Notes, Appendices) Jedidiah D. Adams Sarah P. Biernacki Hannah W. Blauvelt Amanda H. Cammarata Alison J. Koentje Brian J. Olszak Daniel J. Procaccini Paul J. Zajac

General Editor (Introduction) Robert S. Miola

Apprentice House Baltimore, Maryland www.ApprenticeHouse.com