Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

I could imagine no better end to our reading of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays than Measure for Measure, a play which two very trustworthy friends of mine call his greatest and which to me has some of the poetry that we've encountered so far. Often numbered among Shakespeare’s “problem plays”--those that appear destined for tragedy until a last-minute turn toward comedy--Measure has sparked a great number of interpretations. G. Wilson Knight considered the play a parallel to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, with the Duke as the enlightened philosopher-teacher; while Harold Bloom finds the Duke to be idiotic and locates the hero in Barnardine, the imprisoned drunk who refuses to be executed. Maybe, though, the critic Walter Pater put it best when he said that Measure contains “a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of [Shakespeare’s] moral judgments.”

Morality and Mortality

Since the play is not as well known as some of Shakespeare’s others, let’s give a quick synopsis. The Duke of Vienna suddenly leaves his post and puts in charge Angelo, a law-abiding but inexperienced man who immediately enforces all the laws that had fallen by the wayside during the Duke’s tenure. Claudio is the first man to be arrested because of the laws, as he had premarital sex with his fiancée. While he sits in prison, his sister, Isabella, pleads his case to Angelo, who ironically falls in love with her, and in exchange for her brother’s freedom, he asks her to sleep with him. Meanwhile, the Duke has inexplicably donned the robes of a friar and goes to the prison to minister to Claudio. A lot of things happen--including the friar tricking Angelo into having sex with his former lover Mariana and tricking Isabella into thinking her brother has been executed by Angelo--before the play ends with the Duke revealing himself and pairing off all the characters, taking Isabella for himself.

At issue in the play, which neither Wilson Knight nor Bloom would deny, is the chasm between “godlike aspirations and fallible human implemention,” as the introduction puts it. Angelo enforces the law to the letter and has no time for mercy or sympathy. The Duke says as much in his estimation of him: “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.” Moreover, consider the way Escalus, another lord, questions his judgment:

“[I]n the working of your own affections, / Had time cohered with place or place with wishing, / Or that the resolute acting of your blood / Could have attain'd the effect of your own purpose, / Whether you had not sometime in your life / Err'd in this point which now you censure him.”

He asks, Could you not picture yourself committing the same offense under any circumstances at all? Angelo, stubborn to the end, responds simply: “Sir, he must die.” Yet even he cannot ignore the poetry of Isabella’s words, which must count as some of the most moving lines Shakespeare ever wrote:

“Alas, alas; / Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, / And he that might the vantage best have took, / Found out the remedy. How would you be, / If he, which is the top of judgment, should / But judge you as you are? O think on that, / And mercy then will breathe within your lips, / Like man new made.”  Then: “So you must be the first that gives this sentence, / And he, that suffers. O it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant… / Could great men thunder / As Jove himself does, Jove would never 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 gnarled oak / Than the soft myrtle; but 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; who with our spleens, / Would all themselves laugh mortal.”

Isabella is the symbol of purity and mercy, a woman so committed to virtue that she joins the strictest convent she can find, and as such, she seems a perfect match for Angelo, the strictest enforcer of the law. This is true in more ways than one, for when Angelo hears her speech, he is not moved to free Claudio, but rather falls in love with her: “Ever till now, / When men were fond, I smiled and wondered how.” Angelo, who has never felt his blood flow, feels it now without a shadow of a doubt. Yet this recognition does not reveal to him his errors.

Let us turn to consider Claudio. Isabella’s poor brother, unlike Angelo, understands the depravity present in all people, including himself: “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 [i.e., ravenously drink poison], / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.” Such recognition is more than Angelo can muster, but it is cold comfort when he is about to be executed.

Even colder comfort is the visit he receives from the Duke, who has dressed as a friar for reasons which are unclear. Though his dress is saintly, he does not have the “spiritual solace” thing down quite yet: his words to Claudio sound more like a philosophical treatise than a prayer:

“Be absolute for death; either death or life / Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing / That none but fools would keep. A breath thou art, / Servile to all the skyey influences / That dost this habitation where thou keep’st / Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death’s fool, /For him thou labor’st by thy flight to shun, / And yet run’st toward him still. Thou art not noble, / For all th’ accomotations that thou bear’st /Are nursed by baseness. Thou’rt by no means valiant, /  for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork / Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep, / And that thou oft provok’st , yet grossly fear’st / Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself, / For thou exists on many a thousand grains / That issue out of dust.” We should think of Hamlet, who calls life a “quintessence of dust.”

The Duke beseeches Claudio to “reason with life,” as if such a thing were possible, and goes on to remind him of how poor and depraved he is, as if he did not know. The Duke continues:

“Thou are not certain; / For thy complexion shifts to strange effects / After the moon. If thou art rich, thou’rt poor; / For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, / Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey, / And Death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none; / For thine own bowels which do call thee sire, / The mere effusion of thy proper loins, / Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum / For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth, nor age, / But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep / Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth / Becomes as aged , and doth beg the alms / Of palsied eld: and when thou art old and rich, / Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty / To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this / That bears the name of life? Yet in this life / Lie hid moe thousand deaths; yet death we fear / That makes these odds all even.”

The beauty and nuance of such a passage notwithstanding, it isn't very comforting. Before we get to Claudio’s response, let’s look at Samuel Johnson’s great comment on the after-dinner’s sleep bit: “When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.”

Claudio, while the Duke is with him, appears to be strengthened by this speech, whether truly or falsely, but when Isabella visits him later on, it is clear that he received no solace from the friar-duke, who appealed to his intellect alone. Claudio gives his own masterful speech on the horrors of death:

“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-ribbed 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 loathed worldly life / That age, ache penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”

His speech is manifestly Catholic, straight out of the Inferno, and it demonstrates what the Duke does not know: that there can be no intellectual comfort from such fear. When Isabella tries to mollify him, he refuses to accept it and asks her to appease Angelo by sleeping with him, a request that she of course cannot fulfill. She, like Angelo, cannot confess that she is human, that her blood flows. Just as Angelo does not bend the law for mercy, so too can Isabella not bend her virtue for her mercy. As Angelo himself says of her ethic, “More than our brother is our chastity.”

Wilson Knight and the Gospels

G. Wilson Knight and his essay, “Measure for Measure and the Gospels,” were fun to read for the same reason that Harold Bloom is often fun to read: he proposes a concrete, unambiguous reading that is not only erudite but incredibly controversial. Here, he states without qualification the central theme, that of "the moral nature of man in relation to the crudity of man’s justice,” and goes on to explain the characters: “Isabella stands for sainted purity, Angelo for Pharisaical righteousness, the Duke for a psychologically sound and enlightened ethic.”

None of that is very strange, save for the bit about the Duke. The Duke does not often appear enlightened, as his shitty advice to Claudio seems to indicate. Certainly he functions in the play as the author and judge, and all the events between his leaving his post and returning to it could be read as a play within the play, one orchestrated by the Duke himself. What evidence do we have of his enlightenment?

Wilson Knight claims that the Duke has let Vienna's laws go unenforced (which is true from the text of the play), not because he is incompetent, but because “meditation and self-analysis, together with profound study of human nature, have shown him that all passions and sins of other men have reflected images in his own soul.” True, he does have some rather insightful things to say about some characters, as we noted with his comment on Angelo above, but profound? Meditative? That feels like he’s reaching.

Yet Wilson Knight also locates many fascinating parallels to the Gospels in the play, excluding the obvious source of the title, Matthew 7:2: “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” One example comes from Escalus’ question to Angelo about whether he would not have committed the same offense had “time cohered with place.” He sees it as analogous to this teaching of Christ: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28) To me, this had always seemed like a harsh admonition, a command to remain pure in thought as well as deed. Wilson Knight, however, makes the argument that committing adultery in one’s heart means that the sin would have been committed had all hindrances been removed. If a man lusts after a woman, it means that he would sleep with her given the opportunity, and such lust is inexcusable. God, though, is a merciful judge, one who knows the world and the people within it and can judge them according to their hearts, whereas Angelo is simply “dressed in a little brief authority,” with no such power.

Of the strangeness readers find in the play, such as the weirdo ending, Wilson Knight has this to say: “And, if ever the thought at first sight seems strange, or the action unreasonable, it will be found to reflect the sublime strangeness and unreason of Jesus’ teaching.” Which is an interesting thought, because the gospel morality does have a sublime logic to it that resembles but is distinct from ours.

Wilson Knight’s reading has some support. Northrop Frye sees the biblical influences as well: he wites that Angelo’s legalism “really descends from what is called in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden knowledge, because…it’s not a genuine knowledge at all: it can’t even tell us anything about good and evil. This kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of self-conscious sex, when Adam and Eve knew that they were naked, and the thing that repressive legalism ever since has been most anxious to repress is the sexual impulse.” Put another way, Angelo possesses the trappings of power, as Kafka might say, but not power itself. Indeed many things in this play have the absurdity of Kafka or Beckett, an idea to which we will return.

Frye, however, sees in Measure not a Christian ethic, but a primitive one: it “reflects the priority of mythology to ideology," and goes on to say, 

"His later plays are more primitive than the earlier ones, not, as we might expect, less so. They get closer all the time to folk tales and myths, because those are primitive stories: they don’t depend on logic, they don’t explain things and don’t give you room to react: you have to listen or read through to the end.”

Barnardine or Bust

Bloom comes in to argue against such a positive reading of the Duke. To him, the Duke is supremely incompetent, spouting false wisdom everywhere he goes (e.g., to Claudio). But this may be influenced by his view that the play is the Bard’s “farewell to comedy,” and serves to “purge Shakespeare of whatever residual idealism” he had left. Shakespeare likely wrote Measure just before the sequence of famous, dark tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear; and like those plays, Measure “harbors a deep distrust of nature, reason, society, and revelation,” at least in Bloom’s mind.

“To be sober in this mad play is to be madder than the maddest,” he writes, and as such he spends most of his energy on Barnardine, who stays drunk in his prison cell every day. Barnardine is “the genius of [Vienna’s] disorder, and qualifies as the imaginative center (and greatest glory) of Measure for Measure.” The notion of disorder is interesting and certainly apropos, and Bloom follows with a list of examples:

“Claudio pleads in Act I that all he and Juliet lack is ‘outward order’; except for that, they truly are husband and wife. Angelo, grimly allowing the ‘fornicatress,’ Juliet, ‘needful, but not lavish means,’ adds, ‘There shall be order for’t.’ The Duke also intricately plays upon ‘order,’ as he commands the beheading of Barnardine: ‘By the vow of mine order…’ Sublimely, Barnardine refuses to cooperate: ‘I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion.’ The idea of order in Vincentio’s Vienna ultimately is an idea of death.”

Death is at the heart of order just as it is at the heart of disorder, for all things tend toward decay. In a vacuum, the orderly thing to do is to die, and in a way, death is the trivial ordering, the order of least resistance. It would be impossible, for example, for someone to evaluate each fornicating couple to see who is engaged to be married and who is just getting their rocks off, so all are condemned to death. Which is why, when Barnardine refuses to be executed, the guards order him to be beaten until he consents. Though such consent is meaningless, it has the appearance of meaning, of order. In the most Beckettian moment of the play, Pompey urges Barnardine to die, saying, “Awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.”

Bloom is not wrong, then, to say that order in Vienna is death; where he seems to go wrong is attributing that death-drive to the Duke. Though I would not go so far as Wilson Knight and say that the Duke has an enlightened consciousness, he is also not the idiot that Bloom makes him out to be. Rather, Vienna has a death-drive only insofar as each civilization has one forced upon it by necessity. It is easier to kill than to understand, and Vienna doesn’t have too much understanding under Angelo’s rule.

A final point on Barnardine: he is a rather interesting figure in the play, as he is the only one (apart from the Duke) who seems capable of free thought. When Isabella, for example, is confronted with a choice, sex Angelo or have a dead brother, she feels bound to those options and cannot choose, and in doing so, has a choice made for her, first by Angelo, then by the Duke. Barnardine, on the other hand, is presented with two options, consent to die or get beaten until he consents to die, and locates the third choice: to live. Bloom’s fascination with livelihood in Shakespeare’s characters easily leads him to exalt Barnardine here, and it is not totally unwarranted.

The Measure of All Things

I firmly believe that the middle way is often the right way, and here I would volunteer a middle of the road reading of the Duke, who is certainly the most important figure in the play. (Sorry, Harold Bloom.) The introduction makes the following point about the ending:

"Perhaps, however, the play’s forced and ambiguous resolution underlines the old dramatic truism that only God can write Act V. Although this duke plays God more than most stage characters do, and takes over the plotting of the play (perhaps that is one implication of being God’s deputy), the solutions he delivers are no less flawed, theatrical, and conventional than he is."

The Duke seems neither an enlightened intellect nor a drooling imbecile; the fact that such divergent interpretations are both possible and convincing is a testament to Shakespeare's power. Rather, he is, like everyone else in the play, a human. He starts things off by deputizing Angelo, thereby extending his political and moral authority to a subordinate. That Angelo is less effective than the Duke is debatable: more people are arrested, sure, but nowhere does that count as efficacy, except in the US (topical humor!); rather, the point that seems reinforced to me is that all authority is inherently flawed. The Duke, in theory, is a deputy of God, enforcing civil laws which mirror divine laws, but he finds himself unable to play the role of God, as his stint as friar shows all too plainly. Nor can he play the role of cupid (or Puck), as he proves in the final court scene. Yet again, he takes on the role of a deputy of God, determining who belongs with whom, and again, the results are mixed at best. Which is perhaps the best reading I can think of for the ending: it is the last decision in a chain of decisions by a chain of deputies, and given how well the other decisions have worked out, we do not have much hope for this one.

Stray Observations

• More from Pater: "The idea of justice involves the idea of rights. But at bottom rights are equivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the recognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands, or our thoughts, is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love."
• More from Frye: Calls the Duke a “trickster figure” trying to turn tragedy into comedy; refers to the Duke’s “benevolent trickery,” much like Maimonides’ concept of God's gracious ruse.
• Escalus: “What news abroad i’ th’ world?" Duke, as friar: “None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness that the dissolution of it must cure it. Novelty is only in request, and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth [knowledge of human nature] enough alive to make societies secure, but security [self-confident “justice”] enough to make fellowships accursed. Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is ever y day’s news.”
• Duke: “Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be; all difficulties are but easy when they are known.” For example, justice, love, etc.
• Lucio, to encourage Isabella: “Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win, / By fearing to attempt. Go to Lord Angelo / And let him learn to know, when maidens sue / Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel, / All their petitions are as freely theirs / As they themselves would owe them.”
• From the introduction: “The social and prison worlds become increasingly interdependent, and the solution to the problems of the play depends on the mobility of characters across the supposedly dividing line.” This seems to be a common feature of Shakespeare. We should refer to it again when we come to Othello.