Measure for Measure - A Problem Play

Title
• Matthew 7.1-2 - “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be
judged, and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again”
• Elizabethans familiar with biblical allusion

The Royal Proclamation

• May 1559
• 'either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the common weale’
• 'forbidding direct treatment in plays of current public issues or the representation of important living
persons'.
• Allusions: deliberate and obvious
• Mode of allusion is equivocal
• Vienna (Catholic) / London (Protestant)
• Friars – nuns / Puritans (Angelo?)
• 1604 - Holy Roman Emperor attempting to suppress Protestantism in nearby Hungary

Religious Extremism
• Vienna – Roman Catholicism
• London – Protestantism (Puritanism)
• Foxe’s list of protestant martyrs – 300 under Queen Mary
• Over 200 Catholic martyrs under Elizabeth I
th
• 16 c. extreme English Puritans advocated the death penalty for fornication
• 1650 - the death penalty introduced for incest and adultery for a short period

Philip Stubbes
• Puritan pamphleteer
• threats everywhere
• Ascribes all problems to neglect of religious teaching
• Anatomy of Abuses (1581) – those who commit whoredom, adultery, incest and prostitution should
'tast of present death'
• 'wincke at [fornication] or els as looking thorowe their fingers, they see it, and will not see it'
• 'give a wild horse the libertie of the head never so litle, and he will runne headlonge to thyne
and his owne destruction also . . . So correct Children in their tender yeres'
• Cf. The Duke
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 . . .
Now, as fond fathers
Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch
Only to stick it in their children's sight
For terror, not to use - in time the rod
More mocked than feared - so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose,
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum. (1.3.20-2, 24-32)
Nashe’s Reply to Puritans
• Anatomie of Absurditie (1589)
• Writings banned 1599 by royal order
• Objects to their distortions of Scripture
• 'as though they had beene brought uppe all the dayes of their life with bread and water’
• 'as though they had beene Eunuches from theyr cradle, or blind from the howre of their
conception'
• they enquire into 'every corner of the Common wealth, correcting that sinne in others,
wherwith they are corrupted themselves'

James I
• A prince should show virtue in action and cultivate it as a private inward state, warning against
hypocritical outward show and empty words
• Confessed lax at the beginning of his rule and expressed strong disapproval of 'unreverent speakers'
• 1603-4 dispensed justice in person - demonstrating the importance of mercy;
• Raleigh conspiracy, letter sent on the very morning fixed for the execution of one group,
secretly reprieving them.
• prisoners brought out - taken back to their cells - brought out again to hear a speech
condemning treason and stressing the mercy of the monarch who had saved their lives

Surveillance
Renaissance: birth of centralised state
Elizabethan period - 2 methods of control:
• external instruments to physically control
• punishment of irregularities and transgression, prisons, mental institutions, police, army
• Self-control - implanted system of surveillance:
• education, church going, family – guilt - inner mechanism of brainwashing
• control subjects’ minds in order to gain control over the territory
• A Mirror for Magistrates (1584) - George Whetstone
• Roman Emperor Alex Servus - sophisticated system of surveillance, included his own
disguising and observing his subjects' transgression
st
• 1 performance: "A Play Called Measure for Measure" by Shaxberd, performed at court, for the new
King James I, by "his Maiesties plaiers" on Dec 26, 1604

Is it comedy?
• Comedy:
• Regeneration, celebration of life
• Tragedy:
• death wish
• despair

Problem Play
• Initially play about a problem
• Now, generically unclassifiable play
• 1599-1601 – great comedies
• 1601-1607 – great tragedies
• In between, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure
• Why?

Comic ending (?)

 • Marriages – satisfying?
• Claudio and Julietta
• Angelo and Mariana
• Lucio and Kate Keepdown
• Duke Vincentio and Isabella (?)
• “and say you will be mine” - Silence

The Anti-Comedy
• Block to young love
• Highest law outlaws young love
• Heroine wants to escape world of sex and corruption
• Hero manipulates her in appalling way – should hate him
• Heroine is silenced
• Shatters the normal limits of the comic form

Sex is...
• Usually a source of pleasure and life
• In Measure for Measure,
• a source of pain and death
• brings hatred of self
• brings a lack of charity towards others
• Three Different Approaches...
• Angelo represses
• Isabella withdraws (monastic vows)
• Duke’s prescription: forgive and marry –
• Justice tempered with mercy?

Scene Progression

1.1. Place of government – place of law, order and power

1.2. Street outside brothel – place of disorder and illegality
- Claudio sentenced to death because of pregnancy
- Public law and order  disorder and lawlessness
- Pure goodness and pure vice are placed side by side
- Difficult to tell them apart
1.3. Cell of friar – secret place – desires to disguise self as friar
• expect religious goodness and purity
• deception and mistrust instead of religious authority
1.4. Nunnery – religious goodness?
• Isabella plans to take vows and wants stricter rules
• she fears and loathes the body and sexuality (and love itself)
• seeks convent not for love of God but fear and loathing of man

The Duke’s Abdication

• Cause of all the ordeals
• Why?
1) Laws which haven’t been enacted by him
• Wants to clean up town but still be liked
• Appoints Angelo to do dirty work
2) To test Angelo’s character
 • Is he as moral as he seems?
• Will he be corrupted by power?
• Duke:
“Angelo / There is a kind of character in thy life / That to th’observer doth thy history / Fully unfold.”
(1.1.)
• Equivocal statement:
• Does the Duke know something even Angelo does not?
• Duke is conducting experiment on
• the nature of power and its effect on individuals
• how the human self and society works
• Two possible readings
• Duke is cowardly ruler
• Duke is philosopher king
• Creates interpretative problems
• Duality present in all characters!

Isabella
• Apparent holiness conceals her loathing of the body
• First interview:
• She condemns her brother’s sin but pleads for his life because she loves him
• Second interview:
• “I am come to know your pleasure”
• Coy or innocent?
• Dilemma: her body for brother's life
• response is negative but language is alluring (erotics of purity)
• stepping into the setting of justice has brought out her sensual side
• She desires sensuality so much that she abhors it
• provokes questions about human nature itself
• provokes questions about the true Isabella

Angelo
• As head of state, criticised by Escalus for being too strict
• Have you never erred in this way ?
• One thing to be tempted, another to fall.
• Angelo setting for himself level of morality which is Christ-like: prophetic – let me be judged
in the same measure
• Angelo falls “in lust”  Immoral proposal
• Isabella is shocked – will reveal him
• Angelo becomes a negative figure
• she has no chance against him
• unleashes the inner demon that the duke appears to have noticed in him

Angelo’s 25-line soliloquy Act II, ii

• filled with self-loathing upon the discovery of sexual desire
• upright judge and careful administrator to an acknowledgment of a sexual desire whose very presence
astonishes him – leads him to seduction under gross pressure, into what amounts to rape and on into
judicial murder and hypocrisy – a self-discovery speech
What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Ha!
Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I
 That, lying by the violet, in the sun
Do, as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season.
• astonished
• where is this coming from – him or her?
• is she tempting him – normal male projection, the woman was provocative
• Angelo acknowledges that she has not tempted him
• I am the one (lying by violet... assonance)
• she will blossom, but he is like dead meat, he will stink in contrast to the sweet smell of the
flower
Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough,
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary,
And pitch our evils there?
• Surprised to find this woman in sober religious clothes can tempt him in a way that a harlot cannot.
• Woman’s modesty is betraying his sense(s)
• There are enough brothels already but he desires to knock down the church and to build a brothel on
the sanctified spot...
O, fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou? or what art thou, Angelo?
• Key line – trying to define himself
• has discovered some fundamental part of his identity
• he isn’t going to blame circumstances for his current thing – this is in him
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good?
• Virtue is tempting
O, let her brother live;
Thieves for their robbery have authority
When judges steal themselves.
• He immediately sees the paradox
• lusting after girl after arresting her brother for fornication
• thinks it might be an innocent feeling?
What! do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again
And feast upon her eyes?
• Possibly love, could see her, court her... etc., like any young man with a woman –
• but this is not the case
What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook!
• He sees he wants sin
• the devil is working in him
• he does not want to marry her!!
Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue:
• Enemy is cunning
• Temptations adjusted to who we are
• Angelo’s love of virtue is being used to lead him into vice
 never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art, and nature,
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite.--Ever till now,
When men were fond, I smil'd and wonder'd how.
• Is he different from other men?
• Whores and loose women could never move him!
• He always wondered how men could be foolish enough to follow a whore to a brothel.
• He is not better, but he is worse than others
• His lust is a kind of desecration
• to violate the nun instead of using the whore for which use she is there...
• But he has found that he is now worse – and his self-loathing begins
• statement of identity – working out who he is and what is happening to him

Challenge of the Play

• how to overcome this?
• Problem:
• no noble hero to oppose Angelo
• Isabella is off-putting
• a heroine of moral qualities, or is there something rancid in her chastity?
• Duke is repulsive at times, but generally better

Lucio
• Boundary-crossing figure
• At home in brothels (joking about grace and venereal disease)
• Wishes to appear knowledgeable about everything
• Shocked by Claudio’s situation
• Claudio’s misfortune
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. (1.3.)
• like rats, vermin, rodents
• eagerly seeking the ratsbane that will kill us
• rat poisons do not kill directly – the rat eats, seeks water and cannot stop drinking…
• it dies from what it desires most
• Man seeks to quench his instincts and desires, they lead to restraint, sin and death…
• Lucio goes to convent
• shows respect for Isabella’s sanctity and holiness
• Wordy and flowery description of sexual act in terms of agriculture
• natural process as opposed to Angelo whose blood is snowbroth…

Barnadine
• imprisoned man who refuses to be executed
 • always drunk, careless, reckless and fearless
• liberty of prison, could escape but too drunk to leave
• Replacement for Claudio's head
• he refuses to pray or confess or die
• only person who realises how crazy the world of the play is
• only logical path is to refuse to participate in this world
• Consequently, only character not manipulated by Duke

The Prison
• Physical & symbolic
• Characters imprisoned by their choices:
• Claudio gets Julietta pregnant
• Angelo succumbs to desire
• Isabella wants to do right – lost in maze
• Powerless to change anything
• Fate governs the characters’ lives and steers the play towards tragedy

Enter the Duke…

• Disguised as Friar
• Reconciles Claudio to death
• Overhears conversation between Claudio and Isabella
• Duke reenters the play and alters the course of events

Act III, i
CLAUDIO.
Sweet sister, let me live:
What sin you do to save a brother's life
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue.
ISABELLA.
O you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest to take life
From thine own sister's shame?
(Her sleeping with Angelo to give him life is akin to incest)
What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair!
For such a warped slip of wilderness
Ne'er issued from his blood.
(can’t be my brother if you beg this of me – complete want of charity, complete denial of their
common human condition, their relationship.)
Take my defiance:
Die; perish! might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed:
I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,--
No word to save thee.
• Last words spoken to her brother in the play
Mariana – Angelo Relationship
• Angelo abandoned her when dowry sunk
• Marriage
• engaged couple could live together before marriage
• precontract and spousal
• pledge before witnesses and considered married before the church wedding
• Claudio and Juliet have done nothing wrong
• vowed to wed but have not made public announcement yet
• married according to civil law
• Angelo's situation parallels this:
• he backed out of his contract
• if he sleeps with Marianna, marriage is valid
• Angelo is already Mariana’s husband
• no sin for her to sleep with him

The Moated Grange

• Function of Barnadine
• the world of law that would kill love does not make sense
• it must be reformed from the deepest level.
• Mariana - setting
• a repository for grain, a life house – nature, life.
• a version of the green world
• in other plays, whole acts are set in green world, here it is a mere scene = the
healing world of nature has all but vanished.
• Duke launches his plot here

Act V
• Angelo completely outmatched by the duke
• The duke becomes the figure of divine power, not unlike James’ idea of himself
• not web of fatedness like in tragedy:
• Instead characters guided by a benevolent providence which leads to a positive, even if
unsatisfactory, ending

Folklore Motifs
• The corrupt judge.
• Novelised and dramatised often
• The disguised prince.
• The bed trick.
• The head trick.
• The trickster.
All used to bring about the temperance of justice with mercy.

“The old fantastical duke of dark corners”

• Duke – actor; director, scriptwriter
• Trickster in religious mythology
• the hidden force for good,
• A benevolent providence moving story to happy ending
• Holy Spirit - comforter left behind to guide the world after the resurrection
• Duke is trying to bring about regeneration for self, state and perhaps human condition as a whole
The Tests
• All characters put to test in extreme situations
• gives Angelo rule to see how he would do
• death speech to see how Claudio will respond
• Isabella’s desire for vengeance,
• Mariana, Lucio
• All endure agony to get to a better place
• Ordeals of Isabella and Angelo bring it to the conclusion
• His apparent virtue is seeming – becomes true tyrant
• loss of Claudio's head and Isabella's maidenhead
• Angelo is very much aware of own evil – unlike other villains who revel in their
manipulations, Angelo is wracked with guilt
• Isabella and Angelo use virtually identical constructions – mirror each other
• each concealing true desires even from self

Drama of handover
• praises Angelo's tenure – in ambiguous terms – the truth has to emerge from within, not from without
• Isabella and Mariana accuse Angelo
• be the judge to your own cause
• look inside and tell us what you see
• Angelo thinks he can manipulate justice as he has done
• Angelo is relieved when he admits guilt
• he wants to die; he knows himself and asks for just punishment

Isabella’s Desire for Vengeance

• Will “proclaim” Angelo and seek redress:
• For death of brother
• For immoral proposal / “loss of maidenhead”
• Mariana is still in love with Angelo
• Begs Isabella to kneel in mercy for Angelo's life
• Duke is daring Isabella to beg for Angelo's life
• Appeals to the Duke to spare Angelo for Mariana’s sake and for his own
• Believes him to be noble, until she turned up – she was the reason for his transgression

Isabella’s Mercy
• She begs for mercy for the man she most abhors in the world
• This is Isabella’s true self
• granting mercy because we desire mercy
• every human being is condemned, but God, through his mercy, brings about
salvation

One of the most hopeful endings

• Shows Christian forgiveness and charity
• Cf. Merchant of Venice and Portia’s mercy speech

Justice?
• Mariana consummates her contracted “marriage” to Angelo who jilted and slandered her
• Angelo embraces execution – being judged by the standards he judged Claudio (?)
• Mariana loves Angelo – believes in Christian doctrine that men can reform
• Claudio’s life to be maintained through lechery
 • Payment – virgin blood (Mariana’s not Isabella’s)
• Orders execution for fear of retribution – tricks Isabella who has tricked him – in order to be tricked by
the Duke/Friar and Provost
• Angelo – is not executed, because he did not have Claudio executed (An Angelo for a Claudio...)
• Claudio is restored to Isabella and Juliet although Isabella does not speak to him... (cf. Die! Perish!)
• Only marriage based on love and mutual affection

Lucio’s Punishment
• Reveals self to Friar as liar/fornicator
• Forced to marry Kate Keepdown – fate worse than death – a cuckold
• Is the punishment too harsh for slander?

The Duke’s Proposal

• Proposes to Isabella twice
• She is silent – no response
• Interpretation open to discussion
• Some claim Isabella is a sensuous person and realises this
• Others claim Isabella is being punished
• Is this punishment or a reward????
• For what in either case?

Topics
• Compare the Duke and Angelo.
• Compare Isabella and Angelo.
• Has justice been tempered with mercy?
• Discuss the use of disguise in the play.
• How does the sub-plot mirror the main plot?
• Exchange is a very important motif in the play as a whole. How does it function?