Exemplaria

Medieval, Early Modern, Theory

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"Lord Have Mercy Upon Us": The King, the

Pestilence, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Catherine I. Cox

To cite this article: Catherine I. Cox (2008) "Lord Have Mercy Upon Us": The King, the
Pestilence, and Shakespeare's Measure�for�Measure , Exemplaria, 20:4, 430-457, DOI:
10.1179/175330708X371447

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exemplaria, Vol. 20 No. 4, Winter 2008, 430–457

“Lord Have Mercy Upon Us”: The King,

the Pestilence, and Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
Catherine I. Cox
Texas A & M University–Corpus Christi

While King James might see himself in Shakespeare’s “merciful” duke of

Vienna and delight in his charades to test and teach his people, Measure for
Measure, through its pervasive imagery of disease, displays a subtler and
darker spectacle, a scene that only a monarch desiring more than flattery
would see. Shakespeare lends to the pox of Vienna and to the duke’s
surrogate Angelo’s reign of terror a pandemic quality familiar to him through
his own experiences with pestilence. The tyrannies of disease and of
Angelo’s unmeasured applications of the law become the touchstones by
which each character’s moral and spiritual mettle is tested and the duke’s
reign is finally to be judged. Although Vincentio attempts to heal his duke-
dom, his inability to fully cleanse the city of spiritual contagion, in spite of
his earnest efforts and partial successes, renders Measure for Measure an
uneasy comedy and a dark mirror of James’s new regime.

KEYWORDS James I, Measure for Measure, Shakespeare, plague, absolutism,

disease, London, judgment, mercy

The Stage whereon the Scenes are plaide

Is a whole Kingdome.
—Newes from Graues-ende

The plague that ravaged England in 1603–1604, leaving in its wake more than 25,000
Londoners dead and extending the closure of London playhouses for more than a
year,1 resonates as a strong chord in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Images of
contagious disease, a breakdown in moral order, scenes of urban crowding, and
threats of sudden death suggest a comedy born in the season of pestilence. Yet while
the play surges with images of physical violation and moral decay, it was ironically,
as Josephine Waters Bennett and others have argued, a work intended for the
Christmas revels of James I.2 According to the Revels office, the play was performed

© Exemplaria 2008 DOI 10.1179/175330708X371447

 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 431

on St. Stephen’s Night, 1604, at the palace of Whitehall. Leah Marcus offers that
this “may have been the play’s inaugural performance and King James was almost
certainly present” (Puzzling Shakespeare, 163).3 Leeds Barroll, on the other hand,
speculates that even though the play was performed for the second Stuart Christmas,
it could have had its debut at the Globe after the reopening of the playhouses in late
September, 1604 (Politics, Plague, 123). Even so, given the King’s Servants’ nine court
performances during the previous holiday season (124), Shakespeare certainly would
have anticipated both royal and popular performances when writing Measure for
Measure.
As a play performed for the king’s Christmas revels, we would expect it to both
flatter the new monarch and celebrate the values of Christmas—the hope of an
eternal, perfect measure. Shakespeare probably expected James to recognize his
resemblance to Vincentio, and to feel gratified by this “merciful” duke, who devises
splendid charades to test and teach his subjects.4 While the king might find much to
delight him in Measure for Measure, the play, through its pervasive imagery of dis-
ease, could offer a subtler and darker spectacle, a scene that only a monarch desiring
more than flattery would see. The action reveals a society—Vienna, but, as impor-
tantly, England—whose vitality cannot be fully channeled into constructive, godly
paths, even by the most well-meaning monarch, and for which earthly judgment
serves as a flawed, yet necessary, image of the perfect judgment of God.
Like many writers before him, Shakespeare associates disease with civic excess and
degeneracy. In the Decameron, Boccaccio describes the Black Death’s disastrous
effects on the familial and social fabric of Florence in the mid fourteenth century.
Traditions of burial are broken, the sick are abandoned by loved ones, citizens
succumb to illicit pleasures, unscrupulous servants thrive, and noblewomen accustom
themselves to undressing before their male servants, a practice lending to the moral
decline in days to come. The specter of an agonizing death thus tested to the core the
resources of a people. Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, and many other early modern
English writers reflect Boccaccio’s concerns and see in the pestilential scourge
warnings of more devastating judgments to come should the people persist in their
sins. Following in this tradition, Shakespeare lends to the pox of Vienna and to
Angelo’s reign of terror a pandemic quality familiar to him through his own
experiences with pestilence.5 The tyrannies of disease and of Angelo’s unmeasured
applications of the law become the touchstones by which each character’s moral and
spiritual mettle is tested and the duke’s reign is finally to be judged. As sovereign of
a sick land, Vincentio attempts to heal his dukedom by achieving moral measure both
within himself and within his subjects. The inability of the duke to cleanse the city
of spiritual contagion, in spite of his earnest efforts and partial successes, renders
Measure for Measure an uneasy comedy and a dark mirror of James’s new regime.

From pox to plague

Although the disease that infects Vienna is literally syphilis, its associations with
plague are closer than we might at first imagine. Paul Slack explains that until 1600
432 CATHERINE I. COX

little separation was made between the bubonic plague and other infectious diseases,
such as leprosy, small pox, and venereal disease: “For most of the period and for most
writers bubonic plague was merely the most extreme form of epidemic infection—
‘a pernicious and contagious fever’ distinguishable from others only by the excep-
tional pain it caused its victims and by their slim hopes of recovery” (Impact, 25).
Since the plague was observed as early as 1563 to begin its siege in the Liberties
(Creighton, History, 474), areas notorious for stews, taverns, and playhouses,
Londoners had for many years causally linked prostitution, venereal disease, and
plague. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, claimed that the first sin bringing forth the
plague is “the sinne of Peor [that is] for fornication. . . . For, that kinde of sinne . . .
doth end in Vlcers and sores; and those as infectious, as the Plague it selfe” (Sermon
at Cheswick, 163). Plague and the pox are imaginatively linked still again in The
Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie: Or the Walkes in Powles (1604), attributed to
Thomas Dekker or Thomas Middleton, or to a collaboration by the two. In this
debate, War derides Pestilence for her social inferiority, calling her “plaguy woman,”
“pestilent strumpet,” and “freckled-Harlot” (109). Refuting these insults, Pestilence
distinguishes herself from the venereal Pox yet admits her close relation: “Warre, twit
not me with double damned Bawdes, / Or prostituted Harlots, I leaue them / For my
French Nephewe, he raignes ouer these” (110). In a similar vein, George Wither writes
in Britain’s Remembrancer (1628): “all Diseases” including “the Pox of ev’ry kinde”
are within the “Regiment” of “Pestilence” (21, fol. B9r).
While most early modern writers agreed that the first cause of the plague and the
pox was spiritual (God’s punishment for sin), natural events and agents were often
considered mediating forces. God’s angel might strike through eclipses, malign plan-
etary conjunctions, earthquakes, and floods, which were believed to emit infectious
poisons into the air. Thus any rancid smell could bring forth the plague. One must
especially avoid the stench of carrion and filthy, stagnant pools, as well as crowded
streets and “the pestering” of people “in small and strait roomes.”6 Like the plague,
the pox too might assault unwary victims through the air. Theodore Beza Vezelian’s
A Shorte Learned and Pithie Treatize of the Plague explains that the air transmits
the “arrowe of GOD which striketh whoremongers”: “rather doeth not euen one
Strumpet infect many with this disease, who againe beray one another: so that this
most filthie sicknesse is gotten not only with lying togeather, but also by breath and
handeling” (fol. A8r).
The Galenic or humoral model of the body, endorsed by most physicians of the
day, also helps to explain the close association of various diseases; for an excess of
heat and moisture in the body, caused by an “evil diet” and riotous living, was thought
to leave the body vulnerable to an array of diseases, including both syphilis and
plague (Healy, Fictions, 20–3). During plague time, citizens were thus urged by
physicians to live in measure, eating moderately, cleansing chambers with fires,
spices, and perfumes, shutting windows against the venomous south wind, avoiding
undue fear, purging themselves of all gross impurities of blood, phlegm, and bile, and
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 433

refraining from “ouermuch copulacion” (Present Remedies, fol. A6v). This, in

addition to public and private prayers and fasts, charitable expressions of faith, and
quiet living, would both appease God’s wrath and bring the body into a harmonious,
protective balance.
In Measure for Measure syphilis possesses, like the plague itself, a mysterious
power of contagion. An awareness of rank, pernicious air pervades the play, from
the Duke’s warning to Isabella and Mariana, “make haste, / The vaporous night
approaches” (4.1.56–7), and his blessing of the Provost, “The best and wholesom’st
spirits of the night / Envelop you” (4.2.73–4), to descriptions of moral corruption and
damaged reputation, such as Mistress Overdone’s complaint of the “sweat” hindering
her business,7 the Provost’s description of Julietta’s disgrace as one “Who, falling in
the flaws of her own youth, / Hath blister’d her report” (2.3.11–12),8 and Angelo’s
description of himself as carrion rotting in the summer sun (2.2.164–7). The fear of
assault from moral and physical miasma, as it dominates the play’s atmosphere,
motivates many of the play’s actions. The duke’s negligence of duty, preference for
“the life removed” (1.3.8), and sudden departure from the seat of power; Isabella’s
desire for “a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood” (1.4.4–5); and Angelo’s swift
arousal of sleeping laws and rigid determination to purge the city—all reflect human
responses to avoid or to eradicate moral pestilence. And, just as the play’s tone
reflects the uncertainties of living amid a dangerous and unpredictable enemy, the
play’s many ambiguities derive from the inadequacy of any agent—whether monarch
or poet—to control or to satisfactorily explain the pestilence.

Stars, blight, poison, and pox: Shakespeare’s constructions of

plague
Writing from his own recent experiences, Shakespeare would have expected
Londoners to associate the lawlessness and disease of Vienna with their own trials of
the previous year. Barroll emphasizes the highly disruptive effects of the plague on
the London acting companies, even Shakespeare’s company, the newly patented
King’s Servants. Offering an “alternative narrative” to recent new historicists’ views
of King James, as a man personally invested in theater and in appropriating it for his
own political aims, Barroll “minimizes king and court in both Shakespeare’s artistic
production and his professional life” (Politics, Plague, 31). Barroll argues that James
was not particularly interested in either theater or the welfare of the acting troupes.
Thus receiving hardly any material benefits from the court, apart from payment for
court performances in the brief seasonal revels lasting from December 26 to Twelfth
Night, “the public theater was to be radically destabilized by plague” (32). If Barroll’s
narrative is true, then it is reasonable to think that, having experienced the stresses
of both an imperiled livelihood and a severely diminished venue for creative
expression, Shakespeare would project his own feelings of dislocation and trauma
onto the diseased cityscape of Vienna and would portray its absolutist duke with
ambivalence.
434 CATHERINE I. COX

But why, even if he had found the plague an apt topic for creative revision, would
Shakespeare have thought that playgoers would be entertained by being reminded of
terrors and sorrows that they had so recently endured? Shakespeare surely understood
the human desire to imaginatively revisit lived catastrophes in order to gain some
sense of control over them. According to Sander L. Gilman, the “fixed structures” of
representation offer us a way to deal safely with our fears of self-disintegration:
The fixed structures of art provide us with a sort of carnival during which we fantasize
about our potential loss of control, perhaps even revel in the fear it generates within us,
but we always believe that this fear exists separate from us. This sense of the carni-
valesque provides us with exactly the missing fixity for our understanding of the world
which the reality of disease denies. . . . The images of disease, whether in art or in litera-
ture, are not in flux, even though they represent collapse. They are solid, fixed images
that remain constantly external to our sense of self. Disease, 2

Gilman’s statement is supported by the surge in plague pamphlets published both

during and just following years of severe plague. In fact plague writings intended to
instruct and entertain were often reprinted in subsequent plague years because of their
renewed topicality. Plays written for London’s public playhouses, however, present
a special case, one not completely satisfied by Gilman’s insight. Since audiences must
physically gather in the Liberties, lands associated with crowds and disease, play-
houses would have been highly charged sites following seasons of pestilence. Live
performance too can elicit a far more volatile response than do art forms enjoyed
privately or in an intimate, small circle. Early modern playwrights were thus careful
in how they represented the plague. As Katherine Duncan-Jones and Melissa Smith
have noted, few plays deal substantially and overtly with plague.9 Ben Jonson’s
The Alchemist is exceptional in locating its action in plague-torn London; however,
even here, as Patrick Phillips has observed, Jonson provides a plague setting that is
surprisingly free of plague.10
Although playwrights were careful in how they staged contagion, plague nonethe-
less enters many plays. Duncan-Jones explains, “Though curiously absent from
Renaissance drama and poetry as an explicit topic, plague hovers menacingly in its
margins, sometimes in ways that a modern audience may scarcely notice” (Ungentle
Shakespeare, 54). Exemplifying her contention that “plague was a defining context
for all Shakespeare’s writing,” she turns to Romeo and Juliet (1595–6) to reveal the
importance of plague in the play’s fatal closing. In this tragedy “it is plague that
operates as the stars’ controlling agent in crossing the lovers’ hopes of happiness”
(54). When we keep in mind the miasmic theory of contagion, she explains, the dying
words of Mercutio, “‘A plague on both your houses,’ are more than empty exple-
tives.” Mercutio’s curse is followed by the plague’s more substantial appearance when
Friar John, entrusted with Friar Lawrence’s letter to Romeo relating the truth of
Juliet’s false death, is quarantined in Verona, having been suspected of visiting “a
house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign” (5.2.9–10). The crucial letter will
never reach Romeo in Mantua, and Juliet will awaken to find her beloved husband
dead (54–5).
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 435

Duncan-Jones’s reading is more compelling still when we recall the escalating feud
of the houses of Capulet and Montague and the impotence of patriarchal authority
in the play. Retributive violence, like a malignant infection falling from the stars,
expands throughout Verona due to the unengaged rules of Escalus, Capulet, and
Montague. Fantasies of sexual violence lie at the center of this escalating rivalry. In
his tale of Queen Mab, Mercutio indulges in an especially disturbing fantasy, disturb-
ing because it registers malicious, secretive, and ubiquitous vengeance—disease and
mishap—on all who sleep, and because Mercutio seems to drift unconsciously into
the seductive web of his own story, a web from which he never fully returns.11 It is
against these erotically morbid fantasies, as persistently expressed by Mercutio, for
whom women are no more than “open[-arse]” “medlars” for men’s “pop’rin pear[s]”
(2.1.38), that Romeo rebels, offering in its place equally dangerous idealizations
of Rosaline and Juliet. For a youth who seeks to untangle the “sluttish hairs” of the
(night-mare’s) “[elf-]locks”—the dark dream-works that Mab herself has matted—
“misfortune bodes” (1.4.90–1). Only the patrones can undo the long-entrenched
rivalries and violent fantasies of their families. As retribution against the unseeing and
ineffectual fathers, violence infects and destroys the prized children of their houses,
Mercutio, Tybalt, and finally Romeo and Juliet, whose struggle to escape its deadly
expansion proves futile. Thus, Renaissance constructions of plague, and especially
Shakespeare’s, as shown in Romeo and Juliet and, as we shall see, in Measure for
Measure, emphasize its fatal, avenging, and spiritually sanctioned power. These con-
structions further associate plague with other forms of retributive violence, sexual
transgression, and disinterested and ineffectual civil authority.
In Shakespeare’s English history plays, plague also erupts under the rule of
weak fathers, in this case the dreamer Richard II and his illegitimate successor, the
guilt-burdened Henry IV. Just as Shakespeare employs the garden as a central image
of the innocence, harmony, and beauty imagined as England’s rightful heritage, so
also blight, plague’s botanical equivalent, signifies the contagious, systemic illness of
recent, fallen times. “Thou diest,” John of Gaunt proclaims to his nephew and liege,
Richard II, “though I the sicker be,” “Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land, /
Wherein thou liest in reputation sick” (Richard II 2.1.91, 95–6). In recklessly farming
out fair England and allowing flatterers to flourish like rapacious caterpillars,
Richard, Gaunt insists, deposes himself. As the War of the Roses unfolds in Shake-
speare’s plays, England’s moral blight, centered initially in King Richard II, spreads
its poisonous tendrils from person to person and from one generation to the next.
In 2 Henry IV, diseases (strange fevers, pox, and the sweats) proliferate amid scenes
of aggrieved nobles preparing for war and ruffian quarrels in the taverns and stews
of Eastcheap. Contagion breeds not only from the grievances among England’s elite,12
but also from the nest of lascivious vipers in the kingdom’s sordid underworld. King
Henry IV’s garden, much like Richard’s, and anticipating Duke Vincentio’s venere-
ally plagued dukedom, is overgrown with weeds and filled with rapacious caterpillars.
Puffed up by recent honors falsely won at Shrewsbury, ailing due to the pox and the
gout, yet ever persistent in his vices, Falstaff recruits, as he had at Shrewsbury, men
436 CATHERINE I. COX

too impoverished and sick to bribe their way out of service. He once had described
such soldiers as “slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s
dogs lick’d his sores” (1 Henry IV 4.2.25–6). When he is not “misus[ing] the King’s
press damnably” (4.2.12–13), whoring, eating, drinking, quarreling, boasting, cower-
ing, or laughing at his jests, the old fox is envisioning his meteoric rise under the
aegis of a new king. The pestilence that Richard foresaw has thus penetrated every
level of the feudal order, and Falstaff would gladly set his diseased and bloated body
at the right hand of England’s young king.
In Henry V (1599), vengeance and holy war are Henry V’s rhetorical themes when,
like Richard at Flint Castle, he threatens his enemy’s house with plague. On the
morning of the Battle of Agincourt, Henry sends a chilling message to the French
(4.3.98–107) in which he appeals to God to unleash a pestilential assault. Greeting the
bones of the fallen English, the sun shall “draw their honors reeking up to heaven”
while their decaying bodies produce a stench to “choke your clime” and “breed a
plague in France” (101–3). Henry imagines that should they fail, the English soldiers
will enter a second, divinely waged assault, their valor honored and their deaths
avenged by a holy plague. Though his words are filled, like Richard’s, with a sense
of just indignation, Henry has brought the problems of England’s divided spirit to the
fields of France, not ending, but only delaying, war on English shores.13 Through
brutal conquest, Henry at the play’s end has won a garden bride for England and a
royal bride for his bed, but, as the Chorus sadly concludes, this fragile concord will
soon be broken and all gains lost in the next generation when Henry VI will be
crowned “in infant bands” and this “the world’s best garden” again be blighted by
the management of many hands (Epilogue 9, 7).
Just as evocations of prelapsarian gardens disintegrating into fields of blood, along
with allusions to fratricidal Cain, figure strongly as emblems of contagious violence
in these plays, so too in Shakespeare’s Hamlet moral and psychic decay are germi-
nated by a brother’s murder in a beautiful garden—a murder that unleashes, through
personal contact and language, extreme and violent destruction. Furthering Derek
Traversi’s observation that “the action of Hamlet is in its inner logic, the progressive
revelation of a state of disease,” Eric S. Mallin contends that “Hamlet’s plot is
a virtual schematic of plague” and that the second quarto (Q2), published in 1604,
especially reveals the imprint of the two major anxieties of the time, royal succession
and disease (Inscribing the Time, 65). England’s and James’s succession worries both
prior to and following Elizabeth’s death in March 1603, along with the plague’s entry
into the capital, delaying the Stuart triumph and coronation, produced unusual stress
on the English people, stress that was, according to Mallin, registered in the revisions
of Q2.
Plague, figured in Hamlet by poison, spreads cognitively through language.14
The Ghost’s horrid story of his murder—including his body’s leprous encrustation
by poison, torture in purgatorial fires, sexual disgust at the thought of his wife’s
betrayal, and bloody instruction to his son to revenge his “foul murder”—infects
Hamlet’s imagination and blurs his moral vision. The physical contaminant, the
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 437

poison administered by Claudius in the garden, leaves a “psychic residue” that is

“borne from the Ghost to young Hamlet” (Mallin, 67). Replicating the Ghost’s
moral confusion and rage, Hamlet becomes the plague’s primary carrier. His toxic
words reach his victims’ ears, and these victims in turn replicate Hamlet’s dis-ease.
Hamlet’s venomous taunts and half-veiled threats thus blast and destroy his victims
one by one, from Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Laertes, to
Claudius, the Queen, and Hamlet himself.
The second part of Mallin’s argument rests on the similarity between Hamlet’s
position in relation to monarchical succession and the plague’s substitution of itself
for James as supreme power during the spring and summer of 1603. Mallin explains
that the plague, keeping King James from London, became “power’s surrogate, its
negative image” (Inscribing the Time, 108). Hamlet too stands in negative relation to
power, for his sexual ambivalence prevents him from boldly asserting his desire to be
king. “To be phallically sexual is to be vulnerable” (120), says Mallin. Heterosexual
commitment, with its obligation to provide legitimate heirs for the kingdom, resides
at the center of kingly power, as Hamlet knows; yet Hamlet, disgusted by Claudius’s
“whor[ing]” of his mother and Ophelia’s deceptions, has proclaimed that there shall
be “no moe marriage” (Hamlet 3.1.147). Hamlet’s movement from his profession of
pure love to Horatio before the play of Gonzago’s murder to his bitter remarks to
Ophelia about lying “betweene maids legs” (3.2.118) and his later scourging of his
mother, “Nay but to liue in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,” underscore, Mallin
insists, “his sullied descent from matters of the soul to those of the groin—where he
and the play locate vortices of political force” (120). Hamlet’s role, like the plague’s,
is “to contest and control monarchy, to master the space where authority resides—
but not to occupy that space. . . . He seeks mainly to stymie the reigning force, not to
seize it” (122).
While furthering associations with failed authority, sexual license, and retributive
violence, Troilus and Cressida (entered in the Stationer’s Register on 7 February 1603)
and Timon of Athens (written between 1604 and 1609), like Measure for Measure,
explicitly relate plague to venereal disease and civil chaos. René Girard shows how
in Troilus and Cressida self-aggrandizement, spiraling at its highest pitch, finds
correlative expression in the image of plague. Mirroring in its pride, promiscuity, and
indolence the adulterate city of Troy, the Greek camp seethes with willful disobedi-
ence. Each officer envies and emulates the narcissistic posturing of the commander
just above him. Achilles, dissipated and haughty, leads his fellow soldiers in disre-
specting Agamemnon and his aged counselors (“Plague,” 142–3).15 The venereal
Thersites embodies and voices the camp’s cynicism, envy, and self-absorption:
“the vengeance on the whole camp! or rather, the Neapolitan bone-ache! for that
methinks is the curse depending on those that war for a placket. I have said
my prayers, and devil Envy say amen” (2.3.17–21). As descriptive of Shakespeare’s
licentious Vienna as of the decadent Grecian camp is Ulysses’ explanation of societal
collapse:
438 CATHERINE I. COX

Degree being vizarded,

Th’unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
...
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d
Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the [ill aspects] of [planets evil],
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny!
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. 1.3.83–103

Girard explains: “Ulysses describes a crisis so pervasive and acute that it goes beyond
even the most radical notion of social crisis” (141). While Ulysses sees Achilles as the
man most at fault in breeding this civic plague, Agamemnon, whose seven-year siege
to redeem his cuckolded brother Menelaus’s honor has borne no fruit, has fully
earned his soldiers’ disrespect. Just as venereal disease imaginatively converges with
plague and chaos in this play, so too in Timon of Athens Timon sees his revenge upon
Athens, by war and by venereal disease, as the unleashing of a mighty plague. As
Rebecca Totaro explains, after bribing Alcibiades to plague Athens with war, Timon
gives the prostitutes Timandra and Phrynia gold to spread venereal disease through-
out Athens. Timon “seeks to convert them into terrorists for his anti-Athenian
campaign: ‘Plague all, / That your activity may defeat and quell / The source of all
erection’” (Suffering in Paradise, 100–1, citing 4.3.162–4). Like Romeo and Juliet, the
English history plays, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens, Measure
for Measure links sexual license, compromised authority, and reciprocal debasement
and violence with the terrors of catastrophic plague.

Paternal guilt, vials of pestilence, and saintly intercessions

As the action of Measure for Measure unfolds, the duke’s rationales for placing
Angelo in charge of Vienna while he himself remains incognito in the city raise more
questions than they resolve. The duke offers Friar Thomas multiple excuses for his
unusual actions—to shield his name from scandal, to protect the people from too
great a fear of tyranny, and to test Angelo—to see “what our seemers be” (1.3.54).
These reasons differ greatly from those earlier given to Angelo: to travel on foreign
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 439

matters of state, thereby allowing Angelo the chance to put his talents to use. Such
varied explanations seem contrived and inadequate.16 Perhaps contemporary events
offer the best avenue for understanding Vincentio’s reluctance to take a firm, per-
sonal hand in Vienna.17 Rather than enforcing plague measures at the first outbreak
of disease, London officials in the spring of 1603 delayed warnings and restrictions
until the disease had become uncontrollable. Reluctant to disrupt commerce and
cause panic and hoping that the disease would die its own quiet death, city magis-
trates postponed action until stern measures were unavoidable.18 Like the officials
of Shakespeare’s London, the duke has equivocated, hence failing to suffocate the
glowing embers of disease.
While the duke’s past leniency suggests London’s reluctance to take action at the
first outbreak of plague, so too the anxiety caused by the duke’s apparent departure
from the city hints at growing doubts among James’s subjects regarding his leader-
ship. The discrepancy between the duke’s instructions to Angelo—“Heaven doth
with us as we with torches do” (1.1.32)—and his request to Friar Thomas for “secret
harbor” (1.3.4) reflects the incongruity of James’s philosophy of presence, as
expressed in Basilicon Doron,19 contrasted with his notable absence from the capital
when the monthly death tolls began their dramatic increase. Slack refers to difficulties
facing both James and Charles I when plagues coincided with their new reigns:
“[C]elebrations and processions which set the convincing seal of public approval to
a coronation were severely curtailed. . . . Though temporary, these limitations on the
appeal of monarchy sapped confidence” (Impact, 18–19). John Davies of Hereford
offers insight into the people’s frustration as they awaited King James’s return to
London:
The king himselfe (O wretched Times the while!)
From place to place, to saue himselfe did fle,
...
Its hard with Subiects when the Soueraigne
Hath no place free from the plagues his head to hide;
And hardly can we say the King doth raigne,
That no where, for iust feare, can well abide. Triumph of Death, 233

Feeling, like Davies, deserted, the subjects of Vienna wonder about the disappearance
of their duke who has left them a prey not only to civil disorder (“The baby beats
the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum,” 1.3.30–1) but also to the instrument
of cure, the “precise” and deadly Angelo. In his irrepressible way, Lucio voices
this sense of abandonment: “It was a mad fantastical trick of him to steal from the
state, and usurp the beggary he was never born to” (3.2.92–4). Although Escalus will
reassure the royal “friar” that he has ever known the duke to be “a gentleman of all
temperance” (3.2.237), who has studied above all things “to know himself” (3.2.233),
Lucio’s quips have unsettled Vincentio. They have emitted a scandalous, penetrating
vapor, tainting and compromising the duke’s good name.
440 CATHERINE I. COX

Many early modern spectators, skeptical of King James’s absolutist rhetoric20 and
fearing the encroachment of royal prerogatives on the people’s traditional “liberties”
and “property,” would, no doubt, have found many of Vincentio’s words and actions
troubling.21 In a prelude to the increasingly fractious debates that would eventually
lead to civil war, these guardians of the “ancient constitution” and the common law
would surely object to the duke’s lending his royal mantle to a mere subject, much
less to a man he distrusts. Margaret Atwood Judson points out that most subjects of
Stuart England believed that “God, who ordained and established a king, bestowed
upon him grace sufficient for his task. To govern was not to wield naked or veiled
power, but to practice an art for which a king was peculiarly and uniquely endowed
by God” (Crisis, 20). Judson continues: “The king, but no lower official . . . could be
fair and objective to all, because only he was so unconcerned with private interests
that he could view the whole dispassionately, free from the private desires which
sometimes swayed and clouded the judgments of less exalted men” (30).22 By selecting
as “absolute Vienna” a self-interested person, lacking divine sanction, one unused
to the princely arts of equitable judgment, the duke appears to have broken faith
with his people. This, in addition to the duke’s repeatedly mistaking the intentions
and spiritual strength of his subjects, would make many spectators wary of both
Vincentio’s and James’s mysterious arts of governance.
Although Vincentio’s “sudden departure” from Vienna would have raised anxieties
in many early modern spectators, as in many viewers today, King James would have
probably found the duke’s growing commitment to minister to his people and his
secretive art of governance reassuring. Vincentio’s mysterious craft, whereby he turns
his subject’s weaknesses to advantage, demonstrates, from the royal perspective, that
a monarch’s methods are not always apparent to his subjects. Just as God’s ways are
obscure yet just, so too are the ways of his earthly ambassadors. Jonathan Goldberg
explains that James I attempted throughout his reign to promote respect for the
mystery of royal power:
“Incroach not upon the Prerogative of the Crowne:” James said, “If there fall out a
question that concernes my Prerogative or mystery of State, deale not with it.” . . .
The mysteries, or as James called them in Basilikon Doron, his “secretest drifts” . . . were
the center of the royal sphere of power, an inner sanctum from which all subjects were
excluded—or almost all. James I and Politics, 5623

Thus even as the duke’s layers of disguise—his masks of holy father, “good doctor,”
and clever dramaturge—are revealed to the audience and his motives articulated,
there remains at the center an unfathomable mystery, a mystery that a royal mind
would surely approve (Seiden, Measure for Measure: Casuistry, 23). Shakespeare’s
presentation of archana imperii might well have appealed to the new Stuart king, as
well as to royalists desiring to exalt and extend the king’s prerogatives.
Constance Jordan’s description of Sir Francis Bacon’s concept of “creative
vexation” as it relates to The Tempest may further advance our understanding of
Vincentio’s craft of governance:
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 441

If the deceptions Prospero practices on these antagonists [Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian]
lead to a renewed moral and political order, they may fall into the Baconian category of
a creative vexation; as Bacon suggested, to try in this sense is to change and to refine.
If, however, they are merely coercive, they may prove more dangerous than constructive.
Government requires a sentient body politic. . . . It must remain alert.
Shakespeare’s Monarchies, 175

Vincentio not only cements his own royal prerogatives by his secretive commerce
with his people but also attempts to foster his subjects’ agency as well. The civic
tempest he foments through his deputy Angelo is the “creative vexation” needed to
establish a more “sentient,” balanced, and vital government in Vienna. Bacon cap-
tured the age’s appreciation for the balance and harmony that England’s form of
monarchy allowed: “Take away liberty of Parliament, the griefs of the subject will
bleed inwards . . . On the other side, if the King’s sovereignty receive diminution or
any degree of contempt . . . it must follow that we shall be a meteor or corpus imper-
fecte mistum; which kind of bodies come speedily to confusion and dissolution”
(quoted by Judson, 62–3). The diseased reign of Angelo draws forth subjects as well
as the duke himself to engage in cooperative actions to help resolve Vienna’s crisis.
With the aid of the Provost, Friar Peter, Mariana, and Isabella, the duke exposes
Angelo’s hypocrisy and despotic rule. But, like the silence and brooding of Sebastian
and Antonio of The Tempest’s closing, Antonio’s desire for death rather than a
merciful reprieve near the play’s end hints at a perverse resistance to positive change,
a willfulness that signifies the duke’s limited power to create a “sentient” and
balanced government in Vienna.
The duke’s curious “departure” from Vienna additionally signals his transitional
status and initiation into the role of an active and visible, if not wholly wise and
capable, monarch.24 Because of his prior negligence, the duke must remove himself
from the seat of power, look upon the diseased condition of his realm at close range,
and accept responsibility for building a more involved, participatory government.
Anticipating Shakespeare’s Prospero, whose love of seclusion costs him twelve years
of separation from his dukedom, Vincentio must undergo a journey whereon he
experiences, through engagement with his subjects, the human potential for evil and
for good and the “mingled yarn” of his own nature. With no usurping brother at
hand, Vincentio, who has effectively abdicated his responsibility for fourteen years,
exiles himself. Holding himself responsible for the disastrous state of Vienna, he
explains that he bade “this [the sexual license of the city] be done” by granting “evil
deeds . . . permissive pass” (1.3.37–8). To lessen if not absolve his guilt, Vincentio
must fully confront the diseased state of his realm and acknowledge his complicity in
his people’s distress. He does this by observing the corrupt government of Angelo.
There he sees the suffering he has caused by his own crime of omission. Angelo
becomes for Vincentio a kind of Caliban, a monstrous subject, reflecting his master’s
own dark potentialities, “This thing of darkness, I / Acknowledge mine” (Tempest
5.1.275–6). By pardoning Angelo and fostering his reintegration into the fabric of the
state, the duke in effect acknowledges his own mortality and failures, forgiving in the
442 CATHERINE I. COX

end not only Angelo but himself. The duke has thus set in motion the wheel of his
return by placing on the throne one who zealously lances the sores of Vienna but who
rejects the commission to heal. Only after discovering the problematic nature of rule
and asserting his own powers of healing, vexed as its effects may be, does the duke,
like Prospero, don regal attire, becoming at last “a little GOD . . . on his Throne”
(Basilicon Doron, 149).
By maintaining a liminal, initiatory position throughout much of the play, the
duke, like James in the summer of 1603, seems neither subject nor wholly monarch;
in Vienna the venereal pestilence truly reigns. Due to the tyranny of this moral and
physical infection, the duke makes Angelo his substitute, instructing him to use his
own discretion in ruling the city, “Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue
and heart” (1.1.44–45). The balanced phrasing of this commission appears to weigh
justice and mercy equally; however, the biblical allusions which follow in the duke’s
directive place decisive weight on the need for compassion:
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch’d
But to fine issues. 1.1.32–6

While the references to the parables of the candlesticks (Matthew 5:15) and the talents
(Matthew 25:14–30) articulate the importance of active virtue, the allusion to Christ’s
healing of a young woman with “an issue of blood” (Luke 8:43–8),25 though a more
elusive reference, underscores the royal responsibility to heal:
45) Then Iesus said, Who is it that hathe touched me? When euerie man denyed, Peter
said, and thei that were with him, Master, the multitude thrust thee, & tread on thee,
and sayest thou, who hathe touched me?
46) And Iesus said, Some one hathe touched me: for I perceiue that vertue is gone out of
me.26

This story of pressing crowds and a suffering woman, whose faith generates action
and whose touch is felt by the compassionate Lord, ironically comments on Angelo’s
response to Isabella when she pleads for her brother’s life. The “virtue” that Jesus
feels go out of him to heal the diseased woman is as spontaneous and free as the
mercy Portia praises in The Merchant of Venice, whose “quality . . . / . . . droppeth
as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath” (4.1.185–7).27 Angelo’s
initial response to Isabella’s distress, unlike Christ’s to the suffering woman, is cold
and detached. In an image of false healing, Isabella warns Angelo that his authority
may blunt his sensitivity to others: “Because authority, though it err like others, /
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself, / That skins the vice o’ th’ top” (2.2.134–6).
She pleads with Angelo to find compassion by thinking on his own guilt, “Go to
your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my
brother’s fault” (2.2.136–8), and on the divine redemption, “O, think on that, / And
mercy then will breathe within your lips, / Like man new made” (2.2.77–9). But
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 443

Angelo’s garments, the hem of which she would touch for healing, are but “prinzie
guards” to cover his “damned’st body” (3.1.95–6). The image of spiritual re-creation
in Isabella’s words breeds in Angelo only bodily appetite: “She speaks, and ’tis / Such
sense that my sense breeds with it” (2.2.141–2). The idea of Christ’s healing touch
thus jars discordantly as Angelo’s character unfolds, for he would touch Isabella with
beastly hands in the “heavy / Middle of the night” (4.1.34–5).
As the idea of the lord’s healing touch merges with the theme of coinage, the irony
of Angelo’s name redoubles. Angelo uses the imagery of minting when he requests
that more time be given to “test [his] mettle / Before so noble and so great a figure /
Be stamp’d upon it” (1.1.47–9). While the “noble . . . figure” refers primarily to
the duke, a secondary meaning may arise when we consider coinage in relation to
Angelo and the theme of healing, for a coin called the Angel was especially minted
for use by English sovereigns in curing the King’s Evil. This royal coin, impressed
with the image of the Archangel Michael, was used, even by King James, to touch
the swollen glands of those inflicted with scrofula (Crawfurd, King’s Evil, 81–3).
Angelo, however, resists the suggestions of mercy in the duke’s commission and
begins to purge Vienna, not as an angel of mercy but as an angel of vengeance. In his
zeal to purify, Angelo ironically merges with the disease he strives to eradicate.
Even before Angelo meets Isabella, his tyranny is as impersonal and unrelenting as
the plague. For Shakespeare’s first audience, Claudio’s words at his unexpected arrest
must have been a compelling reminder of the plague’s seemingly arbitrary though
biblically justified assault:
Thus can the demigod, Authority,
Make us pay down for our offense by weight
The words of heaven: on whom it will, it will;
On whom it will not, so; yet still ’tis just. 1.2.120–4

Appropriately, Shakespeare names his stern magistrate Angelo, for the angel was
considered the minister of God’s implacable wrath in times of plague. Like Angelo,
the angel’s mission was to scour and cleanse the land. Such were the angels that killed
Egypt’s first-born (Exodus 12), the angel that smote David’s people (2 Samuel 24),
and the angel of Revelation that pours forth the vials of God’s retribution in the final
days.28
The panic caused by Angelo’s sudden claim upon Claudio’s life and by the pro-
clamation to pluck down houses in the suburbs strongly resembles these angelic
scourges, as well as the Triumph of Death, a visual and poetic tradition depicting the
terrors of the plague.29 Here Death, standing tall in a chariot or bestriding his horse,
cuts down with his scythe the hapless supplicants in the city streets. In John Davies
of Hereford’s poem The Triumph of Death, Death cries alarm throughout the city:
Then scowre the Brothel-houses, make them pure,
That flow with filth that wholsomst flesh infects;
Fire out the Pox from thence with plages vnpure;
For they do cause but most vnpure effects. 227
444 CATHERINE I. COX

The scourge of the angel and Death’s triumph not only recall recent and ancient
periods of pestilence, they also suggest the far more devastating apocalypse: “Thus
with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no
more at all” (Revelation 18:21).30 Mistress Overdone, Lucio, Pompey, and Barnardine
indeed seem comical types of the iniquitous of Revelation who survive the plagues,
yet “[n]either [repent] . . . of their murders and sorceries, nor of their fornications,
nor of their thefts” (9:21).
Michel Foucault’s insights on the role of plague in the formation of modern life are
instructive for understanding the world that Angelo is attempting to create. Foucault
explains that the plague brought forth a response of discipline, segmentation,
and surveillance within the culture. Magistrates sought to eradicate the disease by
quarantining houses, monitoring and certifying entry into the towns and movements
within it, and controlling the behavior of each individual:
If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion . . . then the plague gave rise to
disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people
and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organiza-
tion in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power.
Discipline, 198

As Claudio is sentenced to be executed, not only for his own crime, but to serve as
an example to others, Vienna’s houses of prostitutions are ordered to be pulled down,
and bawds and madams like Pompey and Mistress Overdone are hauled off to prison,
it is clear that society is being shaped in the image of its sternest member, Lord
Angelo.
But while Angelo would act as angelic scourge and supreme municipal disciplinar-
ian, his attempts to purge and subdue the city are frustrated at every turn. Pompey
and Lucio provide satiric voices, mocking the folly of his stringent control. When
Escalus tries to frighten Pompey with the magistrate’s severe orders, Pompey deflates
his advantage with a simple truth of human instinct, “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” (2.1.238–40). As Cheryl Lynn Ross explains, Angelo’s quarantine
merely redirects vice, moving the bawdy houses from the suburbs into the heart of
the city: “when the attempt is made to extirpate prostitution, or more broadly,
sexual incontinence—when the sewer is blocked—the contained ordure overflows its
boundaries and invades formerly protected areas” (“Plague and the Figures,” 159).
Thus, the houses of Mistress Overdone, shut down in the suburbs, crop up in respect-
able neighborhoods where even a constable’s wife might unwittingly venture (159).
Just as Angelo’s social reform makes problems worse in Vienna, so too his attempts
to deny all human emotion in himself fail miserably when he confronts the eloquence
of Isabella’s youth and her “prosperous art” in “reason and discourse” (1.2.184–5).
Claudio’s words at his arrest prepare us for Angelo’s fall: “As surfeit is the father of
much fast, / So every scope by the immoderate use / Turns to restraint” (1.2.126–8).
Immoderate in righteousness and purity, Angelo ironically becomes the victim of the
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 445

passion he most abhors. Thus, he especially is imaged in Claudio’s grotesque meta-

phor of “rats that raven down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil, and when we drink
we die” (1.2.129–30).
Long before he is publicly exposed, Angelo embarks on a course of self-
punishment. He cannot delude himself with the comforting fantasy that Isabella has
seduced him, for his sexual excitement depends on his awareness of desecrating
innocence. Struggling briefly with the possibility of shared guilt, “Is this her fault, or
mine? / The tempter, or the tempted who sins most, ha?” (2.2.163–4), he soon denies
Isabella’s complicity. Separating Isabella from himself in the images of violet and
carrion, he admits with horror his own unprovoked culpability:
[I]t is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flow’r,
Corrupt with virtuous season. 2.2.164–7

As putrefying flesh was considered a strong purveyor of pestilence, Angelo appropri-

ately describes himself as carrion corrupting in the summer sun. His iconoclastic zeal
has turned inward, for the purity of his life—what he has valued most and has orga-
nized his life to secure—he now runs pell-mell to destroy. Angelo’s pleasure lies in
infecting the body and temple of holiness itself: “Having waste ground enough, / Shall
we desire to raze the sanctuary / And pitch our evils there?” (2.2.169–70). The
erotic delight in desecrating the spiritual and ethical core of another and of oneself
underscores unequivocally the failure of piety when void of human compassion.
Thus, with eyes fully open to the horror of his crimes, Angelo determines to possess
Isabella. His language, earlier abstract and cold on the topic of fornication, now boils
with anger and self-loathing:
Ha? fie, these filthy vices! It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stol’n
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image
In stamps that are forbid. 2.4.42–6

Coins, associated earlier with mercy and healing, are now in Angelo’s imagination
converted to coins of bastardy—the counterfeit coins that he would stoop to make
though he bears the “noble” image of the duke. Not surprisingly, Angelo sees his
own likeness in Isabella, for she too seeks protection from the contamination of the
city. Francisca’s description of the order’s strictures against speaking with men and
Isabella’s desire for “a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood” (1.4.4–5) suggest
a fear underlying the convent’s order. The cloister provides not only a devotional
home but also a retreat from worldly experience and infection.
Isabella’s seclusion at the play’s opening is understandable, however, when we
remember the representation of women in the literature of disease. Ross has shown
how, in times of plague, those perceived as Other—whether prostitutes, the poor,
446 CATHERINE I. COX

rogues, actors, Puritans, Catholics, or Jews—are accused of causing the disease and
consequently suffer literal or metaphorical quarantine (“Plague and the Figures,”
16–20). Misogyny flourishes in the plague pamphlets and medical treatises of the day.
In his handbook on cures, Simon Kellwaye explains that the “coniunct cause” of the
“pockes and measles” (often predecessors of the plague) is the “menstruall bloud
which from the beginning in our Mothers wombes wee receaued, the which mixing
itselfe with the rest of our bloud, doth cause an ebulition of the whole” (Defensative,
39).
The daughters of Eve bear not only physical responsibility but also moral respon-
sibility. Since illicit sensual actions incite God’s anger, the female body that inspires
such actions is hideously inscribed with disease. While many whoremongers
willingly share in her vice, the prostitute is in Dekker’s plague pamphlets given the
most damning portrait:
What a wretched wombe hath a strumpet, which . . . is . . . the onely Bedde that breedes
vp these serpents?. . . Shee is the Cockatrice that hatcheth all these egges of euills. When
the Deuill takes the Anatomy of all damnable sinnes, he lookes onely vpon her body.
When she dies, he sits as her Coroner. When her soul comes to Hell, all shunne that there,
as they flie from a body struck with the plague here. Lanthorne and Candle-light, 267

Although she is spared this kind of savage invective, Mistress Overdone is viewed
as the comical cockatrice of Vienna. Lucio proclaims, “I have purchas’d as many
diseases under her roof as come to . . .” “To three thousand dolors a year” completes
the Second Gentleman (1.2.46, 50). For her persistent efforts in mitigating desire,
Mistress Overdone pays penance in the sweating tub and is finally condemned to
prison.
Mistress Overdone and Kate Keepdown receive a comical indictment for their
persistence in the trade; however, even women who are selective in matters of love
must pay the price of shame. Though her pregnancy preserves her from death,
Julietta is instructed by the disguised duke that, for their shared sin, her guilt is
heavier than Claudio’s. The duke offers no reason for this uneven distribution of
shame. Mariana too must pay a heavy price for her commitment to love. Maligned
and rejected when her dowry disappears at sea, she, like Isabella, has turned to a life
of maidenly seclusion. In a world contaminated morally and physically—one in which
a woman must face shame when she yields to desire and also when she does not—
Isabella understandably would seek refuge in piety and physical seclusion.
As the play unfolds, however, Isabella’s asceticism proves inadequate to her
own needs and to the dilemma presented by Angelo. Images of glass and mirrors
significantly enter Isabella’s discourse when she faces the issue of female desire and
male abuse. Angelo’s observation, “Nay, women are frail too” (2.4.124) draws from
Isabella an admission of female weakness and a passionate appeal for protection:
“Ay, [women are frail] as the glasses where they view themselves, / Which are as easy
broke as they make forms.” (2.4.125–6). Isabella’s cry, “Women? Help heaven” (127),
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 447

and her command, “Nay, call us ten times frail” (128), as well as her shift to the first
person, suggest that her plea is for herself, as well as for women in general. Now
beyond the convent walls, Isabella feels the predicament (and perhaps the temptation)
of the other women of Vienna, who, subjected to male desire, are imaginatively cast
as prostitutes—the cockatrices of disease.
The duke’s instructions to Claudio just prior to Isabella’s entry into the prison
suggest that Isabella’s idealized view of her own death, “Th’ impression of keen whips
I’ld wear as rubies” (2.4.101), and her miscalculation of Claudio’s willingness to
die for her, are motivated in part by a fear of contamination. Critics often dismiss
Vincentio’s speech as a Renaissance commonplace, illustrating his tediousness and
lack of human feeling for Claudio. The central placement of this Christian consola-
tion in the play, its unusual length, and its philosophic content, however, underscore
its critical importance. The speech serves as a memento mori to remind the audience,
as well as Claudio, that death comes to all. The duke’s emphasis on accepting death
so that one may more righteously live extends the ideas of his opening instructions
to Angelo: “Heaven doth with us as we with torches do.” With so many characters
looking for havens where the moral and physical diseases of Vienna will not touch
them, the duke’s words on fear seem especially relevant.
Indeed, the central metaphor of the speech, “death’s fool,” though not unique to
plague literature, appears frequently in these works. In The Wonderfull Yeare, Dekker
satirizes with great color and variety the London runaways who, forsaking their
neighbors in time of need, are caught by the cold hand of Death. Dekker’s description
of a father’s flight with his son uses the same motifs as those employed by
Vincentio—the ass laden with goods, the fool who flees death, and death’s ironic
entrapment:
But thou art gotten safe (out of the ciuill citie Calamitie) to thy Parkes and Pallaces in
the Country, lading thy asses and thy Mules with thy gold (thy god), thy plate, and thy
Iewels . . . [and] one onely sonne . . . him also hast thou rescued from the arrows of infec-
tion: Now is thy soule iocund, and thy sences merry. But open thine eyes, thou Foole and
behold that darling of thine eye (thy sonne) turnd suddeinly into a lumpe of clay: the hand
of pestilence hath smote him euen vnder thy wing. 107–8

The physical act of running from death in Dekker’s passage is manifested in

more complex ways in Measure for Measure. Claudio expresses his terrifying vision
of death while the duke, Angelo, and Isabella each show a proclivity to isolate
themselves in a world of abstract values.
After returning from prison, the duke responds to Escalus’s question, “What news
abroad i’ th’ world?” (3.2.221), by saying that “there is so great a fever on goodness,
that the dissolution of it must cure it” (3.2.222–3). It is only by its dying that goodness
can be restored. We have seen Angelo abandon himself to his basest desires and
Claudio in abject fear rationalize the magistrate’s actions and urge his sister to submit
to violation. Under the extreme pressure of the moment, Isabella too displays a
cruelty that gives full meaning to the duke’s words, “so great a fever rages on
448 CATHERINE I. COX

goodness.” When Isabella vents her anger on Claudio, we realize how destructive her
fear can be:
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. 3.1.142–6

Isabella’s reference to kneeling, “might but my bending down,” underscores her

intransigence, for she now disdains the gesture of humility that is associated inextri-
cably with her vocation. Her “thousand prayers” are to assure not Claudio’s salvation
but rather his death and annihilation. The exclamation “perish!” connotes finality,
the death of the soul. With these words, Isabella leaves Claudio, refusing to answer
his plea that she return. Her self-protectiveness and disappointment have temporarily
cut her off from the Christian virtue of mercy that she so eloquently praised in her
first meeting with Angelo (2.3).
Yet while Angelo’s ethical world shatters into a thousand pieces at his first aware-
ness of passion, Isabella’s spiritual world grows richer through minor breakage and
repair. When she first emerges from the nunnery to plead for Claudio’s life, Isabella
begins a journey whereon absolutes blend to form shades of gray. Faced with
Angelo’s proposition and her brother’s fear of death, Isabella chooses to negotiate
with the world rather than retreat from it. Her decision to play a part in the friar’s
bed-trick stratagem and her later decision to “speak so indirectly” (4.6.1) before the
duke are compromising actions, affirming the duke’s medicinal treatment for curing
vice: “Craft against vice I must apply” (3.2.277). Isabella’s spiritual growth and her
participation in a morally ambiguous world thus enable her to function, along with
the duke and Mariana, as an agent of moral “measure.”
The play’s denouement emphasizes intercession and mercy as regenerating princi-
ples. On the Continent and in pre-Reformation England, the role of intercessor was
considered essential in stopping the plague. Catholic cities often took refuge under
the shield of particular plague saints. Along with St. Sebastian and St. Roch, the
Virgin Mary was especially popular in this role (Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence,
102). She was often depicted with her mantle extended over a diminutive city, shield-
ing the people from the flying arrows of pestilence.31 Vienna’s intercessors in Measure
for Measure are human and flawed, yet the self-effacing Mariana, who submits her-
self to Angelo’s lust in order to protect him from lasting shame, and Isabella, who
kneels and pleads for Angelo’s life, though believing her brother dead by his order,
imitate divine intercession. Mariana’s role is especially striking, for she has chosen to
suffer physical violation in exchange for Angelo’s life and honor. Though her name
suggests her role as intercessor, it also underscores, by contrast to the mystical
impregnation of the Holy Virgin, Mariana’s physical submission and human
vulnerability in accepting the role of virgin sacrifice. In the closing scene, Mariana
emphasizes her loss of identity when, veiled before Angelo and the duke, she denies
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 449

that she is “a maid, a widow, or a wife” (5.1.177). Lucio’s retort, “My lord, she may
be a punk” (5.1.179), witty though it is, points to the potential cost of Mariana’s
intercession.
Taking part in the “game” that will eventually free both Angelo and Claudio,
Mariana, Isabella, and the duke must all endure slander and scorn. Vincentio associ-
ates slander with contagion, calling it a “blasting and a scandalous breath” (5.1.122).
As he uncloaks the duke, Lucio furthers the duke’s association with disease, “why,
you bald-pated, lying rascal, you must be hooded, must you? Show your knave’s
visage, with a pox to you!” (5.1.352–4). Perhaps taking his cue from Friar Peter’s
earlier explanation of Friar Lodowick’s absence as due to “a strange fever” (5.1.152),
Lucio implies that the friar hides his head because he has been stricken bald by
syphilis. The duke’s willingness to remain concealed as Lucio maliciously assaults his
name (first as duke, and then as friar) signifies the self-effacement and intercessory
submission needed to resurrect goodness in Vienna.
When the duke, uncloaked by Lucio, takes his place as magistrate, he begins to
play another role, that of implacable justice: “‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for
death!’ / Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; / Like doth quit like, and
Measure still for Measure” (5.1.409–11). While Matthew 7:1–2 is the primary source
for Vincentio’s words and the play’s title, Shakespeare’s audience, with fresh memo-
ries of the plague, might have considered as well the scene of the Lamb’s opening of
the third seal of Revelation 6:5–6:
5) And when he had opened the thirde seale, I heard the thirde beast say, Come and se.
Then I beheld, & lo a blacke horse, & he that sate on him, had balances in his
hand.
6) And I heard a voyce in the middes of the foure beasts say, A measure of wheat for a
penie, and thre measures of barlie for a penie, and oyle and wine hurt thou not.

This third horseman, usually identified as Famine, carries a pair of balances in his
hand. Riding with his fellow scourges (Pestilence and War), he ushers in the pale
horse and pale rider, Death (or as interpreted in the Geneva Bible, Christ). Popular-
ized through illustrations, the most famous being those by Albrecht Durer and Lucas
Cranach the Elder,32 the scene warned of the imminence of God’s last judgment.
For Protestants, the vision urged instant and dramatic reform. Plague sermons and
pamphlets taught that the people’s failure to repent would bring worse disasters still,
even the horrors of the apocalypse. The awed response achieved by the duke’s
appearing and his stern demeanor as he moves to the seat of judgment might suggest
for Jacobean audiences a greater revelation and weighing that will come at time’s end.
While the faithless will be exposed and punished, the meek will discover refuge in the
tenderness of the Lamb. Christ will preserve and shelter precious and holy things:
“and oyle and wine hurt thou not.”
With the duke’s declaration that the time of Antonio’s measuring is now, the audi-
ence waits to see if Isabella will plead on behalf of the man she believes executed her
brother. The suspense gathers momentum as Mariana thrice urges her to kneel and
450 CATHERINE I. COX

as the duke admonishes her that should she plead for the murderer, her brother’s
ghost would rise from the grave in revenge. In a single gesture of humility, Isabella
repels the duke’s warning and symbolically overturns her earlier refusal to kneel for
Claudio and her angry threat to “pluck out” the “eyes” of Angelo. The moment is
deeply moving, for Isabella thoroughly enacts the doctrine of her faith. Her earlier
words to Angelo apply now to her, “O, think on that, / And mercy then will breathe
within your lips, / Like man new made” (2.2.77–9). As she kneels, the scales of justice
tip, and the heavens appear to shower forth their mercies.
While Isabella’s gesture is dramatically compelling and, along with Mariana’s
intercession, allows the duke to display his sympathy for his subject’s appeals, the
duke’s radical shift from stern justice to magnanimous lord and dispenser of mercy’s
wealth remains troubling. Richard Ide maintains that Shakespeare “evoke[s] the
conventional ‘last judgment’ scene in the tradition of homiletic tragicomedy, but for
the purpose of highlighting the ironic contrast between Vincentio and his heavenly
model” (“Shakespeare’s Revisionism,” 113). The duke’s actions are indeed perplex-
ing, for Barnardine, the unrepentant and hardened murderer, is freed as well as is the
eleventh-hour penitent Angelo. The ideal of Christian benevolence seems here to clash
with the pragmatics of responsible rule.
The backdrop of an England besieged by plague, however, provides insight into
Shakespeare’s complex handling of mercy in the play’s final scene. During periods
of epidemic, the theme of mercy took on unusual urgency. The fruits of faith—
compassion towards the poor and sick—were deemed important to both personal
salvation and God’s remission of the scourge. In Trevelyon’s pictorial commonplace
book, a scene entitled “Mercie” (fol.188r) portrays a richly dressed man lifting his
fingers in blessing over a diseased victim stranded in the countryside. The helpless
man, covered with bright red sores and bandages, leans against the embankment. By
his side stands a chalice, symbolizing mercy. The numerous scriptural verses beneath
the scene admonish Christians to be merciful. One verse, fitting to our play’s final
scene, reads: “For there shall be iudgement mercilesse to him that sheweth no mercie,
and mercie reioyceth against iudgement” (James 2:13; 188). Trevelyon’s scene advo-
cates embracing fully this Christian virtue (save touching the victim, which the healthy
man does not do). Other tracts of a more practical nature, however, warn people
against contact with the diseased and instruct magistrates that the most merciful path
is strictness in rule. The phrase “Lord Have Mercy on Us,” posted on the doors of
quarantined houses, underscores the equivocal meaning of the word “mercy,” for the
plea that God remit his anger converges with a clear warning that human mercy must
not extend too far. Entering a house under quarantine was both physically dangerous
and punishable by law. In a sermon preached before the King, entitled Phisicke for
the Plague (1604), Richard Eedes advises James that God’s visitation should teach him
sternness:
that out of this iudgement he take a warning . . . to know . . . that he is sent . . . so to
reforme the euils of this land; and therefore that he is to walke betweene God and his
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 451

people, as another Moses, of whom it is excellently obserued, that . . . hee pleaded the
cause of God to the people with the swords of Iustice: he pleaded the cause of the people
to God with the teares of Mercie. 60v (fol. I4v)

Thus the judgment scene of Measure for Measure cuts two ways, complimenting
the new king by associating merciful bounty with the “advent” of his reign while
simultaneously revealing to those who have “eyes to see” the folly of indiscriminate
benevolence.
As a compliment to James, the play suggests the power of majesty to cleanse a
diseased realm. The ending of the play evokes the magical quality of a Christmas
masque as the problems raised seem to scatter before revealed majesty. As we hasten
to the final scene, the duke prepares us for a miracle, “Look, th’ unfolding star calls
up the shepherd” (4.2.203). The duke’s emergence “like pow’r divine” to look upon
Angelo’s “passes” (5.1.369, 70) and to perform merciful judgments, simultaneously
claiming Isabella as his bride, affirm the power of majesty to control disease and
magically sweep the road to comedy. The road, however, is not cleanly swept, for the
anxieties produced by the duke’s methods, especially his expedient marriage arrange-
ments to ensure legitimate “coin” for the realm, and by the contagious atmosphere
of the play, for those less accepting of the artificial devices of masque, remain to the
end and beyond.33
That King James’s interpretation of events could be vastly different from that of
his English subjects is seen in a real-life spectacle where James himself played the role
of the merciful judge. As Craig A. Bernthal has shown, the public “resurrection” of
Claudio and the duke’s reprieve of Angelo and Barnardine resemble James’s reversals
of judgments in the case of the conspirators Lord Grey, Sir Gervase Markham, and
Lord Cobham.34 William McElwee explains that after expounding “in contrarieties”
the dilemma of delivering an equitable judgment, James surprised his courtiers by
announcing that he would extend mercy to all three (Wisest Fool, 120–1). Like James
himself, Vincentio allows his subjects to taste the horrors of death before surprising
them with leniency. Dismissing the murky issues of equity, he extends grace to almost
all. The only one in the play’s final scene who must “pay down by weight” is Lucio,
a suitable scapegoat, for he not only bears the physical tokens of syphilis, but also
has blasted the name of majesty with “scandalous breath,” a heinous crime for any
monarch and a capital offense to James. Lucio is most culpable, however, for having
persisted unwittingly in piercing the duke’s illusion of his own inviolability. The play
thus achieves its design of presenting the king as he would like to see himself pre-
sented, and at the same time advances its chances for popular success by questioning
the pragmatics of merciful rule. Like the courtiers who witnessed the sudden reprieve
of Markham, Grey, and Cobham, we look with astonishment at the duke’s easy
dismissal of problems. And just as Lucio cannot be quieted by the threats and punish-
ment of the duke, the problems of physical and moral disease that we have seen boil
and fester in Vienna refuse to die quietly in our consciousness, producing a play that
only uneasily we call comedy.
452 CATHERINE I. COX
Notes
1
I am grateful to Ira Clark, Elaine Marshall, David
Mead, Vanessa Jackson, Elisabeth Mermann-
Jozwiak, and Janis Haswell for their helpful
comments during the preparation of this article.
According to Paul Slack, the mortality rate for
the plague of 1603 was 22.6% (Impact, 151). The
London playhouses first closed on 19 March 1603 in
expectation of the Queen’s death, and except for a
few brief, intermittent openings, remained closed
throughout the year due to bubonic plague. They
finally reopened after Easter (8 April) 1604. See
Leeds Barroll’s Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s
Theater, 102–3; 120–1.
2
While Roy Battenhouse (“Measure for Measure
and King James”), John Wasson (“Measure for
Measure: A Text for Court Performance”), and
Josephine Waters Bennett (Measure for Measure
as Royal Entertainment, 2, 7–9, 11) argue that the
play was written or revised with a royal audience
in mind with the purpose of either flattering or
instructing James, other scholars, such as Richard
Levin (“King James Version”), strenuously disagree.
Even readers who do not believe that Shakespeare
wrote the play for a royal audience admit that it
reflects James’s style of governance. For Jonathan
Goldberg, the duke’s ruling of his subjects “in
absence, through others and in disguise” closely
resembles James’s absolutist style (James I and
Politics, 235).
3
Marcus contends that the play “can easily be under-
stood as setting forth a ‘Jacobean line’—mirroring
the king and his most cherished principles by
displaying his ideas about equitable government
(familiar to contemporaries through the just
published Basilikon Doron, which was selling like
hotcakes in London, and through other royal
pronouncements) in triumph over harsher, more
limited codes” (Puzzling Shakespeare, 163).
4
See Bennett’s chapter “The Duke” (78–104) and
Bernthal’s “Staging Justice.”
5
Since the King’s Servants remained in London
waiting for the reopening of the theaters in October
1603, Shakespeare would have experienced first
hand the plight of London during this severe epi-
demic. According to Barroll, Shakespeare probably
had lodgings near the theater district in Southwark
at this time, but may have found a new dwelling
since this area in the autumn of 1603 was “one
of the sections of the city hit first and hardest
by plague” (111). Barroll argues that the plague of
1603–4 strongly affected Shakespeare’s productivity:
“When the Globe was closed, Shakespeare’s dra-
matic production slowed markedly or stopped”
(119). Shakespeare produced only two new plays,
Othello and Measure for Measure, “certainly
achievement enough for a span of two years and
four months; yet the process of producing them falls
below the prior Shakespearean rate: an average of
two plays per year” (125).
6
Proclamation 25, “By the King,” dated 16 September
1603 in Stuart Royal Proclamations, 1:47.
7
The editors Alfred Harbage (William Shakespeare:
Complete Works), G. Blakemore Evans (Riverside
Shakespeare), Stephen Greenblatt (Norton Shake-
speare), and, most recently, Ivo Kamps and Karen
Raber (Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts)
gloss the sweating sickness as either “plague” or “a
form of plague.”
8
N. W. Bawcutt glosses “flaws” as “sudden blasts or
gusts of wind,” explaining that “a Shakespearian
link between infectious winds or fogs and blisters
occurs in King Lear 2.2.339–41 (Folio version) and
The Tempest 1.2.326–27” (Measure for Measure,
134).
9
See Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shake-
speare, 54. Melissa Smith states, “Revenge tragedy
seems an obvious candidate for a site of the plague’s
impact because of its biologically graphic plots: a
single character’s thirst for blood in the beginning
of the play results in a stage littered by bodies at the
end. Thus some revenge tragedies may be said to be
about the plague insofar as they reflect the narra-
tives constructed by early modern discourse to
explain the plague” (“Playhouse as Plaguehouse,”
79). In his article “Plague Writing, 1603” Ernest B.
Gilman concludes: “it will be productive to consider
all literary texts written during plague times as
plague texts” (172).
10
By setting The Alchemist in the plague-torn district
of Blackfriars where the play may have debuted in
the summer of 1610 and infusing it with “a harmless
fictional pestilence,” Jonson intended to purge his
audience’s minds of fear and the city of contagion.
Thus, replete with cony-catching rascals and a fear-
ful master who strangely returns home before the
“visitation” has ended, this play would provide “a
‘wholesome remed[y]’ for the dangerous thoughts
. . . believed to be not merely an effect of plague, but
often its cause” (Phillips, “You Need Not Fear,”
43–5).
11
Mercutio confides to Romeo his story of the malign
fairy queen’s passing “O’er ladies’ lips, who straight

on kisses dream, / Which oft the angry Mab with
blisters plagues, / Because their breath with sweet-
15
meats tainted are” (1.4.74–6). The sexual implica-
tions of “sweet-meats” connect female sexuality
with transgression and contagion.
12
2 Henry IV fully enacts the plague and reciprocal
violence prophesied by Richard at Flint Castle
(Richard II 3.3:85–90). Along with his crown,
Richard has bequeathed his successor the plagues of
sovereignty, the most painful being anxiety about
his first son’s love for him and loyalty to the realm.
Harry Monmouth’s self-revelation as true son of
Henry IV at the Battle of Shrewsbury, his imitation
there of the sun breaking through “the base conta-
gious clouds” (1 Henry IV 1.2.198), though tempo-
rarily gratifying to his royal father, serves to further
aggravate the rebels’ distemper. Casting his own
grief and rage over the death of his son Harry Percy
in terms of a patient’s contempt for restraint when
stricken with a raging fever, the Duke of Northum-
16
berland feels the impulse to destroy. See 2 Henry IV
1.1.140–5.
13
We remember Gaunt’s lament for England’s loss of
17
garden health, “This other Eden, demi-paradise, /
This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against
infection and the hand of war” (Richard II 2.1.42–4)
in Burgundy’s description of France’s decimation by
war:
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleach’d,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder’d twigs. Henry V 5.2.41–4
14
Mallin grounds his reading on the medical theory of
Fracastor (Girolamo Fracastoro, whose De Conta-
gione was first published in 1546) and insights
by René Girard. According to Fracastor, plague is a
poison, but differs from ordinary poisons because
it is contagious, its effects being “precisely similar
in both the carrier and the receiver of contagion”
(Inscribing the Time, 68). Mallin explains that, just
as plague’s contagion operates through sympathetic
18
attraction and produces like symptoms, so too the
moral and psychic plague that courses through the
body of Denmark transmits its toxin and replicates
19
itself through sympathy and likeness. Complement-
ing Fracastor’s theory, Girard observes that when
plague enters a mythic or fictional landscape, social
and moral order breaks down, hierarchy collapses,
and characteristics that distinguish one person or
thing from another dissolve. Symbolic replications
of speech and action thus produce a milieu “of
“LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 453
undifferentiation, a destruction of specificities”
(quoted by Mallin, 69).
Even when characters try to distinguish themselves
from others, envious and destructive emulation
occurs. As Ian Munro illustrates in Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus, plague imagery ironically connects the
Roman warrior Coriolanus to the common people
that he excoriates with curses of pestilence. The car-
buncle used early in the play to praise Coriolanus,
“A carbuncle entire . . . / Were not so rich a jewel”
(1.4.55–6), returns like a plague token in the final
act to describe Coriolanus’s lethal intention,
his “eye / Red as ‘twould burn Rome” (5.1.63–4)
(“The City,” 259). While Munro’s splendid article
emphasizes plague as a metaphor for Rome’s (and
symbolically London’s) burgeoning population, an
uncontrollable energy threatening social collapse,
the metaphor also, and I believe more strongly,
figures the moral diseases that threaten civil peace,
especially arrogance and ingratitude.
Bennett justifies the duke’s disappearance as an
artificial device signaling our entry into the realm of
comedy, 22–3.
Marilyn Williamson notes the moral laxity of
James’s court as early as 1603 and the profligacy of
local authorities who often blinked at and partici-
pated in the subculture’s illegal activities. Parlia-
ment, from 1576 to 1628, “was debating ninety-five
proposed laws which would control personal
conduct: regulations of dress, drinking, swearing,
bastardy, church attendance, and honoring the
Sabbath” (Patriarchy, 95). King James’s proclama-
tion of 17 September 1603, authorizing the transpor-
tation of rogues and vagabonds across the seas,
claims that it is by “the remissenesse, negligence,
and connivencie of Justices of the Peace, and some
other Officers in divers parts of the Realme,” that
“Rogues, Vagabonds, and idle and dissolute persons
. . . have swarmed and abounded every where more
frequently than in times past, which will grow to the
great and imminent danger of the whole Realme”
(Stuart Royal Proclamations, 1:51–2).
Slack explains that “[t]he initial reaction of all
urban magistrates to outbreaks of plague was to
pretend that they did not exist” (Impact, 256).
Like the duke’s instructions to Angelo in 1.1.32–6,
James’s letter tells his son Henry that kings should
“glister and shine before their people, in all workes
of sanctification and righteousnesse, that their
persons as bright lampes of godlinesse and virtue,
may, going in and out before their people, giue light
to all their steps” (Basilicon Doron, 149).
454 CATHERINE I. COX
20
J. P. Sommerville explains that “the succession of
James I—himself an outspoken absolutist—acceler-
ated the shift towards absolutism.” The surge in
absolutist rhetoric by James and the clergy increased
fears that the Stuarts intended to rule as absolute
monarchs. What alarmed the people most was
that “James and Charles themselves subscribed to
absolutist notions” (Politics and Ideology, 47). Som-
merville, however, agrees with Margaret Atwood
Judson, Glenn Burgess, and others that “whatever
the theoretical merits of absolutist doctrine, it mis-
described English political practice, for the king and
his subjects were in fact bound together by mutual
dependencies” (57). Glenn Burgess describes the
prerogative and law as “mutually enhancing, not
contradictory.” Writers including Sir Francis Bacon,
Thomas Hedley, and Sir Edward Coke described
the powers of the king and the people in terms
of balance and harmony (Politics of the Ancient
Constitution, 5–6).
21
Burgess contends that absolutism was not wide-
spread during the early Stuart period: “If anything,
the early Stuart political nation was held together by
an anti-absolutist consensus,” in Absolute Monar-
chy and the Stuart Constitution (18). In Politics of
the Ancient Constitution, Burgess explains: “the
normal Jacobean position was that the king’s abso-
lute prerogative was not a sovereign power over the
law but a supplementary power, outside it in the
sense of not operating through it, though within it
in the sense of having its boundaries defined by law”
(167).
22
Judson is referring to words by Thomas Egerton,
Earl of Ellesmere, in “A coppie of a written dis-
course by the Lord Chauncellor Ellesmere concern-
ing the Royall Prerogative” (Ellesmere MSS, 1628,
Treasure Room, Harvard Law School Library).
23
Golderg is quoting from James’s “first appearance
before the Star Chamber in 1616” and Basilicon
Doron, reproduced in Charles H. McIlwain, The
Political Works of James I, 332, 5. While James
insisted that parliament should not pry into his royal
prerogatives, parliament continued to discuss pre-
rogatives that they had an interest in, such as military
defense, marriage of the king’s son, and monopolies.
Judson writes, “When finally in 1642, in the debates
over the militia bill, parliament openly claimed
control of the defense of the kingdom, this denial of
a prerogative long associated with the king helped to
precipitate the civil war” (Crisis, 27).
24
Miles and Williamson place Measure for Measure
among the “disguised ruler” plays that became
popular in the years following the accession of
King James. These plays, including Marston’s The
Malcontent and The Fawn and Middleton’s The
Phoenix, adapt and complicate the didactic “con-
vention of the education of the ruler” (Miles, Prob-
lem, 140). See Miles, 140–60, and Williamson, 74–9.
Leonard Tennenhouse writes: “The plague made it
necessary to close down the theaters during the year
1603. Their reopening in April 1604 saw a new form
of comedy which revised the materials of Elizabe-
than romantic comedy so drastically as to render the
earlier form all but obsolete” (Power on Display,
154).
25
See Bawcutt’s note in Measure for Measure, 88–9.
26
All biblical passages quoted by me are from the
Geneva Bible.
27
Many scholars have interpreted Portia to be hypo-
critical in the central judgment scene. They claim
that, though she preaches mercy, she bestows none
on Shylock. However, Alice N. Benston convinc-
ingly argues that mercy cannot be dictated by any-
one; it must come freely from the injured party.
Portia urges mercy, but her role in this scene is
to see that the contracts established by law are not
broken. “It is only after the verdict is rendered that
mercy is allowed its proper place and function—‘to
season justice’” (“Portia, the Law,” 379).
28
In Doctor Andros his Prosopopeia Answered, the
Puritan Henoch Clapham, a fervent advocate of
spiritual causes of plague, declaims, “Angels are
made ministering spirits to powre out the violes of
r
Gods wrath on any people or Nation” (fol. C3 ).
29
One of the most famous paintings of the “Triumph
of Death” is Pieter Bruegel’s (painted in 1562).
This highly detailed, energetic, and disturbing work
strongly suggests the apocalypse. More cruel than
the biblical pestilence, the armies of Death lay siege
to all humanity. See Charles L. Mee Jr., “How a
Mysterious Disease,” 67.
30
In Certaine Sermons Concerning the Pestilence
(1603), William Cupper tells us that the “pockes,
and other filthie sores” intended “to punish whore-
dome and adulterie” at first “terrifie men,” but soon
after are laughed at: “Yea you shall heare such
cursed caytiues gibe at one another, when they
know they are striken with such fearefull kind of
leprosie . . . [W]hat other course therefore should
the Lord take, than by sending the pestilence and
sudden death” (220–1).
31
See Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence, plates XIV
and XV.
32
Albrecht Dürer’s wood engraving of the four horse-
men is one of fifteen illustrations entitled Apoca-
lypse, dated 1498 (readily available in Panofsky, Life
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 455

and Art). Cranach’s Apocalyptic cycle contains
twenty-one woodcut illustrations. My source for the
Cranach cycle is Kathryn Henkel’s The Apocalypse,
83 figure 42. For her reproductions, Henkel has used
Martin Luther’s September Bible of 1522 (in the col-
lection of the John W. Garret Library, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore). Poets, such as John Davies of
Hereford, use the balance (Libra) as a sign of present
plague and as a warning of God’s final judgment:
“Now, had the Sunne the Ballance entered, / To giue
his heate by weight, or in a meane / When yet this
Plague more heate recouered, / And scowr’d the
towns, that erst were clensed clean” (Triumph of
Death, 233–34).
33
An entry dated 15 July 1603 in G. B. Harrison’s A
Jacobean Journal illustrates that even before James’s
coronation, some were suspicious of the new king’s
generosity: “The King is most bountiful, seldom
denying any suit: the Queen was strict in giving,
which age and her sex inclined her unto. The one
often complained of for sparing; the other so benign
that his people fear his overreadiness in giving” (46).
Following Robert Ashton, Marilyn Williamson
attributes this passage to Sir Roger Wilbraham
(Patriarchy, 93).
34
Bernthal states that the trial at the conclusion of
Measure for Measure may be read as a “celebration
of James’s Solomon-like wisdom and mercy.”
Yet the scene simultaneously serves to “demystify
James’s actions, to display him, in the duke’s
backstage maneuvering, as less like the Wizard of
Oz, and more like an ordinary man, behind the
curtains, frantically pulling levers to project a
mightier image of himself” (“Staging Justice,” 256).
Also, see Williamson, 94.

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——. The Wonderful Year. In The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Vol. 1 (5 vols). Ed. Alexander B.
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Books, 1995.
456 CATHERINE I. COX

The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. Intro. Loyd E. Berry. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969.
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All my citations of the plays are from this edition.
 “LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US” 457

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Notes on Contributor
Catherine I. Cox is Professor of English at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi,
where she teaches Shakespeare, Literature of the English Renaissance, and Literature
of the Western World to the Renaissance. She has published articles on Shakespeare,
John Milton, Thomas Nashe, and plague sermons of the early modern period.
Her essay, “Recreating Zeal in Donne’s ‘The First Sermon after Our Dispersion, by
the Sickness’,” is forthcoming in Explorations in Renaissance Culture.