Norton Shakespeare based on the Oxford Edition

Second Edition ISBN 978-0-393-11135-4

WW Norton
Introduction to Measure for Measure
by Katherine Eisaman Maus
A young man is in grave trouble with the law, and his beautiful sister foes to the
magistrate to plead for mercy. The magistrate offers to remit the penalty if the
sister will sleep with him. It is an old story in more ways than one. Shakespeare
knew several sixteenth-century versions: the Italian Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio
produced both prose and dramatic renderings, and in 1578 the English playwright
George Whetstone published Promos and Cassandra, the most important source
for Measure for Measure. Shakespeare took the title of his play from Jesus
Sermon on the Mount: Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment
ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured to you again (Matthew 7:1-2). Jesus advice combines threat with
promise: a prudent fear of heavenly retaliation persuades believers not to pass
judgment themselves, while at the same time, an apparent abdication of equity is
folded into an overall scheme of just compensation. As we shall see, the passage
in all its complexity complements the intricacies of Shakespeares treatment of
the ancient tale.
Measure for Measure was performed in 1604 at a pivotal moment in
Shakespeares career. The play is the last in a long series of comedies that
explore complex issues of sex, marriage, and personal identity. Its tones, themes,
and methods of characterisation, however, veer close to tragedy, the genre that
largely, though not exclusively, preoccupied Shakespeare in the years
immediately following. Many critics, therefore, classify Measure for Measure as a
problem comedy. The designation attests both to the difficult moral issues that
the play confronts and to the boldness with which it stretchessome would say
shattersthe normal limits of comic form.
The plays distinctiveness becomes evident almost immediately. In Act 1,
Scene 2, Claudio and his pregnant lover, Juliet, appear in the custody of the
Provost, being led away to prison. Their crime is premarital sex; the penalty, doe
Claudio at least, is death. The seriousness of their situation is not in itself
unusual: The course of true love never did run smooth, Lysander remarks in A
Midsummer Nights Dream, and if it did, it would hardly make an engrossing

dramatic subject. Nonetheless, Claudios initial description of his plight is quite

remarkable:
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.
(1.2.104-10)
Claudio likens his passion for his beloved to a rats craving for poison:
compulsive, irrational, and self-destructive. Excessive indulgence, or surfeit,
inevitably brings regret and punishment in its train. Claudio sounds as if he is
describing the most arrant kind of lust, although, as he will subsequently explain,
he is actually pre-contracted to Juliet, bound by a promise of marriage that many
in Renaissance England saw as providing conjugal privileges. (Shakespeare
himself may have subscribed to this view, since his wife gave birth to their
daughter five months after their wedding. More pertinently, the Duke, in his guise
as a friar, affirms that the pre-contract sanctions Marianas intimacy with Angelo
later in the play.) Interestingly, however, neither Claudio nor Juliet is inclined to
argue that their devotion to one another mitigates their guilt. Instead, they admit
that they have committed fornication, a severely condemnatory term that
conflates all kinds of sex outside marriage under the same rubric, recognising no
difference between long-term relationships and sheerest promiscuity.
As the play continues, it becomes clear that Claudios imagery of suicidal
animalism, havoc, and pollution is not merely the consequence of his immediate
agitation, but expresses a profound assumption of the society in which he lives.
For his sister, Isabella, sexual intercourse is what I abhor to name (3.1.100); the
Duke deplores Pompeys filthy vice and Juliets most offenseful act; the wise
Escalus acknowledges Claudios error even as he attempts to alleviate his
punishment. Few doubt that human sexuality is an essentially sordid matter, a
sign of degradation rather than a means of creativity or love. Occasional
glimpses of an alternative visionLucios brief, radiant analogy between Juliets
pregnancy and agricultural fertility, for instanceby their very rarity reinforce the
prevailing pessimism.
Such austere views of human sexuality have ancient roots. When the

Duke calls Viennas sex laws needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds
(1.3.20), he recalls an image from Plato, who compared the desiring part of the
soul to a useful but refractory horse, which the rational part of the soul needs to
keep strictly bridled and under firm control. When Isabella refers to erotic desire
as a natural guiltiness (2.2.142), she draws upon a traditional Christian
connection between sexuality and original sin, the disobedience committed by
Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden and passed on to all their offspring as a
kind of intrinsic pollution.
To say that a view is traditional, however, is not to say that it is inevitable.
What makes sexuality so troublesome in this particular play? In Shakespeares
earlier, more optimistic comedies, the prospect of heterosexual consummation
usually seems automatically to entail marriage, so that the weddings with which
the plays conclude seem to follow spontaneously from the eroticism that fuels the
plot. By marrying and establishing a family, the young couples simultaneously
satisfy their mutual yearning for one another, and their communitys demand for
clear kinship structures and for orderly means of transferring property to
legitimate members of a new generation. In Measure for Measure, however, the
link between heterosexual desire and marriage seems to have snapped. Claudio
and Juliet defer their wedding day; Angelo abandons Mariana; Lucio refuses to
support his child or marry its mother. Prostitution flourishes. Rampant promiscuity
makes syphilis a familiar ailment and a standard topic for nervous jokes.
Once carnal desire comes unhinged from the institution of marriage, it
begins to seem subversive of personal and civic order. And if one believes, rightly
or wrongly, that ones sexuality is intrinsically antisocial and depraved, then
complete sexual renunciation might seem the wisest course. In Measure for
Measure, the morally ambitious charactersthe Duke, Angelo, and Isabella
initially assume that their virtue is tied up with, perhaps even identical with, their
chastity. Believe not that the dribbling dart of love/ Can pierce a complete
bosom, the Duke boasts to the Friar (1.3.2-3). Angelo attempts to protect his
reputation for austerity even as he hopelessly compromises his scruples in
secret. Isabella believes that sleeping with Angelo will defile her forever, even if
she does so in order to save her brothers life.
The value of celibacy is endorsed by characters who do not themselves
aspire to such high standards of conduct. Lucio is a libertine, but he believes that
Isabellas intention to enter a nunnery renders her a thing enskied and sainted
(1.4.33). Likewise, Pompey admits that his life as a pimp does stink in some sort,
sir (3.1.283). A few of those who cannot be chaste themselves are, like Claudio,
capable of moments of shame or self-loathing; others, like Lucio, shruggingly

accept their lack of saintliness. The Vienna of Measure for Measure is full of
people unlikely to be enlisted for projects of social or spiritual improvement: the
moronic Elbow, the impenitent Pompey, the unregenerate Mistress Overdone, the
gravel-hearted Barnardine, the heedless First and Second Gentlemen, the
gullible Froth. These people are part of the commonwealth, subject to the law,
and willy-nilly part, too, of a Catholic church that aspiresunlike some of the
Protestant sects of Shakespeares timeto include the entire community. Should
the laws of this community reflect its stringent ideals or the actual behaviour of
most of its members? Throughout the play, those who aspire to belong to a
principled moral elite deplore the weaknesses of the reprobate. At the same time,
because the rascals in Measure for Measure are so vividly memorable, the play
also suggests that moral failure is often at least as humanly compelling as moral
excellence isat least moral excellence defined in narrow, self-denying terms
that prevail in Vienna.
For the intransigent majority unable or unwilling to control the horses of
lust, the needful bits and curbs of which the Duke speaks impose an external
system of repression. Such a system would not have been unfamiliar to
Shakespeares original audience. Courts administered by the Church of England
prosecuted many sexual infractions: among them fathering or giving birth to a
bastard, committing adultery or bigamy, deserting a spouse, reneging on a
wedding engagement, or groundlessly accusing others of such transgressions.
Convicted individuals could be fined, whipped, displayed in the marketplace, or
made to announce their sins in church. (Thus Claudio and Juliet are paraded
about the streets of Vienna before being taken to prison, to humiliate them and to
serve as an example for others.) Repeat offenders were excommunicated, or
cast out of the church.
Underlying such proceedings was the assumption, as in Measure for
Measure, that morality could and should be legislated; that the sexual conduct of
individuals was the business of the entire community. Indeed, in the early
seventeenth century, when Shakespeare was writing Measure for Measure, an
increasingly powerful group of Puritans, or precisians, argued that the church
courts punishments were far too mild. Threats of disgrace and excommunication
failed to deter the most egregious offender, who had no reputation to lose and
were unlikely to fret at their exclusion from church. Moreover, shaming
punishments worked less well in the increasingly busy, heterogeneous
neighbourhoods of Jacobeans London than they had in smaller rural
communities for which they had originally been designed.
In Measure for Measure, the repeated characterisation of Angelo as

precise associates him with the rigorists of Shakespeares time; and since
Viennese justice treats Claudio more strictly than it does professionals in the sex
trade, the question of what constitutes adequate severity is certainly at issue.
Perhaps, then, the play comprises Shakespeares reflection on an issue of
contemporary concern: what would happen if as some argued, sexual
misconduct could be punished by death? At the same time, Shakespeare
carefully distinguishes the world of his play from the seventeenth-century
England, most obviously by making Vienna a Catholic city peopled with the nuns
and friars who had been eliminated from Protestant England over half a century
earlier. For despite obvious connections between Measure for Measure and
some of the issues of its own day, Shakespeares play hardly constitutes a clear
policy recommendation. He is more deeply attentive to general issues about the
often-vexed relationship between civic life and human passion, and between
religious commitment and the conduct of secular affairs. What happens to
individuals and a community when sexuality is viewed as transgressive, when it
becomes the subject of public discipline? Is it possible or advisable to regulate
sexual behaviour through the courts? How do religious convictions affect the
experience of sexual desire? These concerns resonate in an era like our own,
characterized by a lack of consensus in religion and in sexual mores, by
widespread transformations in the institution of marriage, and by debates over
the extent to which the state ought to monitor the sexual behaviour of citizens.
In Measure for Measure, Angelos disastrous career suggests one
possible effect of strict sexual self-denial: that the habits of restraint can
themselves provoke sexual excitement. Rigid and self-righteous, Angelo seems
not to have experienced the violence of desire until Isabellas first visit on behalf
of her brother awakens his appetite:
Whats this? Whats 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.
(2.2.167-72)
Like Claudio, Angelo thinks of passion in terms of death and decay, but the
resemblance between the two men ends there. Angelo imagines himself as
tainted meat rotting all the faster under the very sun that gives life to innocent,
lovely things. What ought to improve Angelohis keen appreciation for the

presence of virtuemakes him worse.

Angelo is sexually aroused by prohibition. Mariana loves him, and his
relationship with her breaches no social norms; he discards her. Isabella is
ostentatiously pristine, and her nuns habit marks her taboo; he finds her
irresistible. In order to extract pleasure from the encounter, however, Angelo must
force himself to remain aware of the principles he attempts so flagrantly to
violate. If he rationalised his behaviour or blamed it on Isabella, he would lose the
nearly sensual luxury of self-hatred. Therefore, the lucidity with which Angelo
analyses his own motives leads not to penitence but to an increasing moral
recklessness. His inclination to categorise all sexual conduct as transgressive
actually makes his offence easier to commit. Propositioning Isabella in their
second meeting together, he tells her: I have begun,/ And now I give my sensual
race the rein (2.1.159-60). Angelo explains why he cannot govern himself with
the same image the Duke used to underscore the necessity of control. Once
embarked on the sensual race, he imagines, here is no alternative to utter
abandon.
For Isabella, however, sleeping with Angelo is out of the question. Some
modern critics have found her defiance heroic, other chilling or selfish. Doubtless
in Shakespeares time, she elicited a similarly mixed response. Shakespeare
alters his source story considerably to expand Isabellas role and specify its
implications more exactly. In Whetstones Promos and Cassandra, the sister has
no plans to enter a convent, and she eventually goes to bed with the deputy in
order to save her brothers life. For Isabella, by contrast, virginity is a principled
choice, not an accident of youth. The vow of lifelong, religiously dedicated
chastity she plans to take is a matter about which Shakespeares contemporaries
had conflicting feelings. One effect of Englands break with the Catholic Church
had been a spectacular change of official attitudes toward celibacy. While
Catholics honoured sexual renunciation and demanded that their clergy remain
chaste, Protestants discouraged veneration of the Virgin Mary, abolished
convents and monasteries, and urged clergy to marry. Despite these alterations,
however, a powerful appreciation for virginity and belief in its semi-magical
powers persisted in Reformation England, cut loose from its explicitly religious
moorings. The effect of Shakespeares innovations on Whetstone, then, is both to
heighten the ambivalence of the story and to focus the moral spotlight on
Isabellas convictions and the choices that follow from them.
Isabella believes that she would damn herself by sleeping with Angelo.
Better it were a brother died at once

Than that a sister, by redeeming him,

Should die for ever.
(2.4.107-9)
Is she right? St. Augustine, the most influential Christian writer on sexual morality,
insists that since sin is a property of the will, not a physical state, persons who
are forced to perform sexual acts are blameless. If chastity is a state of mind,
then the fate of Isabellas body is possibly independent of, and irrelevant to, the
fate of her soul. Perhaps, in fact, by acquiescing to Angelo, Isabella would
perform an act of charity, generously sacrificing her own preferences for
Claudios benefit. On the other hand, female virtue has traditionally been defined
in physical as well as mental terms, so that chastity, the spiritual attitude, is hard
to separate from virginity, the bodily condition. Moreover, Isabella is not exactly a
rape victim; she must, as Angelo says, fit her consent to his proposal. Does
consent, however reluctant, contaminate her with his sin? Quite possibly. Would it
permanently unsuit her for her religious vocation? Quite possibly. Clearly it is
reasonable, then, for Isabella to be cautious; and no one, says Augustine, is
obliged to put him- or herself in eternal peril merely in order to save the life of
another person.
Since, however, Shakespeare characteristically translates sweeping moral
questions into scrupulously personal terms, apparently reasonable general
maxims do not entirely suffice to explain Isabellas motives. On one hand, her
obstinacy seems justified after the face, when Angelo decides to execute
Claudio, because clearly her capitulation would not have saved her brothers life.
On the other hand, Isabellas obsession with her own purity seems excessive,
especially in 3.1, when it manifests itself in gross insensitivity to her plaintive,
terrified brother. Moreover, her fervent yearning for constraint, like Angelos
seems luridly imbued with sadomasochism.
That is were I under the terms of death,
Thimpression of keen whips Id wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere Id yield
My body up to shame.
(2.4.100-04)
At such moments, Isabella seems not to be exterminating or transcending her
own sexuality, but redirecting it in ways of which she is not entirely conscious.
She not only shares Angelos assumption that the sexual act is a defilement, but

like him she finds discipline exciting. With all our disapproval of Angelos abuse of
power and our sympathy with Isabellas indignation, we can still see how their
conflict arises as much from their similarities as from their differences.
Isabellas difficulty is hard to resolve because it is unclear how much her
chastity is worth. Is it more valuable than her brothers life? Is it more valuable
than her own life, which she would throw down for Claudio, she claims, as frankly
as a pin (3.1.105)? Is it only fair, as Angelo claims, to yield him her body as
compensation for overlooking Claudios offence, or is lawful mercy... mothering
kin to foul redemption (2.4.113-14)? Shakespeare provides no answer to these
questions, but the conflict they produce yields the plays most vividly realised
interactions. As the title suggests, Measure for Measure is obsessed with
problems of substitution and commensurabilityfrom the opening scene in which
Angelo takes over as the Dukes deputy to Angelos proposal that Isabella
vindicate Claudio by committing his sin herself, to the bed trick that replaces
Isabella with Mariana, to the Provosts exchange of Ragusines head for
Claudios. Even the most apparently trivial comic interchanges persistently echo
the concern with equivalence, proportionality, and relative priority: the Gentlemen
argue about whether they are cut from lists or velvet; Pompey and Abhorson
debate the relative standing of bawd and hangman.
Questions of equivalence seem to underlie the very possibility of justice,
even the possibility of ethical thinking. When a person commits a misdeed,
restoring the status quo ante is usually impossible. Thus the wrongdoer ought,
we feel, either to make adequate restitution or to suffer in rough proportion to the
anguish he or she has caused, rendering, in the biblical phrase, measure for
measure. In sexual matters, however, such problems of equivalence are murky,
because there is no consensus regarding how apparently straightforward bodily
acts ought to be interpreted. Angelo compares Claudios offence to murder and
counterfeiting; Lucio thinks it is trivial, a game of tick-tack (1.2.167). What seem
to be the same actions can be evaluated in wildly different ways, depending on
ones frame of reference: to the abstemious Angelo, Claudios behaviour look like
gross debauchery, while to Mistress Overdones dissolute patrons, it looks
positively restrained. Motives alter what seem to be the same actions, so that we
are inclined to regard Claudio more leniently than Lucio, who abandoned his
mistress after making her pregnant. So do outcomes: the bed trick means that
Angelo, intending to commit an impermissible act, in fact performs a licit one,
unknowingly laying the groundwork for his pardon in the final scene.
The commitment of several characters to a Christian religious vocation
further complicates the possibility of establishing some kind of commensurability,

Isabella especially, assumes that spiritual goods like honour and purity are
infinitely more important than secular, visible possessions. In her system of
values, a promise of ardent prayer constitutes the most potent bribe she can offer
Angelo, beside which gold is barren and trivial. The counterintuitive
otherworldliness of Isabellas concept of commensurability is central to
Christianity, a religion founded on the spectacularly lopsided substitution of the
blameless Christ for sinful humanity in the system of Gods justice. But since
such religious convictions are not subject to the verification of the sense, they are
open to challenge by those more firmly attached to the things of this world. For
Claudio, any fate seems better than death. His hierarchy of priorities is different
from Isabellas, and so, therefore, are his conceptions of commensurability.
How are such drastic discrepancies between the various characters
moral and social outlooks to be reconciled? The agent for brining order and
justice is Duke Vincentio, a concealed authority who learns everybodys secrets
in the course of the play. Far from providing an authoritative solution to the plays
ethical impasse, however, the Duke has elicited almost as much controversy as
Isabella. Some critics see him as a version of God, like power divine, as Angelo
declares in the final scene. Some have suggested that the Duke was meant to
compliment the diffident King James I, who at the time of the plays first
performance had just ascended the English throne, after the death of his
extroverted predecessor, Elizabeth I. More sceptical critics see the Duke as a
schemer who foists his dirty work onto political subordinates and meddles
impudently, even sacrilegiously, with the lives of his subjects.
The Dukes function as clergyman reflects the fact that the problems of
Measure for Measure can only be solved by someone who can obtain access to
the concealed realm of motives and intentions, a privilege usually reserved for a
confessor. But merely knowing such information will not bring practical redress of
injustice. So at the same time, unlike a clergyman, he must retain the secular
rulers ability to mandate changes in the world in order to bring matters to a
satisfactory conclusion. A prince disguised as a friar, the Duke bridges, however
unsteadily, the gap between knowledge and power. An actual sovereign with such
prerogatives would approach tyrannyfor that reason, the functions of priest and
lay magistrate were ordinarily separated even in Shakespeares time, when
church and state were far more closely allied than they are today. In the plays
fictional Vienna, however, the Dukes sweeping authority conveniently allows him
to impose a resolution.
There are limits to Vincentios power. Not even a Duke can sequester
erotic fervour from the cruelty and disorder with which it has proven to be so

intimately and insidiously allied. Not even a Duke can make passion tractable.
The best he can manage is to introduce his subjects to some socially sanctioned
medium between celibacy and abandon. Marriage in Measure for Measure is this
patently not a happy aspiration but a stopgap measure imposed on reluctant or
noncommittal individuals, for whom the alternative in several cases is death.
Indeed, Lucio, forthright as usual, complains that marriage is a worse fate than
hanging; the others are distinctly muted in their response to the Dukes nuptial
stratagems. Claudio and Juliet are given no lines in which to celebrate their
reunion; nor do we hear that Angelo, who claims to crave death more willingly
than mercy (5.1.470), is grateful to be preserved as Marianas husband. Isabella
remains silent in the face of the Dukes unexpected proposal of marriage, leaving
it an open question whether she is overwhelmed with joy or gripped with horror,
whether the Duke provides her with a socially and personally satisfying
alternative to the cloister or merely recapitulates Angelos harassment.
The pro forma quality of the coupling with which Measure for Measure
concludes suggests that marital union is not, finally, the resolution toward which
the play most convincingly moves. Most of the last scene is devoted to finding a
way out of the difficulties posed by the radical moral incommensurability
described above. In quick succession, the Dukes trial rehearses the normal
outcome of Isabellas complainther condemnation and Angelos exoneration
and then demonstrates that in this instance, almost miraculously, Angelos secret
vice will be made manifest after all. But this disclosure does not end the play, for
the Dukes plan demands that Isabella plead for Angelos life against all sense,
as the Sermon on the Mount commands her to do. The simple asceticism of the
flesh with which Measure for Measure begins is displaced at last by a more
subtle and exacting asceticism of the spirit, as Isabella renounces the hunger for
vengeance in favour of forgiveness that goes very much against the grain. Only
this principled willingness to overlook injury and tolerate difference, the play
seems to imply, can still the jostling among heterogeneous moral perspectives
that endlessly complicate life in Vienna.