Measure for Measure (Vol. 76) | Stephen Cohen (essay date fall 1999)
Stephen Cohen (essay date fall 1999)
SOURCE: Cohen, Stephen. “From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure.” Criticism 41, no. 4 (fall 1999): 431-64.
[In the following essay, Cohen contends that Measure for Measure begins as a romantic comedy and ends as a monarch play. The critic maintains that these two incompatible genres result in the play's “notorious contradictions, incongruities, and frustrated expectations.”]
Through most of its critical history, responses to Measure for Measure have been of two types: those proffering a key that unlocks the play's notorious difficulties to reveal its unity and integrity, and those that find the play's unsatisfactory elements irreconcilable and thus declare it a failed or flawed work.1 In the last twenty-five years, however, readings that dismiss the play as flawed have largely been supplanted by others that see in...
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