Scholars interested in Shakespeare's treatment of the law in Measure for Measure have examined English ecclesiastical and civil laws pertaining to marriage, adultery, and fornication in some depth, but they generally ignore Reformation theories of the law and, in particular, Calvin's emphasis on the epistemological function of the law. And yet Shakespeare seems far less interested in details of the English legal system—one critic calls the law of Vienna "story-book law"³⁶—than in exploring the relation between law, broadly defined, and the problem of knowing and judging. Central to his play's inquiry into the law, I suggest, is a Calvinist insistence that self-knowledge can be achieved only by recognizing one's utter inability to fulfill the law, a recognition that necessarily precludes passing judgment on others.

Emphasizing the immeasurable gulf between any individual and perfection, Calvin teaches that no one is capable of obeying the law. His discussions of the law focus not on ethical behavior, discipline, and punishment but on knowledge. "By the law," he writes, "is the knowlege of sinne."³⁷ For him, the law does not correct or control sin but rather represents it, showing people the multiple ways they have transgressed. The law, he writes, is a "loking glasse" that "representeth unto us the spottes of our face," a mirror that reveals to people how utterly they have defaced the divine image in which they were made.³⁸ English Protestant catechisms of this period invariably advance Calvin's interpretation of the law, rehearsing the notion that the law is a "glasse" that teaches "that we be imperfect in all our workes," thereby making us aware of "our naughtiness sinne and defectes."³⁹ That awareness, moreover, is productive, for it creates the conditions for repentance and redemption. "And so by our own euells we are stirred to consider the good thinges of God," Calvin writes, "and we can not earnestly aspire towarde him, untili we begin to mislike our selues."⁴⁰ For Calvin, the law thus serves a vital function: by revealing our inherent sinfulness, it produces dissatisfaction with the self, a dissatisfaction that, because it initiates the process of repentance, is essential for salvation.⁴¹

When Calvin defines the law as a mirror that works to "admonish, certifie, proue gilty, yea and condemne euery man of his owne unrighteousenesse," he declares any belief in one's own righteousness a fantasy; insisting that none "shall come to the mark of true perfection, unlesse he be loosed from the burden of his body," he warns that to presume that one has "any woorthinesse" or "any meane or abilitie to doo good (of himself:)" is "too step intoo Gods place," that is, to confuse one's own powers with God's, usurping the place of the Creator.⁴² The law thus serves as a continual reminder that "there is none righteous, no not one" (Romans 3:10) by enabling people to see their transgressions, imperfections, and failings. Calvin insists that the person who believes himself to be righteous is deluded by self-love,

so long as he measureth it [his strength] by the proportion of his own will. But so sone as he is compelled to trie his life by the balance of the law, then leaving the presumption of that counterfait righteousnesse, he seeth himself to be an infinite space distant from holinesse: againe, that he floweth full of infinite vices, wherof before he semed cleane. For the evels of lust are hidde in so depe and croked privuie corners, that they easily deceiue the sight of man.⁴³

Setting aside the tantalizing linguistic echoes of this passage in Measure for Measure, I want to suggest how Calvin's theory of law informs Shakespeare's play and, in particular, its theatrical insistence on the gap, the "infinite space," between "counterfait righteousnesse" and "holinesse."

Measure for Measure dramatizes a conflict between two characters who trust in their own capacity to obey the law and to lead virtuous lives: a reformist magistrate smugly confident of his own righteousness and a Roman Catholic novice earnestly preparing to join a strict religious order. Through their confrontation both discover the "infinite space" between their behavior and perfection. Angelo commits a crime far more repugnant than the one for which he has condemned Claudio, and in the trial scene he is forced to acknowledge the distance between the laws he administers and his own rapacious and unruly appetites. Isabella experiences a range of conflicting emotions when she is confronted with Angelo's terrible proposition that requires her to choose between her chastity and her brother's life. Passionately pleading for her brother's life, actively participating in the duplicitous bed-trick, and deliberately giving false testimony against Angelo in order to take her revenge on him, she, too, fails to live up to her ideals of purity and holiness.

The play's insistence that neither the rigorous discipline of the religious novice nor the severe laws of the precise puritan can produce a state of righteousness surely must have resonated in a powerful way with the audiences of post-Reformation England, where questions of human merit, good works, and righteousness were vigorously debated. Protestant reformers vehemently denounce the clerics and saints of the Roman Church because they "most shamelessly call" their lives "Angelike, doing herein verily so great injurie to the Angells of God" when in reality they are nothing more than "whoremongers, adulterers, and somwhat ells muche worse and filthier."⁴⁴ And satiric attacks on radical Protestantism skewer puritans for assuming they could attain a state of righteousness, exposing that belief to be a grand delusion and exposing them as contemptible hypocrites.⁴⁵ Many recent critical readings of the play, however, ignore these contemporary religious controversies and especially the intense anti-Catholic and anticlerical sentiments they generated in Jacobean London. Feminist criticism in particular tends to valorize Isabella's commitment to a monastic life of celibacy and saintliness, viewing the cloistered life of a nun as an admirable assertion of "female autonomy" that is inherently subversive of patriarchal society. From this perspective, Isabella's public humiliation in the final act is an inexcusable violation of both Isabella's independence and her religious vocation, a shameless "shaming of a nun."⁴⁶

For these critics the play's ending, which turns on Isabella's capacity to forgive the man who tried to coerce her into having sex with him, is profoundly disturbing, for that forgiveness represents to them not an admirable willingness to relinquish a "counterfait righteousnesse" but a regrettable surrender to patriarchal authority; and the Duke's subsequent pardon of Angelo constitutes a nullification of the grievous wrongs committed against Isabella. Declaring the final trial scene "aesthetically and intellectually unsatisfying . . . [and] personally infuriating," Harriett Hawkins, for one, complains that "the Duke's decision to grant mercy to everybody revokes the rule of law, and to revoke the rule of human law is to revoke the idea of consequence, of necessity."⁴⁷ Such an intense resistance to the play's resolution provides insights into late-twentieth-century democratic notions of law and justice, criminals and victims, power and submission. But it may also illustrate the way Measure for Measure challenges traditional notions of merit that were being contested in Shakespeare's own day. The play arouses but thwarts a deeply felt desire for "justice, justice, justice, justice!" (5.1.25), eliciting a profound dissatisfaction, a dissatisfaction inherent in Calvin's premise that the law exists not to control the dangerous behavior of a few but to reveal everyone's imperfections.

In deliberately violating the conventions of poetic justice, Shakespeare not only challenges traditional belief in human merit but also interrogates his own theatrical practices. Many critics have noted that the final trial scene resembles a play that the Duke carefully scripts, rehearses, and stages. The insistent metadrama of this final scene, I suggest, underscores how theatrical representation can thwart self-righteous judgment and compel self-knowledge.

In compliance with the Duke's script, the chaste (and chastened) Isabella plays the role of the defiled woman in the trial scene and publicly proclaims that she has slept with Angelo. Although Shakespeare depicts her as self-conscious about the role she reluctantly agrees to play, heightening his audience's awareness of the pretense, he insists on the value of her role-playing. Isabella experiences her theatrical performance as profoundly humiliating, but her public humiliation enables her to identify and empathize with Mariana. Required to step into Mariana's place, Isabella, "with grief and shame" (1. 96), declares herself a "fallen" woman and is treated as an object of scorn and approbation. Imaginatively reversing the earlier physical substitution of Mariana for Isabella, a substitution that put Mariana at risk in order to save both Isabella's brother and her chastity, the Duke's casting thus forces Isabella to recognize that she, like the woman she plays, is vulnerable, conflicted, passionate, imperfect, and at risk. It is this recognition, the product of a theatrical fiction, that enables Isabella to join Mariana in pleading for Angelo's life.

The Duke's theatrics force Angelo, too, to acknowledge his imperfection. When Isabella and Mariana accuse Angelo of terrible crimes and demand justice, the Duke, in a shocking move, turns the legal proceedings over to the accused, placing him in the seat of judgment and telling him, "be you judge / Of your own cause" (11. 165-66). Rather than reasserting his authority, the Duke delegates his power of judgement to his deputy, the very man whom he knows to have flagrantly abused that power and who is the subject of judicial inquiry. The Duke then stages an elaborate theatrical performance, one in which Angelo is positioned as both dramatic protagonist and judging spectator. Shaken and exposed by this performance, Angelo confesses his crimes and repents. If Shakespeare calls attention to the contrived and scripted nature of Angelo's trial, he nevertheless attributes its efficacy—its capacity to make Angelo's transgressions visible to himself and others and to elicit self-examination and confession—largely to the Duke's representational strategies: his use of indirection; his substitution of Isabella for Mariana; his deployment of a paradoxical riddle; his teasing theatrical presentation of a mysterious, veiled woman; his own complicated doubling as friar and Duke; and the way he forces Angelo to pay attention to the discrepancies between what Angelo thinks he knows and what is. By foregrounding the confusing gaps between language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the substitute and the person she stands in for, the disguise and the person in disguise, the Duke's theater disrupts and confounds its spectators, ultimately revealing to them what has been hidden, denied, or misunderstood.

In Measure for Measure, as in Hamlet, Shakespeare insists on the capacity of theater to activate the conscience, arouse guilt, and elicit confessions of wrong-doing. In both plays he draws on Calvinist theories of the conscience to explain the powerful affect of theater, and in both he nurtures as well as thematizes the interiorized, reflexive, and self-disciplinary gaze that those theories seek to inculcate. According to the many English Protestant tracts on the conscience which proliferated in the wake of the Reformation, the conscience enables a person to see his or her actions from God's perspective and therefore to render " 'a man's judgment of himself, according to the judgment of God of him.'⁴⁸ "Angelo confesses his crimes and declares his heart "penitent" as soon as he realizes that the Duke, "like power divine," has been privy to his most secret acts and private transgressions—that is, as soon as he imagines his actions from the viewpoint of a judging authority:

O my dread lord,
I should be guiltier than my guiltiness
To think I can be undiscernible,
When I perceive your grace, like power divine,
Hath looked upon my passes.

(5.1.358-62)

It is, significantly, the Duke's theater that provides Angelo with this perspective by positioning him as a spectator and judge at his own trial. In this scene, as in the performance of "The Murder of Gonzago," Shakespeare claims for the stage the power to activate the conscience—that internalized and self-regulating spectator, "God's spy," "man's . . . overseer," and a keeper "ioyned to man, to marke and watch all hys secretes"—that Protestant reformers taught has the power "to prescribe, prohibit, absolue and condemne de iure."⁴⁹ In a play that questions the capacity of any individual to achieve righteousness, he imagines a theater that nurtures reflexivity, produces guilt, and thwarts the impulse to judge others.