SOURCE: "Language and Structure in Measure for Measure," in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, Winter, 1976-77, pp. 147-61.

[In the following essay, Berry examines language and structure in Measure for Measure.]

I

The structure of Measure for Measure is expressed through a dual location system not found elsewhere in Shakespeare. It is usual for Shakespeare to oppose geographic locations, each symbolizing and generating a complex of values: thus, court and country, Egypt and Rome, Venice and Belmont. Even in plays where the dual setting scheme is less apparent, a change of milieu does hold its significances: Hamlet's abortive journey to England evidently signals a change of mental direction. All these instances involve geographic change, 'travel' in its customary sense, for the protagonists. Measure for Measure is unique: it is set within the boundaries of a single city, Vienna,¹ yet presents an opposition between the underworld, whose control mechanism is prison, and the overworld. It is, schematically, an upstairs-downstairs play in which the structural alternations are vertical. All the conventionally identifiable scene settings—nunnery, grange, a public place, 'Vienna,' courtroom, prison—conform to this principle. And these settings present as dramatic realities the energies of Measure for Measure.

This governing idea encompasses a complete society, a community whose values are fully realized in the dramatist's selection of material. The overworld is founded on government, restraint, morality, shame, discipline; its main representatives are the Duke, Angelo, Isabella, Escalus. The underworld exists for the free gratification of impulses controlled or suppressed elsewhere; its leading citizens are Pompey and Mistress Overdone. Between these worlds is an iron grid, the law of the land. And that barrier is in effect impassable save to men about town and officers of the law. This is no organic society, no Navarre in which Costard can exchange ruderies with a lady of the court. The leading proof of the social divide is Lucio. Shaw observed of him long ago:

Lucio is much more of a gentleman than Benedick, because he keeps his coarse sallies for coarse people. Meeting one woman, he says humbly, 'Gentle and fair: your brother kindly greets you. Not to be weary with you, he's in prison.' Meeting another, he hails her sparklingly with 'How now? which of your hips has the more profound sciatica?' The one woman is a lay sister, the other a prostitute. Benedick or Mercutio would have cracked their low jokes on the lay sister, and been held up as gentlemen of rare wit and excellent discourse for it.²

Shaw is technically in error here (the 'sciatica' greeting is spoken by First Gentleman: doubtless Shaw's memory of a production betrayed him), but right in substance. Lucio makes a sharp distinction between the two worlds that he moves in, and his speech signals the change unmistakably. With his male friends, with Pompey, with the backstairs Friar, his language is prose. It is fluid, inventive, bawdy, malicious. With Isabella, and with the Duke in the final scene, his language is verse: decent, restrained, rather unctuous. 'I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted' reflects the pedestal on which the virtuous woman is placed. Simply, Lucio distinguishes between being on his best behaviour (in the overworld) and indulging himself. The verse-prose switches of Lucio are one way of identifying the inner characteristics of Vienna; another is the role of Juliet. Her only speaking scene is II.iii, and this is entirely superfluous to the general needs of the action. It appears therefore as an emblemscene, whose function is to present a speaking picture of sin and shame, the pregnant Juliet. The Duke's judgment is society's 'As that the sin hath brought you to this shame' (II.iii.31), and Juliet's submission is a perfect acceptance of the social imperative: 'I do repent me, as it is an evil, / And take the shame with joy' (35-6). Evil, which in this society is conceived primarily in sexual terms, is above all detectable in pregnancy. But until then it is veiled, prohibited, surmised.

We grasp, then, a society in which vertical communication between its two main divisions is at all times difficult. The body politic appears imperfectly aware of the functioning of its separate parts. So much is apparent in a notable characteristic of Vienna's citizens, evasion or euphemism. Claudio finds it impossible to answer directly to his friend's enquiry 'What's thy offence, Claudio?' (I.ii.138-9). Lucio, after trying 'murder' and 'lechery,' has to come out with the truth himself, in the wake of Claudio's involved explanation: 'With child, perhaps?' Shame dominates Claudio,³ and he is thankful to acquiesce in Lucio's wording of the matter: 'Unhappily, even so' (160). It then becomes Lucio's problem to break the same news to Isabella, and he succumbs to the same psychological difficulties. His first attempt is indeed direct:

For that which, if myself should be his judge,
He should receive his punishment in thanks:
He hath got his friend with child.
                                    (I.iv.27-9)

But his follow-up is largely circumlocution:

             Fewness and truth, 'tis thus:
Your brother and his lover have embrac'd;
As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.
                                     (I.iv.39-44)

Two points here. 'Fewness and truth' is sheer window-dressing, for the unctuous tautology of the imagery is scarcely redeemed by the pun on 'husbandry.' These lines amplify the earlier statement but add nothing. Then, 'lover': Lucio discreetly refrains from naming the guilty one. Isabella guesses Juliet anyway, and Lucio confirms the guess after a hesitation, but he would not otherwise have identified her. There is a resistance to openness in this society; it is secretive, evasive, euphemistic.⁴ This is seen clearly in the caricature of its mores that the underworld supplies. The trash apes gentility, and Pompey finds it necessary to excuse a notorious allusion: 'Sir, she came in great with child; and longing, saving your honour's presence, for stewed prunes … ' (II.i.91-2). Pompey, evidently, feels it keenly when Escalus extracts from him his unfortunate surname. I suggest, then, that language, reflecting the prevailing spirit of Vienna, imparts a distinctive concern with tabu and propriety.

It is an easy progression, then, to arrive at an estimate of the dramatic forces in Measure for Measure. The dual location system, allied to the observed characteristics of Viennese society, figures a dialectic of liberty and restraint, freedom and imprisonment. So much is obvious: but the dialectic is not, of course, a simple matter of debating oppositions, of Angelo versus Pompey. Rather, what emerges is a total play which presents a completely synthesized account of the dialectic. J.I.M. Stewart's excellent commentary on Othello is suggestive here:

I conjecture, then, that at certain cardinal moments in the play when poetically received Othello and Iago are felt less as individuals each with his own psychological integrity than as abstractions from a single and, as it were, invisible protagonist.⁵

Similarly, the characters in Measure for Measure can easily be comprehended as representing inclinations on a liberty-restraint scale; but the human and dramatic truth of the characters depends upon the proposition that these contrary impulses co-exist in the same mind. Thus, we become aware that these impulses are not merely present in a single intense encounter (Isabella-Angelo) but animate the entire play, impelling or inhibiting the dramatis personae in any line they take. Claudio and Juliet are as conscious of guilt as previously eager for each other; Abhorson and Pompey have an equal taste for respectability ('he will discredit our mystery'); the contradictions of Angelo need no catalogue. Measure for Measure forces upon us a continuous awareness of the dialectic, until we perceive the play ultimately as nothing else: that is, that the apparatus of prison and overworld is simply a physical model for the mental forces that animate the play. Self-indulgence, self-repression, self-knowledge are the primary concerns of this play.

II

It is clear that we are circling around the entire question of the sexual element in Measure for Measure, and indeed that the restraint-freedom dialectic can be discussed in terms of the Freudian mental model. We have then to appraise this sexual element. Eric Partridge, in his pioneering study, found that 'Measure for Measure and Othello are Shakespeare's most sexual, most bawdy plays.'⁶ Reasonable as this judgment appears, it suggests a possible confusion of categories: 'sexual' is not the same as 'bawdy.'⁷ The bawdy in Measure for Measure comprises the linguistic territory of Pompey and Lucio, with help from Elbow. I regard it as the actualization of tendencies present elsewhere, the covert, latent sexuality that permeates the entire piece. 'Sexual' I prefer to employ in its wider sense, as a description of impulses of desire and repression that tend towards, but may stop short of the threshhold of, sexual congress.⁸ The nature of these impulses is unremittingly probed through the action and language of Measure for Measure.

Nothing need be said of the plot, save that it is based to a degree not found elsewhere in the canon on the fact of the sexual act. The comedies are broadly concerned with love as a value associated with sexuality. So, too, is Othello, since the tragedy stems from a sense of betrayed love. Measure for Measure does not examine love, other than by inference. It rests on the state's will to interdict all extra-marital congress. And from this central fact emerges a certain symbolism. First and most obvious is the matter of beheading. We have it on Freud's authority that beheading occurs frequently in dreams as a substitute for castration; it is a psychoanalytic commonplace.⁹ But we scarcely need the later authority, since the play presents, in its own terms, beheading as an associate of castration. The beheading of Claudio is an explicit punishment for the sexual act. Pompey, as usual, provides the bawdy-variant of the issue: 'Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?' (II.i.242-3) The answer, in symbolic language, is 'yes': that is exactly what the law intends. Pompey's line is the play's only explicit reference to castration, but this deep sense of the punishment's objective pervades the play. It is perhaps most effectively confirmed in Isabella's 'There is a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice' (II.ii.29-30).

Again, consider the symbolism of Angelo's gardenvineyard. As J.W. Lever points out, 'No mention of a garden assignation appears in the sources': it is an imaginative addition by Shakespeare. Lever goes on to note that ' "garden houses" in the suburbs were associated with secret love trysts.'¹⁰ To this local association one can add the general and permanent symbolic values. Freud lists 'gardens' as 'common symbols of the female genitals'¹¹ and this accords very well with the immediate and specific associations of Angelo's trysting-place. The luxuriant, secretive garden-vineyard of Isabella's description (IV.i.28-36), with the culminating reference to the 'heavy middle of the night,' generates strongly sexual overtones. These are clarified into Mariana's later claim 'in's garden house, / He knew me as a wife' (V.i.229-30). 'Garden,' in this play, carries suggestions that unite Freud and the historian of Elizabethan usage.

Less obvious but worth nothing is the by-play with 'key.' Clearly (a point one has sometimes to make concerning the more enthusiastic psychoanalytic commentators) there must be occasions in literature when the object is permitted to be itself alone, sans symbolism. Agreed, but Shakespeare does impart a sense of special importance to 'key' here. The Nun, hearing Lucio outside, reacts immediately:

It is a man's voice. Gentle Isabella,
Turn you the key, and know his business of
  him;
You may, I may not; you are yet unsworn.
                                   (I.iv.7-9)

In dramatic context the opening of a door to a man is viewed as a potentially sexual act; the key mediates the process, and to Isabella is entrusted control. Those who resist Freud's formulation (key = penis)¹² at this point may find more convincing the later episode, in which Isabella receives from Angelo the keys to his vineyard and inner garden. Since the purpose of the transaction is overtly sexual, the resonance of this line is formidable: 'That makes his opening with this bigger key …' (IV.i.31). Always, in Measure for Measure, it is the force of the action itself that imparts sexual energy to situations and allusions which (in another play) would be relatively innocent. It is, however, through the play's language that the most extensive documentation of its sexual concerns can be made.

III

The language of Measure for Measure reflects in diffused but fully realized form the concerns of the play. That which is repressed, that which forces itself upwards towards consciousness, that which is known: these are the elements that language, no less than dramatic structure, must convey. It is above all a matter of vocabulary. We are concerned with words that impart a hierarchy of meanings, meanings that fall easily into a higher and lower division. And this is not the same as the general multiplicity of meanings found everywhere in Shakespeare, nor is it the simple trick of double entendre that every Jacobean playwright has at his fingertips. Broadly, the language of Measure for Measure tends to crystallize into a lower—essentially, a sexual—implication, as well as the higher sense in which it is formally employed.

We can begin with the act of government. It is on four occasions imaged as the action of riding a horse, itself the most potent of symbols of sexual activity:¹³

Or whether that the body public be
A horse whereon the governor doth ride,
Who, newly in the seat, that it may know
He can command, lets it straight feel the
 spur …
                                   (I.ii. 163-6)

That is Claudio's account. The Duke has

We have strict statutes and most biting laws,
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong
 jades …
                            (I.iii. 19-20)

Angelo adds to the cluster with 'And now I give my sensual race the rein' (II.iv.160), and the Duke rounds it off with

He doth with holy abstinence subdue
That in himself which he spurs on his pow'r
To qualify in others.
                                   (IV.ii.84-6)

The proposition is that government expresses a subdued sexual satisfaction for the governor, though the Duke is careful to state a rationale for his sense of the image. 'Satisfaction,' then, becomes a word less than fully innocent, and we notice that it is used only by Angelo and the Duke (twice each). It tends towards OED sense 5, 'The action of gratifying (an appetite or desire) to the full … ' and its occurrences are worth quoting in order:

ANGELO (to Escalus) Let us withdraw together,
And we may soon our satisfaction have
Touching that point.
                                    (I.i.81-3)

DUKE (to Isabella) I would by and by have some speech with you: the satisfaction I would require is likewise your own benefit.

(III.i. 155-7)

DUKE (to Isabella) … give him [Angelo] promise of satisfaction.

(III.i.275)

ANGELO (to Provost) For my better satisfaction let me have Claudio's head sent me by five.

(IV.ii. 126-7)

These passages demonstrate the 'hierarchic' principle of meanings that I have proposed. (1) is innocent, since 'satisfaction' means 'resolution of doubt'; (2) suggests fulfilment of (undisclosed but legitimate) wish; (3) means sexual satisfaction; and (4) a gratification of totally illegitimate desires. The doubt which the action progressively throws on 'satisfaction' surely culminates in the Duke's injunction to Angelo, 'And punish them to your height of pleasure' (v.i.240). And these meanings are strengthened by the ambivalences of 'act.' Claudio, in a passage of early importance, has

                and, for a name,
Now puts the drowsy and neglected act
Freshly on me.
                                  (I.ii. 173-5)

The play is on the legal (government) and sexual senses. The prime meaning, via 'neglected,' evidently relates the statement to the law. But 'drowsy' creates a sexual dimension, and the passage's secondary meaning appears as 'blames me for a careless ("neglected") and sleepy act.' ('He hath but as offended in a dream,' as the Provost observes, II.ii.4: Partridge thought the phrase especially worthy of citation as euphemistic.¹⁴) Shakespeare repeats the play on 'act' via Lucio: 'He … hath pick'd out an act / Under whose heavy sense your brother's life / Falls into forfeit…' (I.iv.62-6). 'Heavy' perhaps attracts the transferred sense of 'sleepy' (of 'the heavy middle of the night,' IV.ii.35). 'Act' is coloured by the near presence of 'law' and 'statute,' yet carries the sexual possibility, to which 'sense' contributes. 'Act' has in Measure for Measure the effect of associating the action of government with the sexual impulse.

The dramatic tendency of these passages is to question the purity of the Duke's motives. And this challenge is sustained elsewhere, sharply or insidiously. We are, for instance, led towards viewing Angelo as the Duke's agent in the fullest sense. Even in the opening scene the sexual vibrations are easily detectable. 'Pregnant' (line 11) is not, in this play, an innocent metaphor, and the Duke's account of his policy is striking:

             … we have with special soul
Elected him our absence to supply;
Lent him our terror, dress'd him with our
  love,
And given his deputation all the organs
Of our own power.
                                     (I.i. 18-22)

Again, 'But I do bend my speech / To one that can my part in him advertise … ' (I.i.41-2). It is not necessary to press the interpretation that Angelo is acting out the concealed desires of his master; it is sufficient to note the linguistic cruxes that direct us to think along these lines. One of the sharpest hints occurs very late, when Angelo protests that his accusers are 'But instruments of some more mightier member / That sets them on' (v.i.237-8). Member has the general sense of 'a part of organ of the body,' but the OED allows special sanction to 'privy member.'¹⁵ In any case the word is coloured by its one previous application, by Pompey of all people: 'Your whores, sir, being members of my occupation' (IV.ii.39), after which it might seem a scholarly reservation even to admit of an additional, higher sense. No word retains its innocence after Pompey has used it.

A curiously reversed process occurs with motion. We noted with 'satisfaction' a progressive deterioration of moral status, from resolution of doubt to desire. Now with 'motion,' the final occurrence attempts to wrest it from an established meaning. The Duke, in his closing speech, has

                 Dear Isabel,
I have a motion much imports your good …
                                  (V.i.531-2)

'Motion' can only mean 'proposal' here; it is clearly a sense of the utmost propriety, not unreminiscent of our modern sense of formal debate. Yet we have to recall its three previous occurrences:

LUCIO        one who never feels
The wanton stings and motions of the sense …
                                     (I.iv.58-9)

CLAUDIO This sensible warm motion…
                                                       (III.i.120)

LUCIO And he is of a motion generative …
                                                     (III.ii.l18-19)

The speakers define the word. For Claudio, l'homme moyen sensuel, it is life itself, the movement of the body and its desires. For Lucio 'motion' is the lusts of the flesh. Here the history of this word suggests in microcosm Lucio's scene with the disguised Duke (III.ii), in which the ducal motives and sexual inclinations are consistently slandered. Malicious or not, Lucio's function is to set up doubts in the audience which the Duke's rebuttal cannot entirely dismiss. (Indeed, his 'I never heard the Duke much detected for women,' III.ii.129-30, seems a classic instance of the Freudian slip.) When, therefore, the Duke employs 'motion' to describe his initiative towards Isabella, the word is already devalued.

'Know' is the easiest instance of this tendency. As all agree, Measure for Measure is much concerned with self-knowledge: the Duke's 'Pattern in himself to know' (III.ii.277) and Angelo's 'What art thou, Angelo?' (II.ii.173) suggest that for both the action is a journey into the interior of self.¹⁶ But I want to emphasize the importance of 'know' in the final scene. It is heavily stressed in the Mariana-Duke passage (eight times in 27 lines, V.i.187-213), especially in Mariana's

Who thinks he knows that he ne'er knew my body,
But knows he thinks that he knows Isabel's.
                                   (V.i.203-4)

The point of this word-play is given to Lucio to dramatize:

DUKE Know you this woman?
LUCIO Carnally, she says.
                                      (v.i.213-14)

A very old dual sense of 'know,' this: yet Shakespeare insists on the point, and wrings a laugh out of it too. He will not let the dual sense escape here; yet in Much Ado, a comedy of romance that exploits 'know' consistently, he excludes the carnal sense.¹⁷

In fine, a central cluster of words can be shown to have tendencies towards higher and lower meanings. It is unnecessary for me to analyse at length the word which bears the weight of the entire linguistic and dramatic enterprise, sense, since this has been accomplished in William Empson's classic study in The Structure of Complex Words. 'Sense' occurs on twelve occasions, with the general meaning of 'reason,' 'decent feeling' on the one hand, and 'sensuality' on the other. The representative passages are:

LUCIO The wanton stings and motions of the
  sense …
                                                         (I.iv.59)

ANGELO She speaks, and 'tis such sense
That my sense breeds with it.
                                                       (II.ii.141-2)

DUKE Her madness hath the oddest frame of
  sense …
                                                         (V.i.61)

DUKE Against all sense you do importune her.
                                                         (v.i.438)

Though the possibilities here are much more complex than with the other terms discussed, the word exhibits the general dualism I have argued for, and I accord with Empson's conclusion: 'the performance with the word sense is made to echo the thought of the play very fully up to the end.'¹⁸ The term verges on homograph, for 'sense' must cover a wide range of mental and physical activity. In its division between sexual and rational/sensibility meanings, it corresponds to the dual location structure and to the dialectic of freedom-restraint. 'Sense,' even more than the other terms we have considered, contains the genetic code of the play.

IV

Language is character, and we can move from the vital areas of the play's language to the characters who speak it. Claudio is a convenient beginning. Early in the play he says of Isabella:

                  For in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect
Such as move men; beside, she hath
  prosperous art
When she will play with reason and
  discourse,
And well she can persuade.
                                 (I.ii.187-91)

Lever remarks: 'There is an undercurrent of irony in the equivocal words "prone," "move," and "play," all capable of suggesting sexual provocation.'¹⁹ Precisely: and Lever's observation applies as cogently to the preceding 'Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends / To the strict deputy; bid herself assay him.' But the real point is that this passage is so entirely typical of the play; the leading characters all express themselves in this mode, with its undercurrent of sexuality. Isabella's own language combines an underlying awareness of sexuality with an overt determination on chastity. Her opening words are a commitment to self-restraint: 'I speak not as desiring more, / But rather wishing a more strict restraint' (I.iv.3-4). And her address to Angelo places the intensity of her commitment beyond question:

There is a vice that most I do abhor
And most desire should meet the blow of
 justice …
                                  (II.ii.29-30)

Still, the repressed sexuality of her temperament is very clear in

Th'impression of keen whips I'd wear as
  rubies,
And strip myself to death, as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield
My body up to shame.
                                   (II.iv.101-4)

Her scene with Claudio (III.i) has a strong erotic tension. The progression is interesting:

ISABELLA In such a one as, you consenting to't,
Would bark your honour from that trunk you
 bear,
And leave you naked.
                                   (III.i.71-3)

CLAUDIO              If I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride,
And hug it in mine arms.
                                        (83-5)

ISABELLA Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame?
                                      (139-40)

The allusions intensify. 'Incest,' the culminating word, presents Isabella's yielding to Angelo as a symbolic congress with her brother. The psychological reality here appears as extreme revulsion, tinged with a certain awareness of the erotic charge in 'incest.'²⁰ I am not, of course, proposing a full-dress psychoanalytic interpretation of Isabella based on a supposed regard for her brother, in the manner of The Duchess of Malfi and A King and No King. One could as well pursue the implications of her exchange of names with Juliet, 'By vain though apt affection' (I.iv.48). I suggest rather that there is in her an undischarged sexual tension that reveals itself in the erotic element in her language. To the obvious instances can be added her retort to Angelo, 'I would to heaven I had your potency, / And you were Isabel!' (II.ii.67-8), for potency contains the same suggestions. It is true that the OED does not give 'possessing sexual power' for 'potency'; but this is a word impossible to separate completely from its fellow, potent and impotent, in the seamless web of language, and these terms undoubtedly admit the sexual implication at the time of Measure for Measure. It is clear, as one reviews the six instances of 'potency' and twenty of 'potent' in Shakespeare, that the uppermost sense is of temporal power. But Antony and Cleopatra has 'And gives his potent regiment to a trull' (III.vi.95), and the OED cites 'impotency' with the sexual sense from 1594. Isabella's wish, then, expresses itself through a term already tinged with what, in the later history of the language, was to become the strong implication of male (and female) sexual capacity. In sum, Johnson's celebrated comment on Isabella's late flash of sexual vanity ('I partly think / A due sincerity govern'd his deeds / Till he did look on me,' v.i.450-2),

I am afraid our varlet poet intended to inculcate that women think ill of nothing that raises the credit of their beauty and are ready, however virtuous, to pardon any act which they think incited by their own charms,²¹

appears less an intrusion of eighteeth-century cynicism than a sound perception that Isabella's self-knowledge—and hence, sexual awareness—has been growing throughout the play. This speech is her last, and combined with her silence towards the Duke's overtures is the formal culmination of the state of awareness she has reached by the end of Measure for Measure.

Angelo's thoughts and actions are specifically directed towards the sexual act, and as such they require little commentary. Even so, it is striking that the language in which he expresses his inclination is so often veiled, allusive, suggestive. It is as though he finds difficulty in admitting the extent of his propensity, even to himself; and in this sense his language is indeed an amplification of the wondering 'What art thou, Angelo?' For instance, 'And in my heart the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception' (II.iv.6-7) projects the physical implications of conceive, while holding nominally to the mental sense. (The further, glancing possibility that conception is evil may help the actor.) The same physicality looms in

This deed unshapes me quite, makes me
  unpregnant
And dull to all proceedings. A deflower'd
  maid!
And by an eminent body that enforc'd
The law against it!
                      (IV.iv.23-6, italics added)

The first line and a half convey a mental state, yet the impression is as much of detumescence as of depression; it is a plain case of post coitum omne animal triste est. Again, his first reaction to Isabella contains the lines:

                 Having waste ground enough
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there?
                                    (II.ii. 170-2)

The play is on evil, which means 'privy' also. This repellent symbolism for the sexual act takes up, via 'corrupt,' the 'carrion' idea in line 167 of the same soliloquy. But above all sex is a 'temptation' (182), and the 'hook' image with which Angelo expresses the thought,

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook!
                                   (II.ii.180-1)

parallels strikingly Isabella's sense of the situation:

                    O perilous mouths,
That bear in them one and the self-same
  tongue
Either of condemnation or approof;
Bidding the law make court'sy to their will,
Hooking both right and wrong to th'appetite, To follow as it draws!
                                   (II.iv. 172-7)

Both Angelo and Isabella perceive each other as a dangerous adversary, as a tempter. Since it is impossible to be tempted by what one does not wish, it is the play's function to delineate the source of this profound attraction.

The Duke focuses the play; as, on standard Shakespearean form, we should expect. Shakespeare has an abiding sense of the ways in which a community is symbolized in its ruler: the fever-stricken John as emblem of England's internal war, Richard the ravening boar, the strong-willed but uncomprehending Prince of Verona. A ruler generates, reflects, and exemplifies the values of his realm. Commentators and directors have varied widely in their perception of the Duke as a semi-religious figure, God's Viceroy,²² and as an 'unctuous fraud.'²³ It seems clear, as one reviews the general linguistic pattern of Measure for Measure, that the issue is not best stated in direct moral categories at all, as fraud versus holy man. It is a matter of the human mind coming to terms with itself. Our experience of the Duke is analogous to his speeches in the opening scene, which move from a bafflingly contorted and obscure syntax to a clear, easily flowing style. The early part is concerned with giving an account of himself, the latter with giving orders. So the movement from shadow to clarity is contained even in the opening; and we retain this sense of the Duke at the close.

Much of what has already been cited applies to the Duke, is indeed spoken by him. I select a few crucial passages to amplify the sketch of him that has emerged. The Duke, ever ready—until the final scene—to disclaim any sexual interest has an early denial: 'Believe not that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom' (I.iii.2-3). (Whatever can be said of 'dribbling' as 'falling wide / short of the mark,' the underlying phallic possibility remains.) This brief challenge and parry is amplified into the Lucio-Duke episode of III.ii. 'The Duke,' as Vickers observes, 'sees himself in that divine Renaissance triplicity: "a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier" ';²⁴ Lucio sees an aged roué: the composite image is the play. Now nothing in the entire action vexes the Duke so much as Lucio's scandal-mongering. His immediate reaction is fierce; the only real punishment he hands down at the end is to Lucio; and in an intervening scene, àpropos of nothing at all, he launches into the following:

O place and greatness! millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee; … thousand escapes of
  wit
Make thee the father of their idle dream …
                                      (IV.i.60-4)

It is a fascinating reference to the tendency of humanity to project fantasies upon the great (cf Jonson's scurrilities to Drummond of Hawthornden on the subject of Queen Elizabeth).²⁵ The dramatic impression so insidiously conveyed is that there is something to it. Lucio's 'I' am a kind of burr; I shall stick' objectifies an impulse of the drama. And after all, the 'complete bosom' is pierced by the final scene.

What, then, are we to make of the 'pattern in himself to know' address? Its primary characteristic is an archaic form and broad allusion: it appears as an Everyman monologue as much as a soliloquy. On the principle that all speeches in mature Shakespearean drama are compatible with a naturalistic psychological explanation, I propose that we regard the soliloquy as a kind of incantation. The speech, an expanded sententia, is a reminder to himself of his role. The Duke is stating, for the purposes of self-rectification, the acknowledged premises on which a ruler should proceed. Even so, 'weed my vice and let his grow' is decidedly arresting. I can see little point in a critical sanitizing of 'my vice' as 'Everyman's.' The suggestion is obvious and immediately available in the theatre. That, if you like, is the unacknowledged premise. The Duke appeals to a past tradition as the guardian of his persona.

On this approach, then, we can see the final scene as a public exorcisement by the Duke of impulses in himself. After 'We do condemn thee to the very block / Where Claudio stoop'd to death' (v.i.419-20), the Duke enacts Angelo, as Mariana and Isabella kneel to him. The key line then becomes, 'I find an apt remission in myself (503), surely a vector that indicates the Duke's share in the flawed humanity of his realm. As for the proposal to Isabella, Sachs's commentary here is suggestive:

As Angelo's wedding parallels on a higher level the enforced marriage of Lucio, so performs the Duke, in a legitimate and honourable way, the crime which Angelo attempted in vain.²⁶

Recent stage practice, we can note, has fully grasped that Measure for Measure's ending is not a bland churching, a slice of the higher kitsch.²⁷ We remain, in the text's own terms, with a marked lack of response to a truly surprising psychological dénouement. Why not accept the Duke's late conversion to marriage as the key fact of the drama, and read it backwards from there?

That concludes the analysis. I add a postscript: the play, from the same perspective, can be thought of as Barnadine's. One of the great images of Measure for Measure is of Barnadine, that unregenerate life-force, rising up from the ground to assert his own shameless existence. I am aware that a trap-door is not essential to the staging here; and Hosley, in his survey of plays designed for original performance at the First Globe playhouse, has shown that Measure for Measure did not require a trap-door.²⁸ The Folio direction in IV.iii is simply 'Enter Barnadine.' But the directors who have preferred the trap-door entrance have, I think, the root of the matter. Invulnerable to the censor, this figure of the mental underworld forces himself up into the play's consciousness to announce: 'I swear I will not die today for any man's persuasion.' Nor does he; nor does what he represents.

Notes

References are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed Hardin Craig and David Bevington (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman 1973).

¹ We need not quibble as to whether Mariana's grange is formally situated outside the city limits, or merely in the outskirts.

² Edwin Wilson, ed, Shaw on Shakespeare (New York: Dutton 1961), p 142.

³ His opening line is 'Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to th'world?'

⁴ The tendency crystallizes in two dwellings. Mariana's grange is moated; Angelo's house has a walled garden, outside a vineyard (also walled, since it has a gate). Each entrance has a lock.

⁵ J.I.M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London: Longman 1949), p 108.

⁶ Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1968), p 46.

⁷ This difficulty is not properly faced up to in E.A.M. Colman's recent The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman 1974).

⁸ The definition of 'sexual' in Webster's Third New International Dictionary is simplest: (2b)'… relating to the sphere of behaviour associated with libidinal gratification.'

⁹ Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers (New York: Basic Books 1959), II, 162.

¹⁰ J.W. Lever, ed, Measure for Measure, New Arden Edition (London: Methuen 1965), p 97.

¹¹ S. Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed James Strachey (New York: Norton 1966), p 158.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ This symbolism is cited in Freud, Complete Introductory Lectures, p 157. Colman (p 211) points out that ten columns of quotation and analogue are cited in J.S. Farmer and W.E. Henley, Slang and its Analogues: Past and Present (repr in 3 vols, New York: Kraus Reprint 1965). Among the most striking parallels in Shakespeare are Henry V, III .vii.45-72, and Antony and Cleopatra, IV .viii.14-16.

¹⁴ Partridge, p 39.

¹⁵OED gives 'privy member or members, carnal member: the secret part or parts.'

¹⁶ There is a useful general discussion in Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1972), pp 215-36.

¹⁷ See 'Problems of Knowing' in Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1972), pp 154-74.

¹⁸ William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (New York: New Directions 1951), p 284.

¹⁹ Lever, p 18.

²⁰ This element, to my observation, has been increasingly played up in recent stage productions, notably in Jonathan Miller's Measure for Measure at the Greenwich Theatre, 1975.

²¹ W.K. Wimsatt, ed, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (New York: Hill & Wang 1960).

²² The locus classicus of this view is G. Wilson Knight's 'Measure for Measure and the Gospels,' in The Wheel of Fire, 4th ed (London: Methuen 1949), pp 73-96.

²³ A view advanced (but not endorsed) by Nevill Coghill in 'Comic Form in Measure for Measure, ' Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955), p 15.

²⁴ Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London: Methuen 1968), p 327.

²⁵ See Herford and Simpson's Works, I, 142.

²⁶ Hanns Sachs, 'The Measure in Measure for Measure,' The American Imago, 1 (1939-40), p 80.

²⁷ This is true of John Barton's production (RSC, 1969); Keith Hack (RSC, 1974); Jonathan Miller (Greenwich, 1975); and Robin Phillips (Stratford, Ontario, 1975). Three of these productions left Isabella in a state of more or less anguished doubt; one (Miller's) made it plain beyond doubt that Isabella has rejected the Duke.

²⁸ Richard Hosley, 'The Playhouses,' The Revels History of Drama in English, vol III: 1576-1613 (London: Methuen 1975), pp 193-5.