[In the following essay, Ashizu examines Duke Vincentio’s poor treatment of the prisoner Barnardine in Measure for Measure, and argues against conceptions of the Duke as an ideal or godlike authority.]

Measure for Measure is certainly one of Shakespeare's most controversial works; it has elicited and continues to elicit a diversity of violently conflicting interpretations. However, no matter how various the elements and interests in these controversies, the arguments seem to converge after all on one subject—how to see Duke Vincentio. The critical commentary on the Duke falls, roughly speaking, into the following two schools. The first consists of the anti-Duke critics, including many early critics such as William Hazlitt¹ and E. K. Chambers² as well as recent ones like A. D. Nuttall:³ they regard the Duke as unpleasant or even repulsive, and find fault with his unmotivated plotting and his heartless manipulation of the others' actions and emotions. This critical view of the Duke was not staged until John Barton's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970.⁴ A second school of critics, who only started to appear in the 1930s, hold favorable views of the Duke, giving him a special dispensation which, in one way or another, resolves or dissolves the problems in his character and behavior. Most of these critics, including G. Wilson Knight⁵ and Roy W. Battenhouse,⁶ favour Christian interpretations which treat the play as a parable of the Christian doctrine in which the Duke represents God. In terms of stage history, this was the view that Peter Brook staged in his famous production in 1950.⁷ F. R. Leavis, though not Christian, also belongs in this oddly-assorted pro-Duke school when he argues that ‘the Duke's attitude, nothing could be plainer, is meant to be ours’.⁸ And so do historicists like W. W. Lawrence⁹ and E. E. Stoll,¹⁰ when they emphasize conventional elements and regard the Duke as a ‘stage Duke’. The effect of this is, once again, to endow the Duke with a special licence.

The present paper seeks to cut its way into this vital problem of how to regard the Duke—by examining a character whom many critics have simply ignored or paid little attention to in their arguments. Indeed Barnardine, a convicted murderer in prison, is a ‘bit part’, one of the tiniest roles of all the named characters in the play. We first hear of him refusing to appear, and his later appearances are limited to two occasions: in Act 4 Scene 3 he speaks no more than fifteen lines; in the final scene he appears again but remains completely silent. However, in spite of the smallness of the role, his dramatic function is significant and strikingly consistent. For everything we learn about him bears significantly on that problem of how to regard the Duke. Whatever Barnardine says, does, does not say, does not do, and also what we learn of his previous history, reflects adversely on the Duke.

If true, this in itself would be striking, and I shall remind you of the relevant details in a moment, so that you can judge for yourselves. But let me first also remind you that there is no Barnardine in Shakespeare's source materials for this play. What I am calling Barnardine's dramatic function is all the more striking because Shakespeare does not inherit Barnardine; he invents him. So why does Shakespeare want, or need, to invent Barnardine? The answer to that must be: because Barnardine has a job to do—or, as I put it earlier, a dramatic function. Any coherent account of this play must be able to explain—or must, at the very least, be compatible with some other plausible account of—what Shakespeare chose to invent. If my own account of Barnardine's significance does not seem persuasive, it would not be enough to reject it; it would need to be replaced, since we want some answer to that question, why invent Barnardine and his remarkable history?

1

We first learn about Barnardine in Act 4 Scene 2, when Angelo sends the order that Claudio and Barnardine are to be executed. Asked by the Duke who Barnardine is, the Provost informs us of Barnardine's earlier history: he is a prisoner who has been rotting in jail on suspicion of murder for nine years, without any final sentence or judgment until this moment. It then becomes apparent, although the Provost does not clarify, that the Duke himself had tried Barnardine's case, could not decide what to do when Barnardine's friends appealed for ‘reprieves’, left Barnardine in prison—and forgot all about him, so that he now needs to ask the Provost, nine years later, ‘Who is that Barnardine who is to be executed in th'afternoon?’ Really, it is not so easy to think of Barnardine's judge as the same character whom so many modern critics think of as an ideal, and even godlike, governor.

At the very least, one effect of these revelations should be to make us ponder what sort of governor Vincentio has been. In the third scene, the Duke himself admitted to Friar Thomas that the (real or presumed) crisis in Vienna was the result of his own lax government, in letting the laws ‘slip’ for fourteen years. Not until the fourth act does Shakespeare reveal specific details of what ‘lax’ government or justice might mean—in revealing the incompetence with which the Duke judged both Barnardine's case and Lucio's, which I shall discuss later. My immediate point is that to leave a prisoner rotting in jail for nine years, while forgetting his name and existence, is worse than lax.

Moreover, when Shakespeare does finally reveal these details of Barnardine's history, the light they throw on the Duke as governor is all the more harshly ironic because the revelations come not merely from the Provost but through the dialogue between the Provost and the Duke. In Shakespeare's skillful dramatization, timing and inadvertent self-revelation are both crucial. I take it that we are, or should be, shocked when the Duke cannot even remember who Barnardine is or why he has been in prison all these years—until Angelo quickly and efficiently reviews his case and arrives at a verdict which is ‘most manifest, and not denied by [Barnardine] himself’ (4.2.139).¹¹ But then, if we do find that shocking (not a sign that the Duke is godlike), we will also be shocked by the stupidity of the Duke's next question, ‘How came it that the absent Duke had not either delivered him to his liberty or executed him’, and by the hint of self-regard in his further comment that ‘I have heard it was ever his manner to do so’. And, in each of these scenes we should notice how Shakespeare is departing—deliberately, creatively, and provocatively—from his source materials. So far as the third scene is concerned, the departure involves the way the Duke himself is implicated in the supposed Viennese crisis—through misgovernment, as he himself admits. Yet he will not countenance anybody else's criticism of his judgment, as we see in his self-excusing remarks about ‘slanders’ to Friar Thomas. Similarly, when the Provost reveals one disturbing detail after another, the Duke shows no disturbance at his own mishandling of the case. If we ask why Shakespeare made these changes and innovations, various answers might be possible, but none allows an uncritical view of the Duke.

You may also notice a strikingly consistent and unique feature of Barnardine: his own attitude towards life and death is always described in terms of sleep—or, in the Provost's words, being ‘insensible’ (4.2.145). When summoned by the Provost for the first time in the play, Barnardine refuses to appear onstage because, as Claudio explains, he is

As fast lock'd up in sleep as guiltless labour
When it lies starkly in the traveller's bones.
He [Barnardine] will not wake.

(4.2.66-8)

This association of Barnardine and sleep and insensibility is even more clearly voiced by the Provost in his depiction of the obdurate prisoner:

A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep, careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality and desperately mortal.

(4.2.142-5)

Furthermore, when Pompey and Abhorson, comic hangmen, attempt to bring him out of the prison for execution, Barnardine's first reply amply demonstrates this extraordinary attitude towards life and death:

POM.
Master Barnardine! You must rise and be hang'd, Master Barnardine!
ABHOR.
What ho, Barnardine!
BAR.
(Within.) A pox o'your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are you?
POM.
Your friends, sir, the hangman. You must be so good, sir, to rise, and be put to death.
BAR.
(Within.) Away, you rogue, away! I am sleepy.
ABHOR.
Tell him he must awake, and that quickly too.
POM.
Pray, Master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.

(4.3.21-33)

This characterization of Barnardine's ‘insensibility’ is consistently developed through these descriptions of Barnardine and through his own few utterances. This in itself can be very funny, and excite an audience's laughter; yet more is in question than comic ‘relief’. Once again, Barnardine is being used to raise questions about the Duke's inauthenticity as a disguised Friar and about his love of playing games with other people's lives.

Of course, we will not see how this is happening in the play if we regard the Duke as Shakespeare's spokesman. Rather, we need to see how the dramatic design, and Shakespeare's organization of telling contrasts and juxtapositions, implicate the Duke in the extreme contrast between Barnardine's ‘insensible’ responses and Claudio's own, all too ‘sensible’—human and fearful—attitude towards death.

Barnardine is always juxtaposed with Claudio: Angelo commands the Provost to execute the two on the same day; the Duke then plans to substitute the former for the latter; in the final scene Barnardine appears onstage with Claudio, and both are silent. In Act 4 Scene 3, when the Duke pronounces Barnardine ‘unfit to live or die’, he regrets that Barnardine will not listen to the Duke's advice. However, Claudio has had the benefit of the Duke's lengthy advice in the ‘Be absolute for death’ speech, which the deeply Christian Dr. Johnson found so shallow and shocking in its impiety.¹² Claudio's first response showed some resignation;

                    I humbly thank you.
To sue to live, I find I seek to die,
And seeking death, find life: Let it come on.

(3.1.41-4)

However, within minutes of the satisfied Friar-Duke's departure, Claudio's deeper feelings about death erupt in one of the most extraordinary speeches in this extraordinary play:

Ay, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling—'tis too horrible!

(3.1.117-27)

The contrast with the ‘insensible’ Barnardine is obvious enough. Claudio's speech also passes its own dramatic comment on the kind of insensibility seen in the Duke's speech.

                                                  Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok'st, yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more.

(3.1.17-9)

Death is more than that, just as life is more than ‘an after-dinner's sleep’ (3.1.33) to anybody who feels this ‘sensible warm motion’. Claudio's trembling words tell us that the pseudo-friar can give no more than pseudo-comfort.

However, although Vincentio's words of consolation fail with Claudio, we are soon to find them realized, in a mockingly truthful way, in another figure, namely, Barnardine. Not only does he apprehend ‘death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep’; but also his insensible sleepiness passes its own comment on the pseudo-friar's advice to think of life as ‘an after-dinner's sleep’. Apart from its comic effect, the characterization of Barnardine as an ever-sleepy prisoner is, again, to question the Duke's insensitive manipulation of Claudio's life and emotion.

Claudio is not the only person to whom Vincentio attempts to preach. Shakespeare makes use of the act of preaching—a mission typical of friars—as the special occasion for implying the inauthenticity of the disguised Duke: Vincentio attempts to preach a sermon to the other two people, Juliet and Barnardine. Earlier in the play the Duke in disguise tries to preach to Juliet, Claudio's lover. Exhibiting a perfect awareness of the nature of her fault, however, Juliet cuts off his unnecessary and moralistic sermon unfinished (2.3.35-6). Interrupted in mid-sentence, the Duke reveals his incompetence as a preacher.

Barnardine more severely frustrates Vincentio's capricious scheme. After persuading the Provost to spare Claudio and to execute Barnardine instead, the Duke ‘mercifully’ talks to Barnardine, ‘Sir, induc'd by my charity, and hearing how hastily you are to depart, I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you’ (4.3.50-2). The response from the prisoner is, however, one that the Duke had never expected:

BAR.
I will not consent to die this day, that's certain.
DUKE.
O sir, you must; and therefore I beseech you
Look forward on the journey you shall go.
BAR.
I swear I will not die to-day for any man's persuasion.
DUKE
But hear you—
BAR.
Not a word. If you have any thing to say to me, come to my ward, for thence will not I to-day.

(4.3.55-63)

Barnardine's blunt refusal to die or to listen to the Duke-Friar not only spoils the Duke's neat plan, but also exposes, again, the Duke's inadequacy as a ‘friar’.

After the failure to persuade Barnardine to accept his death sentence, or even to bring him out of the prison, the irritated Duke gives the order to ‘bring him to the block’ (4.3.65).¹³ Vincentio tries to carry out his scheme coercively, in spite of his view of the prisoner:

A creature unprepar'd, unmeet for death;
And to transport him in the mind he is
Were damnable.

(4.3.67-9)

Why is the Duke so determined to execute Barnardine a few hours earlier, if he really finds Barnardine in such a mental state as this?—Because the Duke's scheme depends upon having Barnardine's head now. Only after betraying such a coercive aspect of the Duke, Shakespeare lets the Provost introduce the timely news of Ragozine's head: ‘O, 'tis an accident that heaven provides!’ (4.3.77), exclaims the Duke most suitably for a pious ‘friar’, while for the audience it is nothing but a loudly signaled contrivance that a dramatist provides. Herbert S. Weil, Jr. observes that this speech by the Duke ‘invariably brings laughter in the theater’.¹⁴ Shakespeare thus sets off the contrivance itself, by adding an extra substitute, Barnardine, to the normal plot of the substitute head inherited from the source play.

Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, one of the sources for Measure for Measure, contains the episode of the head-trick, or contrivance with the substitute head. Some critics such as Walter Raleigh and H. B. Charlton regard Barnardine as ‘a mere detail of machinery’ created as a counterpart for the substitute head in Promos and Cassandra.¹⁵ However, in their views, he was too endearing and unique a character to be destroyed by the hand of the dramatist.¹⁶ On the other hand, many other critics do not agree with ‘this rather sentimental explanation’,¹⁷ holding that Ragozine is the counterpart for Whetstone's substitute head which the Gaoler brings in. The latter opinion obviously supports my argument above. That is, Barnardine is a pure invention of Shakespeare without an origin in the source; Shakespeare chooses to create this prisoner in order to call attention to the Duke's contrivance itself, by bringing things to a point where a substitute for the substitute is needed.

After Pompey and Abhorson take Barnardine off, we never hear his voice again. The last scene allows us only to see him: however, the silent Barnardine onstage no less powerfully reflects adversely on the Duke, as we shall see in the following section.

2

Philip McGuire discusses in Speechless Dialect the final scene of Measure for Measure as ‘the most challenging and complex example of Shakespeare's use of open silence’, in which six characters conspicuously maintain silence. In no other Shakespearean comedy are so many characters silent at the very end. ‘Open silence’ is, according to McGuire's definition, a silence ‘whose precise meanings and effects, because they cannot be determined by analysis of the words of the playtext, must be established by nonverbal, extratextual features of the play that emerge only in performance’.¹⁸ What is Isabella's response when she suddenly discovers that her brother is still alive? In performance she cannot not respond, yet the text does not tell us how she responds—whether she is speechless with joy, or shows some more troubled or even indifferent response. Similarly, the text does not tell us how she responds to the Duke's proposal. Does she look pleased or startled, or even shocked? When the characters leave the stage, does she go off with the Duke, or with Claudio, or does she leave by herself?

In McGuire's view, Barnardine's silence when the Duke so suddenly pardons him is ‘open’ in that it can be played differently, without any contradiction to Shakespeare's original text, within the particular context of different performances. As McGuire observes, Barnardine's silence can be played as an act of defiance—as in Keith Hack's 1974 production for the RSC—which casts into doubt the nature of the Duke's mercy and of his own staging of himself as an ideal governor.¹⁹ It can also be played as a sign of gratitude or repentance—as in Barry Kyle's 1978 production for the RSC—which affirms the Duke's power and mercy.²⁰

This conception of ‘open silence’ is especially helpful in considering the final scene—with so many carefully orchestrated silences. However, McGuire does not open up a new path in interpreting Barnardine's silence; despite his intelligent and clarifying analysis based on different productions, McGuire goes no farther than to observe that Barnardine's silence ‘has the potential to confirm, cast into doubt, or totally undercut the Duke's mercy toward him [Barnardine]’.²¹ But is it really sufficient only to say that there are different alternatives for interpreting Barnardine's silence?

Whatever took place on stage when Measure for Measure was performed by the King's company at Whitehall on 26 December 1604, we may be quite sure that Barnardine's silence would not—could not—have been represented as being both an act of defiance and an act of submission. If in doubt about how to respond to the Duke's pardon, the actor who first played Barnardine could have asked Shakespeare about his dramatic conception, whereas the modern actor, or critic, or reader cannot do that. However, this does not mean that we shall never know what is meant by Barnardine's silence or that there is no point in seeking for it.

Let me again remind you that Barnardine is a pure invention: Shakespeare would not have created the silent Barnardine in Act 5 as well as that boisterous Barnardine in Act 4 without any dramatic purpose. Our best way forward in interpreting Barnardine's silence is to consider its place within Shakespeare's elaborately designed final scene. This involves considering how two different issues come together. On the one hand, there is the local and immediate issue of whether Barnardine's response to the pardon shows that he is as ‘insensible’ as ever; we have seen how the text is, as it were, awkwardly silent about Barnardine's silence. On the other hand, Barnardine's response should not be considered in isolation; he is only one of four recipients of ducal mercy in the final scene. The others are Angelo, Claudio, and Lucio—none of whom seems grateful for the ‘mercy’. If Barnardine's silence were an expression of gratitude, for example, it would actually contrast with the others.

Here we might notice how the opposed interpretations of Barnardine's silence in the Hack and Kyle productions correspond with—or rework—that disagreement I mentioned earlier between the two, anti-Duke and pro-Duke ‘schools’. Keith Hack clearly supposed that Barnardine remained ‘insensible’ or even aggressively defiant. In other words, Barnardine's behavior at the end is consistent with his earlier behavior, and once again brings into focus a (more than ever) harsh view of the Duke's inadequacies. To pardon and release a convicted and unrepentant murderer is at odds with any serious conception of justice.

In sharp contrast, Kyle was driven to use stage business to establish what the text itself nowhere explicitly suggests—that Barnardine is grateful and repentant. This reading might be compared with that of Darryl Gless, who looks upon Barnardine's silence as a sign of his ‘acquiescence in the Duke's sentence’ since ‘it contrasts strongly with his earlier obstreperous desire to hear “not a word”’.²² Gless supposes that Barnardine ‘may be willing, like his yet-unborn kinsman Caliban, to “be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace” (Tempest 5.1.294-5)’—and adds, very revealingly, that ‘If this likelihood should prove wrong, then at least the Duke will have erred in the right direction’.²³ That shows how indifferent Gless is to practical and legal issues: if Barnardine is unrepentant and kills somebody else, the Duke will not have erred in the right direction. But Gless's and Kyle's readings align them very clearly with my second ‘school’ of modern, pro-Duke critics.

Kyle's only warrant for staging a sudden transformation in Barnardine is not, in the strict sense, textual, but interpretative; he is disposed to think that the Duke's extension of mercy to Barnardine must be justifiable. The pardon cannot be justified unless Barnardine is suddenly transformed, so we must assume that he suddenly transforms, and stage the scene accordingly. This quite inevitably involves using stage business to establish what the text itself leaves uncertain.

One response to this Gless-Kyle reading can be helpfully focused by considering another ‘open silence’ which McGuire does not include among his six examples—that of the Provost, who is onstage, though silent, when the Duke pardons Barnardine. As you may remember, the Provost is the only person (apart from Angelo) who shows a thorough grasp of the history and character of this murderer; virtually all the information about Barnardine comes from him whereas the Duke remembers nothing. Furthermore, the Provost is presented as ever impartial, consistent and sensible in his words, deeds and judgment. The capriciousness in the Duke's reversal of the sentence becomes all the more striking if we remember the firmness of the Provost's earlier judgment of Barnardine:

Th' one [Claudio] has my pity; not a jot the other [Barnardine], Being a murtherer, though he were my brother.

(4.2.61-2)

Having fetched Barnardine, the Provost is likely to stand beside or close to Barnardine. When the pardon is granted to the prisoner, the Provost would be visible onstage: we could not expect his response, though speechless, to be approving. This stagecraft seems to be incompatible with the pro-Duke reading, and therefore such a production as Kyle's would need some further stage business to erase the incompatibility.

As I observed earlier, Barnardine's sudden transformation could make the Duke's pardon of Barnardine seem less unjustifiable. Whether there is such a transformation is precisely what is in dispute. When the Duke has sent the Provost for Barnardine—‘Go fetch him hither, let me look upon him’ (5.1.469)—one effect of what immediately follows is to make it more unlikely that any mere (nonverbal) gesture of repentance from Barnardine could seem adequate, after hearing in Angelo the accents of true penitence and self-disgust:

I am sorry that such sorrow I procure,
And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart
That I crave death more willingly than mercy:
'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.

(5.1.474-7)

Again Shakespeare's timing is very telling; only after this speech does Barnardine appear, to whom the playwright could have given exactly the same speech if he wanted a penitent Barnardine. The Duke talks to the prisoner:

Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul
That apprehends no further than this world,
And squar'st thy life according. …

(5.1.480-2)

This brief summary of Barnardine's earlier behavior, directly opposed to the deep penitence in Angelo's preceding speech, offers a striking contrast between Angelo and Barnardine; the former penitently craves ‘death more willingly than mercy’ whereas the latter, far from craving death, has stubbornly refused to be executed. Even if Barnardine were given Caliban's speech—promising to ‘be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace’—it would sound very weak after Angelo's agonized self-condemnation.

For McGuire, ‘The contrast between the two characters deepens when Barnardine silently accepts from the Duke the life-giving mercy that Angelo has just explicitly rejected’. I do not think the contrast works in that way; rather, Angelo's repentance emphasizes the absence of any corresponding feeling in Barnardine. Thus, the context of Barnardine's appearance makes it much more difficult to read repentance in his silence and therefore to stage the scene accordingly.

The most crucial issue in considering Barnardine's silence is of course the content of the Duke's pardon itself. And it is, again, likely to stress the critical view of Vincentio within the context above examined. While Barnardine stands by silently, the Duke begins with ‘There was a friar told me of this man’ and goes on talking;

                                                                                          Thou'rt condemned,
But for those earthly faults, I quit them all,
And pray thee take this mercy to provide
For better times to come …

(5.1.482-5)

First of all, you may notice here Vincentio's unnatural introduction of Barnardine. The line ‘There was a friar …’ indicates that the Duke evades mentioning the fact that he himself tried Barnardine nine years ago. Yet this might be remembered by any spectator who is inclined to ask ‘why does Vincentio need to speak about Barnardine in this way?’

Another point should be made on the lines cited above: it is obvious to everybody but the Duke himself that the pardon sounds problematic or even ridiculous in moral and legal terms. Barnardine is, most importantly, a self-confessed murderer whose guilt is ‘most manifest, and not denied by himself’ (4.2.139). And he has not shown the slightest hint of repentance up to the point where he is pardoned, even if he should repent later. Is Vincentio's pardon convincing as an explanation for releasing a murderer like this? Certainly not; sparing such a murderer simply means that he is free to kill again. However, the Duke thrusts the future responsibility for that onto Friar Peter, nonchalantly saying ‘Friar, advise him, I leave him to your hand’.

We can question the issue in another way: if Vincentio can grant to Barnardine such a disturbingly benevolent mercy as this, why was he ready to bring Barnardine ‘to the block’ in Act 4 Scene 3 when he needed the substitute head? Indeed, as Graham Bradshaw points out, ‘If the Duke's subsequent decision to pardon Barnardine is not to seem unprincipled, capricious and stagy, we need to know what principles apply in Act 5 which did not apply in Act 4, when the Duke wanted a substitute head’.²⁴

As I suggested earlier, Barnardine's silence should also be examined in a larger design of the final scene, in which the Duke passes judgment on four men—not only Barnardine, but also Angelo, Claudio, and Lucio. The first pardon, to Barnardine, is only the start of what A. D. Nuttall calls the ‘orgy of clemency’—one of the most controversial episodes of the play:²⁵

[To Isabella.] If he be like your brother, for his sake
Is he pardon'd, and for your lovely sake,
Give me your hand, and say you will be mine,
He is my brother too. But fitter time for that.
By this Lord Angelo perceives he's safe;
Methinks I see a quick'ning in his eye.
Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well.
Look that you love your wife; her worth worth yours,
I find an apt remission in myself; …

(5.1.490-8)

Here the Duke spares the other two characters, Claudio and Angelo, who were also to undergo the death sentence.

Claudio's offense is not taking but making a life—begetting a child by his beloved woman before they are legally married. This is typical of what the Duke regards as Vienna's critical condition. Here we are faced with another contradiction in the ducal pardon to Claudio. If Vincentio really thinks, as he says in Act 3 Scene 1, that the present Viennese crisis needs reformation, why does he not punish Claudio according to the ‘strict statutes and most biting laws’? This mercy to Claudio, which looks very much like a return to the old laxity, seems to suggest that Vincentio was not really concerned with the Viennese crisis; he simply needed a good reason for embarking on his scheme for the sake of caprice and curiosity. Then, Claudio would have been the Duke's greatest victim, who has had to undergo various kinds of mental and physical adversity—the imprisonment, the terrible fear of death, the swearing words of his sister. Claudio neither complains of those adversities, nor thanks the Duke for the life-granting mercy, nor talks to his sister; instead he keeps complete silence. Considering what he has been through in the play, however, it is extremely hard to take Claudio's silence for an expression of joy or gratitude.

Angelo's case is more complicated: first, he has only planned to kill a man and rape a woman, for which he is deeply penitent and even wishes to die; secondly, he has abandoned his betrothed, but this is not a legal crime, if inexcusable in moral terms, since Mariana could not fill her part of the contract and there was no physical consummation. This case seems to need much fuller examination, but one simple point is to be made here. Angelo does not welcome the Duke's mercy on him, for, firstly, he has just expressed his sincere wish to ‘crave death more willingly than mercy’. Moreover, it would be an awful torture for him to marry a woman, Mariana, whom he not only does not love but also has once betrayed. Thus considered, it should not be hard to read what is in Angelo's silence.

Vincentio next turns on Lucio, suddenly changing his tone:

And yet here's one in place I cannot pardon.
[To Lucio] You, sirrah, that knew me for a fool, a coward,
One all of luxury, an ass, a madman …

(5.1.499-501)

Lucio is guilty not only of begetting an unlawful child, like Claudio, but also of slandering a ruler, which was commonly punished by death at the time this play was written. Lucio's fathering of an unlawful child is another strong indicator of Vincentio's misjudgment in the past. Earlier in the play, Mistress Overdone testifies to Escalus: ‘Mistress Kate Keepdown was with child by him [Lucio] in the Duke's time; he promis'd her marriage. His child is a year and a quarter old come Philip and Jacob’ (3.2.199-202). Moreover, Lucio himself confesses to the disguised Duke that he was tried by the absent Duke (4.3.169-70), but managed to deceive the Duke through forswearing (4.3.172-4). Nevertheless, Vincentio never mentions, throughout the last act, his former trial of Lucio or its failure. In Lucio's case, as in Barnardine's, the Duke either does not, or does not want to, remember his previous, mistaken judgment. Earlier in the play, the Duke boasts to the Provost of his ‘ancient skill’ of reading brows (4.2.153-5). The revelation of his misjudgments of Lucio as well as Barnardine, however, makes this pride of the Duke sound stupid or even blasphemous, because that ‘skill’, which claims a kind of quasi-divine omniscience, was certainly of no help when the Duke was trying the two cases.

Vincentio then proclaims, in mitigation, that although he carries out the punishment for the unlawful child, he will forgive Lucio's slanders. What the Duke gets from Lucio for this mercy (as he believes) is an ungrateful complaint about the Duke's judgment: ‘Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging’ (5.1.522-3). This boisterous response, which makes a vivid contrast to the others' silence, triggers another problematic statement from the Duke, who instantly answers ‘Slandering a prince deserves it’. This clearly shows that it is for the slanders, not for the child, that the Duke wants Lucio to suffer punishment; the Duke still does not or cannot forgive those slanders. Is this obsession with slanders compatible with the image of a duke as an embodiment of justice and virtue? In all likelihood, he is merely revenging himself, in the name of justice, for those unprincipled slanders and absurd gossips that earlier wounded his inner pride and self-esteem. Thus, the Duke's judgment of Lucio is also a significant reminder of how impossible it is to regard the Duke as a godlike figure or an ideal governor.

The above analysis of the four cases points sharply to the consistent features in the design of the final scene. Firstly, it is a succession of the problematic and disturbing cases, each of which invokes questions, in one way or another, about the Duke himself and the adequacies of his ‘orgy of clemency’; secondly, you may notice a conspicuous absence of any expression of approval from any of the four—Barnardine's, Claudio's and Angelo's silences and Lucio's complaint. Moreover, none of these responses is what the Duke expects. These features become more manifest when Vincentio completes his spectacular demonstration of justice with the final speech of a conventional comic ending (5.1.525-39); to that speech, however, not only the four men but Isabella, Mariana, Juliet, the Provost and Escalus make no verbal responses of the kind that Vincentio would expect. This elaborate stagecraft—the succession of disturbing judgments followed by no suitable response up to the very ending—quite inevitably makes us uneasy about Vincentio's judgments at the conclusion, for it strongly suggests that all the problems and issues are not really resolved, but only seem to be ‘resolved’ through the Duke's spectacular stage of justice and mercy.

Without doubt, the silent presence of Barnardine plays a significant part in this larger, elaborate design of the scene; not only does his pardon come first, but it is also the most obviously problematic case. Consequently, it is likely to trigger the critical awareness of the audience, silently but bitterly pointing at the various contradictions and problems in the ducal judgment at the conclusion. Through this highly complicated stagecraft, Shakespeare raises this crucial issue: we should not respond to the final scene as some kind of demonstration of ideal justice, but regard it as the ironic culmination of that critical view of the Duke which Barnardine has up to this point made all the more pressing.

If Shakespeare's attitude to the Duke had been that of Wilson Knight and later pro-Duke critics, he would not have invented Barnardine. Or, to reverse Leavis's judgment: the Duke's attitude, nothing could be plainer, is not meant to be ours.²⁶

Notes

1. William Hazlitt, ‘Characters of Shakespeare's Plays’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe. Vol. 4. (London and Toronto, 1930), pp. 345-349.

2. E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1925).

3. A. D. Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’, Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968), pp. 231-251.

4. Barton's production questioned the by then dominant interpretation of the Duke as a godlike figure. Most attention was paid to the final scene, in which Isabella defiantly refused to respond to the Duke's marriage proposal. For further details, see Joseph C. Tardiff, ed., Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 23 (1994), pp. 318-325.

5. G. Wilson Knight, ‘Measure for Measure and the Gospels’, in The Wheel of Fire (London, 4th ed. 1949), pp. 73-96.

6. Roy W. Battenhouse, ‘Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement’, PMLA 61 (1946), pp. 1029-1059.

7. Brook's production owed much to Wilson Knight's interpretation. According to H. S. Weil, Jr., Brook's prompt-books deleted a number of significant passages, including a group of lines that suggest that the Duke is either confused or conniving. For further details, see Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 23, pp. 296-307.

8. F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London, 1952), p. 163.

9. W. W. Lawrence, ‘Measure for Measure’ in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (London, 1931), pp. 80-114.

10. E. E. Stoll, ‘All's Well and Measure for Measure’, in Shakespeare to Joyce: Author and Critics; Literature and Life (NY, 1944), pp. 235-68.

11. All citations from Measure for Measure in my text are to The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).

12. Arthur Sherbo, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare (New Haven and London, 1968), pp. 174-216.

13. The Folio attributes this line to the Duke, while some modern editors give it to the Provost. I do not find the latter modification necessary.

14. Herbert S. Weil, Jr., ‘The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook's Measure for Measure’, in Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 23, p. 304.

15. The quotation is from Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare (London, 1907), p. 148.

16. See Raleigh, pp. 148-9, and Charlton's Shakespearean Comedy (London, 1938), pp. 215-7.

17. J. W. Lever, Introduction, Measure for Measure (The Arden Shakespeare, London, 1965. Rpt. London, 1987), p. 89.

18. Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985) Introduction, p. xv.

19. For fuller details of Hack's production, see Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 23, pp. 325-330.

20. For Kyle's production, see also Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 23, p. 383.

21. McGuire, p. 65.

22. Darryl Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton, New Jersey, 1979), p. 229.

23. Gless, p. 229.

24. Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare's Scepticism (Ithaca, NY, 1991), p. 170.

25. Nuttall, p. 239.

26. Since this essay went to press, Harry Berger Jr. has published a long and important essay on Duke Vincentio in Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford, 1997), pp. 335-426.