[In the following essay, Rappaport responds to critics who view Measure for Measure as lacking unity, contending that there is sufficient thematic coherence in the drama's resolution.]

O place and greatness! millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee. Volumes of report
Run with these false, and most contrarious quest
Upon thy doings; thousand escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dream,
And rack thee in their fancies.

(IV.i.59-64)

In her call for papers for the 1980 Shakespeare Association Convention's seminar on Measure for Measure, Barbara Hodgdon wrote the following sentence, which may stand as a representative postulate of problem-play criticism: “Because of its ambiguities, Measure for Measure resists cohesive treatment.” The assumption contained in this statement and the conclusion it comes to were seconded in some way by nearly all the participants in the seminar and seem to be almost universally subscribed to at the present time. Yet if the statement is true, the inevitable condition of the modern reader's relation to the play is antagonism. Our perception of ambiguity must interminably battle our longing for coherence, in our minds and in countless published skirmishes, with no peace in sight. Some critics, like L. C. Knights, feel merely a “discomfort” in the play's ambiguities (222). Others, like Ann Barton, go so far in pursuing and identifying not only its ambiguities, but its difficulties, roughnesses, stylistic contrasts, illogicalities, obsessions, and savageries, that even the vague hope for a unity produced by the play's “noncohesiveness” (as Ms. Hodgdon puts it) is dashed and only confusion remains. Those of us who love the play and are moved by it again and again may therefore be justified in inquiring whether in such assessments the incoherence is not traceable less to the play itself than to the comprehension of its audience and readers. If it is, we ought properly to distinguish those conflicts that Measure for Measure actually dramatizes from the unwarranted conflicts between us and the play that arise from our own preconceptions. Perhaps when we recognize that the villain ambiguity lies in ourselves, the supposed ambiguity of the play will vanish and peace between our perception of ambiguity and our longing for coherence, between our imagination and Shakespeare's play, will be restored.

About Isabella at the end of the play Ms. Barton writes,

Like Angelo, she has arrived at a new and juster knowledge of herself and also, by implication, of a world of compromise and imperfection which has, at least to some extent, to be accepted on its own terms.

(546)

This statement suggests that the ultimate knowledge to be gained in the play, and by implication in life, is a provisional acceptance of compromise and imperfection, an attitude in keeping with Ms. Barton's view of the end of the play as a muddle of compromised principles, defeated intelligence, and clashing values (547-48). But reading the scene again we are compelled to ask, is it not in Christian love rather than in compromise that Isabella kneels at the end? Surely her craving for justice for Angelo, a craving even the Duke pretends will not be altered, is converted not in the name of a provisional acceptance of imperfection but in the name of mercy. (The Duke himself uses the word about her kneeling.) Isabella forgives Angelo, moved by his repentance, by Mariana's plea of love, and by recognition of her own significant (though innocent) part in his fall. And she is right to do so. It is the best gesture of one who all along has had “spirit to do any thing that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit” (III.i.205-207).

Angelo, in the same scene, surrenders not merely because he has been caught: he recognizes his pride and destructive self-will as sin, honestly repents, and becomes for the first time capable of true justice in calling for the death penalty to be executed upon himself:

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.

(V.i.474-77)

His words here are neither ambiguous nor deceitful, any more than are his confessions in the soliloquies of Act II. Nor is Shakespeare writing in careless haste (Knights, 232) or succumbing as Ms. Barton claims, to the pressures of “comic form” (548). He is providing, rather, a polished and morally serious resolution. Where before the seemer sacrificed justice to pursue his own corrupt will, now he is able to surrender his will and his very life in the name of justice.

The Duke, whose goal all along has been not to study or torment but to guide corrupt Vienna toward the true harmony of justice and mercy and of virtue and desire, at last succeeds. In the first scene he lent Angelo “our terror” and “our love”: “Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue and heart” (I.i.44-45).

In the last scene Isabella is called to enact the truth that, at a certain point, mercy is just. And Angelo is forced to learn that there is no true justice without mercy. Both have been tested in the crucible of mortality through the false government of Vienna by Angelo and the false government of Angelo by his vice. Through a suffering, not caused but overseen by the Duke, all have come to recognize and celebrate the mysterious but now revealed truth that love makes justice and mercy one.

If these perceptions of the last scene are correct and exemplary, as more than one critic has argued, then the question the play actually raises is not what unity can there be in all this ambiguity but what is it that causes so many of us to see ambiguity in this communion? What is wrong with our vision when in looking at mercy and repentance we can see only compromise and acceptance of imperfection, when we call the “probing deep into the dark places of society and the human mind” realism but the dramatization of sublime motions of the spirit mere fairytale? (Barton, 548).

The fault with our vision is the characteristically modern axiom of thought underlying it—that the world is accidental and that meaning, in life and in plays, is a merely human (and so equally accidental) product and not, therefore, truly meaningful. The bleakness of this pervasive axiom gives rise to the conviction that seeing through all pretensions to meaning is the only true seeing there is, that only “the dark places of society and the human mind” are true and the light places, wherever they appear, must necessarily be illusions. This conviction, when it becomes a habit of mind, is known traditionally as despair. If there can be nothing but accidental meaning, then all claims for transcendent meaning must be false. If only misery is true, happiness must be suspect. Building on these unconscious assumptions we then refuse to, or rather cannot, take seriously mercy in Measure for Measure. Before we ever experience its reality as it is revealed in the play, we are certain it must be a “blatant fiction.”

The results are that we both fail to receive the play as it is and feel compelled to re-invent it according to the variety of our own conflicted images of reality while at the same time compelling Shakespeare, against his will, to validate the particular kind of misery and despair that is in fact ours alone. As F. R. Leavis puts it,

Taking advantage of the distraction caused by the problems that propose themselves if one doesn't accept what Measure for Measure does offer, [the bad prepotent tradition] naturally tends to smuggle its irrelevancies into the vacancies one has created.

(237)

The “bad prepotent tradition” is that which

has placed Measure for Measure both among the ‘unpleasant’ (‘cynical’) plays and among the unconscionable compromises of the artist with the botcher, the tragic poet with the slick provider of bespoke comedy … that incapacity for dealing with poetic drama, that innocence about the nature of convention and the conventional possibilities of Shakespearean dramatic method and form, which we associate with the name of Bradley.

(234)

In this tradition, the happy ending is either denied (Isabella does not with a gesture, accept the Duke's proposal; she may beg for Angelo's life but cannot truly forgive him) or defined out of existence (the author has weakly succumbed to the pressure of a fairytale ending in place of what should have been a realistic one—leaving, presumably, each character with a grudge or dead). Isabella becomes a heartless prude, the Duke an arbitrary tyrant, Lucio and the bawds exemplary exponents of teeming life, and Angelo everyman only to the point where he repents, whereupon he is abandoned as one more fairytale. It is certain that any hope for finding coherence in Measure for Measure within this tradition is doomed, for not only can Shakespeare not be both the authoritative dramatic genius we axiomatically take him to be and the botcher of Measure for Measure, but no play can possibly cohere for a reader despairs of all unconflicted meaning.

In fact, however, the common conclusion, based upon all the supposed ambiguities, that the shadow of the tragedies hangs over Measure for Measure is simply false. There is, first of all, no such shadow of the tragedies as the statement implies. The tragedies themselves reveal as much, containing not only a vision of evil but also as thoroughgoing a vision of good (albeit presented under a different aspect) as that to be found in the comedies. It is true that the play is different in tone and mood from both a farcical comedy like The Comedy of Errors and from a love comedy like As You Like It. The threat of death that hangs around the edges of those plays is at the center of this one. But it is not far in spirit from The Merchant of Venice or The Winter's Tale. At the same time, like them, though it is not at all bleak or conflicted as a whole, it does dramatize profound, painful and potentially deadly conflicts—to the soul as well as to the body.

Angelo is torn between pride in his reputation and the lust that belies it. Vice drives him the whole sinful route through false seeming, lechery, and murder to become the embodiment of injustice. Only the Duke preserves him from doing real damage. The general discovery of his sin destroys his pride (for his reputation, in which he takes pride, is exploded). He is then free to embrace true justice. For Claudio, the apparent conflict, whether or not to preserve his life at the expense of his sister's chastity, merely serves to reveal his real conflict between faith and despair, between love for Isabella and selfishness. This inner conflict is resolved in his acceptance of the Duke-Friar's appropriately tuned advice, a resolution from which he falls away momentarily only because of the false (and falsely embraced) hope constructed by Angelo's evil conditions. (As we shall see, understanding the terms of this challenge to Claudio's virtue is essential to understanding Isabella's reaction.)

As for Isabella, she undergoes no moral conflict at all (in the sense of having to overcome any evil in herself) but rather suffers the challenge and the pain that come with consistently responding with complete virtue to the variety of evil conditions presented to her by Angelo's villainy and to the good that is brought out of them through the Duke's endeavors. In conversation with Angelo (II.ii & iv) she is the pure voice of reason, justice, truth, and mercy. In conversation with Claudio (III.i) she is at first properly supportive of his virtuous resolution to die (“There spake my brother”). She is ready to sacrifice her life if doing so could save his (“O, were it but my life”), and we are to believe her, as Claudio himself does. She is compassionate (“Alas, alas!”) toward his fear of death, which, as the images he uses reveal, is really fear of damnation, a form of despair and Claudio's worst sin so far. And when his fear turns to reprehensible pleading (for he does become precisely a “faithless coward” and a “dishonest wretch” when his despair makes him tempt his sister to sin for his sake), she properly resist with righteous anger. Her agreement to the bed trick later is, in the circumstances, exactly what the Duke calls it, an act of virtuous boldness. And her forgiveness of Angelo at the end is the crowning act of her goodness.

Isabella's reaction to Claudio's pleading is perhaps more troublesome to the modern sensibility than anything in the play. When we read her outburst,

Die, perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed.
I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,
No word to save thee,

(III.i. 143-46)

we are tempted to compare it with the moment in Act V when she kneels to beg forgiveness for Angelo and to conclude that Isabella has been changed. She has grown, according to one interpretation, out of a selfish and prudish harshness into a newly acquired humility; or, according to another, out of an honest if distasteful-sex revulsion into a fake and superficially comic coupling instinct. Even Robert G. Hunter, in his otherwise excellent discussion of the play, likens Isabella to Angelo and finds “an armor of unyielding righteousness” and “an instinctive turning to death as a way out of life's difficulties” behind Isabella's “lack of charity in her harsh judgment of the human weakness of Claudio.” He claims that Isabella's solution to the problem of Claudio's sinful weakness is his death” (218-23).

But to argue in these ways is to misunderstand what evokes the different reactions in Isabella. The contrast is not between a healthy and a sick or an innocent and a guilty response to “man's sinful nature.” The true contrast is between the virtuous reaction to penitence and the equally virtuous reaction to sin, for the Claudio that pleads for his life here, while he is very like the Angelo of the previous scene, is very unlike the Angelo Isabella forgives in Act V. The difficulties of seeing Isabella's virtue at this moment are dispelled in Philip Thompson's discussion of the lines:

[Their] meaning is an unexpected one. … The statement is certainly opposed to charity, but you could say that in such a situation an act of charity could be expected only of a saint. What some see in Claudio as only a natural weakness [Isabella] feels as a mortal assault, and it is for this violent crime that she personally condemns him to death, as anyone but a saint would condemn to death his murderous assailant at the moment of attack. Claudio's crime here is like Angelo's in being the fruit of weakness, and it is as bad as Angelo's in its disregard of everything but the weakness inspiring it. To gain the power to repudiate his crime against her (his only sin), Claudio needed to feel the fury of her swift and devastating judgement (“judgement” itself).

Her prayers for his death … are … prayers for his good death. Forgiveness-of-sins and judgement are not contraries: reflecting, I forgive any man any sin against me because I wish all sinners (every man) to overthrow the government of sin and to find the salvation established by divine forgiveness; suffering at the hands of sin, I resist it with the judgement and the hope that “the wages of sin is death,” and Claudio concurs.

As judgement itself in the person of the Duke moves Angelo to repent in Act V, so in the person of Isabella it moves Claudio here. It is Claudio, then, who has become for the moment an Angelo. Isabella has not.

Two additional passages require specific mention since, together with her angry response to Claudio's plea for life at the expense of her chastity, they constitute the only cause for the accusations made against Isabella even by those who admit her fundamental goodness and her final forgiveness: they are her first words to the nun Francisca wishing “a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood” (I.iv. 1-5) and Lucio's repeated exhortations to her to speak again and less tamely to Angelo in Act II, Scene ii.

Isabella is accused of a proud and uncompassionate moral rigor in wishing the most strict of the orders of nuns to be stricter still and in being willing to settle for Angelo's initial pronouncement without further resistance. But here is another example of the tendency to fill the space left by the rejection of what Shakespeare has given us with the problematic inventions of our own minds. Only one already doubtful that the desire for a perfect strictness could be a sign of piety and devotion would read Isabella's first lines as other than a sign of just that. And those who can entertain the possibility of such a representation of piety but reject that interpretation are reading backward, looking at the introduction of Isabella through eyes already clouded by what the “bad prepotent tradition” has had to say about Isabella's later actions.

Likewise, that Isabella needs Lucio to prod her to defend her brother is not a sign of “the frosty lack of sympathy of a self-regarding puritanism” (Knights, 222), but rather a sign of her innocence of that morally corrupt and unredeemedly passionate world which has called her from the gates of a haven of holiness to do battle with it in the name of goodness. She does need prodding, not because of unfeeling detachment but because of her unfamiliarity with and innocence of the powerful evil and rank injustice hidden behind the very authority she ought to be able to (and does at first) trust. Isabella is not an unfeeling prude learning the riches of teeming life but a lively innocent confronting the cold hard fact of sin, learning that there are seemers. Lucio knows better at this moment not because he loves more compassionately but because he is cynical about all authority, the Duke's as well as Angelo's, and seeks to preserve license against all preventions, tyrannical or just. And it is precisely because she does love her brother, and distrusts the justice of the sentence upon him, that Isabella puts off her meekness, responds to Lucio's encouragement, and confronts the authority of Angelo.

Finally, the Duke himself, like Isabella, is guiltless and exemplary and in no way internally conflicted, and like Isabella he has been slandered by those who ought to know better than Lucio. Even a critic who acknowledges that the Renaissance held ideal government to be an instance of imitatio dei and who observes the Duke's similarity to the absent testing master of the Gospel parables, as does Louise Schleiner, nonetheless accuses the Duke of spiritual usury, of cruel manipulation and of a comically ironic failure to be God (227-35). Arguing that the play “shows what a delicate balance exists between morality … and the potent drives” of unredeemed men like Pompey and Barnardine, between the Duke's craft and Angelo's vice, Ms. Schleiner asks, “Why must the play be either dark or sententious?” She answers, in effect, that thanks to the magic of irony it is really both. But to think of good and evil, of God's mercy and men's sins, as equal opposites, to settle for “a comedy of a well-intentioned ruler with the rather quixotic notion of actually imitating the New Testament God in his government” (235), is again to pretend that the incoherence we observe because of our own cynicism is in fact the coherence of a reductive Shakespearean irony. It is to get the allusions but miss the point.

And the point is that Renaissance sentences, as Renaissance audiences well knew, often contain not merely sententiousness but truth. True to life goodness in a dramatic character is not for them a contradiction in terms. The Duke never does think of himself as imitating God (is not proud) but is meant to be seen by the audience as like God (just, merciful). Nor does he manipulate the souls of Vienna in the name of some kind of egotistical spiritual usury. (Here Ms. Schleiner gets even the allusion wrong.) Rather, he leads them to become more worthy the Creditor before whom all men are, as the Lord's Prayer worded it in Shakespeare's day, debtors. His confession that he has been too lax in his government is not a dramatic complication to be pounced on as a sign of his dubious authority or inconstant nature; it is rather a revelation of his humility in blaming others' sins on himself and of his gentle character in resisting severity as long as possible.

The critic continues to miss the point when she argues that the Duke, to be justified as a ruler and as a man, ought to be even more like God than he is and that the play ought not to be called “straightforwardly doctrinal” because it is unthinkable that one of the goats on Judgement Day would interrupt God with “bawdy, self-serving interjections,” as Lucio interrupts the Duke in Act V. To argue thus is to misunderstand both Christian doctrine and Shakespearean drama. The former is presented as mere theater so irrelevant to life that the latter is doomed to choosing between it and truth. If doctrine is present, so the error inevitably concludes, it can only be that Shakespeare means us to see it ironically (Schleiner, 232).

It is true, of course, that no ruler, no man, can transform the dark sinfulness of men. But, according to Shakespeare's drama, the divine love can, and it does so not by offering an unattainable ideal but by working actively in the lives of men, inspiring just rulers and transforming sinful villains. Nor does truth to life, as Shakespeare employs it, preclude the “straightforwardly doctrinal” representation of divinity thus working in the world. Shakespeare steers between our ideas of pure allegory and slice-of-life realism, combining poetic allusions to the rich complexity of Christian texts and tradition with a dramatically convincing articulation of character. Only the conflicted modern sensibility will demand that Shakespeare confine himself to writing either mystery plays or Ibsen. Only in a peculiarly modern species of despair will critics assume that doctrine and life are absolute contraries which can never coexist in the same play (or in the same world) unless irony wed them. Shakespeare did not assume so, and the Duke, like any other Shakespearean character rightly understood, is proof. He is a man moved by justice and mercy, and only thus does he stand poetically and dramatically for the One in whom justice and mercy have their source.

The Duke defers telling Isabella that Claudio is alive not in cruelty but in goodness and for two complementary reasons. First, Claudio must be thought to be dead by all, including Isabella, if her own pleading for justice, Angelo's repentance, and the Duke's judgement are to have full force. Second, the Duke wants, just as he says, “To make her heavenly comforts of despair, / When it is least expected” (IV.iii. 110-11)—that is, to reward her not merely with the life of her brother but with his resurrection. Claudio's reappearance becomes, for the audience as well as for the characters, an image of all heaven's reunions, of the comfort that despair cannot imagine. Thus Shakespeare, so far from botching the play or cheating us with an “ironically employed theological pattern” (Schleiner, 227), is in fact demonstrating that not only sin but its wages, death itself, can be transformed by God's grace; that all trials are at last redeemed in being revealed as mercy working for our good. Act V is not heaven debunked by the world but heaven foretold in it. It is the slanderous fantastic Lucio, benightedly imagining his prince to be no better than himself, who calls the Duke “the old fantastical Duke of dark corners.” The audience, enlightened by the play, ought to see more clearly: the Duke only enters dark corners to bring light. Not to see this is to miss the whole dramatic point, to be guilty of studying to ironic, novelistic tatters what was written to be dramatically apprehended as deep and simple truth.

One additional example of the supposed incoherence of the play lies in the apparent ambiguity of the Duke's attitude to unsanctified sexual union. He calls for Claudio and Juliet to confess the sin of their deed and then arranges for Mariana to perform the same deed with Angelo. The ambiguity disappears, however, when we recognize that while the acts may be the same, their spiritual contents are opposite. The parallel is crafted precisely to dramatize that the real issue in both cases is the right relation of sexuality to sacrament. Claudio and Angelo have both been guilty of divorcing the two and thereby of betraying each his betrothed, Claudio through his passion's impatience and Angelo through his more vicious denial of love; one in the act of sexual union, the other in withholding himself from that union and the consummation it implies. The begetting of life and the consequent threat of death force Claudio and Juliet to recognize their sin and to repent. Angelo comes to recognition and repentance by finding that it is not after all Isabella but Mariana who has satisfied his lust. (That she has satisfied it is a demonstration to him, and to us, of the illusory nature of his compulsion to possess Isabella.) Both Claudio and Angelo have learned that the only worthy love is the love that defeats lust in sacramental union and that it alone constitutes their true happiness.

In the end, it is love that resolves all the real conflicts in the play—between justice and mercy, sexuality and sacrament, will and conscience, tongue and heart. And the resolution consists in the recognition that where love governs there is no conflict between these things. This is why the pairings of the last scene are in no sense the theatrical “disease” Ms. Barton accuses them of being (548). Such an accusation can grow only out of an utter misreading of what has gone before, the sort of misreading that finds at the foundation of Isabella's character an “irrational terror of sex” (546). But Isabella has no such negative terror. She has, rather, a positive love of chastity which, for Isabella as for Shakespeare, includes both the virginity of the convent and the sacramental union of the marriage bed. It is not sex but sin that Isabella would shun, and not out of false antipathy but out of a true love of the good. Her movement toward marriage from the celibacy of the convent does parallel Angelo's movement toward it from his pretensions to icy virtue, but only in outward form. In spirit they are complementary opposites. Hers is a progress to redeemed earthy love through all virtues: his is a progress to the same through sin and repentance.

The marriages at the end are thus the appropriate symbols, the incarnations, and the joyful rewards of the harmony of love. Isabella accepts the Duke's loving proposal (on stage must be shown to do so with a gesture), for it does import her good. Angelo has received both mercy and his life, and will now properly value both, because of Mariana. And because of her faithful love, and for the sake of their sworn, consummated, and now finally acknowledged and sanctified union, he will learn to forgive even himself. These marriages are no more fairytales (again in Ms. Barton's negative sense) than Angelo's falseseeming or Claudio's moment of despair. Nor does the Duke's influence on events bespeak chaos in heaven. Rather the resolution of all the play's painful conflicts in sacramental marriage embodies and prefigures the harmony of heaven itself.

There is no desperation and no confusion of values in Measure for Measure. And Shakespeare did not write problem plays. The play is, in fact, a clarification of values, a demonstration of the truth that “with what measure ye mette, it shal be measured to you againe” (Matthew 7:2, Geneva). And let us be sure what this means in the play. It is not merely an expression of the principle of an eye for an eye, whose apparent abrogation by repentance and forgiveness in the last scene many critics find so hard to swallow. Rather, it means that as the measure of sin will be the measure of punishment, so the measure of repentance will be the measure of forgiveness. As justice will requite sin, so mercy will requite penitence. (We may add, as ambiguity will require doubt, so coherence, at least in Shakespeare, will requite faith.) In the Gospel itself it is not the plucking out of eyes that is being discussed but the redeeming of their sight:

Hypocrite, first cast out the beame out of thine owne eye, and then shalt thou se clearely to cast out the mote out of thy brothers eye.

(Matthew 7:5, Geneva)

In the recognition of one's own fallibility and the forgiveness of the other's lies the harmonizing of justice and mercy. The Duke and the Friar, as the quick changes of the last scene impress upon us, are one.

In seeing both the mote of Claudio's sin and the beam of Angelo's, the Duke is a representation of Divine Providence (as accusers and defenders of the play both claim), but no more so than any fictional ruler who has succeeded in removing the beam from his own eye. And Isabella is a representation of the sanctified human soul, but no more so than any fictional heroine who always responds with the particular virtue called for by the moment. Her responses, meekness and boldness, argument and outrage, courage and patience, and finally forgiveness, all reveal a soul answering in right measure to the civil and good measures that confront her. She is an appropriate wife for the Duke, for they are of one mind in goodness. Thus it is precisely the coherence of virtue that Shakespeare has made wonderfully visible in Measure for Measure, a coherence which the Duke and Isabella embody, which Claudio and Angelo learn, and in which, if we will only permit ourselves, we may in full measure rejoice.

Works Cited

Barton, Ann. Introduction to Measure for Measure. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974.

Hunter, Robert. Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

Knights, L. C. “The Ambiguity of Measure for Measure.” Scrutiny 10 January 1942.

Leavis, F. R. “The Greatness of Measure for Measure.” Scrutiny 10 January 1942.

Schleiner, Louise. “Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure.” PMLA 97 1982.

Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. The Riverside Shakespeare.

Thompson, Philip. Letter to the author, Nov. 1, 1981.