SOURCE: Lanier, Gregory W. “Physic That's Bitter to Sweet End: The Tragicomic Structure of Measure for Measure.” Essays in Literature 14, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 15-36.

[In the following essay, Lanier presents a structural analysis of Measure for Measure, seeing in its divided form “a juxtaposition of two dramatic modes, tragedy and comedy, carefully poised to create a cohesive, resonant unity.”]

In 1949 E. M. W. Tillyard bisected Measure for Measure into potentially tragic verse and dissolutely comic prose; some years earlier G. Wilson Knight asserted that the symbolic sequence of transgression, judgment, and redeeming mercy provides an innate structural integrity.¹ This polarity in critical responses has proved to be nearly as enduring as the play itself. Cynthia Lewis provides a short summary of this division in her recent article:

Readers who, like Harriett Hawkins, find the play's ending “not only aesthetically and intellectually unsatisfying, but personally infuriating,” usually see Measure for Measure as split in tone, structure, and viewpoint. … On the other hand, many readers see Measure for Measure as unified. Arthur Kirsch, who sees Measure as a radically Christian play, concludes that the Duke's secret plotting represents the hidden workings of Providence. …²

Lewis' argument, based on a consideration of “Duke Vincentio not as a plot device or a Providential figure, but as a human character,”³ is a solid and welcome answer to a number of recent excoriations of Measure for Measure. Richard Wheeler's assessment is, perhaps, more indicative of the prevailing voice:

The ending of Measure for Measure does not “playout” earlier developments, it plays them down; it looks back to the previous action with an averted, mystifying gaze that has its emblem in Vincentio's anxiety-denying movement from one character and one issue to another in the final scene. The failure of these characters (and these issues) to respond to him—as in Isabella's silence and the silence of Claudio and Angelo—mirrors Shakespeare's inability to find an ending that responds fully to the whole action. The kind of integration of inner impulse with external reality that is established in a successful play, and which provides a paradigm for the comic action of As You Like It, is not achieved in Measure for Measure. … Instead of clarifying either positively or negatively, the relations between comic art and experience, Shakespeare seeks unearned reassurance in a comic ending that cannot fully acknowledge previous developments in Measure for Measure.⁴

I strongly disagree with Wheeler's statement that Measure for Measure fails to provide an ending that “responds fully to the whole action,” and I do not believe that the “integration of inner impulse with external reality” defines a successful play. Rather than judging this controversial play by noting its failure to fit into a preconceived notion of what it should be, I think it would be more fruitful to examine the play's disposition, to see what the structure of the play itself reveals. Measure for Measure is, structurally, a tragicomedy. It is a juxtaposition of two dramatic modes, tragedy and comedy, carefully poised to create a cohesive, resonant unity.

But we need not allegorize Measure for Measure into a redemptive pageant with the Duke as Christ-like regisseur to discover its unity. To do so, in fact, obscures the structural division fundamental to the play's essence. The structure of Measure for Measure is, indeed, sharply divided: eight tragic scenes cast the characters into catastrophe; a medial scene wrenches the action about; eight comic scenes restore social harmony. Moreover, as Tillyard noted, the shift from tragedy to comedy precisely coincides with a shift from verse to prose.⁵ Spatially, as Northrop Frye has said, Measure for Measure presents “a dramatic diptych of which the first part is a tragic and ironic action apparently heading for unmitigated disaster, and the second part an elaborate comic intrigue which ends by avoiding all the disasters.”⁶ We should, then, approach Measure for Measure as we would approach a diptych altar painting: we should look for correspondence, balance, resonance, and continuity of theme between structural elements while comprehending the essential contrast between and separation of halves. The integrity of Measure for Measure is created through just such a correspondent balance of discontinuous parts. A careful equipoise of antithetical elements informs the play's intrinsic structure; contrast, not similarity, is the dominant mode. The tragic actions, textures, and themes that initiate the play find their measure and fulfillment in the inclusive comic denouement. A fundamental resonance binds tragic fragmentation to comic cohesion and achieves a unified balance through the correlation of contrasting parts, and the main element of that resonance is the temperance introduced into the play's action by the Duke.

The first half of Measure for Measure carefully establishes a tragic pattern—the conflict of inflexible wills that leads to the disintegration of social order. Claudio tenaciously clings to a “weary and loathed worldly life” regardless of the cost; Angelo indulges the tyrant of his “sensual race,” assured of exploiting his office without retribution; Isabella, by steadfastly preserving her chastity, drives the play towards the tragic resolution of violation or violent death. But comedy lurks in the shadows. When Isabella, Claudio, and Angelo have locked themselves into tragic confrontation, the “mad fantastical Duke of dark corners” steps forward and conjures a comic ending. With “cold gradation and well-balanced form,” the Duke tempers conflict into concord, thereby recreating stability in Vienna. Significantly, the Duke's method is recognizably comic. The disguises, deceptions, substitutions, and choreographed spectacles he employs are counterparts to Rosalind's festive manipulations, not Iago's vicious plots.⁷ The action and texture of the play invert once the Duke applies “Craft against vice.” The play initially sweeps us along with concern for the bloodshed, outrage, and death which threaten the characters but concludes with festive, ceremonial, and almost ritualistic marriages. And that emblematic inversion is the essence of Shakespearean tragicomedy.⁸ As the play progresses we should be aware that Shakespeare is gently coercing us to subordinate our engagement with the feelings of the characters to our comprehension of their emblematic movement within the larger pattern of the play's dramatic structure.⁹

Claudio's arrest for his affair with Juliet—perhaps a benign form of sexual license but trangression nonetheless in Angelo's eyes—initiates the tragic movement. The opposition of liberty to restraint provides the pattern for succeeding tragic complications in the play:

LUCIO.
Whence this restraint?
CLA.
From too much liberty, my Lucio. Liberty,
As surfeit, is the father of much fast;
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint.

(I.ii.116-20)¹⁰

Surfeit causes restraint with an almost binary exclusiveness. Claudio, unaware of moderation, expresses his dilemma in antithetical terms: surfeit vs. fast, scope vs. restraint. Further, the remainder of Claudio's speech implies that humans are naturally intemperate, unwilling and unable to control their appetites:

                                                                                Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.

(I.ii.120-22)

Man is not merely frail but severely flawed, a slave to his rapaciousness and doomed to actively seek his “proper bane.” Such a description, emphasizing both the appetite's abrogation of the reason and the inevitable destruction that results from that imbalance, presents man as a tragic figure, a life-long calamity who, fallen, can only fall further. Claudio's rhetoric establishes the tragic model followed not only by himself but by other characters in Measure for Measure. In each case the character moves away from moderate actions towards excessive reactions, whether it be to excessive restraint (Isabella and, initially, Angelo) or excessive liberty (Claudio, Lucio, and the fallen Angelo). Without proper government to curb the pursuit of the “thirsty evil,” disintegration on both the individual and social levels inexorably occurs.

A spreading dissolution of the Viennese community is evident quite early in the play, and it is firmly linked to Claudio's excessive libertinism. What appears to be on the periphery of the tragic concerns in Measure for Measure, the comedy of Lucio and his companions, contains a second pattern central to the play's tragedy:

LUCIO.
Thou conclud'st like the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scrap'd one out of the table.
2 GENT.
‘Thou shalt not steal’?
LUCIO.
Ay, that he raz'd.
1 GENT.
Why, 'twas a commandment to command the captain and all the rest from their functions: they put forth to steal.

(I.ii.7-14)

The pirate captain proves an apt example for Lucio and Pompey, even for Claudio and Angelo. Each had a “function” to follow; each dismisses the law as his convenience (we may read appetite) demands. Lucio habitually flaunts the statutes prohibiting fornication and slander to pursue his moment's fancy. Pompey swears that pandering would be a lawful trade “If the law would but allow it” (II.i.224) and refuses correction, promising to follow Escalus' advice “as the flesh and fortune shall better determine” (II.i.250-51). Neither character will allow any law to impede the indulgence of their “flesh and fortune”; their resolute devotion to gratification demonstrates the accuracy of Claudio's simile comparing man to rats. Claudio also exhibits this disregard for the law, admitting that he lacked the denunciation of “outward order” when he took possession of Juliet's bed (I.ii.138). And, lest we are hastily inclined to exonerate that mutually committed offense, we must admit that Claudio and Juliet's sexual relationship parallels Lucio's escapade with Kate Keepdown. The more chilling resonance, however, links Pompey to Angelo. Pompey would have the law allow pandering; Angelo will have it allow rape. When Angelo determines to give his “sensual race the rein” (II.iv.159), he fulfills the pattern started by Lucio's joke about the sanctimonious pirate. Angelo is in the position to raze any law from the table; he can fulfill Pompey's wish and force the law to allow any transgression he fancies. No law alone sufficiently deters man's natural tendency to glut his appetite. In Pompey's words, “they will to't” unless one manages to “geld and splay all the youth of the city” (II.i.227-30). Again the language and logic are binary, entertaining only the extremes of indulgence or eradication. What began as comic by-play becomes a major tragic theme, an indication of the tightly conceived balance between comic and tragic elements. Man's innate impulses drive him to gratify his animalistic appetites, and his reason, the law over his body, is swept aside. Man's proper balance seeks a median between ascetic denial and unrestrained sensuality. Hence, proper government would seek to temper desires, to channel excess into appropriate vessels. “Firm abstinence,” however, is as dangerous as “sharp appetite,” and as Lucio and Claudio are guilty of excessive liberty, there are those guilty of excessive restraint—Angelo and Isabella.

An icy reserve cloaks Angelo from his first entrance. The Duke's famous “heaven and torches” (I.i.27-47) speech is less remarkable for its Biblical allusions than for its penetrating characterization of Angelo. The image distinguishes an outer, radiant charity from an occult self-absorption, and firmly links Angelo to those who inordinately husband their resources. The Duke later articulates this implied duality:

                                                                                Lord Angelo is precise;
Stands at a guard with Envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows; or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone.

(I.iii.50-53)

Angelo's controlled appearance is the antithetical complement to Lucio's licentious behavior. Yet the Duke suggests a kinship between them, that stubborn self-control thinly covers the blood and appetite Angelo must possess. Unfortunately, Angelo remains blind to his hypocrisy, and, thinking himself the paragon of humanity, imposes his unnatural restraint on the inhabitants of Vienna.

Once he has assumed the Duke's position, Angelo governs with the inflexible severity of a self-appointed and self-righteous saint. The rigid standard of austerity becomes Angelo's measure of justice:

You may not so extenuate his offence
For I have had such faults; but rather tell me
When I that censure him do so offend,
Let mine own judgment pattern out my death,
And nothing come in partial.

(II.i.27-31)

Angelo's response to concupiscence is eradication, in Pompey's terms to “geld and splay all the youth of the city,” including himself. This repression presents the antitype to Claudio and Lucio's pattern. Imposed restrictions based on inhuman self-denial cannot eliminate the offenses of sexual license since that desire is ingrained in man's nature. The infliction of “stricture and firm abstinence” (I.iii.12) only further emphasizes the opposition of license to restraint. Moderation is required, but Angelo's justice does not recognize a via media.¹¹

Although the Duke has admonished Angelo to “enforce or qualify the laws / As to [his] soul [seemed] good” (I.i.65-66), Angelo wields strict enforcement, tyrannically demanding that all adhere to his personal asceticism. And Claudio rightly complains that Angelo's sword of justice cuts capriciously:

Thus can the demi-god, Authority,
Make us pay down for our offence by weight.
The words of heaven; on whom it will, it will;
On whom it will not, so; yet still 'tis just.

(I.ii.112-15)

The conflation of just authority with the inscrutable, perhaps arbitrary, design of heaven is striking. It seems that Angelo, swollen in his power, elevates temporal and limited prerogratives to a level beyond their normal scope. Angelo sees himself as the “demi-god, Authority,” a posture confirmed by Escalus:

… my brother justice have I found so severe that he hath forced me to tell him he is indeed Justice.

(III.ii.246-48)

The stringent puritanism Angelo professes allows him to tyrannize with a righteous indifference. Angelo claims to judge with an immaculate perception, mistakenly combining the immutable justice of providence with the petulant (and maybe malevolent) authority of man. Significantly, Angelo betrays his limitations, seizing only “What's open to justice” (II.i.21)—Claudio's simple and benign case—while impatiently leaving Escalus to sort out matters with the obfuscating Pompey. Juxtaposed, these two judgments point up the haphazard nature of Angelo's oppression. The “words of heaven” do not fall where they will; only the whims of a self-deceived deputy do.

Angelo is not the only character whose self-deception unnaturally restrains the appetite. Isabella denies her humanity as well. Whereas Angelo assumes affected gravity and precise control to restrain his impulses, Isabella relies on the seclusion of the convent to avoid her sexuality. Immediately after the Duke laments the lapse of strict statutes in Vienna, we find Isabella about to embrace even stricter regulations. Moreover, though the rules of the convent are stringent, Isabella thinks them lax. This dissatisfaction seems over-zealous, and one may conclude that Isabella desires to proscribe the world, or perhaps just the male sex, with consecrated walls.¹² Isabella, wishing for a “more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare” (I.iv.4-5), and Angelo, imposing his puritanic law without mitigation, pursue the same ideal. Both demand an unyielding and religiously based code that would prohibit all illicit (and most licit) sex. Both “rebate and blunt [their] natural edge / With profits of the mind, study, and fast” (I.iv.60-61), and expect the same from others. But neither the puritan's gown nor the nun's habit can unconditionally suppress the “wanton stings and motions of the sense” (I.iv.59). Their repressions are only momentary, and we should expect their sexual desires to erupt violently.

The Duke has previously hinted that Angelo's self-deceptions may not last: “Hence shall we see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be” (I.iii.53-54). We are not then surprised that Angelo succumbs to his blood's appetite when he meets Isabella. What should be emphasized, though, is how Shakespeare chooses to present this action. Shakespeare depicts Angelo's fall into concupiscence in explicitly tragic terms, signaled by the fragmented internal landscape of the psychomachia. The calm smugness of Angelo's assertion, “'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall” (II.ii.16-17), markedly contrasts with the frantic search for identity a few lines later:

                                                                                                              Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough,
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? O fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou, or what are thou, Angelo?
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good?

(II.ii.168-75)

The “strong and swelling evil” (II.iv.6) of Angelo's innate desires will no longer submit to restraint. Clearly, the rise of Angelo's blood indicates his position as the play's tragic protagonist, and we expect his fall from his false seeming to initiate a series of violent incidents. Indeed, by choosing to give “his sensual race the rein” (II.iv.159), Angelo converts tyrannous restraint into licensed tyranny. Angelo's attempt to extort sexual intercourse from Isabella fulfills Pompey's wish. As the “demi-god, Authority,” Angelo allows whatever transgression he desires, confident that the outward “austereness of [his] life” (II.iv.154) shall overweigh Isabella's accusations. And as Angelo undergoes tragic fragmentation, so does his society: “Thieves for their robbery have authority, / When judges steal themselves” (II.ii.176-77).¹³ Angelo's attempt to restrain the world in his own image fails, and Vienna becomes a society where faults are still

… so countenanc'd that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,
As much in mock as mark.

(V.i.318-20)

Though Angelo is determined not to make a “scarecrow of the law” (II.i.1), his repression does not eradicate license from Vienna.

As the play's action then shifts from the court to the prison, the play's tragic texture is distinctly felt. Angelo and Isabella now stand in diametric conflict: Angelo demands Isabella's chastity and Isabella will not yield. Yet the same obsession with sensuality that leads Angelo to give up his restraint leads Isabella to excessively restrain her sexuality, as her rejection of Angelo reveals:

                                        … were I under the terms of death,
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.100-04)

A noble sentiment, but couched in unfortunate images.¹⁴ Isabella has long safeguarded her chastity with inordinate compulsion, and when Claudio suggests she yield to Angelo, Isabella's response becomes a perverse sexual hysteria:

                                                                                                              O, you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame? What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair:
For such a warped slip of wilderness
Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance,
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.135-46)

No one, I think, condemns Isabella for resisting Angelo's immoral pressure.¹⁵ But the frenzied viciousness of those last four lines damns her. Isabella is in “probation of a sisterhood” (V.i.75); to pray for the death of her brother at the least contradicts the duty of her Christian charity. The last remaining social bond—between brother and sister—violently rips apart. The choices Angelo, Isabella, and Claudio have made create a series of forces moving inexorably towards tragic conflict. The only options are dilemmatic. Isabella either sacrifices her chastity and moral sanctity or Claudio dies. Since either action is irreversible, both would satisfy the logic of the play's tragic structure. The binary opposition that pervades the play leads to tragedy's brutal choice: rape or death. And lacking the necessary dramatic indications for a possible alternative, we can only ponder which shall occur.

Thus the tragic impetus of Measure for Measure swells, capped by Isabella's furious outburst. The elements of the play are precisely arrayed on either side of the gulf separating liberty from restraint, the increasing dismemberment of order demanding a violent and irrevocable action to complete the tragic structure. Comedy, however, ensues. The “old fantastical Duke of dark corners” (IV.iii.156) steps forth and assumes control of the play's action, converting tragedy into comedy.

The Duke's emergence as the director of Measure for Measure's action marks the shift from tragic to comic panel in the plays diptych structure. His appearances had been brief and intermittent; after he approaches Juliet his presence on stage is almost continuous.¹⁶ The metamorphosis of tragedy into comedy requires a catalyst, and the Duke alone possesses the freedom and authority to effect that change. The Duke's secular authority in Vienna stands without question. His “terror” is only lent to Angelo, and he resumes it with stunning elan during the comic reversal. Moreover, the Duke's adoption of a friar's robe, along with the clerical habits he appropriates (shriving Juliet, confessing Claudio and Mariana), indicates at least a partial assumption of ecclesiastical authority as well.¹⁷ But more important than his ethical role as head of church and state is the Duke's freedom of movement, more exactly his freedom of influence. Only the Duke ranges across all the strata of Vienna's social levels, contacting (and manipulating) characters from Mistress Overdone and Abhorson to Escalus and Angelo.¹⁸ As we observe the Duke initiate his design, we become aware of his role as the play's chief manipulator, placing each piece in meticulous order to realize the conclusion he creates. To assert that the Duke envisions a comic ending, though, perhaps oversteps the boundaries of the direct evidence in the play. Measure for Measure lacks the number of revealing soliloquies Hamlet conditions us to rely on for glimpses of motivation. The accumulated evidence of the Duke's actions must provide most of our insight. From the opening of the play the Duke seems to be striving to alter the tendencies of his subjects:

I say, bid come before us Angelo.
What figure of us, think you, he will bear?
For you must know, we have with special soul
Elected him our absense to supply;
Lent him our terror, drest him with our love,
And given his deputation all the organs
Of our power.

(I.i.15-21)

Certainly the “special soul” that elects Angelo reveals a complex purpose in the Duke's mind, especially since he passes over the more reliable (and better suited) Escalus. The Duke may expect Angelo's renowned rigor to effectively check the license in Vienna (I.iii.35-43), yet he also suspects that rigor to be fallacious (I.iii.53-54). By dressing Angelo in borrowed “terror” and “love,” the Duke disguises Angelo in a manner analogous to the comic disguises of As You Like It and Twelfth Night where disguise becomes a means by which identity is discovered, not hidden. Viola's “man's attire” (TN I.i.SD) evokes the actual humanity hidden behind the refined facades Orsino and Olivia erect; Rosalind's “doublet and hose” (AYL III.ii.215) elicit a natural gentility from Orlando's tongue-tied rusticity. Further, the disguises allow Rosalind and Viola insight into their identities as well. Viola learns of her role in the play's concatenation of “place, time, and fortune” (TN V.i.250), and Rosalind learns that her feminity makes As You Like It's “doubts all even” (AYL V.iv.25). Similarly, Angelo's assumption of “absolute power and place” (I.iii.13), surrounded with images of dressing, provides the spark of self-awareness that leads to his recognition of the “strong and swelling evil / Of [his] conception” (II.iv.6-7). The consequence of Angelo's perception, the “monstrous ransom” proposed to Isabella, indicates a potentially tragic result from a comic motif.¹⁹ But the Duke's freedom to “Visit both prince and people” (I.iii.45) supplies the means to forestall tragic consequences if the Duke exercises sufficient ability and foresight.

By disguising himself as a friar, the Duke places himself in a position to direct the action covertly, subtly guiding Vienna's inhabitants towards proper government.²⁰ This direction has two purposes: to avert Angelo's abuses, and to re-erect the true authority that lapsed fourteen years earlier. Importantly, the method the Duke adopts corresponds to the advice on ruling given by James I in the Basilicon Doron:²¹ “I neede not to trouble you with the particular discourse of the foure Cardinall vertues, it is so troden a path; but I will shortly say vnto you; make one of them, whiche is Temperance, Queene of all the rest within you.”²² To govern properly in Vienna or London is to exert temperance. Temperance supplies the means by which Measure for Measure's tragedy is converted into comedy since it permits the binary oppositions that have informed the tragic structure to be avoided. The death sentence Angelo decrees for Claudio appears tyrannous (and not just to us, but to Escalus and the Provost as well) because it lacks sensible moderation: “Vse Iustice, but with suche moderation, as it turne not in Tyrannie: otherwaies summum ius, is summa inuria.”²³ The strictures of the law must be tempered when the circumstances demand or else only dilemmatic options can occur, options which, as we have seen, have only tragic resolutions. We are certainly meant to contrast the rigor of Angelo's inflexible judgments and their inevitable tragic potential for both accused and accuser with the Duke's mitigation. Angelo informs Escalus:

You may not so extenuate his offence
For I have had such faults, but rather tell me,
When I that censure him do so offend,
Let mine own judgement pattern out my death,
And nothing come in partial.

(II.i.27-31)

Again we hear Angelo's characteristic division of the problem. One either remains spotless and lives, or slips and dies: “'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall.” The Duke's perception of justice is strikingly different: “I find an apt remission in my self” (V.i.496). The Duke can afford to remit forfeits because he is a man of temperance. Escalus' appreciation for the Duke's moderate temper is, in fact, the most accurate evaluation of the Duke's nature in the play:

DUKE.
I pray you, sir, of what disposition was the Duke?
ESC.
One that, above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself.
DUKE.
What pleasure was he given to?
ESC.
Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at anything which professed to make him rejoice. A gentleman of all temperance.

(III.ii.225-30)

As J. W. Lever notes, “the true ruler or judge was not the most holy or zealous of men, but he whose reason and moderation exalted him above mere pity and passion.”²⁴ Under the Duke's moderate direction the dilemmatic impasses created by Angelo are resolved.²⁵ The Duke's temperate method provides the peripeteia which inverts the tragic oppositions into comic concordance.²⁶ The Duke deflects the tragic possibilities of Isabella's rape or Claudio's death, and, by deflecting these possibilities, admits comic resolutions.

Only after he overhears Claudio and Isabella shriek to an impasse does the Duke begin to exert his influence and alter the direction of the play's action. For his first device the Duke pulls a convenient Mariana out of his cowl. Mariana's introduction marks a significant change in the play's dramatic architecture. The first two acts of Measure for Measure proceed with a smooth verisimilitude in presentation that rivals Lear or Othello or Coriolanus. Shakespeare sculpts the action with an exact eye on the probability of event and character and refrains from staining the dramatic reality of the play. Angelo's tyrannous behavior arises naturally from the combination of his persona and circumstance, just as Isabella's fervid determination to stay chaste and Claudio's plaintive desire to stay alive arise naturally from theirs. But the precipitant introduction of a character who just happens to have a previous connection with Angelo, and who just might be willing to “stead up [Isabella's] appointment” (III.i.251) with Angelo, smacks of contrivance. I do not, however, think this mars the play. Rather, the introduction of elements without consideration to their plausibility (like the concurrent shift from verse to prose) indicates a transformation in the representational mode. In the second half of Measure for Measure Shakespeare abandons the careful causality he used to create the tragic tensions, choosing to allow fortuitous coincidence to establish the critical outlines of the structure. After the crisis in the prison—with Mariana suddenly materializing, then passing undetected in Angelo's bed, and with heaven itself providing a convenient head when no suitable substitute could be obtained—Measure for Measure reads much like Cymbeline or Pericles. The playwright's interest here lies not with psychological veracity, but with the movement of emblematic characters within the denotative structure of the action. Shakespeare chooses to present a suggestive pattern rather than a realistic probability. As Measure for Measure progresses, characterization becomes subservient to form and each character's importance becomes a function of his position in the play's architectural pattern. Mariana, for example, inverts the established pattern of tragic excess into a new comic form. Mariana's love has lost its proper management: “[Angelo's] … unjust unkindness, that in all reason should have quenched her love, hath, like an impediment in the current, made it more violent and unruly” (III.i.240-43). The image of the flood exactly captures the indomitable violence of passion that staggered Angelo. Further, reason's inability to withstand or control sexual impulses indicates the severe need for proper direction. Mariana's state parallels Angelo's but lacks the potential for tragic results. More importantly, her presence provides the balance for Angelo's excess. The flows of desire that plague both characters are channeled; the impediments that augment their excessive tendencies are removed. Bringing Angelo and Mariana together curbs the intemperate license in both:

We shall advise this wronged maid to stead up your appointment, go in your place. If the encounter acknowledge itself hereafter, it may compel him to her recompense; and by this is … the poor Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled.

(III.i.250-56)

Thus Mariana measures (the primary sense of the Duke's “scaled”)²⁷ Angelo by functioning as Angelo's comic antithesis. Angelo's sexual impulses, consciously restrained, erupt without control and force him to attempt a brutal crime. Conversely, Mariana's desires, though frustrated, emerge beneath the Duke's temperate guidance and are channeled toward the social balance implied by Shakespeare's favorite image of social harmony—marriage. Mariana's importance to the play's structure derives, therefore, from her pivotal position in the pattern. Her willingness to accept Angelo averts Isabella's tragic violation and anticipates the inclusive comic denouement.

We know that Mariana's presence can temper, perhaps even redeem Angelo; we are less certain about Isabella. Isabella's need for moderation, though, is certain. Her psychomachia is less overt than Angelo's, but the sensual imagery that creeps into her language indicates an inordinate sexual repression, and the vehement tirades she lashes Claudio with betray her quick temper. The Duke himself assumes the task of instructing Isabella in her own humanity. Although he could inform Isabella of Claudio's preservation from Angelo's treachery, the Duke chooses not to, preferring to

… keep her ignorant of her good,
To make her heavenly comforts of despair
When it is least expected.

(IV.iii.108-10)

We first notice that the Duke defers the revelation until a more dramatic moment, just as he delays the public acknowledgement of Angelo's tryst with Mariana until the moment for proper recompense. This postponement is partly structural—Shakespeare desires to include as much as he can in the comic recognition for maximum theatrical effect. But another, perhaps more fundamental, reason remains. Isabella must be purged of the tendency towards tragic excess, just like Angelo and everyone else. Isabella lacks the Christian charity, even the Christian reflection, a future votarist of St. Clare should habitually exhibit. Isabella's ire surfaces clearly when the Duke tells her that Claudio has been executed: “O, I will to him and pluck out his eyes!” (IV.iii.119). The Duke trenchantly replies: “This neither hurts him, nor profits you a jot. / Forbear it therefore; give your cause to heaven” (IV.iii.123-24). Heaven should have had Isabella's cause immediately. Her novice's habit notwithstanding, Isabella demonstrates neither temperance nor charity. Before the Duke gives her “heavenly comforts,” she will learn both.

The most perspicuous indication of the Duke's desire to employ “cold gradation and well-balanc'd form” (IV.iii.99) is his single soliloquy. True authority and proper government emanate from the moderate balance of remission and repression:

He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe:
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue, go:
More nor less to others paying than by self-offences weighing.

(III.ii.254-59)

These lines are the central expression of the “philosophy of balance and correspondence on which the play is founded.”²⁸ They speak of an equitable temperance, of the just measure of rigor and mercy, and of divine standards and human fraility.²⁹ Extreme positions, either Angelo's repression or Lucio's license, fundamentally imbalance the social structure. And it remains imperative for the representative of heaven's authority to establish and maintain that balance. We notice that the poetry itself supports this conclusion. The octosyllabic couplets (the only verse in a goodly stretch of prose, a definite indication of its importance) are paired, signalling its formal symmetry. Further, the couplets contain carefully counterpoised units: severity and holiness, the individual and society, knowledge and the action springing from that knowledge. And if we follow the soliloquy through, we discover tragedy and comedy balanced in the same fashion:

Craft against vice I must apply.
With Angelo tonight shall lie
His old betrothed, but despised:
So disguise shall by th' disguised
Pay with falsehood false exacting
And perform an old contracting.

(III.ii.270-75)

The craft of an artist employing devices counteracts the vices leading to tragedy. Beneath the comic motif of mistaken identity—which is the essence of Mariana's substitution for Isabella—we again find the pattern of tragic potentialities forestalled by a figure who creates comic possibilities. The “falsehood” of Mariana's disguise, by consummating the “old contracting” of their betrothal, prepares for the marital festivities that conclude the play and that presage new birth, not death. Angelo's impulses continue to trap him into committing tragic actions (he sends the warrant for Claudio's death to hide his culpability), but he will be forced into a comic resolution by the pattern of the play, now firmly under the Duke's temperate control.

The comedy of Measure for Measure culminates in Act V. A “physic / That's bitter to sweet end” (IV.vi.7-8), the pageant functions as a purge and restorative, negating the consequences of the tragic impulses without eliminating the memory of them. This carefully plotted episode is the comic counterpart to the major action of Act II—Isabella's attempt to rescue Claudio from Angelo's decree, and Angelo's extortionary demand.³⁰ The contiguity between the acts is furthered by the exact recurrence of theme: Angelo is guilty of Claudio's offense, and Angelo's sentence becomes the crucial focus of the pivot from tragedy to comedy. The contrast between locales is a less obvious but critical correlation between Acts II and V. Angelo and Isabella confer privately, within chambers; the Duke ensures his proceedings are both public and well attended. Act V is best regarded as a spectacle of justice, complete with actors (the Duke, Friar Peter, the Provost, and, to a point, Isabella) who have prepared parts.³¹ The Duke arranges the entire event so that the denouement becomes an emblematic performance of temperate government.³²

Speaking as if he were playing the part of a prologue, the Duke ceremoniously opens the pageant of justice in Act V. The painstaking formality echoes the careful protocol of the play's opening lines, thus signalling a completion of one cycle of the play's action: the Duke resumes the authority he lent Angelo and ends his surreptitious direction of events. Although Shakespeare's genius for characterization still obtains, this scene is the structural antithesis to the plausible tragedy of Acts I and II. The characters' actions are subservient to the comic pattern, and though occasional moments of spontaneity indicate partially realistic events, complex psychological motivations are replaced by symbolic postures. The Duke even blocks the initial actions as if he were a stage manager. His gestures (“Give we our hand,” and “Come Escalus, / You must walk by us on our other hand” [V.i.17-18]) lend a masque-like stateliness to the episode. Moreover, the Duke's language reveals a preoccupation with dramatic artifice:

O, but your desert speaks loud, and I should wrong it
To lock it in the wards of covert bosom,
When it deserves with characters of brass
A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time
And razure of oblivion. Give we our hand,
And let the subject see, to make them know
That outward courtesies would fain proclaim
Favours that keep within.

(V.i.10-17)

The language indulges in rich grandiloquence and vibrant imagery, qualities unknown in the Duke's pedestrian prose of the previous two acts. It is almost as if Act V metamorphoses into a royal entertainment staged for our edification and delight. Further, as we might expect in a royal masque, the elegant poetry contains a duality of purpose. The Duke extends courteous greetings and thanks but also darkly denounces the hypocrisy of external appearance belying internal reality. We note the oppositions between a “covert bosom” and “characters of brass,” between “outward courtesies” and inwardly kept “Favours.” The Duke presages a revelation of Angelo's occult behavior which has become deadly only because of its need for secrecy.³³ The entire pageant, indeed, is designed to “let the subject see, to make them know” of Angelo's duplicity. But the Duke intends only recognition of, not retribution for, that duplicity. The Duke's comic craft has averted the tragic impulse; to demand punishment for Angelo's transgressions would only revert comedy to tragedy.³⁴ Moderation of actions remains the Duke's goal, and by publicly exposing Angelo's vicious and unrestrained disposition, the Duke may guide him (and his subjects) to conduct his life in a more temperate fashion.³⁵

The action of Act V unfolds reiteratively: previous scenes and textures, once tragic, are now recast as comedy. Isabella's histrionic demand for “Justice! Justice! Justice! Justice!” (V.i.26) inverts her previous plea for mercy before Angelo (II.ii.49ff). Although Angelo's treacherous behavior has ensured our approval of Isabella's fervent demand for redress, the scene communicates none of the deadly impact that surrounds the contest for Claudio's life. Act V's structure allows only a spurious and dramatic threat to Angelo's life, just as the structure of The Merchant of Venice permits Shylock only to menace Antonio without ever placing him in danger of actual bloodshed.³⁶ We know Claudio to be safe; Angelo, therefore, is safe. A second inversion maintains this comic perspective. Isabella has implored Angelo, and most eloquently, to show Claudio mercy:

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgement, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that,
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.

(II.ii.73-79)

The appeals to the elements that normally constitute the comic perspective—the common heritage of man and his shared suffering, the redemption and acceptance of the fallen, the general allusion to the reconstituted man in St. Paul's “man new made”—increase the tragic pitch in the first acts because there they are denied. Conversely, Isabella's desire for strict rigor—“… for that I must speak / Must either punish me, not being believ'd / Or wring redress from you” (V.i.31-33)—increases our expectation of a festive resolution, since reprisals do not sort with our understanding of the comic structure here pertaining. As long as the Duke is present we realize that the intensity of these pre-arranged conflicts is undercut by our awareness of a larger pattern which contains and determines the particular actions. The subliminal comic structure tempers our reaction to momentary dynamics and prevents us from seriously considering a tragic resolution even though the urge to appraise events in dilemmatic terms recurs in Isabella's language:

                                                                                                    'Tis not impossible
But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,
As Angelo; even so may Angelo,
In all his dressings, caracts, titles, forms,
Be an arch-villain.

(V.i.55-60)

But the antitheses here sound histrionic. The ad hominem attack lacks the trenchant applicability of Claudio's assessment of man's condition. Comparing Angelo to the “wicked'st caitiff on the ground” overstates; Isabella's virulence strains the credibility of the accusations. And, were her estimate accepted, it would lead only to the eradication of a single figure rather than the restoration of an entire society. If we accept Isabella's judgment that Angelo is unredeemable, then his execution is inevitable. But the Duke intends inclusion, and Angelo's death would forbid a concordant resolution.

The Duke's feigned rejection of Isabella's suit, Lucio's interjections, Mariana's tale of a night with her lawful husband, and the disguised Duke's charges of corruption all prepare for the comic reversal. Once Lucio unmasks him, the Duke firmly and finally assumes direct control over the comic resolution. In order to move from an extreme position to a medial, thereby establishing a pattern for temperate behavior, the Duke assumes the position of unwavering, strict justice:

The very mercy of the law cries out
Most audible, even from his proper tongue:
‘An Angelo for Claudio; death for death.
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.’
Then, Angelo, thy fault's thus manifested,
Which, though thou would'st deny, denies thee vantage.
We do condemn thee to the very block
Where Claudio stoop'd to death, and with like haste.
Away with him.

(V.i.405-14)

The Duke's condemnation of Angelo resounds with the tragic textures characteristic of Angelo's judgments. Again, and most clearly, we are confronted with an extreme solution: death for death; Angelo for Claudio. To exercise this lex talionis would return us to tragic themes. Man's faults manifested and condemned—and “We are all frail” (II.iv.121)—lead only to death. Or, to borrow Hamlet's piercing rejoinder to Polonius, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?” (Hamlet II.ii.524-25). Angelo is guilty, just like Claudio, of the “violation / Of sacred chastity” (V.i.402-03), and though his conduct is more vicious than Claudio's, and I believe it is, still it is presented in this play as paradigmatic of the human condition. The majority of the characters in Measure for Measure—Lucio, Pompey, Mistress Overdone, Froth, Angelo, Claudio, Juliet, Mariana—exhibit this infirmity to various degrees. We, with the Duke, must remember the truth of Lucio's statement:

Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great kindred; it is well allied; but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down.

(III.ii.97-99)

If the vice cannot be eradicated, perhaps, as the Duke has just said, “severity” can “cure it” (III.ii.96), but surely all that can actually be done is that the vice can be controlled by temperance.

Isabella's reaction to Angelo's sentence provides the archetype for the comic resolution of Measure for Measure. Stability and order are achieved through forgiveness and moderation, through controlling the impulses that lead man to ravin down his proper bane. The Duke's caution to Mariana indicates the impulses that Isabella must control:

Against all sense you do importune her.
Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact,
Her brother's ghost his paved bed would break,
And take her hence in horror.

(V.i.431-34)

But the anger and desire for revenge that had governed Isabella earlier gives way to temperance and the capacious redemption characteristic of Shakespearean comedy. Isabella's request that Angelo receive mercy crystalizes the dramatic nature of tragicomedy, the structure in which tragedy can become comedy. Just as Angelo's transgressions are paradigmatic of the iniquities in Vienna, so must Isabella's tolerance be of comic temperance:

Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd
As if my brother liv'd.

(V.i.442-43)

In that instant Isabella overcomes the binary options that had propelled the characters in Measure for Measure towards tragedy. Isabella bridges the opposition between Claudio's death and Angelo's life with the inclusive possibility “as if,” the fountainhead of simultaneous conceivability from which temperance springs. If one can contemplate the consequences of both extremes, one also discovers the path of moderation between. Mercy extended to one who “should slip so grossly, both in the heat of blood / And lack of temper'd judgment afterward” (V.i.470-71) forms the example of moderate conduct for a world much too predisposed to thrust itself heedlessly into the harsh and deadly shocks that the flesh is heir to. To convert potential tragedy into comedy requires the momentary temperance needed to deter the impulse leading to death and disintegration. Isabella illustrates that temperance and demonstrates its virtue to the characters and audience.

And though it may be identified as such, that temperance is not exactly mercy. Mercy freely pardons; temperance instructs and corrects. As the Duke remarks with regard to Pompey, “correction and instruction must both work / Ere this rude beast will profit” (III.ii.31-32). Those who are sufficiently wise take the emblematic action of Act V as instruction; those who are not (Pompey, Mistress Overdone, Lucio) receive correction. Pompey and Mistress Overdone are removed from their salacious occupations. Lucio is checked, like Angelo, with marriage even though no one expects Lucio to settle into blissful domesticity with Kate Keepdown. Perhaps the humiliation will serve the place of “pressing to death, / Whipping, and hanging” (V.i.520-21). His marriage, like the remission of the “other forfeits,” is emblematic. Lucio represents that portion of humanity “on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (The Tempest IV.i.188-89). Shakespeare seems actuely aware that a darkness unredeemable lurks in the human soul: all men possess Calibans which they must acknowledge theirs. Fortunately, admitting their existence often leads to the ability to control them.

I cannot overstate the importance of the concluding marriages to the structure of Measure for Measure. Marriage is Shakespeare's most pervasive and most hopeful symbol of concordant social integration. By closing Measure for Measure with a recessional of betrothed and married couples Shakespeare appeals to our recognition of the denotation of this forceful dramatic device. What had begun as tragedy concludes with the comic crystalization of a new society, best described by Frye:

… a new social unit is formed on the stage, and the moment that this social unit crystalizes is the moment of the comic resolution. In the last scene, when the dramatist usually tries to get all his characters on the stage at once, the audience witnesses the birth of a renewed sense of social integration. In comedy as in life, the regular expression of this is a festival, whether a marriage, a dance, or a feast.³⁷

Shakespeare repeatedly relies on marriages to represent the triumph over divisive forces in his plays. We only need to remember the endings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night to conclusively demonstrate that argument. And like the marriages in those plays, the marriages in Measure for Measure are less important as psychological realities than as emblematic pairings. Lucio and Kate indicate libidinous impulses momentarily checked. Claudio and Juliet, perhaps the most believable of the pairings, signal the danger of unrestrained and excessive impulses, and how the stability of marriage may rectify the previous intemperance. The marriages of Mariana to Angelo and Isabella to the Duke reinforce that same lesson. I suspect that Shakespeare meant his audience to recognize the social harmony multiple marriages suggest, and I suspect that Shakespeare meant his audience to recognize the attendant triumph of comedy over tragedy as well.

Measure for Measure divides into two structural units that can be described as the progression of locales: the descent from the Duke's chambers to the prison, and the corresponding ascent from the prison to the street. The descent, marked by an increasing polarization that results, finally, in fragmentation, contains the recognizable motifs of tragic conflict. An affair that should signal pastoral harmony is unexpectedly pulled towards untimely death:

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.40-44)

But Angelo's machinations promise the unnatural truncation of that cycle, not its natural completion:

[Angelo], to give fear to use and liberty,
Which have for long run by the hideous law
As mice by lions, hath pick'd out an act
Under whose heavy sense [Claudio's] life
Falls into forfeit: he arrests him on it,
And follows close the rigour of the statute
To make him an example.

(I.iv.62-68)

The profit of Claudio's “full tilth and husbandry” is that his life “Falls into forfeit.” Thus procreation begets death. But the tragedy of this movement must be circumvented. A second assignation and its “blossoming time” averts the earlier tragedy. The description of Mariana's meeting place is the comic counterpart to the tragic panel:

He hath a garden circummur'd with brick,
Whose western side is with a vineyard back'd;
And to that vineyard is a planched gate,
That makes his opening with this bigger key.

(IV.i.28-31)

The overtones of this tryst are antithetical to Claudio and Juliet's affair—Angelo contemplates rape. The result, however inverts that potential and establishes comic stability. The substitution of Mariana for Isabella preserves the comic resolution from Angelo's deadly intentions. Mariana's contact with Angelo, in a setting of hushed fecundity that links their encounter to the fertility of Claudio and Juliet's love, is the seed of comic structure. Mariana craves “no other, nor no better man” (V.i.424), and accepts Angelo without qualification:

They say best men are moulded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad. So may my husband.

(V.i.437-39)

That acceptance is the essence of the comedy of Measure for Measure, just as Angelo's admission, “Blood, thou art blood” (II.iv.15), is the essence of its tragedy. But the two parts stand in concordant correspondence, not isolation, and are joined by strong and pervading resonances. Measure for Measure is divided, but Tillyard, and later Wheeler, failed to consider how that very division gives the play structural unity. And, I believe, few playwrights have ever created a tragicomedy of Measure for Measure's unified magnificence, the perfect balance of tragedy's “bitter physic” and comedy's “sweet end.”

Notes

1. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1949), pp. 130-31; G. Wilson Knight, “Measure for Measure and the Gospels,” in The Wheel of Fire (London: Metheun and Co., 1930), passim.

2. Cynthia Lewis, “‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered’: Duke Vincentio and Judgment in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 271-72. Lewis quotes Harriett Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 76 and refers to Arthur C. Kirsch, “The Integrity of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Studies, 28 (1975), 89-105.

   Those who, with Tillyard, emphasize the play's problematic nature are David Lloyd Stevenson, The Achievement of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966); Hal Gleb, “Duke Vincentio and the Illusion of Comedy, or All's Not Well that Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 24-43; Christopher Palmer, “Selfishness in Measure for Measure,” Essays in Criticism, 28 (1978), 187-207; and Marcia Reiffer, “‘Instrument of Some More Mightier Member’: The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 157-69. Palmer concludes that “Because they retain some certainty of self, and thus some self-interest, these characters resist complete submission to the moral. Each of them asks for a different response, a different comprehension, from us. They cannot be harmonized, and it is futile to attempt to do so” (p. 207). Reiffer, more virulent, states that “This play reveals … the price women pay in order for male supremacy to be maintained. … What [Shakespeare] has created in Measure for Measure is not a poorly written play, but, to some extent, a model for poor playwriting (pp. 169, 167).

   Those who see the play as unified generally follow Knight's argument, though the divine ability each assigns to the Duke varies. See Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965); Darryl J. Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979); Roger Whitlow, “Measure for Measure: Shakespearean Morality and the Christian Ethic,” Encounter, 39 (1978), 165-73; Dayton Haskin, “Mercy and the Creative Process in Measure for Measure,” TSLL, 19 (1977), 348-62; Lawrence W. Hyman, “The Unity of Measure for Measure,” Modern Language Quarterly, 36 (1975), 3-20; and Lucy Owen, “Mode and Character in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1975), 17-32. Haskin states that “The characters in Measure for Measure seem to behave according to a metaphorical pattern rooted in a biblical understanding of human existence” (p. 352). Owen stresses the unification of forgiveness, but downplays the Duke's providential nature: “In Measure for Measure we have a real exploration of the human meanings of repentance and forgiveness without the use of explicitly divine or allegorical figures. There is no concrete representation of the supernatural, eternal world of the spirit” (p. 17).

3. Lewis, p. 272.

4. Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 11-12.

5. Tillyard, p. 130.

6. Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 24. J. W. Lever (intro. The Arden Shakespeare: Measure for Measure [London: Methuen and Co., 1965]) states that the play is “divided into almost mathematical halves” (p. lxii).

7. The change in the Duke's language also signals the pass from tragedy to comedy. The precise rhetorical structure of the contemplatio mortis, used to comfort Claudio, abruptly gives way to flexible colloquialisms. The effect is palpable, as if we have been propelled from one of Hamlet's soliloquies into the midst of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

8. I resist the notion that the structure of Measure for Measure was influenced by Guarini's Compendio della Poesia Tragicomica. Guarini defines tragicomedy as a “mixture of comic and tragic elements. Like bronze, which is made of copper and tin and yet is neither copper or tin, tragicomedy is neither tragedy nor comedy but a third form: ‘He who composes tragicomedy takes from tragedy its great personages but not its action, its versimilar plot but not one based on truth, its emotions aroused but their edge abated, its delight but not its sadness, its danger but not its death; from comedy laughter that is not riotous, modest merriment, feigned complication, happy reversal, and above all the comic order’” (from Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955], p. 138; Herrick translates the Compendio from Guarini's Opera, 3.403). But there is little mixture of elements, and absolutely no mixture of style, in Measure for Measure. Tragedy runs its course, and then comedy appears with no regard for the decorous interpenetration of style and elements clearly evident in Guarini's most widely known tragicomedy, Il Pastor Fido. The line from Italian tragicomedy to the English stage seems to bypass Shakespeare but is quite evident in the tragicomic works of Beaumont and Fletcher. See also Eugene Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 43-85. For an opposite view, see Lever, pp. lxi-lxiii.

9. Wheeler objects to the disengagement forced on us by the playwright and sees it as a fundamental flaw in the play: “The range of feeling dramatized in Measure for Measure is diminished rather than sustained and controlled as the play moves toward completion. Shakespeare seems not to finish quite so large and powerful a play as the one he starts, but to change the rules—excluding powerful trends of feeling already admitted into the action—so that the play can be finished at all” (p. 5). But I must agree with Northrop Frye's assessment: “[Measure for Measure] is a play about the relation of all such things [as the philosophy of government, the responsibilities of rulers, the social problem of prostitution, etc.] to the structure of comedy. And because comedy is a context word and not an essence word, the phrase ‘structure of comedy’ means among other things the reflection of other comedies in Measure for Measure. … Measure for Measure, then, is a comedy about comedy, as Hamlet is a tragedy about tragedy, and as the history plays are plays about history … considered as a theatrical performance” (pp. 24-25).

10. All quotations of Measure for Measure are from The Arden Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, ed. J. W. Lever (London: Methuen and Co., 1965).

11. Lever emphasizes the balancing influence of the Duke: “At the point of total impasse in III.i the motion was reversed by the Duke's direct intervention. Thenceforth in his part of moderator the Duke was tirelessly engaged in ‘passing from side to side,’ ‘working among contraries,’ and shaping a new course for the drama” (p. lxii). We may compare J. C. Maxwell: “The enforcers of the law should not be corrupt. They should take a middle course between excessive laxity and excessive rigour” (“Measure for Measure: The Play and the Themes,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 60 [1974], 209).

12. The exchange between Francisca and Isabella centers pointedly on restricting relations with men.

    When you have vow'd, you must not speak with men
    But in the presence of the prioress;
    Then if you speak, you must not show your face;
    Or if you show your face, you must not speak.

    (I.iv.10-13)

13. The failure of Angelo's justice surfaces most clearly in his shoddy handling of Pompey and Froth's case. Without Escalus' patience, Angelo would “whip them all” (II.i.136). Further, Lucio, a more malignant malefactor, freely escapes Angelo's notice.

14. See Harriett Hawkins, “‘The Devil's Party’: Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Studies, 31 (1978), 105-13, for a thorough discussion of Isabella's sexual obsession.

15. Marcia Reiffer offers this explication of these lines: “Her oaths here are far from endearing. But what they expose is neither rigidity nor coldness but a deeply rooted fear of exploitation, a fear justified by the attitudes toward women prevalent in this Vienna” (p. 164). But this analysis, I think, greatly distorts Isabella's words.

16. The Duke is on stage for only 229 lines in Acts I and II, a figure eclipsed by his presence in Act III, scene i alone—the entire 270 lines. He appears in every scene of the play's second half save for two short scenes: IV.iv and IV.vi.

17. But we must guard against overstating the Duke's ecclesiastical position. As A. P. Rossiter put it wonderfully, the Duke is never a “peripatetic providence” (Angel with Horns and Other Shakespearean Lectures, ed. Graham Storey [London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1961], p. 156).

18. Only Lucio, the Duke's antithetical counterpart (playing the role of the “Vice” opposed to the Duke's guiding influence) has a similar freedom of movement, although his contact is not as pervasive or as influential as the Duke's.

19. See Mary Lascelles, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (London: The Athlone Press, 1953), for a detailed discussion of the folk tale origins of the “monstrous ransom” motif and its literary manifestations.

20. Lever discusses the emphasis on the role of “true authority” to successfully resolve the play's conflicts (p. lx), and Lewis' entire argument is based on the assumption that the Duke “guides us through the play” (p. 273).

21. Stevenson offers a solid discussion of the influence of James I's treatise on Shakespeare's play (pp. 134-66).

22. The Basilicon Doron of King James VI, ed. James Craigie, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: The Scottish Text Society, 1944 and 1950), p. 137.

23. The Basilicon Doron, p. 139.

24. Lever, p. lxv.

25. Lever's remarks obtain: “For Jacobean audiences … the importance of the via media may have seemed paramount in real life and likewise in dramas concerned with contemporary issues. … The ‘demi-god authority,’ thus balanced between the opposites of justice and mercy, saw himself as faced with a more difficult task of maintaining ethical poise than private individuals with only their own unregenerate impulses to control” (pp. lxii-lxiv).

26. Frye offers this summation: “… the reversal in Measure for Measure, carried out by the Duke but dependent also on the genuine sanctity of Isabella, is full of improbability and absurdity, yet none the less it triumphs over the armoured tanks of self-righteousness so completely that we are no longer in this measuring world when the play ends. … the reversal of action in Measure for Measure is not an accident or a stunt, but something deeply involved with Shakespeare's romantic conception of comedy” (pp. 30, 32).

27. O.E.D. v.1 2: To weigh in scales; hence, to compare, estimate (citing this line and COR. II.iii.257).

28. Nigel Alexander, Shakespeare: Measure for Measure (London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1975), p. 40.

29. The Duke's summary of a just ruler's responsibility does not indicate that a merciful pardon can replace correction.

30. We may further note that Lucio serves as prompter and comic foil in both II. ii and V.i.

31. Duessa's trial in The Faerie Queene (Book V. Canto IX) provides an interesting counterpart to Act V of Measure for Measure. Both Shakespeare and Spenser emphasize the spectacular nature of the proceedings.

32. Lascelles sees the Duke as an “oppressive producer” (p. 95), and J. C. Maxwell denies the importance of “laws and justice” in Act V (p. 205). On the other hand, Carole T. Diffey reads the last act as in imitation of The Revelation of St. John (“The Last Judgment in Measure for Measure,” The Durham University Journal, 35 [1974], 231-37).

33. Angelo himself makes this clear:

                                                                                                        He should have liv'd
    Save that his riotous youth, with a dangerous sense,
    Might in the times to come have ta'en revenge
    By so receiving a dishonour'd life
    With ransom of such shame.

    (IV.iv.26-30)

34. Coleridge found the frustration of his desire for poetic justice most unpalatable: “… the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice—(for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive of them as being morally repented of).” Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets and Dramatists, ed. Ernest Rhys, (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1960), p. 84.

35. The suggestion must remain tentative, for its proof lies beyond the play. The quickening in Angelo's eye may indicate contrition, and the Duke notes that his “evil quits [him] well” (V.i.494). What remains paramount, though, is the emblematic resolution Shakespeare presents for us to consider as the stage empties. To seek psychological veracity where none is intended is to distort the contours of the play.

36. We expect Portia to deliver Antonio, and much of the scene's delight results from observing Shylock's wickedness foiled.

37. Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays, 1948 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 60-61.