[In the following essay, Gulley reads Measure for Measure as a play about law, scripted by a legalistic Duke Vincentio, who determines its outcome through his theatrical performance and political power.]

Few lawyers are among the significant characters in Shakespeare's plays, and one tipsy daydreamer is even allowed to suggest that reforming society might begin by killing all the lawyers. Yet Shakespeare's dramatic romance with the law itself is obvious. Reflecting familiarity with the language and procedures of law in his time and addressing a society for which the actions of courts and their officers provided both structure and entertainment, Shakespeare drew repeatedly on the legal world for imagery, characters, plot elements, and themes.¹ The power and scope of law in combining the most lofty philosophical issues with the most mundane functional matters—the ideal with the real, the social with the individual—make it exceptionally resonant as a medium through which to explore the full range of human behaviors and concerns, from the lightly comic to the darkly tragic.

Although legal imagery and characters are present across the chronological and generic range of Shakespeare's drama, and although one of the most famous trial scenes in all of literature centers the early Merchant of Venice (1594-1598), it is in the later, darker period of the major tragedies and the “problem” comedies,² of which Measure for Measure is one, that we see the issues and procedures of law used in the richest ways. Reflecting a sense of law as both method and metaphor by which western civilization organizes and evaluates human behavior, these plays go beyond the specific contexts of courts and lawyers to explore law as warp for the broader fabric of existence. In moments of significant conflict, characters whose circumstances force them to act while depriving them of reliable guides validate their actions by scripting, directing, and performing those actions as legal process. Law becomes theater.

Hamlet, Othello, and Lear all shape points of crisis and decision in the struggle against chaos by creating temporary dramas in legal form. Called to revenge by his father's ghost, Hamlet conducts a conflated hearing and trial in the form of a play he helps to script and direct, with the accused the audience and himself and Horatio the jury. King Lear, shivering in a hovel as storms rage outside, stripped of power, position, family, shelter, and sanity, focuses both the loss of his old self and the movement toward new awareness in a parodic trial of his faithless daughters and, subsequently, in arraignment and conviction of his own former self for crimes against humane and responsible leadership. And, in a more fully developed pattern, Othello marshals his jealous destruction of Desdemona through a privately conducted trumpery of legal procedure: indictment on the basis of Iago's pseudo-evidence (3.3); arraignment, trial, and conviction in the secretively staged “brothel scene” (4.2); sentencing (death) in conference with fellow juror Iago (3.3 and 4.1)—the clear perversion of even the form of justice evident in the order of sentencing before trial; and execution in the bed to which he has directed Desdemona to go (5.2). Later, disabused of his fatal assumptions about Desdemona, he arraigns, tries, defends, convicts, and executes himself, balancing the scales of justice in a summary parallel to the earlier script.

For each of these characters, the patterns of the law, with their implications of order, ethics, and power, are adapted to the need for personal and situational justification. And in each case, the mechanism is dramatization: the staging of pseudo-legal actions that give to the abstract principles of law and justice the local habitation of each character's personal situation. (Significantly, only Macbeth, steadily and entirely clear on the immoral and illegal dimensions of the course he has chosen, makes no use of the structures of law in scripting his actions; they are beyond justification, power and pretense his only defenses.)

II

In Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, legal dramatization is a device for articulating character and focusing thematic issues; law is not the primary subject matter, though power, kingship, family bonds, personal responsibility, and individual morality, which are among the foregrounded subjects, are closely touched by law. In Measure for Measure, however, Shakespeare offers us at once his most fully developed example of legal dramatization by a major character and law itself as the focus of the play. The consequent vision suggests that each exercise of law is intrinsically a theatrical act, thematically driven by legal principles and narratively shaped by the characters and actions pulled temporarily into active relationship with those principles.

The legal occasion in Measure for Measure is one of comprehensive social scope and importance. Like the disappointed God figure in a medieval morality play, Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, observes with dismay the depravity into which his city has fallen and resolves to return law to its proper force. Unlike the morality God, however, the Duke holds himself responsible for too-lax enforcement of the legal order: although there are “strict statutes and most biting laws,” he has for so long let them slip that they, “[d]ead to infliction, to themselves are dead” (1.3.19, 28).³ The immediately obvious remedy is for the Duke to reverse his neglect: the structure for stabilizing society exists and requires only that the Duke “unloose this tied-up justice” to enforce compliance. This is not, however, the course of action he chooses. Reasoning that, having allowed the license, it would be tyranny now “to strike and gall” his people, he deputes a surrogate “[w]ho may in th'ambush of my name strike home” (1.3.41). The Duke himself, disguised as a friar, remains to observe “[i]f power change purpose, what our seemers be” (1.3.53-54). Instead of adapting his role to the logic of the situation itself, the Duke scripts an alternative scenario, placing himself outside and above the action, as director of his personally designed play of law and justice.⁴

The workings of the law are thus presented in two modes: law as reality and law as theater. The characters in the Duke's play, unaware of his intermediate control, will accept as real and absolute the system of values and roles stipulated for them and will work out their destinies within that context. The Duke himself, empowered by his ability to reclaim his position at any time but temporarily released from its obligations and further privileged by the nearly unrestricted access available to a friar, will be free to manipulate events for all the others—scripting, casting, directing, and acting in his own play of the law. In more formal terms, the generic and static concepts of law will be engaged by the particularizing and dynamic forces of theater. And the resulting dialogue, between law as abstract system with which men and women seek to reach accommodation in the best interests of all and law as theatrically manipulated construct serving the vision of individuals with power, drives Measure for Measure, generating its narrative tension, its thematic interest, and, not incidentally, some of the interpretive problems it poses.

The theatrical nature of the Duke's plan is immediately evident: he casts Angelo as temporary Duke (“In our remove be thou at full ourself” (1.1.44)), simulates his own departure from Vienna by giving out rumors that he is abroad, and undertakes his new role as Friar Lodowick.⁵ The Duke's script at this point is very general—a commedia structure in which clearly defined characters work from their own natures to flesh out a play from a narrative sketch. Within this loosely scripted action, the newly cast ruler, Angelo, whose “blood is very snow-broth,” is expected to act from character in restoring legal order to Vienna—a test of the relationship of law to social welfare. At the same time, in the larger play conceived by the Duke, Angelo is to undergo a test of his handling of power—a test of the relationship between character and law.

Although in concept the Duke's script is simple, the possible lines of development are numerous and difficult to predict—Angelo is new to power, the citizens of Vienna are many, and the scope of vice is, by the Duke's own testimony, great. In the face of such potential for chaos, only a director unconcerned with his play could abandon it to its own development, and only a ruler unconcerned with the welfare of his citizens could abandon them to the consequences of legal experiment. The Duke is neither, and the progress of events very shortly forces him to abandon the loose-script, director-as-observer position in favor of a tighter script developed in response to events as they shape themselves within the original play. In so doing, the Duke must come to terms with the very issues he sought to avoid—the proper relationships between law and human nature, between law and justice, between justice and mercy, and between the abstract and the particular. The legal drama he has constructed to test the law becomes in addition a test of the Duke himself and moves him from observer to participant.

Early evidence of how the Duke's play is developing is provided on both serious and comic levels, in the arrest of Claudio for impregnating his fiancée and in an absurdly tangled altercation in the Viennese demi-monde. Both incidents reflect the challenge of applying law to specific cases, and in both, the Duke's deputed officials themselves resort to scripting as a means of dealing with the difficulty.

As the first victim of Angelo's get-tough enforcement of laws against fornication, Claudio brings to instant visibility the problem of the general principle incompatible with the particular situation and thus becomes a natural center for legal theater. (With significant irony, Shakespeare has placed the scene of Claudio's arrest just before the scene in which the Duke explains to Friar Peter his plan in “leaving” Vienna. The effect is clearly to show the Duke's script going awry even while he is developing its first stages.) Claudio, protesting that he and Juliet are duly betrothed and prevented from marriage only by technicalities of dowry not under their control, makes clear that they are in a kind of bureaucratic limbo at odds with their mutual emotional commitment and the near-legal union represented by their betrothal.⁶ If, as the Duke's description indicates, the danger in sexual license is that it threatens moral health and social order, Claudio is clearly not an appropriate target. Nonetheless, Angelo rejects arguments for leniency because he wishes to use Claudio in a legal mini-drama, the referential focus of which is Angelo himself.

Having already been told that he is being publicly paraded through the streets “by special charge” of Lord Angelo, Claudio sees the script and its theme clearly, recognizing that the sudden enforcement of this long-neglected statute is “surely for a name.” While ostensibly affirming the power of the law itself, the script will actually demonstrate and validate Angelo's individual view of the law. But because that script has been written with the pen of real power, Claudio cannot refuse his role. Nor do logical attempts at dissuasion by Escalus, Angelo's wise and moderate second-in-charge, nor moral and emotional pleas from Isabella, Claudio's sister, persuade Angelo to change his text.⁷ Consequently, unless the Duke is prepared to allow the death of Claudio, he must abandon the original commedia structure and involve himself in script and direction. The absolutes of “real” law and power (events in Angelo's Vienna) are to be brought actively into dialogue with the relativities of legal theater (scripting/directorial choices in the Duke's macro play).

In tonal and thematic counterpoint to the arrest of Claudio comes the appearance of constable Elbow bringing before Angelo and Escalus “two notorious benefactors”—Pompey, a bawd, and Froth, “a foolish gentleman.” The facts of the case, somehow involving Froth, Pompey, Elbow's pregnant wife, a house of ill repute, and a dish of stewed prunes, are hopelessly tangled in Elbow's malapropisms, Froth's irrelevancies, and Pompey's evasions. Angelo, his patience quickly exhausted, leaves Escalus to sort out the matter, with the hope that he will “find good cause to whip them all” (2.1.138). In contrast, Escalus, listening astutely and patiently, responds with an impromptu script that sets characters in varying relationships to the law and assigns them courses of action appropriate to those relationships. Froth, deemed guilty only of bad judgment, is sent home with a warning to keep away from places likely to bring him afoul of the law; Pompey, unapologetically engaged in the business of illicit sex, is warned that another appearance before Escalus “upon any complaint whatsoever” will bring down the full force of the law; Elbow, earnest but inept, is thanked for his service and charged to bring Escalus names of others who may be called to act as constable.

The scripting of these two cases serves to point up variations in both the principles from which and the persons by whom law is administered. Angelo's rigid, simplistic a priori script, treating law itself as a body of rules and individuals as abstractions under those rules, ironically attacks the very type of citizen whose primary values—social order and personal responsibility—are those the law seeks to promote. Escalus's more complex script, setting as it does the rule of law in mediate relationship between the facts of each individual case and the general principles in which law is grounded, casts as villains only those whose behavior threatens the general welfare, setting out for others roles preserving their own welfare and that of society.⁸ Though neither of these incidents is directly observed by the Duke, their early staging establishes and evaluates polar approaches to law and to the scripting of legal theater, positioning the audience advantageously to evaluate the Duke himself as legal dramatist.

One clear point of contrast between Angelo and Escalus as legal dramatists is their awareness of creating scripts. Angelo's initial approach to the law as supreme and absolute removes him from any sense of personal control over its administration and simultaneously prevents him from seeing himself as the scriptor he actually is. When Escalus asks Angelo to consider that many people in Claudio's circumstances, perhaps even Angelo himself, might be as guilty as Claudio, Angelo responds, “What's open made to justice, / That justice seizes” (2.1.221-22). And when Isabella argues that Angelo would exercise his power most fittingly by tempering it with mercy, he counters “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother” (2.2.85). Escalus, by contrast, invokes and applies the law with the clear awareness of his own agency: to Froth, he says “Get you gone, and let me hear no more of you” (2.1.206-7); to Pompey, “I advise you let me not find you before me again upon any complaint whatsoever” (2.1.244-5); and to Elbow, “Look you bring me in the names of some six or seven [men] …” (2.1.270-1) [emphasis added]. Both Escalus and Angelo are scripting the action of the law, but only Escalus seems consciously aware of doing so, and his awareness seems intrinsically tied to the superiority of his legal judgment.

Early in the play, then, Escalus is identified as an ideal mediator between the theory and practice of the law. As second in command, however, his position is responsive rather than creative, and subject to the restrictions of place in the hierarchy (he can alter neither the law itself nor Angelo's authority as its interpreter). That his potential as a restorative, stabilizing force for Vienna is limited by the role in which the Duke has cast him reflects the power of the script and reinforces the developing sense of law as theater. Ironically, too, the prescriptions of the Duke's initial scenario are the means of its undoing: the authority assigned him as legal guardian of the public welfare can empower and protect a growing corruption of spirit that makes a charade of the law.

The form this corruption takes is, with full and fitting irony, Angelo's unlawful lust for Isabella. Her appearance before Angelo to plead for her brother's life is itself a small piece of theater, suggested by Claudio in a desperate attempt to counter-script his role as villain brought to justice in Angelo's play. Angelo's initial response is rigidly observant of his role as the instrument of justice, denying Isabella's pleas for mercy as inappropriate and irrelevant to the absoluteness of Claudio's guilt. As he is denying the relevance of individual human factors to the workings of the law, however, one of his own individual human qualities is surfacing, deforming the outlines of his character, undermining the stability of his leadership in Vienna, and subverting the Duke's script for legal reform. Overcome by sudden lust for Isabella, yet finding no place for it within his rigid sense of his role, Angelo becomes in effect two players in a single body, the inner man who would gratify his desires using the outer man as shield and enabler.⁹ His power to punish Claudio for unlawful lust now becomes the ironic means by which he seeks to compel Isabella's compliance in the same act—his public role as guardian of the law now hollowed to accommodate his personal transgression. His new sense of agency is reflected clearly in the proprietary language he adopts in speaking of his power:

I, now the voice of the recorded law,
Pronounce a sentence on your brother's life;
Might there not be a charity in sin
To save this brother's life?

(2.4.61-64)

Angelo's awareness that he can simultaneously enforce and subvert the law enables him to take power over his role, manipulating it to suit his own purposes. And this moment of change is of double consequence for the legal theater in progress. When Isabella threatens to expose Angelo to the world, he reminds her of the power of his role:

Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoiled name, th' austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place I' the state
Will so your accusation overweigh
That you shall stifle in your own report
And smell of calumny. …
Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true.

(2.4.155-60, 171)¹⁰

Clearly, the man cast as the moral savior of Vienna has turned his role against itself, and though the Duke seems to have anticipated some of this difference between seeming and being, his play of the law has been too vaguely conceived to contain the damage Angelo threatens.

The inadequacy of the Duke's play is, however, confirmation of its importance. The administration of law is, inevitably, performance—the refraction of general principles through individual acts. And if individual actors are improperly cast and scripted, justice may not save itself. For the Duke, therefore, taking control of his legal drama is essential if he is to fulfill his own role as protector of the city and return the play itself to its original constructive design. Take control he does. Using the moral authority and privilege granted by society to his role as friar, he scripts and directs the remaining action to realize his vision of just law.¹¹

In the early stages of this revised drama, the Duke acts from outside the law to counter excesses being shielded within the law. Isabella is persuaded to pretend compliance with Angelo's request. Mariana, to whom Angelo was formerly betrothed, is brought in to be the woman Angelo actually beds (the legal status of the betrothal, an alteration from Shakespeare's source material, seems designed to protect the ethical integrity of the Duke's script, casting him as vindicator rather than violator of the laws). Using the power of theater to suspend and re-create reality, the Duke is beginning to rehabilitate law in Vienna by taking personal responsibility for it. In these earliest directoral interventions, the Duke is able to work through his substitutive and distanced role as Friar Lodowick, persuading Isabella and Mariana to the bed trick as a legally defensible means to the moral ends that are their primary concerns: “And here, by this, is your brother saved, your honor untainted, the poor Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled” (3.1.254-257). In the more extreme matter of saving Claudio's life, however, the Duke is forced to re-enter himself as a character in the action. The execution of Claudio transcends concern with individual abuse of authority, which marks Angelo's treatment of Isabella; the disposition of Claudio's case will paradigm the way law is to be administered in Venice. And for such a matter, the moral authority of a friar is inadequate. When, as Friar Lodowick, the Duke asks the Provost to delay Claudio's execution and, in a kind of theatrical reductio, substitute the cosmetically disguised head of another prisoner for that demanded in proof by Angelo, his attempt at legal scripting is confounded by the law itself.

The Provost, inclined to cooperation by his personal sympathies and respect for the Friar's moral authority, nevertheless finds himself pre-scripted by his legal role: “Pardon me, good Father, it is against my oath” (4.2.182). The Duke is thus unable to continue drawing his own script over or behind the conflicting script implicit in the law itself (a script temporarily under Angelo's control). He is forced to acknowledge that in scripting genuine legal theater, law itself must be accommodated and affirmed: enforcement of an honorable and constructive rule of law requires an honorable and constructive ruler. In dramatic terms, restoring proper action within the play requires proper characters; the Duke must establish himself in the script in order to regain authority over the action. His movement to do so partially acknowledges his real self while preserving the disguise role that will continue to allow him directorial distance:

DUKE
Were you sworn to the Duke or to the deputy?
PROVOST
To him, and to his substitutes.
DUKE
You will think you have made no offense if the Duke avouch the justice of your dealing?
PROVOST
But what likelihood is in that?
DUKE
Not a resemblance, but a certainty. … Look you, sir, here is the hand and seal of the Duke. You know the character, I doubt not, and the signet is not strange to you.
PROVOST
I know them both.
DUKE
The contents of this is the return of the Duke. … You are amazed, but this shall absolutely resolve you.

(4.2.183-209)

The moment is crucial, both legally and theatrically: the Provost is convinced to save Claudio, as the final scene makes clear, and the Duke takes the first step toward resuming his authority, leveraging his own legal script into control over events in the real world of Angelo's Vienna and preparing his play for its resolution.

The final act of the Duke's (and Shakespeare's) play expands from the individual to the social, gathering all the players and lines of development in a public scene of resolution staged at the city gates. The Duke, scripting his return to Vienna as a public resumption of authority and responsibility, has directed that the performance be announced: any citizens with complaints under the law are to bring them for open resolution at this time. Law itself, and the Duke as its embodiment, is being characterized as constant, open, and universally accessible. What is given out as open action, however, has been previously scripted, and the scene develops as a kind of theatrical fantasia replicating the pattern of movement in the play as a whole, beginning in pretense and evolving into reality. The corruption of Angelo's character behind a protective righteous facade, the victimization of Claudio, Isabella, and (earlier) Mariana by ill-enforced law, the education of the Duke himself, and the consequent implications of all these elements for the dangers and benefits of legal authority are re-played in a public performance that engages as players all the principals in the case. The Duke offers his people a theater piece that recapitulates his own journey to discovery, re-asserts his authority in Vienna, confirms and demonstrates the power of the law to censure wrong, articulates the importance of mercy to justice, and demonstrates the significance of human agency to the action of the law.¹²

Testimony to the Duke's advance scripting for this resolution is on many tongues. The Duke himself asserts, in soliloquy, that he expects to proceed “[b]y cold gradation and well-balanced form” in dealing with Angelo and that he will leave Isabella temporarily believing Claudio is dead, “[t]o make her heavenly comforts of despair / When it is least expected” (4.3.110-111). Isabella herself, accepting the Duke's instructions for her appearance at the city gate, says “I am directed by you” (4.3.136b); Angelo and Escalus comment wonderingly on the puzzling actions assigned them by the Duke's letters; Friar Peter describes orders from the Duke to “… keep your instruction, / And hold you ever to our special drift, / Though sometimes you do blench from this to that / As cause doth minister” (4.5.4-61). That the scene itself is to involve simulation and pretense is made especially clear in Isabella's preparatory conversation with Mariana:

ISABELLA
To speak so indirectly I am loath.
I would say the truth, but to accuse [Angelo] so,
That is your part. Yet I am advised to do it,
[The Duke] says, to veil full purpose.
MARIANA
Be ruled by him.
ISABELLA
Besides, he tells me that if peradventure
He speak against me on the adverse side,
I should not think it strange, for ’tis a physic
That's bitter to sweet end.

(4.6.1-8)

The matter of the scene is not especially complex: the focal figure is, of course, Angelo; the action is the Duke's coming to terms with what Angelo represents; and the theme is the proper administration of law and justice. The dynamic of the scene in its context and effects, however, is complicated by the varying relationships of characters to the script. The Duke is scriptor/director and also actor, performing three versions of himself—the former Duke (now only an image in the public mind), Friar Lodowick (a temporarily empowering overlay for the developing character of the Duke), and the present Duke (the ruler who emerges at the end of the scene). He is thus both a creator and a creation of his script, now making from the macroplay of his discovery a dramatic event that serves both to represent problems of law and justice in Vienna and to bring them to resolution. What has been publicly perceived as reality will be re-created, revealed as sham, and displaced by the reality of the Duke's revised script. The citizens of Vienna have been cast as audience for this play of their own salvation under law.

As trumpets sound the Duke's entry into Vienna, his entering accolade to his deputies establishes immediately the kind of theatrical interplay that will shape the scene. Offering general praise for the official conduct of both deputies, the Duke narrows his focus quickly to Angelo:

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

(5.1.10-17)

The surface of the Duke's text here—gratified ruler praising faithful subordinate—articulates the original view of Angelo as paragon, offering him a supporting cue to continue his charade. Under the surface, however, is the sub-textual voice of the Duke as theatrical director, speaking the shape of the play to come. It will “make them know” the shape of lawless reality that “keep[s] within” the shell of lawful pretense.

With Angelo thus dramatically positioned, Isabella steps forward to advance the scripted action, declaring that she “did yield to him” to save her brother. Her scripted actions simulate what Angelo assumes to be reality; Angelo, in turn, essays to discredit that reality by labeling it a calumny (i.e. a subversive performance) directed at him. Emboldened by what he believes to be the Duke's confidence, Angelo acts to enlarge his role by requesting judicial authority over Isabella and her charges. The Duke, continuing the pretense of trusting superior, consents and leaves the scene. Again, however, what appears as reality is actually theater. The figure of the Duke who empowered Angelo, and who has performatively re-enacted that empowerment, is leaving the stage both as performer and as idea. When he returns, it is in the transitional role of deliberate pretense—the figure of Friar Lodowick. And Friar Lodowick immediately begins to censure the absent Duke:

… Is the Duke gone?
Then is your cause gone too. The Duke's unjust,
Thus to retort your manifest appeal,
And put your trial in the villain's mouth
Which here you come to accuse.

(5.11.308-311)

Thus, the real Duke, in performance as friar, verbally recalls and arraigns his earlier self as a complex of assumptions and actions out of touch with reality and therefore false to his proper role as administrator of justice. When Escalus, consistent in his own role, defends the honor of the Duke, threatening the Friar with the rack, the Friar/Duke speaks simultaneously out of his disguise as a moral man bound to honest criticism of the state and his own identity as the legal head of that state:

                                                  … The Duke
Dare no more stretch this finger of mine than he
Dare rack his own. His subject am I not,
Nor here provincial. My business in this state
Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,
Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble
Till it o'errun the stew; laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanced that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,
As much in mock as mark.

(5.1.319b-330)

Purporting to be incensed at the effrontery of a monk who challenges the authority of the state, the irrepressible Lucio pulls away the cowl that has visually defined Friar Lodowick's identity, publicly separating the performer from the “real” Duke, the Duke as he is presently, identical to his former self in power and principle but educated in awareness—a “new” Duke who will erase his earlier image, performatively re-created at the beginning of the scene. As this new self, his original power intact but enriched with knowledge, the Duke acts, using the mechanisms of law to articulate and enforce principles of justice that conserve social welfare by attention to individual welfare. Angelo is first sentenced to marry Mariana, redeeming both past and present wrongs by legitimizing her, then sentenced to die, recompensing in kind his order for the death of Claudio.

At this point in the Duke's play, however, questions of mercy and forgiveness are introduced into the action of law, bringing into thematic prominence the interrelationship of these elements, problematical throughout the macro-play. Significantly, at this point the relationship of script to action becomes unclear, blurring the lines between theater and reality. We have witnessed the scripted preparation of Isabella's charges against Angelo and Mariana's defense of him and assume, by reasonable inference, that the Duke's response—his judgment—is also anticipated in his script. The judgments imposed on Angelo are legally appropriate to the wrongs he has done, and the Duke, in his role as upholder of the law, at first insists on the penalties. When Mariana protests those penalties and begs Isabella to ask mercy for Angelo, however, the Duke grants Isabella her request and Angelo his life. The rigorous execution of justice implied by the initial scripting has been moderated in response to actions which themselves were not explicit in the announced script and thus appear to be spontaneous modifications of it. The resulting action, originating in theatrical pretense, grows to merge with reality, perfecting the Duke's script by balancing justice with mercy for the preservation of social good. Equally spontaneous, but more intractable, are the capricious behaviors of several minor characters: Lucio, a flit whose intrusive and irreverent commentary on people, events, and principles persists even in the face of the Duke's repeated demands for silence; Pompey, an unrepentant bawd whose behavior expresses his radical view of the law as entirely relative to the power of the definer; and Barnardine, a condemned prisoner who simply and repeatedly refuses to cooperate in the execution to which he has been legally sentenced. These intrusions of unscripted action, as R. L. P. Jackson suggests, point up the challenge of disordering reality to the ordering impulse of art.¹³ By thus limiting the Duke's control over the artifice of pre-determined legal judgment, however, these intrusions ultimately confirm a higher vision of law as compelled to redefine and amend the abstract in response to the particular. Legal theater is thus invested with genuine social force, and the player-Duke is validated as actual and active shaper of justice in his kingdom. The Duke's play of the law becomes the rhetorical mode by which the reality of that law is established; the script he has created as artifice in turn creates him as real.

In mediate relation to this final scene stand those figures whose affairs have been the material of the Duke's script—in the conclusion of the script lies the resolution of those affairs. Isabella is closest to the Duke in consciously falsifying reality (her scripted accusation that Angelo forced her virtue) for the purposes of advancing the play, and Mariana and Claudio are to some degree involved in conscious performance. Yet for them, as for Angelo and the Duke, the final scene is neither fully real nor fully artifice but both—not merely a re-playing of past events as a public lesson but an active resolution of individual conflicts within a larger drama of social reconciliation. Angelo's evil is exposed and his repentance sparked by the scripted accusations and defenses of Isabella and Mariana; Mariana's past wrongs are righted and her future (potentially) assured by marriage to Angelo; Claudio is saved from death and reunited with Juliet and Isabella; Isabella is rewarded by public censure of Angelo, by the revelation that Claudio lives, and by a proposal of marriage from the Duke.

For the Duke's larger audience, the citizenry of Vienna, this recapitulation and resolution form a play about law in a human context. Their involvement in this particular script is not personal, and in that sense what they have witnessed is most identifiably theater—a narrative of general interest performed in their presence by actors. Yet even for the citizenry, the separation of audience and players is not absolute: the player Duke is their real Duke; Angelo is his real deputy, with real, if temporary, power over their welfare; and Isabella, Claudio, and Mariana are fellow citizens whose real lives have been altered by the events of the drama. The play they have witnessed thus is not separable from the reality that shapes their lives, and while that play has affirmed the necessity and power of law as principle, it has also shown the working out of that principle as necessarily shaped by human interpreters, out of the specific circumstances that constitute the legal occasion. Legal theater has served not only as a mechanism for the action of law but as a dynamic meditation on the nature of law itself, suggesting that the constructive operation of law in human affairs will have something of theater in it.

III

The sense of law which Measure for Measure articulates is, by virtue of the play's construction, tied inextricably to the character of the Duke and the extent of his control over action in the play. The authority in which he is dressed comprehends the entire play and determines its resolution, largely eliminating the kind of dialectic offered by a dramatic structure in which resolution grows out of conflict among strong characters with divergent values and significant degrees of influence on the action. Though the necessity of law itself as an ordering and conserving social construct is never seriously questioned, the Duke's comprehensive power in scripting the action of law seems to compromise the vision of law as transcendent principle, showing it instead as subservient to the temporal power of a single individual. The problematical nature of such a vision is pointed up strongly in the variety of interpretive attempts to fix and evaluate the concept of law being articulated by the play. Is the Duke's theatrical manipulation of the law to be viewed as an essay in relativism, cynically exposing as sham the sense of law as other than a tool for the powerful? Or is the Duke's scripting a metaphorical acknowledgment that the administration of law is inevitably a function of human agency? Is the Duke indulging a personal lust for power or acting as guardian of transcendent moral/ethical values?¹⁴ And relatedly, does the Duke's legal drama reduce law to the status of a plaything, or does it express the essence of law as an active social force?

Critical responses to these questions, situated as they are in the interpretive middle distance between play and audience, have made Measure for Measure a mirror in which a plethora of a priori images of law have been reflected, divergent images radically resistant to critical consensus. Certainly, however, the layering of competing scripts that defines the play's structure suggests that law in practice is inevitably performance and, further, that only through performance can the shape of law be determined. The general principle of law in Vienna is merely a conceptual skeleton, to which Angelo or Escalus or the Duke must give fuller form. In this potential for variation and re-evaluation lies identity with what James Boyd White has described as the essence of legal discourse: “… it creates a set of questions that reciprocally define and depend upon a world of thought and action; it creates a set of roles and voices by which meanings will be established and shared. In creating both a set of topics and a set of occasions and methods … it does much to constitute us as a community and as a polity” (71). This description of the dialectic of law is equivalently a description of the action of theater. And the legal theater that forms the subject of Measure for Measure is both literal and metaphorical representation of that identity.

Notes

1. Information and conjecture on Shakespeare's legal knowledge and experience, on the theory and practice of law in Elizabethan England, and on legal imagery and incident in Shakespeare's plays is widespread. An early examination of this question is John Lord Campbell's Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered (London: John Murray, 1859). Campbell traces legal references and language in the plays, concluding that there is substantial, though not conclusive, evidence that Shakespeare had the kind of familiarity with legal process and terminology consistent with service in an attorney's office. A recent exploration of Shakespeare's treatment of law in dialogue with contemporary legal issues and cases is Daniel J. Kornstein's Kill All the Lawyers? Shakespeare's Legal Appeal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

   Helpful general studies from a literary perspective include Louis Marder's “Law in Shakespeare” (Renaissance Papers, University of South Carolina Press, 1954), W. Moelwyn Merchant's “Lawyer and Actor: Process of Law in Elizabethan Drama” (English Studies Today, 3d series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), George W. Keeton's Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background (New York: Pitman, 1967), and O. Hood Phillips' Shakespeare and the Lawyers (London: Methuen, 1972). Among studies more specifically focused on Measure for Measure are Harold Skulsky's “Pain, Law, and Conscience in Measure for Measure” (Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 [1964], 147-168) and Darryl F. Gless's Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

2. The term “problem,” applied to All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, refers both to the subject matter of the plays (moral and social problems, rather than love and other personal relationships that are the concern of traditional comedies) and to form (traditional comic resolutions produced not by genuine and productive character change but by trickery or force—happy endings through unhappy means—and therefore lacking in credibility or reassurance). A wealth of critical material addresses this issue; representative discussions can be found in Michael Jameison, “The Problem Plays, 1920-1970,” (Shakespeare Survey, 25 [1972], 1-10), Rosalind Miles' The Problem of Measure for Measure (New York: Harper, 1976), Richard P. Wheeler's Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), Northrop Frye's The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), and Vivian Thomas's The Moral Universe of Shakespeare's Problem Plays (New York: Routledge, 1991).

3. All quotations from Shakespeare's text will be from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th edition, ed. David Bevington (New York: Harper, 1992).

4. The intentionality of Shakespeare's design here is evidenced in the changes in his source material. In the originals from which Shakespeare has drawn plot material, events are largely dominated by the actions of the corrupt deputy, with the Duke figure acting at most as a deus ex machina in resolving events. Fuller discussion of significant patterns in Shakespeare's adaptation of source material is fully and persuasively offered by J. W. Lever in his “Introduction” to the Arden edition of Measure for Measure (London: Methuen, 1965).

5. Judd Hubert sees this as initiating a general pattern of displacements, with implications for the psychology of the characters and the view of society advanced by the play (“The Textual Presence of Staging and Acting in Measure for Measure,” New Literary History 18 (1987), 584-596). Alexander Legatt explores the patterns of substitutions as quasi-allegorical, identifying the triangulated parallels among the Duke, God, and James I as a device for ironic commentary on the wisdom and benevolence of rulers (“Substitution in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 342-360). Terry Eagleton finds in the play's repeated and diverse substitutions confirmation of the reciprocity of selves that defines society, where understanding of self depends on knowledge of others (Shakespeare and Society [New York: Schocken, 1967], 83-86). That the pattern of substitutions is intentional is demonstrated by N. W. Bawcutt in a detailed examination of changes made by Shakespeare in adapting his source material (“Introduction” to Measure for Measure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19-25).

6. Helpful on this legal point, in addition to those general sources cited in note 1, are Ernest Schanzer's “The Marriage-Contracts in Measure for Measure”(Shakespeare Survey, 13 (1960), 81-89), J. Birje-Patil's “Marriage Contracts in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure” (Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1964), 106-111), Margaret Scott's “Our City's Institutions: Some Further Reflections on the Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure” (English Literary History 48 (1982) 790-802), and Bawcutt's introduction to the Oxford Measure for Measure (6-12).

   The second of the legal points raised (protest against the invoking of statutes so long unenforced) involves the principle of desuetude. For a concise discussion of the nature and applicability of this principle, see Kornstein's Kill All the Lawyers?, 49.

   For consideration of a related issue—Claudio and Juliet's “authorizing” their own behavior as legitimate, even though in technical violation of law—see James Boyd White's Acts of Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

7. Most commentators regard Angelo as rigidly excessive and Claudio as sympathetically, if fallibly, human. Judge Richard Posner suggests that Angelo's position is actually a cover for his inexperience, behind which he can retreat from his own sense of inadequacy in administering the law (Law and Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 109). Eagleton, however, faults Claudio's rejection of the law as applicable to him: “Law is the articulation of the relations between things: particularly of the relations between private and public experience, personal behaviour and society, self and others. Without law, personal experience can only remain fragmentary, socially irresponsible” (72).

8. David Aers and Gunther Kress argue that rhetorical patterns in the play reflect three major concepts of law—an abstraction removed from human influence, a human construct subject to principled human modification, and a simple convention adaptable by any human agency. The kinetic, order-challenging discourse reflective of the third concept characterizes the speech of the under classes and flashes briefly in infrequent moments of rebellion or emotionalism among the elite. This pattern ultimately loses to domination by the static discourse characteristic of the first and second concepts, reflecting the triumph of the powerful classes and their vision of law (“The Politics of Style: Discourses of Law and Authority in Measure for Measure,” Style 16.1 (Winter 1982), 22-27).

9. Hubert regards Angelo's experience here as a psychological split between scripted and unscripted roles. Floundering in the unscripted surprise of his lust for Isabella, Angelo continues to use the script provided by his public role as a protective shell.

10. Brian Gibbons sees the argument between Angelo and Isabella as modeled after law-court theater, with two types of acting demonstrated: “Angelo, the logician, cold as a chisel, presenting in a few words, a seemingly unanswerable case, Isabella, exploiting a varying rhythm, a variety of different appeals, … stressing the naked humanity of the victim, rapidly exploiting an advantage with thrilling emotion” (“Introduction” to Measure for Measure [The New Cambridge Shakespeare] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41).

11. David Bevington sees the Duke's action here—his active engagement in pretense and fictions—as signaling the comic genre of the play. In asserting this kind of control, the Duke acts as “a kind of morally persuasive playwright who can change the lives of his characters for the better” (“Introduction” to Measure for Measure in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 405).

    Louise Schleiner, arguing an ironic pattern of references to New Testament parables, suggests that the Duke resembles the figure of a “testing master” whose results prove so discouraging that they force him to imitate the New Testament God, creating a kind of legal trick by which man can be saved (“Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure,” PMLA 97 (1982), 227-236).

12. The complexity of narrative and thematic action in this final scene has, not surprisingly, generated significant critical attention, the sum of which reflects the range of response to the play overall.

    For some commentators, the primary resonances of the scene are historical and/or political. The presence of James I, and his likely knowledge of this play, have suggested a view of the Duke's return to power as contemporary political commentary. James I himself argued, in The Basilikon Doron, that kings must not only avoid tyranny but “advertise their virtues through manipulation of external appearance and the promotion of public ceremony” (cited in Gless 160). Lever offers a helpful overview of specific parallels to James I and more general ways in which the play may both celebrate and, subtly, criticize the exercise of supreme authority. Legatt argues that the Duke may be seen as a substitute for James I but must be read as an ironic commentary on the wisdom and benevolence of such figures. Leonard Tennenhouse focuses from a similar perspective on the play as reflecting cultural celebration of James' accession as a return to patriarchal structure while also quietly raising questions about the values of the new order (“Representing Power: Measure for Measure in its Time.” Genre 15 (1982), 139-156). Jonathan Dollimore argues more broadly that the Duke's resumption of power merely reflects a larger social pattern in which the ruling class creates and uses legal and moral structures to subjugate the under classes and perpetuate its own dominance (“Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Daniel Massey, as actor who has played the Duke, agrees that the Duke's action “is the authentic sound of the arrogance of autocratic power, and it has returned once again to the city of Vienna.” Massey, however, sees the implications of returned power as unresolved by the action of the play (“The Duke in Measure for Measure,” in Players of Shakespeare 2. Ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Brian Gibbons argues that successful performance is itself the issue, essential to effective rule (40). Related issues are discussed by Anthony B. Dawson in “Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 328-341.

    Other commentators see the Duke's return primarily in terms of psychological, narrative, and thematic patterns within the play itself. Hubert sees the fact and manner of the Duke's return as motivated by the necessity not only of regaining power but of rescuing himself from inappropriate inventions about his character in the minds of his people (594). More cynical is Robert Watson's contention that the Duke's manipulation of the final scene is self-aggrandizing: “The Duke strategically regresses Vienna from the New Testament to the Old so that he can claim credit, as head of state, for re-inventing Christian forgiveness” (“False Immortality in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 431). A related approach, in extremis, informed Michael Bogdanov's 1985 Stratford (Ontario) production, which configured the final scene as a rally staged to aggrandize a dictator, with loudspeakers, floodlights, and a cynically self-promoting Duke. Anthony Dawson finds this interpretation effective not only in revealing the limitations of the Duke's individual integrity but also in undercutting the theatrical mode by which the Duke has chosen to display his power: “… it is the theatrical itself that is being called into question; the theatrical as a mode of generic manipulation (i.e., as a way of bringing about closure) and as a mode of political power is deconstructed even as it is used and invoked” (“Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 [1988], 338).

    Representative views of the play's conclusion as reflecting the Duke's incomplete sense of sexuality and inappropriate treatment of women can be found in Janet Adelman's “Bed Trick: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman Holland, et al (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Marcia Riefer's “‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The Construction of Female Power in Measure for Measure” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1988), 157-169.

13. Jackson argues generally that the tensions and apparent incompatibilities in theme and form, particularly in the last act, reflect the thematic tension between the need for an impersonal justice and the necessity of recognizing the individual realities that are the reality of human existence (“Necessary Ambiguity: The Last Act of Measure for Measure,” The Critical Review 26 (1984), 121).

14. Helpful synthetic overviews of varied critical response to Measure for Measure include A. J. Franklin's “Changing Critical Attitudes toward Measure for Measure,” Journal of English Studies 3(1980), 13-18; Harriet Hawkins' Measure for Measure (New York: Twayne, 1987), and Mary Ellen Lamb's “Shakespeare's ‘Theatrics’,” Shakespeare Studies 20(1987): 129-146.

    For more extensive overviews and sampling of literary and performance criticism, see Shakespearean Criticism, Volumes 2 and 23 resp. (Detroit: Gale, 1985, 1994).