[In the following essay, Hunt investigates the theme of spiritual comfort and its complex relationship to the human capacity for love, primarily represented through the figures of Isabella, the Duke, and Mariana in Measure for Measure.]

“Pax vobiscum”—versions of the time-honored words of spiritual comfort repeatedly echo in Measure for Measure, especially in the language of Vincentio and Isabella, the disguised Friar Lodowick and the aspiring nun. “Peace be with you” Vincentio exclaims at the end of Act III, when Escalus announces that he will visit condemned Claudio, whom Vincentio has attempted to comfort through a vision of the hollowness of earthly life. Earlier in the play, Lucio travesties the familiar blessing when, upon entering the nunnery of Saint Clare, he presumptuously shouts, “Hoa! Peace be in this place!” (I.iv.6).¹ “Peace and prosperity!” Isabella understandably replies; if comfort exists anywhere, it ought to live in a convent. These greetings of comfort help constitute the approximately twenty expressions of comfort in Measure for Measure, a total higher than that for any other appearance of the word or its derivatives in Shakespearean comedy. That fact alone suggests that comfort may be an important idea in this dark comedy. At the center of the play stands a scene in which comfort is first offered, then lost, only to be finally refound. Positioned thus in the play, the scene, in retrospect, offers itself as a model of the movement of the drama as a whole. An analysis of Act III, scene i of Measure for Measure reveals Shakespeare's understanding—at least his 1602-1604 understanding—of the complex relationship between love and the ability to give and receive comfort. The despair of Claudio, who desperately loves life, indicates that the key to the relationship does not simply involve one's relative capacity for love. Rather, as the character of Mariana suggests, the redemptively mixed quality and aim of one's love determines a life of comfort for others, if not necessarily for oneself, during a stormy earthly pilgrimage. Identifying the special make-up and goal of Mariana's love thus becomes crucial for understanding the source of comfort in Shakespeare's Vienna—not only in the events of Act III but in those of Act V as well. And yet that wellspring of comforting love flows in Act V only when Providence helps arrange dramatic events so that Vincentio can tap it. Both virtuous Isabella and philosophical Vincentio discover in the course of the play that they have some truths to learn about love and comfort, truths crystallized in the haunting figure from the moated grange.

Analysis begins with the conclusion of Act II. There, Isabella, shocked by Angelo's threat to draw out tortuously her brother's death because of her refusal to yield to his lust, resolves to reveal to Claudio the extent of her propositioner's vice:

Then, Isabel live chaste, and brother, die:
More than our brother is our chastity.
I'll tell him yet of Angelo's request,
And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest.

(II.iv.183-86)

In her capacity as nun rather than natural sister, Isabella seemingly plans to use Angelo's outrageous demand as an example of corruption that makes any worldly life, including Claudio's, not worth living. The comfort of dying that Isabella intends to offer Claudio, however, quickly becomes Vincentio's subject during the opening of Act III. As Friar Lodowick, Vincentio, in a bravura oration (“Be absolute for death”), argues that feverish, self-tormenting life is only a breath that “none but fools would keep” (III.i.8). Powerfully “proving” that life is death's fool, Vincentio claims that mundane existence is an ignoble, cowardly, insubstantial, unhappy, uncertain, impoverished, friendless, teasing affair:

                                                                                                    what's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths; yet death we fear
That makes these odds all even.

(III.i.38-41)

Doomed Claudio appears to find comfort in the Friar's compelling portrayal of the endless discomfort of this world:

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

(III.i.41-43)

At the midpoint of the play, the question of consolation appears to have been quite easily and definitely settled.

Because Vincentio has been a “man of comfort” for some time, his apparently effective consoling of Claudio is not surprising. When the Duke, disguised as Friar Lodowick, approaches Mariana, who is listening to a boy's plaintive song, she exclaims:

Break off thy song, and haste thee quick away;
Here comes a man of comfort, whose advice
Hath often still'd my brawling discontent.

(IV.i.7-9)

Paradoxically, the character who gradually emerges as the wellspring of comfort in the play confesses her repeated need for consolation. Moreover, Mariana's comment implies a time frame for Vincentio-as-Lodowick much larger than we had imagined; as a “man of comfort,” Friar Lodowick has successfully consoled Mariana, bereft of her brother Frederick, on many occasions. Apparently Vincentio's request that Friar Thomas supply him with a religious habit and instruct him how he “may formally in person bear / Like a true friar” (I.iii.47-48) antedates Mariana's remark by much more time than we had supposed.² Rather than implying double-time in Measure for Measure, Mariana's comment firmly establishes Vincentio's character as a man of comfort. The Duke has, after all, been portrayed by reliable Escalus as “a gentleman of all temperance”—high praise within the dramatic context of Hamlet, whose protagonist regards the virtue as the source of composure amidst a sea of troubles.

Immediately after Vincentio's consolation of Claudio, Isabella's saintly pax vobiscum is heard—“What hoa! Peace here; grace and good company!”—a benediction of comfort ironically extended to a young man who has seemingly just attained spiritual relief. Responsive to Isabella's greeting, Claudio pointedly says, “Now, sister, what's the comfort?” (III.i.53). Isabella replies:

Why,
As all comforts are: most good, most good indeed.
Lord Angelo, having affairs to heaven,
Intends you for his swift ambassador,
Where you shall be an everlasting leiger.
Therefore your best appointment make with speed;
Tomorrow you set on.

(III.i.54-60)

During the series of questions and answers which follows, Claudio discovers that he might live if Isabella would give up her virginity. His outburst over her refusal reveals that he has not, in fact, been comforted by Friar Lodowick's contemptus mundi argument:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world: or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling,—'tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

(III.i.117-31)

In retrospect, Vincentio's lack of success with Claudio is predicted by his similar failure to console Juliet. After leading a penitent Juliet to embracing the “shame” of her pregnancy “with joy,” a satisfied Vincentio exits with the blessing “Benedicite,” only to leave the audience to hear the mother's words of torment:

                                                                                                              O injurious love,
That respites me a life, whose very comfort
Is still a dying horror!

(II.iii.40-42)

Even as Claudio's “comfort” thinly masks the terror of dying, so Juliet's “content” hides a horror at the imminent execution of the father of her unborn child. In each case, Vincentio not only overestimates the power of his consolation but underestimates the human frailty of his subject as well.

When attempting to account for Vincentio's notable lack of success in comforting Claudio, critics sometimes refer to the Duke's conspicuous omission of any reference to the joys of a Christian afterlife.³ In their view, a morbid Vincentio paints only one panel—the somber one—of the traditional diptych of contemptus mundi.⁴ The Duke's omission is even more striking in light of his apparent belief in Christian Providence; Vincentio's later allusion to the unfolding star that calls up the shepherd, resonant with overtones of the Nativity, reflects a hope that an otherworldly providence abets his own faltering efforts at redemption.⁵ And yet we should not expect that any mortal, regardless of spiritual qualifications, can fully comfort another condemned to a possibly unjust death. While we have no reason to doubt the reality of the generally temperate life that Escalus ascribes to the Duke, Vincentio has, on at least one occasion, been an intemperate ruler of Vienna. That is simply to say that he is a man—a creature unable to conform to his own idealistic account of the wise ruler drawn in tetrameter couplets at the end of Act III.⁶ Vincentio's lapse in enforcing unpleasant laws has allowed Viennese vice to grow unchecked to the degree that the painful and deceptive measures which form the play's subject matter are necessary. An early version of the retiring Prospero, Vincentio has been too comfortable in his lax withdrawal from his people, from the hurly-burly required for political strength. He has, through his license, made his subjects too comfortable with such an illegal act as fornication. Vincentio tells Friar Thomas that his “secret harbour hath a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth” (I.iii.4-6). Almost certainly an older man, the Duke perhaps takes unjustifiable pride in having a “complete bosom” that the “dribbling dart of love” cannot pierce (I.iii.1-3). Though not a “burning youth,” Vincentio later falls in love with Isabella. While he has ever strived to know himself, the Duke, on at least one count, has not fully acquired self-knowledge.

Thus it is not surprising that imperfect Vincentio cannot convert Claudio. In a figure who, like Hamlet, can admire balance and reasonable moderation but never precisely attain them, the omission—for whatever reason—of the crucial heavenly half of the diptych of contemptus mundi nicely reveals the inner disproportion of an ethical character who would seem to be perfect.⁷ Claudio's speech implies that no lasting comfort can be found for mortals for whom death is the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. Through the centuries, audiences have responded more warmly to Claudio's poetic cry of the heart than they have to the Duke's set piece on the empty promise of this world, primarily because Claudio's rich imagination triggers the spectator's instinctive love of life. Shakespeare validates Claudio's outburst through the character of the convict Barnardine, who ironically is so comfortable in the most wretched circumstances that he feels no need to seek or receive Vincentio's spiritual comfort. And yet, unlike Claudio, Barnardine does not cling to misery because he fears death. Still, Barnardine's attitude, regarded in the light of his “loathed worldly life,” underscores Claudio's protest; a rooted and (in Claudio) somewhat attractive love for admittedly miserable life may qualify the impact of spiritual comfort in Measure for Measure.⁸

In keeping with the impasse between earthly love and spiritual comfort, Isabella extends no comfort to the brother who would cling to a life which he loves, if for no other reason than Juliet's and his unborn child's welfare. It is clear, as critics of the play often emphasize, that any dislike we feel for Isabella derives, in large part, from her resolve—so much like Olivia's in Twelfth Night—to remove herself from those warm realities that make life worth living. After all, it takes a degree of emotional detachment to pun upon the words “ambassador” and “leiger” while telling a brother that a vicious judge will send him, via bloody execution, to another world. Moreover, once Isabella hears Claudio's compromising proposal, she lashes out so unnecessarily that countless audiences have been pained by her words:

                                                                                          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.142-46)

At this point, the eavesdropping Duke intercedes, unaccountably excusing Angelo, who Vincentio claims is “testing” his judgment of human nature by making an odd trial of Isabella's virtue. The Duke then, without any attempt at rhetorical persuasion, baldly proclaims that Claudio must be absolute for death on the morrow, even though he has heard his philosophy fail in Claudio's horror at the loss of all sensation. A second time in the scene Claudio admits to having received comfort, although in this case the deceptively genuine ring of his words issues from the blackest of moods. “Let me ask my sister pardon. I am so out of love with life that I will sue to be rid of it” (III.i.170-71). Vincentio has not persuaded Claudio of life's worthlessness; nor has Claudio silently shed his natural fear of death. The utter despair that should be heard in the actor's tone of voice reveals that the cruelest resignation, rather than positive insight, motivates Claudio's willingness to die.

In summary, the positive comfort promised at the beginning of this scene is never truly felt by its intended object. Alone with Isabella, Vincentio proposes his trick of substituting Mariana for Isabella in a dark meeting with Angelo, thus preserving Claudio's bartered life and Isabella's virginity. “The doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof” (III.i.258-59). Or so Vincentio argues. Isabella's reaction to Vincentio's scheme predicts a comic resolution for the play: “The image of it gives me content already, and I trust it will grow to a most prosperous perfection” (III.i.260-61). The comfort announced in this remarkable scene's beginning is fulfilled in its closing lines, although in a sense initially unintended. “I thank you for this comfort,” Isabella exclaims, referring to Vincentio's morally ambiguous bed-trick; “fare you well, good father” (III.i.269-70). Paradoxically, the positive comfort promised for Claudio is felt by the uncomforting Isabella; strangely, comfort has been found not in the other world but in the machinations of this morally muddy one.

Vincentio's final promise of comfort relies upon the whole-hearted cooperation of Mariana. The comfort recovered at the end of III.i in fact radiates from this enigmatic character, isolated by the moated grange—the reduced green world of this perplexing comedy.⁹ As part of his scheme, Vincentio explains to Isabella that Mariana has known extreme worldly loss in her brother Frederick's death by drowning, the sea-swallowing of her marriage dowry, and in rejection by her betrothed Angelo. “Did Angelo so leave her?” Isabella incredulously asks. “Left her in her tears,” Vincentio affirms, “and dried not one of them with his comfort” (III.i.224-26). Isabella's angry reaction focuses the solution offered by dying: “What a merit were it in death to take this poor maid from the world! What corruption in this life, that it will let this man live!” (III.i.231-33). In Measure for Measure, ideas meant for one character often make a striking impression upon a character who has no need for them. It is as though the life-denying Isabella has heard Vincentio's “be-absolute-for-death” speech and been truly persuaded by it. Like Angelo, who later sues for death rather than mercy, Isabella strikes the viewer as a rather brittle character who has never loved life, or as one who has never found anything lovable in life. Thus she stands amazed at Mariana's desire to embrace not only this often sorrowful life but also the man who has so basely wronged her. Obviously Isabella cannot imagine herself doing so. Vincentio patiently explains: “This forenamed maid hath yet in her the continuance of her first affection. His 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.239-43).

Hearing these words, we may briefly recall Helena's masochistic love for Demetrius, the unhealthy affection in A Midsummer Night's Dream that grows stronger with each of Demetrius's insults.¹⁰ Yet this context from the earlier comedy, if remembered at all, is not an appropriate one for judging Mariana's affection. In the later comedy, a more positive frame of reference emerges. By saying that Mariana's love for Angelo has strangely grown out of his betrayal, Vincentio touches upon the mystery of self-denying, spiritual love. “Violent and unruly,” part of Mariana's love for Angelo is strongly passionate; at first glance, the loves of Mariana and Juliet seem to be similar in their turbulence. The pregnant Juliet has cried out against the lacerating love that saves her life—for her child's sake—and yet condemns the child's father (II.iii.40-42). Unlike Juliet, however, Mariana understands that passionate love, rather than being injurious, can be the key to salvation for herself as well as for others. It does, after all, urge her to play the potentially redemptive role Vincentio writes for her when reason and personal honor would dictate otherwise. And yet directing Mariana's erotic feeling is the greater part of her love—her love against all sense for her enemy.¹¹ Graciously bestowed where undeserved, Mariana's secular agape condenses the “Mary” of her name.¹² Her self-sacrificial devotion to Angelo does make her an intercessor for mankind in the fallen world of the play. Ironically, it is the Catholic novice Isabella who can least appreciate this greater love of Mariana's.

Shakespeare comments upon the staging of comfort in III.i in the comic episode following it. Richard Levin has explained how Shakespearean comedy often acts as either a foil to or a parody of ideas seriously presented in a play.¹³ Often a comic episode functions simultaneously as foil and parody.¹⁴ Such is the case in III.ii of Measure for Measure. The scenario in question begins when Pompey, arrested for being a pimp, is about to be hauled off to jail; straightway, he sees his salvation in Lucio: “I spy comfort, I cry bail! Here's a gentleman, and a friend of mine” (III.ii.40-41). In other words, Pompey resembles Claudio needing comfort while Lucio takes the place of the comforter Vincentio. Pompey's word “bail” crystallizes what was latent in the preceding scene; the ghostly father Lodowick's initial comfort—“be absolute for death”—implies Christian redemption. Christ was the bail for mankind, just as Christ's vicar, the Friar, ought to be. However, as depraved and ridiculous foils, Pompey and Lucio heighten the genuine dilemma of Claudio and the well-meant if ineffective counsel of Vincentio. Cruelly baiting Pompey, Lucio certainly is no savior. “I hope, sir, your good worship will be my bail?” (III.ii.70), Pompey entreats. “No, indeed will I not, Pompey,” Lucio replies, “it is not the wear. I will pray, Pompey, to increase your bondage; if you take it not patiently, why, your mettle is the more!” (III.ii.71-73). “You will not bail me then, sir?” (III.ii.78), Pompey asks plaintively a third time. “Then, Pompey, nor now,” Lucio coldly responds. Shakespeare now appears to be parodying Isabella's icy refusal to bail Claudio once she learns that he would embrace life at the price of her virginity. Like Claudio, Pompey receives no true comfort. In the longer speech quoted above, a certain malice creeps into Lucio's wish that Pompey's bondage be increased—not abated. The parallel focuses and accentuates the cruelty latent in Isabella's desire that Claudio die quickly. “I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,” Isabella has asserted, “no word to save thee” (III.i.145-46).¹⁵ In short, Pompey's and Lucio's dialogue causes the viewer to realize that Vincentio's bed-trick depends upon sacrificial bail rather than a legally complicated rationale for what constitutes Elizabethan marriage.¹⁶ More precisely, Vincentio's bed-trick is possible only because in Act III, the still-loving Mariana is a sacrificial bail for Claudio and Isabella, intending to save his life and her virtue. Through the comic episode, Shakespeare stresses by contrast (or by default) the indispensability and admirable nature of Mariana's sacrifice, causing us to realize that such an act, beyond the grasp of reason, can give desperately-needed comfort.

After listening carefully to the dialogue of Act III, a question forms itself in the mind of the theater audience. Does Vincentio, a character who has denigrated romantic love (“the dribbling dart”), possess an adequate understanding of how love can lead to comfort?¹⁷ While the passionately loving Mariana's role in his bed-trick would indirectly indicate that he does, his somewhat cold and unsuccessful attempt to comfort Claudio casts doubt upon the question. Moreover, while Vincentio at one point says “I love the people,” he quickly adds “But do not like to stage me to their eyes” (I.i.67-68). His attitude appears to stem from a disdain for popular enthusiasm:

Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and Aves vehement;
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it.

(I.i.69-72)

Yet Shakespeare later suggests that Vincentio misreads his people's affection for him. Stung by his lust for Isabella, Angelo creates an elaborate simile of how his blood rushes to his heart, incapacitating him:

So play the foolish throngs with one that swounds,
Come all to help him, and so stop the air
By which he should revive; and even so
The general subject of a well-wish'd king
Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love
Must needs appear offence.

(II.iv.24-30)

Angelo's poetry implies that Vincentio may be mistaken in his appraisal of his subjects' energetic reaction to his royal presence. Ironically, the Deputy bitten by lust has an insight into “untaught” love perhaps unavailable to the virtuous, self-congratulating Duke. Unfortunately Vincentio may never understand how much his people love him.

Considered in the light of his dubious appreciation of love, Vincentio's response to Lucio's libel of him is startling. Critics of Measure for Measure often misread Lucio's slanderous portrait of Vincentio as a secretive whoremonger because they miss the greater meaning of the Duke's rejoinder:

DUKE.
Therefore you speak unskilfully: or, if your knowledge be more, it is much darkened in your malice.
LUCIO.
Sir, I know him and I love him.
DUKE.
Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.

(III.ii.142-47)

A ring of conviction in Lucio's utterance—“Come, sir, I know what I know”—has misled some commentators into claiming that Vincentio is, in truth, a far cry from the divine deputy sketched by G. Wilson Knight and other critics.¹⁸ Yet the Duke's remark about the expressive interaction between love and knowledge detects not only Lucio's slander but also the latter character's pitiless refusal moments earlier to be Pompey's bail. James P. Driscoll has argued that in Measure for Measure Shakespeare “anatomizes the illusions of those who believe they can possess knowledge of themselves, others, and moral law without loving.”¹⁹ Earlier possessed of a bosom so “complete” that love could not pierce it, Vincentio has apparently learned the necessity of loving while overhearing the unloving quality of Isabella's words to her wretched brother. On the verge of withdrawing into the religious artifice of eternity, Isabella implicitly endorses a view of mankind as perfectable. Thus it is not surprising that she cannot speak in dear love “with better knowledge” to her flawed brother. The better knowledge issuing in loving speech is generally experiential in nature, composed of the belief that mankind will err by necessity but that forgiveness should rule, because all are cut from the same patched cloth. The Duke of Act I, protective of his perfectable self-image, has given way to the Vincentio of Act III, a character who, in his deceptive bed-trick, plans to forgive the unforgivable Angelo because, eavesdropping, he has been struck by the absolute need for empathetic love as part of the better knowledge leading to mankind's comfort.

Speaking in the better knowledge of forgiving love and offering to sacrifice oneself for another thus become the road to enduring comfort in Measure for Measure. Still, unforeseen events in this often frustrating play intrude between loving attempts to comfort and a prosperous ending.²⁰ As Claudio exits in Act IV, seemingly to meet his death, the Provost exclaims, “Heaven give your spirits comfort!” (IV.ii.68). Appropriately, the character knocking loudly at the door as Claudio exits is the man of comfort—Friar Lodowick. “What comfort is for Claudio?” the Provost eagerly asks. “There's some in hope,” Vincentio replies, confident that Mariana's bed-trick and Angelo's imagined promise have gained Claudio's pardon. Yet when that pardon never arrives the exasperated Duke must quick-wittedly resort to another means of redemption. Learning that the dissolute and manifestly guilty Barnardine is scheduled for execution that afternoon, Vincentio proposes to the jailer that the criminal's head be substituted for Claudio's. In order to save Claudio, Vincentio at this moment must reveal to the surprised Provost that Claudio is no more guilty than Angelo and that this truth will be known within four days.²¹ As surety for this startling claim, Vincentio offers to lay himself in hazard (IV.ii.155). Perhaps impressed by Mariana's example, the Duke takes the first step toward offering himself as bail for fallen mankind, even though his sacrifice in this case would not be literally physical.

And yet, maddeningly, the unshriveable Barnardine ruins Vincentio's plan for saving Claudio when the convict refuses to be executed on someone else's timetable. The unregenerate prisoner balks at supplying his cutoff head as a replacement for Claudio's. Like Mariana's, Barnardine's name evokes a Christian prototype—Saint Bernard and the Bernardine monks, the saviors of travelers near death.²² In this case, however, the allusion points a contrast; Barnardine will not rescue Claudio by his own death.²³ As their religious-sounding names suggest, Mariana and Barnardine—the greatest and the least—are complementary figures in the world of Measure for Measure. In brief, Vincentio's meeting with Barnardine receives a comic turn of the screw. The Duke announces: “Sir, induced by my charity, and hearing how hastily you are to depart, I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you” (IV.iii.49-51). But as was previously mentioned, Vincentio's earlier but dead-end oration against worldly life haunts him with a vengeance when Barnardine finds a godless, dungy existence somehow pleasurable. “To transport him in the mind he is in,” the Duke morally concludes, “were damnable” (IV.iii.67-68).

Thus Providence, despite the best initial intentions of such spiritually knowledgeable mortals as Vincentio and Mariana, must provide—deus ex machina—an immediate savior for Claudio, keeping alive the purposed comfort of Measure for Measure. At this point, Mariana's self-sacrificing love and the Duke's better knowledge, by themselves, have not been sufficient to heal a diseased city: an actual, sacrophantic death is required. Comfort becomes attainable when the great fever on goodness in Vienna breaks. The first sweats appear when the pirate Ragozine dies of an actual fever, miraculously making available a disguisable head at the very instant that one is needed. Ragozine's hair and beard even match the color of Claudio's. “O, 'tis an accident that heaven provides” (IV.iii.76), Vincentio correctly estimates. Not Vincentio, not Barnardine—but the depraved Ragozine becomes the crucial bail for the most knotty of dramatic problems. And to comprehend the humbling and inexplicable working of Providence is, in this case, to gain the better knowledge, prompting kind, forgiving words of love. A couplet from All's Well aptly comments upon the dramatic situation: “He that of greatest works is finisher / Oft does them by the weakest minister” (II.i.136-37).

With Claudio preserved, Vincentio has the leisure to teach Isabella a lesson about comfort. Having failed in his consolatory efforts with Claudio, he perhaps can succeed with his sister. When she enters to learn the outcome of Vincentio's plot, he speaks the following aside:

The tongue of Isabel. She's come to know
If yet her brother's pardon be come hither;
But I will keep her ignorant of her good,
To make her heavenly comforts of despair
When it is least expected.

(IV.iii.106-10)

Strangely, Vincentio would lead Isabella to heavenly comfort by first depriving her of comfort. The Duke clearly plans to mislead Isabella concerning Claudio's preservation; in fact, he would have her think that her brother died. Still, Vincentio's concluding statement is somewhat ambiguous. His explanation of his reason for having Isabella believe that her brother has perished admits two interpretations, which are mutually exclusive. Each reading hinges upon the auditor's selection of a different referent for the pronoun “it” in the utterance “To make her heavenly comforts of despair / When it is least expected.”

No doubt relying upon Shakespeare's penchant for referring to plural nouns by singular pronouns, G. Blakemore Evans glosses “it” as “comforts.”²⁴ Vincentio will make Isabella heavenly comforts of despair when comfort is least expected. In this reading of the speech, the Duke tells the audience that Isabella's later learning of Claudio's rescue (her “good”) will be a “heavenly” comfort. Vincentio has noticed that Isabella's love for her brother requires refining; he has heard love speaking without the benefit of better knowledge. Moreover, struck by Providence's hand in his plot, he perhaps also believes that he can imitate its working upon another mortal (Isabella), instructing her in its marvelous power.²⁵ In any event, the divine degree of Isabella's later comfort depends, in this reading of Vincentio's speech, upon the depth of her despair over Claudio's imagined death. In this interpretation, the word “of” in the phrase “heavenly comforts of despair” connotes “bred out of”—the notion being one of “a physic / That's bitter to sweet end” (IV.vi.7-8). Such a reading of Vincentio's speech causes him to resemble that other ghostly father—Friar Francis—who in Much Ado About Nothing tells Leonato and Benedick that maintaining the falsehood of Hero's death will spiritually educate the Claudio of that play:

She dying, as it must be so maintain'd,
Upon the instant that she was accus'd,
Shall be lamented, pitied, and excus'd
Of every hearer; for it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost,
Why then we rack the value; then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours. So will it fare with Claudio:
When he shall hear she died upon his words,
Th' idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit,
More moving, delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul,
Than when she liv'd indeed.

(IV.i.214-30)

Vincentio may be hoping that the report of Claudio's death will—in the language of Friar Francis—cause Isabella to lament, pity, and excuse her brother, and that, having lost him, she will “rack” (increase) Claudio's value, sweetly recreating him in her imagination. But if such a purpose is Vincentio's, Isabella shows no sign of having lovingly transformed Claudio in her mind when he is discovered at the end of the play; in fact, she is enigmatically silent in the moments after Claudio's unmuffling. Obviously Isabella to some degree loves her brother; otherwise she would not weep so bitterly upon first learning of his death.²⁶ Yet the quality of her love neither causes her imagination to dignify (and so excuse) the lost Claudio, nor prompts her to say that she wishes he were alive (or that she wishes he could have lived). If Isabella tersely says as late as V.i.446—“My brother had but justice”—she can scarcely be thinking at this penultimate moment that Claudio's death is the transvaluing loss that would reconstitute her imagination.²⁷

Now let us address the second, more likely reading of Vincentio's statement:

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

At the moment these words are spoken, Isabella, having trusted the Friar's stratagem, expects comfort; it is despair that she least expects. If the pronoun “it” refers to despair, the Duke is saying that he will make Isabella heavenly comforts of despair when despair is least expected. In this reading, Vincentio apparently believes that, by despairing of any good in this life (such as a last-minute reprieve for a brother), one becomes inclined to seek “heavenly” comforts—comforts in a Christian afterlife. The Duke's remark, in this reading, thus becomes another extension of his “be-absolute-for-death” philosophy.

The troubling possibility exists that Vincentio, who overheard Claudio deny his philosophy, persists in believing that contemptus mundi provides an inclusive ethos for living all of life. Yet why Isabella should need further schooling in this doctrine of comfort escapes understanding. When she publicly begs Vincentio early in Act V to believe her charge against Angelo, she says,

                                                                                          as thou believ'st
There is another comfort than this world,
That thou neglect me not.

(V.i.51-53)

Yet such quotation is unnecessary; the would-be nun distrusted the potential comfort of a worldly life as early as Act I. Still, Vincentio's and Isabella's exchange in Act V clearly endorses this second, troublesome reading of Vincentio's suggestive speech about Isabella's comfort. After he has finally indicted Angelo, Vincentio turns to Isabella:

Your brother's death, I know, sits at your heart:
And you may marvel why I obscur'd myself
Labouring to save his life, and would not rather
Make rash remonstrance of my hidden power
Than let him so be lost. O most kind maid,
It was the swift celerity of his death,
Which I did think with slower foot came on,
That brain'd my purpose. But peace be with him.
That life is better life, past fearing death,
Than that which lives to fear. Make it your comfort,
So happy is your brother.

(V.i.387-97)

In this late speech, Vincentio appears to be expanding upon his earlier, ambiguously expressed purpose in concealing Claudio after Isabella's brother has been saved. The Duke's final utterance again reprises his “be-absolute-for-death” philosophy, making the heavenly comforts earlier referred to those of a Christian afterlife. Not surprisingly, Isabella's response to the Duke's speech is a quick and simple “I do, my lord” (“I do make my comfort my belief that Claudio is happy in another world”).

Vincentio's fifth-act emphasis upon otherworldly comfort is puzzling in light of Shakespeare's simultaneous valuing of worldly life throughout Measure for Measure. This valuing is perhaps most apparent in the implicit underwriting of the sensual life occurring in overtly humorous episodes. Elbow's malapropisms concerning his great-bellied wife, Master Froth, and Mistress Overdone's “hothouse,” for example, suggest not only that Christians (like Isabella) on occasion might be profane but also that a brothel might in some sense be respected. Shakespeare's indirect challenging of Vincentio's and Isabella's conventional morality prepares us for understanding why these characters finally can be classed together. In general, the characters of this dark comedy can be grouped according either to a love for earthly life or to an indifference to its possible pleasures and rewards—fruits such as Claudio's and Juliet's child (one of the traditional comforts of dramatic comedy).²⁸ Claudio, Lucio, and Barnardine, for example, belong in differing degrees to the first camp. Angelo and Vincentio basically belong to the second group of characters, those who either find it easy to die and relinquish this life or who place their trust in the comfort of another world. Once accused, Angelo finds craving death easier than begging for mercy (V.i.474); for him, non-existence is preferable to the painful duty of trying to find happiness in a problematic life. Isabella of course belongs in this latter group, as her ready agreement with Vincentio's advice indicates. Paradoxically, she has never needed the comfort that he planned to teach her.²⁹ In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare disturbingly creates his major characters without a strong zest for living, without, in other words, a powerful need to practice the pleasure principle that, from the time of the Greeks, has informed dramatic comedy. It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that Shakespeare does not sanction one group's view over that of the other.³⁰ Instead, in keeping with his mindset of complementarity, he sanctions both views at once in the mysterious figure of Mariana.

Only Mariana finds comfort both in a love for the unlovable Angelo and the hard-earned joys of this life, as well as in the faith that an afterlife redeems miseries of daily existence. Two loves she has—that for Angelo and that for the God described by Friar Lodowick. Her name, reminiscent of a heavenly mediator, links her with the Providence of Measure for Measure that makes double comfort possible for those who desire it. Even Isabella finally comes under her influence. Kneeling to beg for mercy for Angelo, Mariana exclaims,

                                                            sweet Isabel, take my part;
Lend me your knees, and all my life to come
I'll lend you all my life to do you service.

(V.i.428-30)

By her admonition “take my part,” Mariana is asking for more than Isabella's emotional support; she is in fact entreating her to assume her role of spiritual mediator. Finally dropping to her knees to ask for Angelo's salvation, Isabella mirrors Mariana beside her, capable at last of the self-humbling, forgiving attitude required of the comforter. According to Vincentio's first-act definition of virtue, good qualities become realities not when we simply possess them but only when they “go forth of us” (I.i.34), only when they issue in actions, in “use.” Through the acts of kneeling and clasping her hands, Isabella's virtue clearly materializes. Comfort finally becomes a deed rather than a consolatory word that has so often failed. Vincentio's curt dismissal of her plea for Angelo's life as “unprofitable” ought not to indict her as mediator; he simply knows that her argument is rendered irrelevant by her brother's life—a reality he hastens to reveal. Like the audience, Vincentio tacitly must be pleased with Isabella's new-found capacity for comfort. That her subsequent silence before unmuffled Claudio troubles us should not qualify the triumph of her willingness to imitate Mary's blessed intercession. Such silence coming so soon after victory simply accentuates the mingled yarn out of which the play's characters are woven. Initially offered, seemingly lost forever, refound in the figures of the praying Mariana and Isabella of Act V, comfort in Measure for Measure becomes an overriding value, a complex value that Shakespeare teaches us to forego in easier, more comprehensible reductions, and to admire in its mysterious incarnations. Leaving the theater we find consolation in the visual image of two kneeling women which remains imprinted in our minds.

Notes

1. All quotations from Measure for Measure are taken from the New Arden edition, J. W. Lever, ed. (1965; rpt. New York: Random House, 1967). All other Shakespearean dramatic references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. This temporal discrepancy is also noticed by Richard A. Levin, “Duke Vincentio and Angelo: Would ‘A Feather Turn the Scale’?” SEL 22 (1982):264; and by Louise Schleiner, “Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure,” PMLA 97 (1982):232.

3. See, for example, F. R. Leavis, “The Greatness of Measure for Measure,” Scrutiny 10 (1942):238-39; A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns: and Other Shakespearean Lectures (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), pp. 165-66; Lever, p. lxxxvii; Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 116-19; and Judith Rosenheim, “The Stoic Meaning of the Friar in Measure for Measure,” ShakS 15 (1982):187-88. For an alternative account of the structure and nature of the Duke's famous speech, see Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure,” “Antony and Cleopatra” (1963; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 80.

4. The most interesting interpretation of Vincentio's failure is Joseph Westlund's in Shakespeare's Reparative Comedies: A Psychoanalytic View of the Middle Plays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 164-67. In his opinion, Vincentio purposely creates through words a valueless world so that Claudio will stop idealizing others and blaming sex and Juliet for his undoing—the young man compelled in the process to find comfort in something pragmatically real, after the Duke's devastating portrait. But if this represents Vincentio's plan for comfort, his strategy does not work; Claudio never speaks of something more real than his vital love of life.

5. Josephine Waters Bennett, in Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), comments upon the Duke's “Look, th' unfolding star calls up the shepherd”: “The court audience had celebrated Christmas morning just the day before, and would surely be reminded of the star and the shepherds of the Nativity story” (p. 27).

6. Also see III.ii.179-83 and IV.i.60-65, in which Vincentio implicitly alludes to himself as a mighty king, possessed of greatness.

7. The immoderation of Measure for Measure is well portrayed by W. L. Godshalk, “Measure for Measure: Freedom and Restraint,” ShakS 6 (1970):137-50.

8. Leavis asserts that an implicit criticism of Vincentio's speech is conveyed through Barnardine: “of all the attitudes concretely lived in the play, the indifference to death displayed by him comes nearest to that preached by the Friar. … And towards him we are left in no doubt about the attitude we are to take: ‘Unfit to live or die,’ says the Duke, voicing the general contempt” (p. 238).

9. See James Trombetta, “Versions of Dying in Measure for Measure,” ELR 6 (1976):62.

10. Helena's masochism has been described by Joan Stansbury, “Characterization of the Four Young Lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” ShS 35 (1982):57-63.

11. Darryl J. Gless, in Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), explains that the coexistence of Mariana's passion and miraculous love finds precedence in the reconciliation of passion and piety in such Renaissance works as Spenser's Four Hymns and Epithalamion (p. 222). Gless's citing of the libertine Lucio's gracious speech on natural fertility as an analogue is also convincing.

12. In “Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement,” Roy W. Battenhouse notes: “And Mariana, without whose gift of herself the ransom could not have been paid, and the brother must then have perished, combines in her name (meaning literally ‘bitter grace’) the memory of Mary the Virgin and Anna the immaculate mother,” PMLA 61 (1946):1035.

13. Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 111-24.

14. Levin, p. 124.

15. Concerning Isabella's turning upon Claudio, Norman Rabkin, in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Macmillan, 1967), remarks that “her fault is not in what she asks, but rather in her failure to recognize the value of the sacrifice she demands. Though she is right she seems too right, acts as if what she asks of Claudio is easy to give; she is a prig” (p. 102).

16. Critics have been hard put to find precedent in Elizabethan canonic and civil law for excusing Angelo's sexual intercourse and damning Claudio's. In “The Marriage Contracts of Measure for Measure: A Reconsideration,” Karl Wentersdorf concludes, after a survey of Elizabethan de facto marriage contracts, that “in no sense does Friar Lodowick's assertion that Mariana will commit no sin in bedding Angelo ring legally true,” ShS 32 (1979):142. Also see Schanzer, pp. 75-76. According to both Wentersdorf and Schanzer, Claudio's and Juliet's private expressed intention to wed constitutes a valid Elizabethan per verba de praesenti marriage. Schanzer asserts that “the marriage-contract between Angelo and Mariana seems to have been a case of sworn spousals per verba de futuro (in which the couple promise under oath to become husband and wife at a future date). Now any de futuro contract was turned into matrimony and became as indissoluble as a de praesenti contract as soon as cohabitation between the betrothed couple took place” (pp. 110-11). III.i.213-18 establishes the de futuro dimension of Angelo and Mariana's marriage contract.

17. Vincentio's initial naiveté about “wholesome romantic love” is described by Cynthia Lewis, “‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered’: Duke Vincentio and Judgment in Measure for Measure,” SQ 34 (1983):279. Also see John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies (1962; rpt. London: Methuen, 1968), p. 194.

18. Like G. Wilson Knight in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays (1949; rpt. Cleveland: World, 1957), pp. 73-96, Bertrand Evans, for example, views Vincentio as a supreme power, wholly omniscient and omnipotent. See Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 186-219.

19. James P. Driscoll, Identity in Shakespearean Drama (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 107.

20. For the aesthetically frustrating dramaturgy of Measure for Measure, see Michael Goldman, “Comic Expectation in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 162-74; Richard Fly, Shakespeare's Mediated World (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 53-83; and Jean E. Howard, “Measure for Measure and the Restraints of Convention,” ELWIU 10 (1983):149-58.

21. Vincentio's admission that Angelo is as guilty as Claudio confirms the similarity of Claudio's and Angelo's acts of fornication, and so reveals Vincentio's desire to deceive Isabella for her own good when he explains that Mariana and Angelo may copulate without sin.

22. In n. 17 of 1:156 of The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958-1966), McKerrow suggests that the name Barnardine may be “a jesting allusion to the order of St. Bernard.”

23. For other interpretations of Barnardine's name, consult James E. Ford, “Barnardine's Nominal Nature in Measure for Measure,” PLL 18 (1982):77-81; and Gless, pp. 257-64.

24. The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 577.

25. However, if Vincentio wanted to teach Isabella a lesson mainly about Providence, immediately divulging the providential death of Ragozine, the substituting of the head, and the saving of Claudio's life would be equally if not more effective.

26. Shakespeare stresses the intensity of Isabella's grief over Claudio's loss by calling attention to her tears on three occasions. “Nay, dry your eyes” (IV.iii.127), Vincentio first implores; then he urges Isabella to “Command these fretting waters from your eyes / With a light heart” (lines 146-47). Finally, Lucio states, “O pretty Isabella, I am pale at mine heart to see thine eyes so red” (IV. iii. 150-51). While love—not simply anger or frustration—must partly cause these tears, Isabella does not love Claudio in a way that encourages her to refrain from judging him. Her love has not led her to speak apologetically (in better knowledge) of his frailties.

27. Another reading of the failure of Vincentio's efforts with Isabella vis-à-vis Claudio is Christopher Palmer, “Selfishness in Measure for Measure,” EIC 28 (1978):199-200.

28. For the conflict between life- and death-fulfilling desires in Measure for Measure, see R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1971), pp. 17-31. Also see Lawrence W. Hyman, “The Unity of Measure for Measure,” MLQ 36 (1975):3-20.

29. In King Lear, the failure of Edgar's educational program for comforting Gloucester (his son's ill-timed revelation literally kills him) confirms Shakespeare's skeptical Jacobean attitude toward the likelihood of consoling someone through deception. In this regard, see Philip Edwards, “Shakespeare and the Healing Power of Deceit,” ShS 31 (1978):119-24. Alternative detailed readings of Vincentio's “education” of Isabella are given by Gless, pp. 178-213, and by Bennett, pp. 69-74.

30. In Measure for Measure, Norman Rabkin describes a complementary “opposition between the Christian and the hedonistic-naturalistic views of life, so powerfully dramatized in the parallel speeches of the Duke and Claudio in III.i” (p. 104).