SOURCE: Lewis, Cynthia. “‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered’: Duke Vincentio and Judgment in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 34, no. 3 (autumn 1983): 271-89.

[In the following essay, Lewis evaluates the character of the Duke as the means through which Shakespeare examined the imperfections of the monarchy in Measure for Measure.]

Unlike many Shakespearean plays that concern justice and human judgment, Measure for Measure opens with a clear-cut statement of its moral standard, an ideal, of sorts, which Duke Vincentio urges Angelo to achieve:

Mortality and mercy in Vienna
Live in thy tongue and heart.(1)

From the start, the Duke calls for moderation in judgment, for a balance between exact punishment and forgiveness that, throughout the play, will remain a touchstone. Measure for Measure explores both the ultimate possibility of realizing this standard and the extent to which its characters, particularly the Duke, meet such a challenge.

I

Whether the Duke ultimately reaches his goal to unite strict punishment and mercy is an issue that has evoked as much comment as the means by which he sets out to accomplish it. Readers who, like Harriett Hawkins, find the play's ending “not only aesthetically and intellectually unsatisfying, but personally infuriating,” usually see Measure for Measure as fundamentally split in tone, structure, and viewpoint. For Hawkins, any effort in Measure to combine law and mercy fails utterly. Moreover, she argues, the Duke's character becomes muddled and unconvincing. He proves contemptibly shallow “by forcing the comic upon the characters and the audience.”²

On the other hand, many readers see Measure for Measure as unified. Arthur Kirsch, who sees Measure as a radically Christian play, concludes that the Duke's secret plotting represents the hidden workings of Providence and that, although the Duke's human schemes often fall short of the ideal, he struggles successfully to realize justice—to reform his vice-ridden people by compelling them to repent of their sins.³

At least some critical disagreement is, I think, capable of resolution if we consider Duke Vincentio not as a plot device or a Providential figure, but as a human character. If Measure pays tribute to James I (as some critics have argued), or praises Christ's emphasis on mercy,⁴ the play also depicts the human imperfections of earthly rulers, imperfections to which Kirsch merely alludes and which Hawkins overestimates. The Duke, of course, is a wise man; but nowhere does Shakespeare imply that he is prescient. Like everybody else, the Duke must guess about the future; if he is going to do so effectively, he will have to adapt to new and complicating circumstances as they arise. And they do arise, most conspicuously and abundantly in Act III, during and after which the Duke alters his original outlook. If, at this same point, the entire play did not shift with him—in tone, structure, and viewpoint—Measure for Measure would be no less “flawed” than it is often taken to be by critics who object to its shift in Act III. And it would be far less potent as didactic art.

Because Measure opens with an unequivocal statement of its ideal (e.g., I.i.44-45), it is not surprising that we are disappointed when that ideal is not reached; nor is it surprising that this disappointment sometimes prompts us to make more excuses for the play than it needs. The same holds true for the Duke, who immediately draws us into the play: our secret knowledge of the Duke's objective, to which we are privy from the beginning (I.iii), engages us in solving his political problems along with him. But because of our involvement with the Duke, we are extremely sensitive to any suggestion of weakness in him. He guides us through the play; if our trust in him is shaken, we are understandably inclined to feel betrayed. Such a feeling Shakespeare deliberately evokes, however, because Measure for Measure involves not only the regeneration of Vienna's citizens but also the inner growth of Vienna's ruler.

II

In the opening act of Measure, Shakespeare develops two interlocking contradictions on which the portrayals of both Duke Vincentio and Vienna's citizens will depend. The first is a disparity between the Duke's modes of self-description in scene i and in scene iii. The second is a disparity between the Duke's assessment of Vienna's moral condition in scene iii and Shakespeare's presentation of the Viennese in scenes ii and iv. As to the latter question, the Duke believes that his subjects have interpreted his leniency as license:⁵

                                                            Now, as fond fathers,
Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch,
Only to stick it in their children's sight
For terror, not to use, in time the rod
Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
And liberty plucks justice by the nose.

(I.iii.23-29)

Significantly, Shakespeare offers us the Duke's perception of Vienna's moral laxity only after he has already given us a more direct introduction to the city's character (I.ii). This order of presentation provokes us into scrutinizing the Duke's subsequent evaluation with more care than we might otherwise bring to it, since we have already formed an attitude toward the Viennese that is more mixed than the Duke's.

On the one hand, the opening of scene ii certainly seems to bear out the Duke's complaints. The ethics of Lucio and his friends are situational at best (I.ii.1-84). However humorous, their lines about ignoring “commandements” embody the excesses the Duke seeks to remedy: drunkenness, prostitution, and “disease.” Bereft of self-restraint, these subjects have lost any sense of responsibility for their own actions.

On the other hand, we learn in this scene that licentiousness has not infected all the Viennese to the same degree. We discover as much through Claudio: although Claudio has been indicted for indulging in “too much liberty” (I.ii.125), he is consistently portrayed as a man of his word and even as a moralizer:

LUCIO.
He promis'd to meet me two hours since, and he was ever precise in promise-keeping.

(I.ii.74-76)

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

(I.ii.128-30)

Even though his offense is relatively minor, Claudio's sense of guilt turns out to be stronger than anyone else's in the play, except perhaps Julietta's (II.iii).

With such contrasts as that between the bawdy Lucio and the guilt-prone Claudio, Shakespeare suggests that the Duke's moral assessment of his subjects is slightly severe. In I.ii we see a more stratified immorality in the populace than the Duke describes when he speaks of his people as homogeneously immoral (I.iii). Shakespeare reinforces our impression of the Duke's severity all the more when, after exploiting Lucio as a witty commentator on Claudio's compunction (I.ii.131-34), the playwright then shows us that Lucio too possesses a strain of loyalty. First by convincing Isabella to beg mercy for her brother and next by coaching her as she makes her plea (I.iv, II.ii), Lucio remains true in his own way to his bond of friendship with Claudio. Indeed, Lucio reveals a fidelity which surpasses that of Angelo, who not only lies about Mariana (III.i.226-27) but breaks his promise to spare Claudio's life in exchange for Isabella's maidenhood (IV.ii.120-26).

This broken trust, of which Angelo becomes almost emblematic, is actually more symptomatic of Vienna's disease, as the Duke conceives of it (I.iii.19-31), than the other characters' license. That the Duke should have left such a man in power becomes an increasingly unsettling source of curiosity to us, especially when we learn that, before giving Angelo his rule, the Duke has already known about Angelo's perfidy toward Mariana.⁶ From one point of view, the Duke's choice of exorcists seems completely rational: Angelo's rigid adherence to the law appears to be the perfect physic for Vienna's vice, as Escalus implies (I.i.22-24). And even if Angelo should eventually become a mere “seemer,” as the Duke implicitly suspects (I.iii.54), the disguised ruler will be on hand to correct his deputy's errors. Yet the fact that the Duke, despite his incipient misgivings, bestows his power on Angelo prevents us from completely accepting his perspective: if Vienna's moral landscape is really as bleak as the Duke portrays it to Friar Thomas (I.iii.19-31), then why should he entrust Vienna's care to Angelo, who, in respect to his dealings with Mariana, reflects that landscape?

The Duke appears to reveal his motives for giving the rule to Angelo during his talk with Friar Thomas: “I have deliver'd to Lord Angelo / (A man of stricture and firm abstinence) / My absolute power and place here in Vienna” (I.iii.11-13). The Duke here speaks well of Angelo, implying that Angelo's rigor shows promise of purging Vienna's corruption. Yet this explanation is actually the second of two reasons Vincentio gives for absenting himself from Vienna:

DUKE.
Why I desire thee
To give me secret harbor, hath a purpose
More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends
Of burning youth.
FRI. T.
May your Grace speak of it?
DUKE.
My holy sir, none better knows than you
How I have ever lov'd the life removed,
And held in idle price to haunt assemblies
Where youth, and cost, witless bravery keeps.

(I.iii.3-10)

Here the Duke gives a potentially self-centered reason for retreating to the monastery—his desire to live in contemplation, which, though natural, can be carried to a politically imprudent extreme. In effect, Vincentio hedges in expressing his motives, as he also does when the Friar wonders why the Duke has not himself chosen to administer more severe punishment:

Sith 'twas my fault to give the people scope,
'Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them
For what I bid them do. …
                                                            Therefore indeed, my father,
I have on Angelo impos'd the office,
Who may, in th' ambush of my name, strike home,
And yet my nature never in the fight
To do in slander.

(I.iii.35-37, 39-43)

The Duke's reasoning here may seem sound enough: feeling unable to right his former wrongs as he would wish, he elects what he considers the best of the choices remaining available to him. Even so, the Duke's excuse for giving his office to Angelo can appear self-serving and morally evasive. For even if Angelo inaugurates a stricter application of the laws, the Duke will still have to answer for Angelo and assume such responsibility later if rigor is to endure. Such firm enforcement will depend on the Duke's reappearing before his people as an authority, an object of respect, admiration, and awe, all of which he finds distasteful (e.g., I.i.67-72). With Friar Thomas the Duke verges on abdicating his responsibility in the same way his subjects have done (I.ii) and as Angelo is eventually to do: “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother” (II.ii.80). Divorcing himself from the law, Angelo refuses to mediate between the law and the people; hence he breaks a social contract. Although the Duke seeks to mediate between the law and his people through Angelo, such indirection suggests his own desire to free himself from the restraints of political responsibility, a desire that reduces our sympathies for his wish to impose harsher rules on the Viennese.

In this crucial scene between the Duke and the Friar, Shakespeare thus elaborates on the character whose antipathy toward public life, as described in the play's first scene, has looked slightly more high-minded than it appears here. It is not until this third scene that we even suspect that the Duke perceives a taint either in his manner of ruling or in the body politic. He has initially presented himself as confident, as though he has already achieved the balanced rule which we later (in I.iii) learn to be a desideratum: “Your scope is as mine own, / So to enforce or qualify the laws / As to your soul seems good” (I.i.64-66). Earlier the Duke had expressed none of the concern about his reputation that he now alludes to in his remarks to Friar Thomas (I.iii.41-43). In scene i he has described his distrust of the people's “loud applause and aves vehement” with a philosophic conviction (I.i.67-72) that now, in his conversation with the Friar, seems little more than a common case of shyness: “I have ever … held in idle price to haunt assemblies …” (ll. 8-9).

In effect, the Duke himself comes across as something of a “seemer” (I.iii.54). He remains admirable for his humility, his generally good intentions toward his people (e.g., I.i.3-7, 67), and his recognition of his own contribution to Vienna's moral decline (I.iii.19-31, 35-43). But the muted contradiction between what he wants from his subjects and how he plans to obtain it makes us slightly suspicious of his conduct. Critics who study the parallels between Vincentio and Prospero, only to reject the idea that the two characters are comparable, reject, I think, too hastily.⁷ A key aspect of the Duke's character lies in his inclination to abdicate his political responsibilities for the selfish delights of seclusion. Unlike Prospero, the Duke never succumbs completely to this temptation; but I.iii the Duke is a potential Prospero, wavering between using his wisdom to improve the common good and retreating into that wisdom out of contempt for common ignorance (e.g., I.iii.8-10). If, as Brian Rose argues, the Duke resembles James I, whose “fear of crowds was one of [his] weaknesses,” it may well be that Shakespeare saw in the King's aloofness a potential political hazard. A play that largely pays tribute to the King might also convey some criticism of James's “neglect of state” and “interest in academic … matters,” criticism which Rose assures us the King received from other quarters.⁸ Such criticism, however, would have had to be handled cautiously and worked through carefully.

And so it is. The tension in the Duke's character between private and public interests is so delicately fashioned that we are likely to miss several of its most vibrant signs. One such manifestation is the imagery in the first scene of “warping” and “bending.” Similar images recur in subsequent scenes to describe licentiousness, but in themselves they may suggest both error and resilience.⁹ In the first scene it is the Duke who uses the image each time. He applies it first to Escalus: “There is our commission, / From which we would not have you warp” (ll. 13-14). His next use of the image is self-reflective: “But I do bend my speech / To one that can my part in him advertise” (ll. 40-41). Courteously drawing Angelo's attention to his careful instruction (ll. 26-39), the Duke excuses his moralizing by associating it with indulgent preaching. He depicts himself as one who strays from a standard only briefly before checking himself from further wandering: “No more evasion” (l. 50). The Duke's casual self-assessment turns out to be an accurate description of himself. For we come to understand that the Duke's inner conflicts lie in his ambivalence toward social responsibility. Although less pronounced than Angelo's internal conflicts—

Alack, when once our grace we have forgot,
Nothing goes right—we would, and we would not.

—the Duke's indecision repeatedly involves him in his society's failings, so that he must himself learn what he wishes to teach his subjects (IV.iv.33-34).¹⁰

Until the Duke reveals himself in Act V, his disguise represents his pendant state, his wavering between accepting and rejecting his true role in Viennese society. The friar's habit allows him to invest his inner “nature” in social reformation without risking his “name” or fully accepting the responsibilities of his office (I.iii.39-43). As he continues alternately to “bend” toward and away from these responsibilities, he will indeed often look like a Providential figure whose hidden knowledge and intrigues portend a beneficial outcome. Occasionally, however, he will also appear at odds with the common good, especially when he demands too much from his subjects. The Duke's removal from his society, Shakespeare implies, has shaped him into something of an idealist, a ruler who, having once been excessively lax, now expects more from himself and his people than human nature is capable of achieving. That the Duke at first sees his subjects as more universally corrupt than we do suggests that he has avoided contact with his people: he does not know them well enough to judge them. The Duke's tendency to announce an absolute ideal of behavior (e.g., I.i.64-66, I.iii.19-31), which he then occasionally fails to meet, is a proclivity with which he must come to terms if he is going to judge others fairly. Through his covert but direct experience with the Viennese during the course of the play, he arrives at an understanding of human failure which enables him to lower his expectations without forsaking his ideals.

Because our estimation of the Duke drops somewhat between the first and third scenes—a shift which intensifies our uneasiness about his integrity—we begin to see him as a human being capable of error. By the end of Act I, then, our evaluation of the Duke's character may decline, but our expectations of him should become more realistic. When the Duke's behavior disappoints us, we should judge him as he does the inconstancies of the Viennese. If we hold him up against the same absolute standards that he himself gradually modifies, we become, like Angelo, the blind absolutists whom the Duke finally exposes.

III

After Act I, the Duke's essential characteristics are alternately embodied in Escalus and Lucio, who act intermittently as his mirrors. In III.ii, commenting individually to the disguised Vincentio on his character, these two figures illuminate both the most honorable and the least respectable aspects of the Duke as the audience perceives them:

DUKE.
… I pray you, sir, of what disposition was the Duke?
ESCAL.
One that, above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself.
DUKE.
What pleasure was he given to?
ESCAL.
Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at any thing which profess'd to make him rejoice; a gentleman of all temperance.

(III.ii.230-37)

LUCIO.
The Duke had crotchets in him. He would be drunk too, that let me inform you … the greater file of the subject held the Duke to be wise.
DUKE.
Wise? Why, no question but he was.
LUCIO.
A very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow.

(III.ii.127-28, 136-40)

On first glance, these two descriptions seem incompatible. But eventually we come to see that Escalus and Lucio differ less in their opinions than they appear to do here.

Escalus' appraisal of the Duke as a “gentleman of all temperance” conflicts with the Duke's assertion in I.iii that his own excessive leniency has contributed to the dissoluteness in Vienna. But we should remember that Escalus probably approves of the Duke's judgments because they resemble his own: as the Duke has been, Escalus is lenient. For instance, by merely threatening Pompey with punishment (II.i.244-56), Escalus makes a virtual “scarecrow of the law” (II.i.1). The futility of such hollow attempts at intimidation emerges later, when Pompey is placed under the tutelage of the executioner Abhorson: although the purpose of Pompey's exposure to Abhorson's “mystery” is presumably to instill some fear in him of his own execution, Pompey shows no sign of spiritual recovery (IV.ii.34-41). Rather, he chatters at length about the similarities between bawd and hangman (IV.ii.15-59).¹¹

As ineffective as Escalus' mercy may prove, however, it is at least rational: it is founded on his encounters with unregenerate violators like Pompey. When Escalus begs Angelo to forgive Claudio, for example, he bases his appeal on man's universal sinfulness (II.i.5-16). And although Escalus pities Claudio's predicament and cites Claudio's family history in support of his plea, Escalus' mercy does not stem from feelings of personal attachment to criminals. Instead, he bases his claims on objective observation. Forgiveness, he argues, arises from judging an isolated crime in relation to one's own sins and the sins of all men: “heaven … forgive us all!” (II.i.37). Implicit in his viewpoint is the recognition that some crimes, no matter how severely “whipt” (II.i.256), will never be eliminated completely from mankind: “Which is the wiser here: Justice or Iniquity?” (II.i.172).¹²

Yet Escalus fails to reform lawless behavior by merely “cutting a little” (II.i.5). He is by no means blind to the value of strict justice—“Mercy is not itself, that oft looks so; / Pardon is still the nurse of second woe” (II.i.283-84)—but he cannot really combine legal rigor and mercy. By consistently choosing forgiveness and seasoning it with only the bare threat of punishment, he virtually condones crime. In this, Escalus leaves himself open to the judicial pitfalls to which Angelo is prey. For Angelo, the only way to eliminate crime is to kill the criminal; for Escalus, the only way to preserve human life—and its mixed goodness—is to tolerate sin.

In other words, Escalus has settled for an imperfect choice in an imperfect world. Although he persistently attempts to “save” all sinners, whether they be Pompeys or Claudios (II.i.7), he also recognizes in the law and in himself certain limitations. Hence he acquiesces to his failures, as he acquiesces to Angelo's verdicts: “there is no remedy” (II.i.285).

The Duke, however, has become unwilling to be deterred so easily: “Craft against vice I must apply” (III.ii.277), he says. Escalus' acceptance of what he cannot change acts as a foil, then, to the restlessness of the Duke, who has grown more discontented with the Caliban in himself and in society, but who still lacks Escalus' insight into human nature. In portraying the Duke as generous, easily moved to sympathy, and introspective, Escalus unwittingly puts his finger on the Duke's mixed virtues: “contending especially to know himself,” the Duke has insufficiently examined the humanity around him (III.ii.232-33). As a result, his former leniency—which has sprung from his contemplative and charitable tendencies—has proven politically imprudent.¹³ Evidence of its consequences can be found, on the one hand, in the Duke's occasionally extremist attitude toward social ills and, on the other, in Lucio's view of the Duke as “flexible.”

Both the content and the confidentiality of Lucio's speeches provide an indication of the potential hazards in the Duke's removed way of governing. By misconstruing the Duke's leniency as testimony to his participation in clandestine sexual affairs, Lucio focuses our attention on the Duke's detachment from and his unfamiliarity with his people:

LUCIO.
Why, what a ruthless thing is this in him (i.e., Angelo), for the rebellion of a codpiece to take away the life of a man! Would the Duke that is absent have done this? Ere he would have hang'd a man for the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid for the nursing a thousand. He had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy.
DUKE.
I never heard the absent Duke much detected for women, he was not inclin'd that way.
LUCIO.
O, sir, you are deceiv'd.
DUKE.
'Tis not possible.
LUCIO.
Who? not the Duke? Yes, your beggar of fifty; and his use was to put a ducat in her clack-dish.

(III.ii.114-27)

Lucio reflects, in cruder form, Escalus' awareness of universal sin; he can conceive neither of a blameless human being nor of a mercy founded on any basis other than the fact that all human beings sin. Lucio suggests that satisfying one's sexual drive is as natural as “eating and drinking” (III.ii.97-103), and on that assumption he proceeds to slander the Duke, who “was not inclin'd that way.”¹⁴

In so doing, Lucio inadvertently exposes the Duke's naiveté about sin and even about wholesome romantic love. More importantly, Lucio points out the Duke's failure to reveal to his subjects, in some meaningful way, the activities and thoughts of his private life. Lucio's fanciful depiction of the Duke's inner character, then, springs not only from the perversity of his imagination, but also from the Duke's reticence, which has encouraged such idle minds as Lucio's to supply their own explanations in the absence of real ones. When Lucio refers to the Duke as a “superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow,” he of course describes himself instead (III.ii.139-40). But his epithets hint at what the Duke could become and what, by doing so, he could encourage his subjects to remain. In his wanton lack of self-restraint when speaking behind the Duke's back, Lucio offers us a parody of the Duke's own tendency toward the abuse of privacy, a tendency evident in his near contempt for society (e.g., I.iii.8-10), as well as in his plan to administer justice in disguise, behind the backs of his subjects.

The primary significance of Lucio's commentary on the Duke is that it indirectly describes the insubstantiality of the Duke's former mercy: “The Duke yet would have dark deeds darkly answer'd, he would never bring them to light. Would he were return'd!” (III.ii.176-78). Lucio implies that the Duke has carried out the law in secrecy to avoid embarrassing either himself or the criminal. But the audience—suspecting that the Duke has not been administering the law at all (I.iii)—infers from Lucio's lines that the Duke's real failing has been his refusal to make public his stance toward crime and punishment. Lucio and Escalus both unwittingly intimate that the crucial question about the Duke's behavior is not the extent to which he enforces the law or grants mercy, though that question is of considerable importance. No, Shakespeare's main concern is the Duke's relationship to his people—the extent to which, no matter what he believes, he imparts his beliefs to his subjects. Yet the Duke, as we have noted, cannot himself be sure what he believes about crime until he acquires a deeper vision of human nature.

IV

As the Duke proceeds to shy away from the practical concerns of active life which can inform him, he continues to teeter between an idealistic absolutism and a realistic understanding of the human condition. Our ambivalence about the Duke's idealism reflects an actual Renaissance debate on the nature of mercy. Marion Parker, discussing this philosophic controversy in The Slave of Life, traces the conflict to Seneca:

There are in fact two Latin words translated by Elizabethan-Jacobean writers as “mercy,” clementia and misericordia. … [In the De Clementia] Seneca, in recommending clementia to Nero as something which makes rulers not only more virtuous but more secure, distinguishes it sharply and at some length from misericordia, which he entirely condemns. Clementia he defines as “a moderation of the mind which restrains the power of vengeance, or a lenity of the superior towards the inferior in determining punishment.” Misericordia on the other hand is “a sickness of the mind aroused by the sight of other men's miseries.” Clementia is opposed not to severity but to cruelty, and “I will call those cruel who have cause to punish but have no moderation in their punishment.” … Seneca recognizes that many men will call misericordia a virtue, but insists that it is a vice. “So all good men show clementia but avoid misericordia,” which is “most familiar to the worst minds” and thoroughly effeminate. “Misericordia looks not at the cause but at the condition, whereas clemency is rational.”¹⁵

Shakespeare indicates that the Duke, in his previous efforts to administer mercy, has rendered misericordia, not clementia (e.g., I.iii.23-31). Perhaps Escalus has also looked more at the “condition” than at the “cause,” though Escalus has looked more rationally. Yet the distrust with which Seneca viewed—and we may also view—the Duke's tender-hearted leniency was modified in the later commentaries of Aquinas and in Anglican theology. Parker comments on Aquinas' views: “Misericordia, being caused by charity, is in itself the greatest of virtues. … Misericordia is ‘in God,’ in the motion of the divine will moved by absolute charity … the constantly stressed and typical quality of God's mercy is precisely that it is undeserved, that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’”¹⁶ Hence, from a Christian perspective, the Duke's misericordia reflects a divine ideal which we may well admire.

Shakespeare appears intent on using the Duke's personal conflicts to investigate the ongoing opposition between clementia and misericordia. According to Parker, this debate had evolved, at the start of the seventeenth century, into a tension between political thinkers and theologians. For example, Elyot (Governour) and Bacon (“Of Revenge”) preserve Seneca's distinction between clementia and misericordia by characterizing the former as “politically expedient” and by associating the latter with excessive sentimentality.¹⁷ Duke Vincentio, sometimes bridging and sometimes being caught between the theological ideals and the political realities which confuse the issue of mercy, allows Shakespeare to illustrate the political dangers which lie behind ideals like misericordia. For instance, Shakespeare compels comparisons between the Duke and such blatant absolutists as Angelo, as when he closes I.iii with the Duke's statement on Angelo—who “scarce confesses / That his blood flows” (ll. 51-52)—which returns us to the scene's opening lines:

DUKE.
No; holy father, throw away that thought;
Believe not that the dribbling dart of love
Can pierce a complete bosom.

(I.iii.1-3)

Angelo remains, from start to finish, a projection of the frigid absolutism to which the Duke is sometimes attracted, just as he is attracted at other times to the Christian ideal of misericordia. Such extremes, Shakespeare gradually convinces us, smack of folly.

V

But it is also the Duke who holds the extremist behavior of the other characters in check. The first bit of information we receive about Vincentio—his unwillingness to “bend” away from his awareness of his own limitations—strongly suggests that the Duke's past endeavors to “know himself” have been fruitful:

DUKE.
(To Escalus.) Of government the properties to unfold
Would seem in me t'affect speech and discourse,
Since I am put to know that your own science
Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice
My strength can give you.

(I.i.3-7)

Shakespeare here depicts two noble traits: the Duke's humility and his desire to act on principle. It is these attributes that eventually nurture the Duke's interest in and involvement with his people.

When we consider the general curve of the action in Acts II through IV, we notice almost unavoidably that the Duke is exposed scene by scene to a descending scale of immorality. The Duke's first appearance as the friar occurs in II.iii, where he absolves Julietta, the mildest and most guilt-ridden of sinners. The Duke next attempts to instruct Claudio (III.i), then Pompey (III.ii), and then Lucio (III.ii, IV.iv)—the first of whom sins, confesses, and sincerely attempts a conversion; the second of whom sins and confesses only; and the last of whom consciously sins, but refuses even to confess (IV.iv.169-74).¹⁸ When, in IV.iii, the Duke at last encounters Barnardine, whose “gravel heart” is so immersed in corruption that he will not budge from his flesh or his jail cell (ll. 62-64), the Duke has had direct experience with a full spectrum of sinners. These various confrontations seem not only carefully ordered, but specifically designed to instruct the Duke by degrees in how to judge sin on a relative basis.

As the Duke makes his way through these encounters, he also moves steadily toward engaging in an active life and revealing his inner self to his subjects. Between II.iii, where the Duke appears submerged in his friar's identity while shriving Julietta, and IV.v, where he tells Friar Peter that he has disclosed his “purpose and his plot” to the Provost (l. 2), the Duke has entered into a series of intrigues calculated to administer Viennese law and to teach his subjects how he plans to observe that law. The correlation between the Duke's gradual exposure to increasingly immoral types and his advances toward integrating himself socially indicates the Duke's growth in moral flexibility. It also constitutes a model for the Duke's behavior toward his people in the trial scene (V.i), where he tries to act directly upon their moral sensibilities, as they have acted upon his.

Act III, wherein the Duke first meets Claudio, is the crucial point of transition for the Duke, as well as for the entire play. The action here implies that the Duke learns as much from his subjects about life as he teaches Claudio about death. Opening with the Duke's speech to Claudio on the benefits of accepting death, the act proceeds to reveal the irrepressible and essentially healthy impulse of humankind to live, despite the corruption of the flesh from which death promises release. The Duke's lines—“Be absolute for death …” (III.i.5-41)—at first seem appropriate both as a consolation for a man about to die and as an eloquent, persuasive memento mori for the living. Their effect on Claudio is not merely comforting, but transforming: immediately following the Duke's speech, Claudio actively “seek[s] to die” (l. 42). This sudden change, however, gradually gives way to Claudio's renewed longing to live (III.i.54-150). Claudio's plea that Isabella sacrifice her virginity to preserve his life may not be justifiable on a philosophical level, but it nonetheless proves philosophy to have its consolatory limits. Claudio's resurgent desire to live, which has been momentarily channeled into the attractive thought of living in death (l. 43), shows us that the Duke has been somewhat naive in his attempt to control Claudio's antipathy toward death by appealing to his “reason” (l. 6).

The suggestion that the Duke's philosophic outlook is ingenuous is reinforced in this scene by Isabella's attitude toward death as a solution to sorrow, a means of avoiding the kind of ambiguity with which Claudio's appeal threatens her. Although the audience may appreciate and even applaud Isabella's refusal to barter her purity for Claudio's life, it is with little sympathy that we hear her protest to the Duke that Mariana would be happier dead than living in grief: “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). Before asking how Mariana might be “availed” (l. 233-34), Isabella assumes that both Mariana and Angelo would be better off dead than they would be if guided toward improving their lives. At the bottom of her reasoning lies an escapist impulse to ignore human problems.

With Isabella, however, the Duke draws away from the temptation to circumvent, rather than confront, such dilemmas. He responds promptly to Isabella's situation with a plan by which neither Claudio's life nor Isabella's purity will be lost. Significantly, the Duke's attempt to reconcile the conflicting wishes of Claudio, Isabella, Angelo, and Mariana occurs after he has overheard the exchange between Claudio and Isabella (III.i.54-150). After hearing that dispute, the Duke has had to confront what we have just ascertained ourselves and what Escalus appears to have known long before: that Claudio's hunger for life as well as for love is representative of certain human instincts which the law must accommodate. Claudio's vitality puts Isabella's idealism in perspective: though high moral standards like hers can be valuable guidelines for human behavior, such standards cannot always be met. On the contrary, Claudio's conduct, when viewed in terms of a more worldly standard and in relation to the crimes of Angelo and the lower comic characters, embodies its own kind of value. Claudio's trespass against Julietta is formal only.¹⁹ Founded on genuine love, Claudio's secret sexual union fosters new life and hope, whereas the prostitution in which Pompey and Lucio partake breeds disease.²⁰ Rather than condemn Claudio's appetite because of its potential evil, as does Isabella, the Duke therefore devises a scheme to modulate Isabella's refusal to countenance Claudio's passion. He sets out to temper the absolutism in Isabella's stiff rationale that has typically emerged to a lesser degree in his own attitude toward vice.

In arranging the bed-trick, the Duke prepares to serve up to Angelo a punishment which matches, almost precisely, Angelo's violation of Mariana's trust: “So disguise shall by th' disguised / Pay with falsehood false exacting, / And perform an old contracting” (III.ii.280-82). By insisting that his subjects act on their promises, the Duke begins to live up to his own promises: he resumes on his own the legal enforcement which he has recently only spoken of or wished for (I.i, I.iii). This merging of the Duke's private and public selves reflects the knowledge about Angelo that he has recently acquired from Isabella. Before the Duke has overheard Isabella's charge against Angelo (III.i.94-102), he has been reluctant to consider the possibility that Angelo's deception in his personal life might be paralleled by Angelo's approach to politics (I.iii.50-54). Yet once the Duke has acknowledged the relationship between these two sides of Angelo (III.i), he devises a means of exposing the fraudulence of the whole man—a means that also requires a personal investment from the Duke himself.

The Duke also admits to his own sexuality, for the first time in the play, by maneuvering Angelo into a situation where he will have to own up to his vows and, more radically, his humanity (III.i.151 ff.).²¹ The bed-trick also forces Isabella, through fantasy, to see herself in sexual terms. Before fashioning the bed-trick, the Duke has apparently not been aware that Angelo's, his own, or anyone else's blood could flow toward a good end. From his contacts with both Julietta and Claudio he has learned that sexuality, properly channeled, can be an agent of goodness (II.iii, III.i.1-150).²²

As the Duke proceeds to confront more severe forms of criminality, the remaining traces of his own idealism continue to recede. The Duke never ceases his eager attempts to reform licentiousness. Sending Pompey off to prison with the reproach, “Go mend, go mend” (III.ii.27), he retains a faith in the possibility of reforming sinners; and he persistently employs the same extreme means of evoking emotional response in his subjects that he has first applied to Julietta (II.iii.36-42) and later to other characters, like Isabella (IV.iii.109-11).²³ At the same time, however, he slowly incorporates into his austere expectations an added sense of his own limitations as a ruler. As appalled as the Duke is by Lucio's slander, for example, he seems to respond to the experience, in part, by re-evaluating his ducal responsibilities. Although the Duke first laments, rather evasively, his inability to “tie up the gall in the slanderous tongue” (III.ii.188), he soon after describes the ideal ruler as one who provides a model for the Lucios in Vienna:

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

(III.ii.261-66)

A just ruler should not only measure the guilt of others in the awareness of his own culpability; he should also present himself as a model of the character he demands in others.²⁴ The Duke illustrates his mastery of this principle when, in IV.iii, he extracts from Lucio the offhand confession that Lucio too has forsworn his love (ll. 169-74)—a confession the disguised Duke stores away for the future purpose of demonstrating, in the confrontation between Lucio and himself, the disparity between the Duke's demands and Lucio's unsatisfactory conduct (V.i). This is but one of the ways in which Act III provides the Duke with the knowledge he needs to rule effectively.

For us, the disquieting aspect of the Duke's entrance into active life is that, for him, to involve himself in society is to make judgments the enactment of which may have a startling effect on us. One reason that the Duke's role may be difficult for us to sympathize with is that he exposes crimes which we had thought, along with the characters, to have passed unnoticed. The act of giving palpable shape to thought can be devastatingly frightening. As the Duke himself implies, moreover, the act of judging openly leaves the judge vulnerable to counter-judgment (I.iii.34-43). The Duke, in the process of overcoming his own fear of being judged as a judge, is quite capable of arousing in us our fear of finding ourselves in the same situation. What is more, the Duke's efforts to bring “dark deeds” to light can easily awaken our own private feelings of guilt and our own sense of vulnerability to sudden, unexpected castigation. But if we allow our impression of the Duke to be conditioned too much by these subjective fears and—out of self-protection and under the mask of anger—project these fears back onto the Duke, then we will miss the experience in which Shakespeare invites us to participate, with the Duke, as he becomes a vital part of Vienna's body politic. And having done so, we will remain nervous, suspicious, and repressed, as does Angelo, who, in dreadful and guilty anticipation of Vincentio's return, hastily transfers his own “distraction” onto the Duke: “pray heaven his wisdom be not tainted!” (IV.iv.4-5).

If we fail to experience the Duke's dilemma fully, we will no doubt overlook Shakespeare's brief sketch of the Duke in IV.v as a man poised between his removal from and his re-entry into Viennese society. At this point, the Duke, still somewhat detached from his role as ruler, begins engaging in society with a new enthusiasm:

                                                                                          Go call at Flavio's house,
And tell him where I stay. Give the like notice
To Valentius, Rowland, and to Crassus,
And bid them bring the trumpets to the gate …
I thank thee, Varrius, thou hast made good haste.
Come, we will walk. There's other of our friends
Will greet us here anon. My gentle Varrius!

(IV.v.6-9, 11-13)

Having involved himself in his subjects' lives, the Duke here displays an extra warmth for Varrius and “other friends.” His closing exclamation to “gentle” Varrius is an open expression of the love that can spring solely from serious, honest emotional commitment, and it is equaled in spontaneous purity only by Claudio's plea to Isabella: “Sweet sister, let me live” (III.i.132).

VI

In Measure for Measure justice consists in maintaining contracts; and Duke Vincentio, because he rises to the role of teacher in Act V, epitomizes such loyalty. The Duke's new-found openness toward his subjects enables him, in Socratic fashion, to make judgments on his people by listening to them and by incorporating their viewpoints into his own otherwise sterner verdicts. Judgment in Measure is ultimately a collective activity. It is of no small consequence, for instance, that just as Claudio becomes penitent, the Duke turns amorous. By the play's end, in fact, Claudio seems to have had more effect on the Duke's way of life than the Duke has had on Claudio's. Contrary to the Duke's original expectations, his efforts to instill tighter restraints in his subjects have had the effect of relaxing restraints in at least three repressed characters: Isabella, Angelo, and the Duke himself. These characters are liberated from the constraints that have prevented them from loving completely, just as Claudio is released from prison to love Julietta (V.i.525).

However, the Duke refrains from handing out forgiveness as though it fell “as the gentle rain from heaven.” His merciful judgments consistently contain a stinging element of punishment: nearly every character is asked to enter or renew a contract that requires more commitment than he has previously given. The Duke's threats, though as empty as those of Escalus, still work because they are experienced as real. The public exposure of Angelo, for instance, works as surely to convert him as if he were actually condemned to die (V.i.366-74).²⁵ With this method of forgiving—by measuring mercy against exact punishment—the Duke attempts to teach his subjects the value of mercy.

This pattern in the Duke's instruction emerges most notably in his refusal to admit Isabella's pleas. During the trial, Isabella abruptly shifts from invoking absolute “justice, justice, justice, justice!” to begging complete leniency for Angelo (V.i.25, 443-54). In each instance, the Duke exhibits a disapproval of her insistence that points up the inadequacies of her reasoning. By treating her initially as though she were mad, the Duke elicits from her the background of her case, which includes an expression of sympathy for Claudio: “after much debatement / My sisterly remorse confutes mine honor, / And I did yield to him [Angelo]” (V.i.99-101). Isabella has not felt such “remorse” at the time of Claudio's imminent execution, of course (III.i.147-50). But by promoting Isabella to explain herself in sympathetic terms, the Duke indirectly makes her imagine herself as truly sympathetic. Her statement of “remorse,” though spoken falsely, appears to temper her rigor and provides the foundation for her later, sincere appeal to spare Angelo (V.i.443-54).

That appeal demonstrates Isabella's victorious ability to beg mercy for one who has harmed her. Yet it too is ill-founded:

ISAB.
My brother had but justice,
In that he did the thing for which he died;
For Angelo,
His act did not o'ertake his bad intent,
And must be buried but as an intent
That perish'd by the way. Thoughts are no subjects,
Intents but merely thoughts.

(V.i.448-54)

Mariana's reasoning, naive and trusting though it is (V.i.437-41), rings truer than Isabella's legalism, which is strained at best. The cases advanced by the two women, the one sentimental and the other casuistic, both belong to the category of misericordia, as the Duke's strong refutations imply (V.i.418-25, 433-36, 455).²⁶ The Duke's firm rejection, by turns, of Isabella's polar claims thus permits him to confer his own definition of mercy on the public while engaging his people in arriving at that definition.

However, as evident as the Duke's control over this exposition of justice and mercy becomes, Shakespeare hints that, even during the trial over which he presides, Vincentio himself has not yet fully come to terms with his role as governor. Between the opening of Act V, when the Duke and Isabella appear resolutely at odds, and the conclusion of the play, when the Duke proposes marriage to Isabella, the Duke has assumed three identities in an order that recapitulates his progress during the preceding action. At the beginning, he enters as he was before he left Vienna and, for all his people know, as he remains. Pretending to be deaf to Isabella's charges, he mimics his previous detachment from his subjects (V.i.46-162). Casting aspersions on common folly, he self-consciously directs irony toward the patronizing view in which he once held the general public (I.i, I.iii). And once again he places Angelo in the seat of judgment: “Do you not smile at this, Lord Angelo? / O heaven, the vanity of wretched fools!” (ll. 163-64).

After the Duke re-enters in his second identity (l. 277), he loses much of the ironic humor he displayed behind his first pose. We may find “Friar Lodowick's” diatribe against Vienna's vice rather testy and his praise of the Duke self-defensive:

… I have seen corruption boil and bubble,
Till it o'errun the stew; laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,
As much in mock as mark.

(V.i.316-22)

I protest I love the Duke as I love myself.

(l. 341)

“Friar Lodowick's” object here, of course, is to induce guilt feelings in his subjects and, more particularly, to manipulate Lucio into incriminating himself. Yet the Duke's aggressive posture here, as well as the mounting tension between him and Lucio, exhibits vestiges of the Duke's former self: for example, his tendency toward moral absolutism and his fear of humiliation in the eyes of his people, both of which have consistently motivated his detachment from the Viennese. When the disguised Duke is threatened with prison (l. 346), he has temporarily lost control of the proceedings. Clinging to the friar's habit, beneath which he can audaciously preach, he clings also to the conception of himself as “lovable,” a conception in which he wants to believe and which he fears to have questioned (l. 341). Symbolically, “Friar Lodowick” is earlier said to be “sick … of a strange fever” (ll. 151-52), a mixed allusion to his grief over Vienna's corruption and to the disease such intense grief breeds. The final implication is that “Friar Lodowick,” as an entity unto himself, must die—or be sloughed off as a false identity—before the Duke can re-emerge in control of the “Friar Lodowick” within him. Vincentio has ample opportunity to cure himself by revealing himself (ll. 344-55), but he resists taking the final step toward fulfilling his political responsibility.

To take that step, the Duke needs one more push from his old adversary Lucio, whose indiscreet unveiling of the Duke is, paradoxically, a blessing (l. 355). Lucio provides the ultimate mechanism by which the Duke is forced to take justice into his own hands and, by administering it, to decide when to temper it with mercy. By remaining true to his rude audacity, Lucio performs perhaps the most Providential action in the play; he makes way for the Duke to rectify the ignorance of the people, and most especially of Lucio himself. Once the Duke has recovered his judge's seat and initiated his new rule (ll. 363 ff.), it is no coincidence that Lucio's slander receives the stiffest punishment (ll. 500-525) the Duke metes out. In baring himself to his subjects and at last electing to marry Isabella, the Duke rejects the part of himself that has most resembled Lucio: his tendency toward clandestine and self-indulgent behavior, reflected in Lucio's slander and hedonistic sexuality. Thus Lucio's perfectly apt statement—“Cucullus non facit monachum” (l. 262)—becomes both a self-fulfilling prophecy and an axis on which the Duke makes his final way to a modified rule and to his true self, wherein his first two identities are integrated.

The net result of the dialogue between the Duke and his subjects, then, is a compromise that approximates the ideal balance, presented in I.i, between strict punishment and mercy.²⁷ Shakespeare, of course, leaves us wondering whether the Duke's attempt to change Angelo will work and whether the Duke's rebuttals to Mariana and Isabella will alter their present willingness to turn the other cheek. We also wonder about Lucio, the Duke's suppression of whom could well turn out to be unprofitable, both in terms of Lucio's capacity to meet the Duke's demands and in terms of the Duke's reluctance to see himself as mirrored in Lucio's disturbing, but radically truthful, visions. Perhaps more disquieting yet are the pardon of Barnardine (l. 483) and the disappearance of Pompey after the fourth act: we have no idea whether Barnardine will commit another murder or whether Pompey's punishment—to assist Abhorson—will yield the desired results.

Shakespeare chooses deliberately to withhold from us such projections into the city's future—and perhaps rightly so, since it is only by understanding the present that we can predict and, to a point, will, the future. But given what we have seen about the Duke's past, his future seems encouraging. Exiting with his people, he promises them an account of the events that have led up to the present:

So bring us to our palace, where we'll show
What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know.

(V.i.538-39)

The “mortality” that the Duke has mentioned to Angelo in the first scene has here assumed additional meaning. In revealing himself publicly, Duke Vincentio stresses his own humanity—including his fallibility—and it is that which binds him to his people.

Notes

1. G. Blakemore Evans, gen. ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Measure for Measure, I.i.44-45. All subsequent references are to this edition.

2. Harriett Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 76, 68, 69. Hawkins continues:

   … Duke Vincentio learns nothing. He admits no limits to his power and he never once analyses the total situation. And so, in defiance of all our critical efforts, Duke Vincentio, in the second half of Measure for Measure, remains outside any meaning, an external plot-manipulator, a dramatic engineer of a comic ending, who never sees beyond his single theatrical goal.

   (p. 73)

   Coleridge, too, saw Measure in negative terms: “Measure for Measure is the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakespeare's plays. It is a hateful work, although Shakespearian throughout. Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape. Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable.” [From Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930), II, 352, selections from “Table-Talk.”] Other critics who essentially agree with these views include E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1949), pp. 124-45; W. W. Lawrence, “Measure for Measure and Lucio,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 443-44; Hal Gelb, “Duke Vincentio and the Illusion of Comedy, or All's Not Well that Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 24-34; and Roger Sale, “The Comic Mode of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 19 (1968), 55-61.

3. Arthur Kirsch, “The Integrity of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 89-105. See also Darryl J. Gless, “Measure for Measure,” the Law, and the Covenant (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), chap. 6. Gless expands Kirsch's argument. See also M. C. Bradbrook, “Authority, Truth, and Justice in Measure for Measure,” Review of English Studies, 17 (1941), 385-99.

   Brian Rose, who writes on the parallels between the ethics of Measure and the teachings of James I in the Basilicon Doron, suggests in numerous and intelligent ways that Shakespeare, in alluding so frankly to King James's doctrine, was “striving to interest his new monarch and to engage his sympathy.” Rose further contends that Shakespeare, as a man of the theatre, sympathized with King James's rejection of Puritan legal rigor (represented by Angelo) and that the Duke's final forgiveness manifests Shakespeare's support of the King's preference for the New Law over Mosaic Law. [“Friar-Duke and Scholar-King,” English Studies in Africa, 9 (1966), 72-82.]

   The Basilicon Doron was published in Edinburgh in 1599 and was “secretly printed in London while Queen Elizabeth was dying” [Josephine Bennett, “Measure for Measure” as Royal Entertainment (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), p. 82].

   See also D. L. Stevenson, The Achievement of “Measure for Measure” (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), for various discussions of the Duke as modeled on Providence and James I; and Donald A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (New York: Norton, 1949), p. 142, for an argument that the Duke is “playing God.”

4. See Gless pp. 253-54, for an argument that, “from Augustine's age onward,” the “major implication” of the Sermon on the Mount was interpreted to be “Judge not.”

5. Marion D. H. Parker, in The Slave of Life: A Study of Shakespeare and the Idea of Justice (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), pp. 111-12, 112, states the Viennese social problem thus, but does not question the Duke's perception.

6. The Duke's knowledge of Angelo is indicated not only in the Duke's narrative to Isabella (III. i.197-269), but also in Mariana's suggestion that the Duke has often come to visit her in a friar's disguise (IV. i.8-9). For an alternative interpretation of IV. i.8-9, see Mary Lascelles, Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure” (London: the Athlone Press, 1953), p. 105. Harriett Hawkins (p. 62) views the Duke's deputation of Angelo with considerable scorn.

   It is also worth noting here the juxtaposition of the prison cell to which Angelo consigns Claudio and the “moated grange” where Mariana dwells in dejected solitude (III.i.264, IV.i). Throughout Measure Shakespeare plays with cells as symbols of social estrangement, which he also identifies with Isabella and the Duke, who sometimes choose religious cells.

7. See, for instance, Kirsch, p. 105.

8. Rose, pp. 74-75.

9. Some other instances of this image occur in I.iii.20 and III.i.141.

10. Interestingly, Isabella also expresses such blatant ambivalence: see II.ii.29-33. The Duke, talking with the Provost, seems to deny his own ambivalence (IV.ii.132-34). Interestingly, however, the Provost indirectly confirms the Duke's laxity: his government, unlike Angelo's, lacked sufficient evidence to condemn Barnardine (ll. 135-37).

11. The Duke implies that Pompey's assignment as Abhorson's assistant is intended to “correct” and “instruct” Pompey (see III.ii.27-33). Pompey adapts to his new role almost immediately, alluding to the Christian theme of regeneration (IV.ii.49-51). But the “bawd-born” chameleon does not sincerely convert and thus mocks the authorities' attempts to convert him (III.ii.68).

    See Gelb, passim, for an exceedingly dark interpretation of Pompey and the other low comic characters.

12. This theory of judgment and its relationship to the entire play has been discussed by many critics. See, for example, Bradbrook, p. 397.

13. I do not mean to condemn the Duke's charitable contributions (e.g., III.ii.126-27), but only to question his motives—that is, his apparent confusion of such charity with leniency toward crime.

14. Lucio's character and dramatic role, like the Duke's, have been much debated. As one might expect, the readers who condemn Lucio are, almost without exception, the same ones who, like Kirsch and Rose, stress the Duke's attractive qualities. Some critics who have seen Lucio as a rather serious commentator include Clifford Leech, “Shakespeare's Comic Dukes,” Review of English Literature, 5 (1964), 112-13; Francis Fergusson, The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 135-36; and Northrop Frye, “Characterization in Shakespearian Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (1953), 276.

15. Parker, p. 51.

16. Parker, pp. 52-53.

17. Parker, pp. 53-54.

18. Like the sinners in Measure, the moralistic characters may also be viewed in terms of a scale. Isabella, Angelo, Escalus, and the Duke, in that order, come to reflect ascending levels of moral consciousness. Isabella, on one end of the spectrum, reveals no awareness that she is capable of transgression—an awareness that Angelo eventually reaches, but will not readily admit. The Duke, who finally arrives at the top of the scale, learns to use his knowledge of universal sin, which Escalus shares, toward converting the sinner.

19. The crime is “formal” in the sense that it goes against the wishes of the Church, which urged against clandestine marriage in order to guard against one partner's desertion of the other. See Karl Wentersdorf, “The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure: A Reconsideration,” Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 135. See also Claudio's lines in I.ii.147-49, and compare Gless, pp. 234-37.

20. See Kirsch pp. 98-100, for a longer and richer discussion of views in Measure concerning human sexuality. Kirsch also relates the themes of sexual love and felix culpa (p. 105).

21. Kirsch, pp. 94-95, makes a point similar to mine about the Duke's treatment of Angelo.

22. Like so many aspects of Measure, the morality of the bed-trick has been debated over and again. See especially Wentersdorf, pp. 142-44. See also Hawkins, p. 73, and Leech, pp. 112-13, for extremely negative responses to the Duke's scheme.

23. Elizabeth Marie Pope, in “The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 2 (1949), 71-72, points out that the right to use “extraordinary means,” like disguise, was one of the more or less official privileges of an Elizabethan-Jacobean ruler.

24. So James I also wrote in the Basilicon Doron:

    For it is not ynough that ye haue and retaine (as prisoners) within your selfe neuer so many good qualities and vertues, except ye imploy them, and set them on worke, for the weale of them that are committed to your charge: Virtutis enim laus omnis in actione consistit.

    From James I, Basilicon Doron, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1944), I, 105. (I quote the Waldegrave MS. of 1603.)

25. See Gless, chap. 6, for a description, similar to mine, of the Duke's method. Gless sees the Duke as a physician.

26. On Isabella's maturation see, for instance, Parker, p. 119. Pope pp. 79-80, argues that Mariana's plea for mercy is of a “foolish” kind.

27. That critics disagree so much over whether it is law or mercy that the Duke finally serves is but one indication that he serves both. Whether the Duke's mercy belongs to the Senecan category of clementia is hard to say; but its rational, reserved quality bears resemblance to clementia.

    I am suggesting that the term “measure” in this play ultimately connotes moderation, as Stevenson suggests in Achievement (p. 20). See also Stauffer, p. 155, for a view that “measure for measure” is a titular reference to the Aristotelian mean.