SOURCE: Geckle, George L. “Shakespeare's Isabella.” Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 2 (spring 1971): 163-68.

[In the following essay, Geckle addresses Measure for Measure as a problem play, focusing specifically on the character of Isabella.]

Since critics are generally persistent in terming Measure for Measure a “problem play,” it is useful to designate exactly what the problems are. These cover a wide range of issues, such as the relationships between government and morality, law and justice, and mercy and justice, the dramatic structure and genre of the play, and the attitudes and actions of the play's various characters. In terms of the play's major figures probably more absurd statements have been made regarding Isabella than practically any other Shakespearian character, with the notable exception of Hamlet. It is Isabella who stands out today as Measure for Measure's greatest critical “problem.”

This problem of Isabella derives from the fact that a consensus has been taking shape over the years, an inaccurate, critically untenable consensus. It is based upon two stages of critical development: first, a great number of major critics have disapproved of Isabella; secondly, certain events and speeches in the play have been distorted to prove that Shakespeare also disapproved of Isabella and, in fact, subtly undercut her position throughout the play.

Samuel Johnson was the first great literary critic to discuss Isabella, and he did so in his customarily judicious manner. Where Isabella berates Claudio in III. i, Johnson says in his notes to Measure for Measure: “In Isabella's declamation there is something harsh, and something forced and far-fetched. But her indignation cannot be thought violent when we consider her not only as a virgin but as a nun.”¹ Johnson, in other words, finds extenuating reasons for Isabella's behavior in a scene which Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, a Johnson protégée, had singled out as being proof positive “that Isabella is a mere Vixen in her Virtue.”²

In his Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817, 2nd edn., 1818), William Hazlitt took a position somewhere in between those of Johnson and Charlotte Lennox: “Neither are we greatly enamoured of Isabella's rigid chastity, though she could not act otherwise than she did. We do not feel the same confidence in the virtue that is ‘sublimely good’ at another's expense, as if it had been put to some less disinterested trial.”³ Hazlitt's oblique reference to the substitution of Mariana in the bed-trick is only one in a long series of critical pronouncements condemning the device.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who called Shakespeare's Measure for Measure “the most painful—say rather, the only painful—part of his genuine works,”⁴ averred that Isabella “of all Shakespeare's female characters, interests me the least.”⁵ In a little known comment recorded by J. Payne Collier, we find out that the bed-trick was particularly abhorrent to Coleridge:

In the course of Lectures on Shakespeare delivered in the year 1818, Coleridge pointed especially to the artifice of Isabella, and her seeming consent to the suit of Angelo, as the circumstances which tended to lower the character of the female sex. He then called “Measure for Measure” only the “least agreeable” of Shakespeare's dramas.⁶

Coleridge is not condemning Isabella for her “rigid chastity” but for her seemingly dispassionate approach to the bed-trick.

Although there were several nineteenth-century critics who took a sentimental, albeit positive, view of Isabella,⁷ the criticisms of Johnson, Hazlitt, and Coleridge have been raised time and again. First, Isabella is too harsh toward Claudio; secondly, she seems too “rigid” in her chastity; thirdly, she taints herself by her participation in the bed-trick. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch merely elaborates these objections to Isabella in his well-known condemnation of her and concludes “that she is something rancid in her chastity; and, on top of this, not by any means such a saint as she looks. To put it nakedly, she is all for saving her own soul, and she saves it by turning, of a sudden, into a bare procuress.”⁸ Una Ellis-Fermor likewise echoes Quiller-Couch's sentiments: Isabella's fear of physical violation is an “obsession”; she is “Hard as an icicle”; she has about her “a pitiless, unimaginative, self-absorbed virtue.”⁹

The critics I have thus far cited have two things in common. They do not like Isabella very much, of course, but more importantly they all feel that the fault of Isabella's unattractiveness rests with Shakespeare. Quiller-Couch, for instance, feels that Isabella is an inconsistent character (p. xxxi). Ellis-Fermor speaks of “the lowest depths of Jacobean negation” (p. 260). Many modern critics, however, have taken a more subtle, sophisticated approach to the problem. They argue that Shakespeare knew what he was about and that he deliberately undercut Isabella throughout Measure for Measure. For example, G. Wilson Knight feels that Isabella is a flawed girl and that she behaves “like a fiend”¹⁰ towards Claudio. Knight takes a modern psychological approach to Isabella, an approach similar to Ellis-Fermor's: “Now Claudio has forced the responsibility of choice on her. She cannot sacrifice herself. Her sex inhibitions have been horribly shown her as they are, naked” (p. 102). He concludes: “Chastity is not a sin—but neither, as the play emphasizes, is it the whole of virtue. And she, like the rest, has to find a new wisdom” (p. 103). Isabella's “new wisdom”, of course, involves her plea for the life of Angelo.¹¹ Now, the crucial implication of Knight's line of reasoning is that Isabella should have yielded to Angelo in order to save Claudio. We have come a significant distance from Dr. Johnson's contention that we should “consider her not only as a virgin but as a nun.”

It is the double failure to consider seriously Renaissance ideas about chastity and to accept the total dramatic statement of the play that leads many influential modern critics to a perverse view of Isabella. Following G. Wilson Knight's approach to the play, for example, we find F. R. Leavis arguing that Isabella betrays “in the exalted assertion of her chastity, a kind of sensuality of martyrdom.”¹² William Empson feels that Shakespeare “could not quite stomach the old reverence” for virginity exemplified in Isabella.¹³ D. A. Traversi sees nothing essentially wrong with Isabella's virtue, but her “inexperience” and “false simplicity” are inadequate in the complex moral world in which only the Duke's “understanding is absolute, perfect.”¹⁴ Isabella lacks human sympathy, but is taught compassion and compromise by the Duke, argues Donald A. Stauffer.¹⁵ Francis Fergusson likewise feels that Isabella is “matured by suffering” and taught the “wisdom of love” by the Duke.¹⁶ In a recent study, Ernest Schanzer goes so far as to say that Measure for Measure is a “problem play” essentially because of Isabella's choice of action.¹⁷ (I feel that Schanzer comes close to the essence of the play's “problem,” but the “problem” is the critics' view of Isabella, not her own choice of action.) Schanzer feels that Isabella could have yielded to Angelo without risking eternal damnation (p. 100). “Shakespeare keeps his heroine single-minded and free from doubts but his audience divided and wavering” (pp. 108-109).

Even more recently, in what is certain to become a major criticism of Measure for Measure, J. W. Lever argues that Isabella is “learning, not teaching, a lesson in public and private demeanour towards wrong-doers” in her plea for Angelo in Act V.¹⁸ Lever agrees with Schanzer that a “compelled” sin would not endanger Isabella's soul. “If lay heroines in previous versions of the story were commended for setting aside the thought of shame in order to save a brother's or a husband's life, the novice of a spiritual order might also overcome the fear of disgrace in the world's eyes and manifest true grace by a sacrifice made in self-oblivious charity” (p. lxxviii).

David Lloyd Stevenson agrees with Lever's view and continually denigrates Isabella in the course of a new full-length study of Measure for Measure. Stevenson's position is illustrated by such statements as the following: “As audience, we feel it is her vanity, her picture of herself as a saint, that she is defending when she cries out, ‘More than our brother is our chastity.’”¹⁹ Moreover, when Isabella attacks Claudio, “she is the living antidote to all human charity, to all generous, deeply concerned sympathy and love, Jacobean or twentieth-century” (p. 49).

Now it is because Stevenson and the rest of the above critics are primarily concerned with Isabella from a contemporary and personal, and not a Jacobean, point of view that much of the misreading of her character occurs. The need for historical perspective has, of course, been stressed by W. W. Lawrence, R. W. Chambers, Elizabeth Marie Pope, Mary Lascelles, and Madeleine Doran,²⁰ to name some of Isabella's most convincing defenders. To buttress their arguments and historical evidence, I would refer the reader to such obvious Renaissance defenses of chastity as are found in Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Comus. In addition, such “courtesy” books as Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier and Romei's The Courtiers Academie²¹ were popular works containing extravagant praise of the virtue of chastity. Works by Lodovic Vives, Sir Thomas Elyot, Dorothy Leigh, and Barnabe Rych²² corroborate the esteem in which chastity was held in Shakespeare's era. Even in Shakespeare's major source for Measure for Measure, George Whetstone's ten-act Promos and Cassandra, the heroine roundly condemns herself once she yields to Promos' lust.²³

But Shakespeare's Isabella is a novice and, of course, does not yield to Angelo. Is it possible that Shakespeare's own audience, not to mention a twentieth-century one, would have looked askance at Isabella's choice of her own chastity over her brother's life? We can always fall back upon the New Testament doctrine that Isabella so often alludes to, but no amount of quotation from St. Paul or even from the glosses in the Geneva version of the Bible²⁴ is likely to change the minds of those who dislike Isabella. What is finally most useful and most relevant in interpreting Isabella is the evidence from the play itself.

The key moment in Measure for Measure for most of those who dislike Isabella occurs in III.i where Isabella berates Claudio for his human frailty. Surprisingly, no one who has ever defended Isabella has paid sufficient attention to the Duke's reaction to her castigation of Claudio. Does the Duke, generally acknowledged as the ultimate authority in the play, chastise Isabella for a lack of charity? He does not. On the contrary, he says:

The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good: the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair.

(III.i.184 ff.)²⁵

There is nothing equivocal about the Duke's statement. He says that God has made Isabella both physically attractive (i.e., “fair”) and morally upright (i.e., “good”). In some women physical attractiveness is easily come by (“the goodness²⁶ that is cheap²⁷ in beauty”), but also that very physical attractiveness tends to make those women morally deficient (“makes beauty brief²⁸ in goodness”²⁹). In Isabella, however, a fair exterior reflects a pure interior. Her “complexion,” with the common Renaissance pun on “external appearance” and “temperament or disposition,” is instilled with the Christian virtue of “grace.” The Duke, in short, is expressing the commonplace Neoplatonic doctrine that true physical beauty is a reflection of true spiritual goodness, a doctrine that finds eloquent expression in Castiglione's The Courtier: “And therefore is the outwarde beautie a true signe of the inwarde goodnesse, and in bodies this comelines is imprinted more and lesse (as it were) for a marke of the soule, whereby she is outwardly knowne.”³⁰ Spenser's An Hymne in Honour of Beautie makes the same point poetically: “For of the soule the bodie forme doth take: / For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. / Therefore, where ever that thou doest behold / A comely corpse [living body], with beautie faire endewed, / Know this for certaine, that the same doth hold / A beauteous soule, with faire conditions thewed, / Fit to receive the seede of vertue strewed” (lines 132-138).³¹

As for Isabella's subsequent behavior in the play, Shakespeare takes pains, I would argue, to present her in a favorable light. As both E. M. W. Tillyard and Miss Lascelles have pointed out, the Duke makes all of the decisions after his speech to Isabella at III.i.184 ff.³² The fact that Isabella takes part in the bed-trick has given rise to a great deal of scholarly conjecture about types of Elizabethan betrothal contracts, but surely Shakespeare meant his audience to accept the Duke's explanation that “the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof” (III.i.271-272). Shakespeare, in fact, has the Duke repeat his plans and the justification for them twice more (III.ii.291-296 and IV.i.71-76).

A greater problem lies in the question as to whether or not Duke Vincentio is teaching Isabella a lesson during the remainder of the play. We know that the Duke is testing Angelo (I.ii.51-54), but the text of Measure for Measure as we now have it does not support the critical assumption that Isabella is being taught a lesson in charity or anything else. The only point in the play at which the Duke explains his reasons for keeping Isabella ignorant of Claudio's salvation is at IV.iii.111-115:

                                                  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.

It is more than likely that Shakespeare keeps Isabella in ignorance so that he can dramatize the theme of forgiveness in Act V. However, Shakespeare's purpose is not necessarily to be equated with the Duke's. In fact, I would argue that the text of Measure for Measure is more conducive to the supposition that Isabella teaches the Duke, rather than the other way around.

In Act V the Duke, after conducting a spectacular public trial, cries out:

‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!’
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and Measure still For Measure.

(V.i.414-416)

We have no solid textual evidence, although it makes a nice critical generalization, to show us that the Duke is testing Isabella as well as Angelo at this point. It may well be that the Duke truly means to execute Angelo, who is “in double violation / Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach” (V.i.409-10). However, Isabella intercedes for Angelo, “Against all sense” (V.i.438)—and it is after her act of true Christian charity that the Duke produces Claudio and pardons everyone, including Angelo, Barnardine, Claudio, and Lucio.

The Duke may have planned to extend mercy to everyone well before the crucial moment in Act V, but the fact of the matter is that Shakespeare does not inform us as to the Duke's intentions. In its own way, the final revelation in Measure for Measure is as spectacularly dramatic as the one in The Winter's Tale. Moreover, the initial impetus to the denouement comes from the young Isabella. It is Isabella's ability to put into practice in Act V the moral axioms she uttered in the previous scenes that raises Measure for Measure above the level of mere theatrics. Far from treating Isabella ironically, Shakespeare has presented a heroine of superior moral qualities; one who so impresses her sovereign that she elicits a proposal of marriage from him (V.i.540 ff.); one of whom, in fact, it can be said: “The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good.”

Notes

1. Samuel Johnson, ed. The Plays of William Shakespeare. In Eight Volumes (London, 1765), I, 321, n. 5.

2. Charlotte Lennox, Shakespear Illustrated, I (London, 1753), 32.

3. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, IV (London, 1930), 346.

4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2nd edn. (London, 1960, Everyman's Library Edition), I, 102.

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 49.

6. J. Payne Collier, ed. The Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1842), II, 5. Raysor seems to have missed this reference to Coleridge's comment on Isabella. For the reasons behind Coleridge's dislike of Isabella, see my “Coleridge on Measure for Measure,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] XVIII (1967), 71-73.

7. Mrs. Jameson's effusions are too well-known to bear repeating. See Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (Philadelphia, 1833), I, 85-99. Other similar critiques are found in the following studies: J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, ed. The Complete Works of Shakspere (London, 1850), I, 137; H. N. Hudson, ed. The Works of Shakespeare, II (Boston, 1851), 15; Charles Knight, Studies of Shakspere (London, 1851), p. 318; F. J. Furnivall, “Introduction” to The Leopold Shakspere (London, 1877), p. lxxiv; Arthur Symons, “Notes and Introduction to Measure for Measure,” in The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall, V (New York, 1889), 170.

8. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “Introduction” to Measure for Measure, ed. Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1922), p. xxx.

9. U. M. Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama (London, 1936), p. 262.

10. G. Wilson Knight, “Measure for Measure and the Gospels,” The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930), p. 102.

11. Previously, both Walter Pater and Walter Raleigh argued that Isabella develops in the course of the play from a severe to a sympathetic creature. Neither critic felt, however, that Isabella should have sacrificed her chastity. See Walter Pater, Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (London, 1889), p. 184; Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare (New York, 1907), pp. 170-171.

12. F. R. Leavis, “The Greatness of Measure for Measure,” Scrutiny, X (1942), 243.

13. William Empson, “Sense in Measure for Measure,” The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951), p. 279.

14. D. A. Traversi, “Measure for Measure,” Scrutiny, XI (1942), 47-49, 52.

15. Donald A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images: The Development of His Moral Ideas (New York, 1949), pp. 153-154.

16. Francis Fergusson, “Philosophy and Theatre in Measure for Measure,” KR, XIV (1952), 116.

17. Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1963), pp. 106-107.

18. J. W. Lever, ed. Measure for Measure. The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1965), p. lxxii.

19. David Lloyd Stevenson, The Achievement of Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure” (Ithaca, N. Y., 1966), p. 45.

20. See W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), passim; R. W. Chambers, “The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure,” Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, 1937; Elizabeth Marie Pope, “The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 2 (1949), pp. 66-82; Mary Lascelles, Shakespeare's ‘Measure for Measure’ (London, 1953), passim; Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A study of form in Elizabethan drama (Madison, Wis., 1954), passim.

21. See Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561), ed. Drayton Henderson (London, 1928, Everyman's Library Edition), p. 223; Count Hanniball Romei, The Courtiers Academie (1585), trans. I [ohn] K [epers] (London, 1598), p. 126.

22. See Lodovic Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman (1538), trans. Richard Hyrde (London?, 1541?), sigs. E1, E4^v-F2, L2^v-L3; Sir Thomas Elyot, The Defence of Good Women (1540), ed. Edwin Johnston Howard (Oxford, Ohio, 1940), pp. 56-57; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing: Or, The godly Counsaile of a Gentle-woman, not long since deceased, left behind her for her Children. 10th edn. (London, 1627), pp. 29-30, 37-38; Barnable Rych, The Excellency of good women (London, 1613), p. 22.

23. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, II (London, 1958), 469, 498.

24. See esp. 1 Cor. vi: 9-10, 18-19 and the glosses in the Geneva version.

25. Citations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, ed. Hardin Craig (Chicago, 1951).

26. See OED [Oxford English Dictionary], adj. 3e, where “good” means “satisfactory with regard to beauty.” OED cites Pericles IV.ii.51 for an example.

27. “Cheap” could mean “costing little labour, trouble, effort, etc.; easily obtained” (OED, adj. 3; Measure for Measure II.iv.105 is cited for an example). “Cheap” could also mean “accounted of small value, made little of, lightly esteemed; esp. brought into contempt through being made too familiar” (OED, adj. 5; 1Henry IV III.ii.41 is cited as an example).

28. “Brief” here means “of short duration” (OED, adj. 1), as in Measure for Measure II.ii.118.

29. “Goodness”, when applied to persons, commonly meant “moral excellence, virtue” (OED, 1a; Measure for Measure III.i.215 is cited as an example).

30. Castiglione, p. 309.

31. The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Dodge (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 748.

32. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto, 1949), pp. 134-135; Lascelles, p. 152.