SOURCE: Riefer, Marcia. “‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 2 (summer 1984): 157-69.

[In the following essay, Riefer argues that Isabella highlights the negative impact of patriarchy on female characters in the play, and contends that her eventual subjugation to male authority is incompatible with the dramatic tradition of romantic comedy.]

Isabella has recently been called Measure for Measure's “greatest problem.”¹ She has not always been taken so seriously. Coleridge dismissed her by saying simply that Isabella “of all Shakespeare's female characters, interests me the least.”² Criticism of her character has been cyclical and paradoxical, in part because critics have tended to focus on one implicit question: is she or is she not an exemplar of rectitude? On the one hand Isabella has been idealized as a paragon of feminine virtue; on the other hand she has been denigrated as an example of frigidity. Over the centuries, Isabella has been labeled either “angel” or “vixen,” as if a judgment of her moral nature were the only important statement to be made about her.³ When not idealizing or denigrating Isabella, critics have generally ignored her.⁴

I

The debate over Isabella's virtue obscures a more important point, namely that through her one can explore the negative effects of patriarchal attitudes on female characters and on the resolution of comedy itself.⁵ In the course of the play, Isabella changes from an articulate, compassionate woman during her first encounter with Angelo (II.ii), to a stunned, angry, defensive woman in her later confrontations with Angelo and with her imprisoned brother (II.iv and III.i), to, finally, a shadow of her former articulate self, on her knees before male authority in Act V. As the last and one of the most problematic of the pre-romance comedies, Measure for Measure traces Isabella's gradual loss of autonomy and ultimately demonstrates, among other things, the incompatibility of sexual subjugation with successful comic dramaturgy.

The kind of powerlessness Isabella experiences is an anomaly in Shakespearean comedy.⁶ Most of the heroines in whose footsteps Isabella follows have functioned as surrogate dramatist figures who are generally more powerful, in terms of manipulating plot, than the male characters in the same plays. One need only recall the Princess of France and her ladies in Love's Labor's Lost, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Mistresses Page and Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Viola in Twelfth Night, Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, and, of course, Rosalind in As You Like It. Those heroines who have not actually been in control of the comic action have at least participated in it more actively than Isabella ever does. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, Helena and Hermia, while admittedly acting within Oberon's master plot, still take the initiative in pursuing their loves, which is certainly not true of Isabella. Even Kate in The Taming of the Shrew exercises dramaturgical skills. In her final “tour de force” she employs those very tactics which Petruchio has taught her, reversing them subtly on him and indicating through loving opposites—as he has done in his “taming” of her—that she may have some taming of her own in store for him.⁷ Her “obedience” to Petruchio's dramatic manipulation is far more playful and even assertive than Isabella's obedience to Vincentio. Besides, as Richard Wheeler points out, Petruchio's long-range significance is that the model of love by male conquest he embodies very soon drops out of the maturing world of Shakespeare's comedy, to be replaced by such forceful, loving heroines as Portia and Rosalind.⁸

It is hardly incidental that in Measure for Measure Shakespeare places dramaturgical control almost exclusively in the hands of a male character—Duke Vincentio—who is, in effect, a parody of his more successful, mostly female, predecessors. An understanding of Vincentio's function in this play is essential background for exploring Isabella's character and dramatic function, so it is to him that we must turn our attention first.

II

As a dramatist figure, the Duke perverts Shakespeare's established comic paradigm in that he lacks certain essential dramaturgical skills and qualities previously associated with comic dramatist figures—qualities necessary for a satisfying resolution of comedy—especially (1) a consistent desire to bring about sexual union, what Northrop Frye calls “comic drive,”⁹ and (2) a sensitivity to “audience.”¹⁰ The prime victim of the Duke's flawed dramaturgy is, of course, Isabella, who, more than any of Shakespeare's heroines so far, is excluded from the “privileges of comedy,” namely the privileges of exercising control over the events of the plot—privileges from which, Linda Bamber claims, it is Shakespeare's men who are typically excluded.¹¹ Deprived of her potential for leadership, Isabella succumbs to the control of a man she has no choice but to obey—a man whose orders are highly questionable—and as a consequence her character is markedly diminished.

That the Duke's actions are questionable is apparent from the beginning, when he unexpectedly appoints Angelo to rule in his place instead of Escalus, who, as the opening scene establishes, is clearly the logical choice. Throughout the play, the Duke continues to undermine his credibility as a dramatist figure by making decisions strictly according to his own desires without considering the responses of those he is attempting to manipulate. For instance, his lofty tone in lecturing Claudio on how to make himself “absolute for death” (III.i.5-41) is far from sensitive to the condemned man's situation. Not surprisingly, his effort fails; within a hundred lines Claudio is begging, “Sweet sister, let me live” (l. 132). Similarly unsympathetic, and similarly unsuccessful, is the Duke's attempt to convince the recalcitrant Barnardine to offer his head in place of Claudio's. This attempt results in the ridiculous appearance of a head whose owner, Ragozine, has no other purpose in the play than to cover for (even while calling attention to) Vincentio's insensitivity to the exigencies of motivation. The Duke's ineptitude as a playwright surrogate lies partly in his failure, in Viola's words, to “observe their mood on whom he jests” (Twelfth Night, III.i.62)—a failure which will prove especially detrimental to Isabella.

Another way in which the Duke perverts the Shakespearean comic paradigm is in his unusual antagonistic relationship to the “normal action” of comedy, which Frye defines as the struggle of the main characters to overcome obstacles in order to achieve sexual union.¹² The Duke appears to be possessed by a comic drive toward union when he proposes the bed-trick (dubious as it is) or when he arranges what Anne Barton refers to as the “outbreak of that pairing-off disease”¹³ in Act V. But his explicit denial that he has anything in common with those sinners and weaklings who allow themselves to be struck by the “dribbling dart of love” (I.iii.2)—along with his implicit condoning of Angelo's revival of obsolete sexual restrictive policies (“I have on Angelo impos'd the office, / Who may, in th' ambush of my name, strike home” [I.iii.40-41])—sets him apart from earlier comic dramatists, predominantly women, whose desire was to escape, rather than to impose, sexual restriction. As Wheeler says, “Measure for Measure is guided to its comic conclusion by a character whose essence is the denial of family ties and sexuality, the denial, that is to say, of the essence of comedy.”¹⁴ Vincentio represents not love's facilitator but its “blocking” agent. In this play, the hero and the “alazon” figure—the main obstacle to resolution in a typical comedy¹⁵—are, ironically, identical. Thus, the Duke, as protagonist, also embodies those traits characteristic of a comic antagonist. The “savior” in Measure for Measure turns out to be a villain as well. (Vincentio even allies himself with the play's more obvious antagonist, announcing that Angelo can “my part in him advertise” [I.i.41] and inviting Angelo, in his absence, to be “at full ourself” [I.i.43]. The Duke's intent may be to flatter Angelo with these phrases, but by positing this unity of their characters, he leaves himself open to suspicion.)

Part of what is comically “villainous” in the Duke is his excessive self-interest. Thomas Van Laan is among those critics who point out the Duke's egotism, arguing that he “cares about his image above all else.” Van Laan describes the Duke as writer/producer/director of his own “carefully devised playlet,” a man who is “like some film star more interested in his own virtuosity than ideal representation of the script.” Indeed, the Duke's purpose for relinquishing his public responsibilities—a purpose he himself admits is “grave and wrinkled” (I.iii.5)—is reminiscent of Tom Sawyer's reason for playing dead: he wants to find out what people will say about him when he's gone.¹⁶

While some may argue that such an evaluation of the Duke as selfishly motivated is unduly harsh, there is much in this play to support it, especially in those scenes in which the Duke's actions seem well-intentioned. During the opening scene, for example, Vincentio lavishes praise on Angelo in an unnecessarily long and rhetorically elaborate passage (I.i.26-41), all the while knowing that Angelo has abandoned Mariana, an act which the Duke later calls “unjust” (III.i.240). Far from having Vienna's best interests in mind as he claims—and as many critics accept—the Duke is actually setting up Angelo for a fall while protecting himself (“my nature never in the fight / To do in slander” [I.iii.42-43]), and at the same time betraying the public as well, a public whom he admits he has effectively “bid” to be promiscuous through his permissiveness (ll. 36-38). His ultimate intention seems to be setting the stage for his final dramatic saving of the day—a day which would not need saving except for his contrivances in the first place. Vincentio's brand of dramaturgy is not as well-meaning as it first appears, and it should make us apprehensive about the Duke's potential to warp the experiences of those involved in his plots.

III

The female characters in this play, Mariana and Isabella, are the prime victims of the Duke's disturbing manipulativeness—a significant reversal of the roles women have played in earlier comedies. While both male and female characters serve to some extent as the Duke's “puppets,”¹⁷ only the men resist his orders; the women are bound to be “directed” by him (IV.iii.136), “advised” by him (IV.vi.3), “rul'd” by him (IV.vi.4). As Jean E. Howard points out, Barnardine, Lucio, and Angelo, even though punished in the end, do at times “refuse to be pawns in someone else's tidy playscript”: Barnardine refuses to die, Angelo refuses to pardon Claudio, Lucio refuses to shut up.¹⁸ Neither Mariana nor Isabella ever exhibits such defiance. Thus this play creates a disturbing and unusual sense of female powerlessness. But far from prescribing female reticence, Measure for Measure serves to reveal contingencies that make it difficult for women, even strong-willed women like Isabella, to assert themselves in a patriarchal society like Vienna—contingencies that do not impinge in the same way on the men. By allowing such contingencies to dominate the action, Shakespeare throws into question both the play's status as a comedy and the legitimacy of the prevailing social standards it portrays.

When we judge Isabella, we must consider, as Wheeler does, that she is surrounded by “the threat of sexual degradation”—a threat which, in this play, is “moved to the very center of the comic action,” while in the festive comedies that threat is “deflected by wit and subordinated to the larger movements” of those plays.¹⁹ More than any comic heroine thus far, Isabella has reason to take sexual degradation seriously. Whereas in most Shakespearean comedies the patriarchal world is peripheral to the main action, thereby allowing female characters exceptional latitude, in this play the expansiveness of a “green world” is inconceivable. Isabella has no Arden to retreat to. As Frye suggests, the green world in Measure for Measure, if present at all, has shrunk to the size of Mariana's all but inconsequential moated grange.²⁰

The constriction of the heroine's power throughout the course of Shakespeare's pre-romance comedies has been noted by Anthony Dawson, but only with regard to Portia, Rosalind, and Helena.²¹ Isabella represents the logical extension of this trend. The restrictiveness of Isabella's environment in Measure for Measure is evident in her doubts about her effectiveness (“My power? Alas, I doubt—” [I.iv.77]) in the world as it must appear to her—a Vienna in which lust is rampant and in which even fiancées and wives are referred to in the same terms as whores. Elbow's speeches, for instance, denigrate, if inadvertently, his own wife: “My wife, sir, whom I detest before heaven and your honor—” (II.i.69-70), and “Marry, sir, by my wife, who, if she had been a woman cardinally given, might have been accus'd in fornication, adultery, and all uncleanliness there” (ll. 79-81). Of the female characters who appear in this play, none are actually wives, and the one who is betrothed, Juliet, is called a “fornicatress” (II.ii.23). Otherwise, one of the women has been wronged (Mariana), one is a nun who has withdrawn from this lust-infected Vienna, one is trying to withdraw (Isabella), and the last is a whore (Mistress Overdone, nicknamed Madam Mitigation) whose customers are all sent to jail, leaving her to fret over her lost income. Sex in this Vienna is to be either punished or belittled. While Claudio, the true lover, sits in prison, the rakish Lucio roams the streets, joking about getting caught at a game of “tick-tack” (I.ii.190-91). The word “healthy” could hardly be associated with female sexuality in such an environment, no matter how positively a woman saw herself.

What Isabella is afraid of, synonymous with her loss of virginity, is her loss of respect, both her own self-respect and the respect of the community. Her desire for “a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood” (I.iv.4-5) must be linked with a strong fear of the consequences of integrating herself into a society dominated by exploitative men. In Irene Dash's terms, “In Measure for Measure Shakespeare again raises the question of woman's personal autonomy—her right to control her body.”²² For Isabella, in light of the Vienna facing her, sexuality and self-esteem are mutually exclusive options. She has made her choice before she ever sets foot on stage. A woman in her position would not make such a decision without difficulty, even resentment. Isabella realizes that her “prosperous art,” her ability to “play with reason and discourse” (I.ii.184-85), would be wasted in the city. So she attempts to withdraw to the protective cloister—an option much missed by women in post-Reformation England.²³ Just as Kate has taken “perverse refuge” behind the role of Shrew,²⁴ Isabella tries to take refuge behind the role of Nun.

But just as Isabella is on the brink of forswearing the company of men, Lucio arrives to pull her back into it. Reluctantly she returns to Vienna, where, gradually, her character dissolves, her spirit erodes, and she becomes an obedient follower of male guidance: an actress in a male-dominated drama.

IV

If we examine Isabella's development in this play, we can see how her sense of self is undermined and finally destroyed through her encounters with patriarchal authority, an authority represented emphatically, but not exclusively, by the insensitive Duke. Her dilemma initially becomes apparent when she appears, a mere nun, before the Duke's appointed deputy. At first she is hesitant to assert herself against Angelo and is ready, at the slightest resistance, to give up her task of persuading him to free Claudio. But with Lucio's prompting, her “prosperous art” with words becomes evident. More and more masterfully she develops her argument, pleading eloquently for her brother's life:

                                        Go to your bosom,
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault. If it confess
A natural guiltiness such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life.

(II.ii.136-41)

Even though at this early point in the play Isabella is already acting according to male direction, namely Lucio's, her integrity, which she so adamantly desires to protect, is still intact. Her voice remains, impressively, her own.

But Angelo assaults that integrity when he forces Isabella to choose between her brother's life and her maidenhood. He commands her, “Be that you are, / That is a woman,” defining a woman's “destin'd livery” in no uncertain terms (II.iv.134 ff.). As hard as she has tried to avoid understanding Angelo earlier in this scene, Isabella can now no longer claim to be ignorant of his “pernicious purpose” (l. 150). When the deputy finally departs, leaving Isabella in the wake of his promise to torture her brother if she doesn't yield up her body to his will (“thy unkindness shall his death draw out / To ling'ring sufferance” [II.iv.166-67]), she cries out in exasperation, “To whom shall I complain?” Her only hope for compassion lies with Claudio: “I'll to my brother,” she declares, assured that there is at least one man in the world possessed of “a mind of honor” (ll. 171-79).

Naturally, when Claudio echoes Angelo's demands, arguing that Isabella's surrendering her virginity in this case would be a virtue, her frustration is exacerbated. She reacts the way a woman might if she had been raped and had found those closest to her unsympathetic; she feels isolated, hurt, terrified, enraged. Loss of virginity, after all, is never a light matter for Shakespeare's calumniated, or potentially calumniated, women. In Much Ado About Nothing, the perception of Hero as sexually tainted corresponds directly with the illusion of her as dead. For Isabella, too, the prospect of giving herself to Angelo is tantamount to dying: “Better it were a brother died at once, / Than that a sister … / Should die for ever” (II.iv.106-8). If we understand how high the stakes are, we can hardly justify labeling Isabella a “vixen” when her strong will, until now subdued, gets the better of her and she swears,

                                                  O you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
.....                                                                      Take my defiance!
Die, perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed.
I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,
No word to save thee.

(III.i.135-46)

Her oaths here are far from endearing. But what they expose is neither rigidity nor coldness but a deeply rooted fear of exploitation, a fear justified by the attitudes toward women prevalent in this Vienna. Claudio's urging Isabella to give up her virginity, understandable as it is from his point of view, compounds her increasing sense of vulnerability and helplessness.

Our experience of Isabella's being “thwarted here, there, and everywhere”²⁵ is reinforced by the intervention of the Duke at precisely this troublesome point in the play. Although his intentions appear honorable at first, in his own way he replicates Angelo's and Claudio's indifference to Isabella's desire to remain true to herself. Like Angelo and Claudio before him, Vincentio sees in Isabella a reflection of his own needs. Consider his surprising endorsement of her attack on her brother. Rather than recoil at the harshness of her attack (as most of the play's critics have done), the Duke responds with delight: “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.180-84). The Duke's perceptions of Isabella here reveal more about his character than about hers. What the Duke sees at this moment is the ideal woman that Hamlet never found: a woman who combines beauty and honesty; a woman who doesn't need to be told to get herself to a nunnery; a woman who represents the opposite of Frailty. Unfortunately for Isabella, the Duke is so taken by his Hamletian fantasies that he fails to see the woman she really is—a woman in distress, who fears the very thing he will eventually require: the sacrifice of her autonomy.

Isabella's willingness to cooperate with the Duke's unscrupulous plot—and so to forfeit her autonomy—is clearly related to his choice of disguises. Vincentio, wearing Friar Francis' robe, has become the very thing he accuses Angelo of being: an “angel on the outward side” (III.ii.272).²⁶ Lucio is right to call him the “Duke of dark corners” (IV.iii.157).²⁷ But whatever “crotchets” the Duke has in him (III.ii.127), his disguise represents an authority that Isabella, as a nun, can hardly repudiate. When he invites her to fasten her ear on his advisings, she agrees to follow his direction. But like the Provost, who protests that the Duke's orders will force him to break an oath (IV.ii.181), Isabella makes it clear that she does not want to play any part that would require her to violate her personal sense of truth: “I have spirit to do any thing that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit” (III.i.205-7). She does not want to have to sacrifice her own voice.

But by the time the fourth act closes, the Duke has imposed on Isabella a role which goes against her wishes. As she explains to Mariana in the last scene of that act, “To speak so indirectly I am loath. I would say truth” (ll. 1-2). However, because a supposed religious superior has instructed her to “veil full purpose” (l. 4), she denies her personal inclinations and obeys the Duke without questioning. Neither green world nor cloister is available to Isabella now; she can neither subvert nor avoid the distorted value system which Vienna represents. She has no alternative but to submit to the Duke's authority. The Church, which was originally to function as Isabella's protector, has become her dictator.²⁸ Even though she was able to resist both Angelo's attempt to ravish her body and Claudio's attempt to change her mind, Isabella is unable, finally, to resist the Duke's demands on her spirit.

V

This negation of Isabella's essentially self-defined character becomes complete upon the Duke's taking control of the action in Act III. Critics have noted this change variously. Richard Fly, for example, says that Isabella, “formerly an independent and authentic personality with a voice of her own,” is “suddenly reduced to little more than a willing adjunct to the Duke's purpose.”²⁹ Clara Claiborne Park refers to Isabella as losing center stage.³⁰ Whatever autonomy Isabella possessed in the beginning of the play, whatever “truth of spirit” she abided by, disintegrates once she agrees to serve in the Duke's plan. As soon as this “friar” takes over, Isabella becomes an actress whose words are no longer her own. There are no more outbursts. In complying with the role Vincentio has created for her, Isabella becomes his creation in a way that the male characters never do. When he presents her with the irreverent idea of the bed-trick, Isabella simply answers, “Show me how, good father” (III.i.238) and “The image of it gives me content already” (l. 259). She cooperates with the Duke throughout the last act, in spite of her preference for “saying truth.” When Angelo says that he perceives these “poor informal women” as “instruments of some more mightier member / That sets them on” (V.i.235-38), he doesn't know how truly he speaks.

The Duke claims, of course, to be acting in Isabella's best interests, just as he has claimed to be acting in the best interests of Vienna. He professes to be withholding the news that Claudio is alive in order to make Isabella “heavenly comforts of despair, / When it is least expected” (IV.iii.110-11). But the relationship between his professed intentions and the scenario he asks Isabella to act out is tenuous. In reward for her cooperation, Isabella has to kneel and swear in public that she, a recognized member of a local convent, “did yield” to the learned deputy (V.i.101)—a humiliating position to be forced into, no matter how cleverly the Duke may be intending to redeem her reputation.³¹ In retrospect, the Duke's promise to comfort Isabella—what Frye calls a “brutal lie”³²—appears to be a veiled justification for perpetuating his control over her. The passage in which the Duke urges Isabella to “pace” her wisdom “In that good path that [he] would wish it go”—a passage densely packed with imperatives (IV.iii.118-48)—is followed, significantly, by the entrance of the ego-puncturing Lucio. This juxtaposition of scenes should warn us not to take the Duke's proclaimed altruism at face value—just as the Duke's proclaimed aversion to staging himself to the people's eyes (I.i.68) belies its face value. Vincentio's grand opus, Act V—complete with trumpets to announce his entrance—is so conspicuously dramaturgical that it divides into a five-part structure.³³ Clearly we are not to rest easy with this man's proclamations, nor should we be comfortable with the role he is asking Isabella to play.

Isabella's last words reveal just how far this imposed role diminishes her character. To those who argue that rather than depriving Isabella of autonomy the Duke is actually releasing her from moral rigidity by arranging for her to plead for Angelo's life, I answer that Isabella's final speech, often accepted as representing character growth, in fact represents the opposite.³⁴ Ostensibly, Isabella is once again displaying her “prosperous art,” using rhetoric to reveal a new-found capacity for mercy. But the quality of mercy here is strained:

                                                  Most bounteous sir:
Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd
As if my brother liv'd. I partly think
A due sincerity governed his deeds,
Till he did look on me. Since it is so,
Let him not die. 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.443-54)

This speech lacks the integrity of Isabella's earlier speeches in which she pleaded with Angelo to ask his heart what it knew that was like her brother's fault. Logic, used so convincingly in the earlier speeches, has become twisted. For example, Isabella argues that since Claudio did “the thing for which he died” but Angelo did not commit the sin he thought he had, Angelo should not be punished. This argument is illogical because it wrongfully implies that evil actions, when carried out under mistaken circumstances, are harmless. If the crime had been misdirected murder, by this logic Isabella would have claimed that the act was no crime since the intended victim was still alive. Not only the laws of logic, but the concept of justice is twisted here. Isabella claims—as she need not—that her brother's supposed execution was, in fact, just. Her mode of argument is unsettling, not only because she sounds indifferent to Claudio's death, but also because she resorts to specious legalism where one would expect her to appeal to her faith, as she did when pleading for Claudio's salvation in II.ii.75-77:

                                        How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are?

In comparison with this earlier speech, Isabella's final appeal represents not an increased but a stunted capacity for mercy. Her “prosperous art,” subjected to the Duke's perverted dramaturgical efforts, has itself become perverted. Vincentio's charge—“trust not my holy order / If I pervert your course” (IV.iii.147-48)—becomes retrospectively ominous.

With the conclusion of her final speech, Isabella is immediately confronted with a series of overwhelming events: a living Claudio appears, the Duke proposes marriage, and Angelo is pardoned. All of Isabella's main assumptions—that Angelo was condemned, that the Duke was a committed celibate, that her brother was dead, and that she herself would remain chaste for life—are challenged, if not negated, in the space of five lines. She remains speechless, a baffled actress who has run out of lines. The gradual loss of her personal voice during the course of the play has become, finally, a literal loss of voice. In this sense, Measure for Measure is Isabella's tragedy. Like Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, the eloquent Isabella is left with no tongue.

VI

If we see Isabella as a victim of bad playwriting, we can compare her bewilderment at the end of Measure for Measure with our own. She has trusted the Duke, as we've trusted our playwright, to pattern events as he has led her to expect events to be patterned—and the Duke, sharing Shakespeare's affinity for surprises in this play, pulls those expectations out from under her.³⁵ But by using Ragozine's head, for example—caput ex machina—to call attention to the ridiculousness of the Duke's machinations, Shakespeare simultaneously calls attention to his own superior skills. With this play Shakespeare has moved from comedy's romantic pole to its opposite, ironic, pole.³⁶ What he has created in Measure for Measure is not a poorly written play, but, to some extent, a model for poor playwriting.³⁷ (Such a model, clearly of abiding interest to Shakespeare, is less subtly depicted in the rustics' production of “Pyramus and Thisby” in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) By creating in Duke Vincentio a model third-rate playwright—one whose mind-set Jean Howard calls “confining, inelastic, dangerously reductive,” one who has no qualms about “[draining] the life out of previously vital characters such as Isabella”³⁸—Shakespeare calls into question the ethics of his own craft, including the ethics involved in handling characters of the opposite sex. However, the extent to which Shakespeare transcends the Duke's limitations is not clear, especially with regard to the treatment of female characters. It is in this area that the comparison between the playwright and his surrogate becomes most murky.

Vincentio's sexual double standard is hardly subtle. Ever oblivious to female experience, Vincentio tells Juliet that because she returns Claudio's affection—because the “most offenseful act” is “mutually committed”—her sin is therefore “of heavier kind” than Claudio's (II.iii.26-28). Such chauvinism, while present in Shakespeare's previous comedies, has almost always eventually been subverted in favor of mutuality.³⁹ It would be tempting to claim that because the expected subversion of chauvinistic values does not occur in Measure for Measure, therefore Shakespeare must be consciously critiquing the Duke's double standard, once again—as in the case of Ragozine's head—showing himself to be the superior craftsman. But this claim would be ill-founded, considering that Shakespeare's own treatment of female characters at this point in his career becomes less than generous. As Vincentio “drains” life out of Isabella and Mariana, so Shakespeare drains life out of Gertrude and Ophelia, giving them scarcely any character at all. Joel Fineman's well-documented discussion of Shakespeare's “not uncommon defensive gynophobia,” which erupts in certain tragedies, would support such an argument.⁴⁰ If Shakespeare can be credited with critiquing Vincentio's treatment of female “characters,” which seems unlikely, then he must also be said to be critiquing his treatment of some of his own.

But regardless of the playwright's intention, Measure for Measure, more than any of his previous plays, exposes the dehumanizing effect on women of living in a world dominated by powerful men who would like to re-create womanhood according to their fantasies. Duke Vincentio's distorted interpretation of Isabella's outrage in the prison scene is only one example of this kind of dehumanizing mind-set. His tampering with Isabella's character in Act V—which she must endure, according to religious edict—is no less a violation than Angelo's attempt to possess her body. As Hans Sachs puts it, the Duke succeeds in committing “in a legitimate and honorable way, the crime which Angelo attempted in vain.”⁴¹

This play reveals, among other things, the price women pay in order for male supremacy to be maintained. That price for Isabella is, precisely, a mandatory denial of her personal standards. But Isabella's plight is only one element in a larger pattern. As a whole, Measure for Measure explores the incompatibility of patriarchal and comic structures. The world of patriarchy, antithetical to the world of comedy throughout Shakespeare's works, comes closest here to overthrowing the comic world. Far from the one-dimensional representative of morality that critics have perceived her to be, Isabella is a key part of a dramatic environment in which the forces of patriarchy and comedy clash. In this context, her dramaturgical powerlessness becomes a variable in an equation in which the pervasiveness of chauvinism and the possibility of comic resolution are indirectly proportional. In other words, the stronger the forces of patriarchy, the less likely—or at least less convincing—comic resolution becomes.

Generically, Isabella is Shakespeare's pivotal female figure. She simultaneously links the dramatically effective early comic women to the victimized tragic women, even while her sympathetic portrayal anticipates the revival of influential women in the later plays. If Isabella's voice is lost in Measure for Measure—to remain mute throughout Shakespeare's tragedies, in which male misfortune and misogyny explode into significantly linked central issues⁴²—that voice is rediscovered in the romances, Shakespeare's most mature creations, in which patriarchal and misogynistic values, if present at all, are, as in the early comedies, subverted, and in which the imaginative environment once again allows female characters, like Paulina in The Winter's Tale, for example, to exert a powerful, positive force in shaping dramatic action.

Notes

1. George L. Geckle, “Shakespeare's Isabella,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 163.

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), p. 49.

3. Among those who idealize Isabella are Anna Jameson (Shakespeare's Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical [London: G. Bell, 1913], p. 66) and George Geckle, who call her, respectively, an “angel of light” and a “heroine of superior moral qualities.” Taking the opposite stance are Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Introduction” to Measure for Measure, ed. Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922], p. xxx), who calls Isabella a “bare procuress” who “is something rancid in her chastity”; Charlotte Lennox (Shakespeare Illustrated, I [London, 1753], p. 32), who calls her a “Vixen in her Virtue”; and Una Mary Ellis-Fermor (The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation [London: Methuen, 1936], p. 262), who refers to her as “Hard as an icicle.” I am grateful to George Geckle for several of these references.

4. Frank Harris (Women of Shakespeare [New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912]) ignores Isabella, presumably because he could not identify a correlative for her in Shakespeare's life. A book by “An Actress” (The True Ophelia and Other Studies of Shakespeare's Women [New York: Putnam, 1914]) similarly excludes Isabella, as does Helena Faucit, Lady Martin's On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1887). Even recent feminist critics slight Isabella. In The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, Carol Thomas Neely [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980]), only two articles make significant mention of her, both pointing out that Isabella is one of the few female characters in Shakespeare to confront men without benefit of men's garments. (See Paula S. Berggren, “Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare's Plays,” p. 22, and Clara Claiborne Park, “As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular,” p. 109.) Two other recent books written from a feminist perspective—Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981), and Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982)—have little more to say about Isabella, relegating her to footnotes or oblique references.

5. For a discussion of patriarchy as a destructive force in Shakespeare's tragedies, see Madelon Gohlke, “‘I wooed thee with my sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms” in The Woman's Part.

6. See Linda Bamber's Comic Women, Tragic Men for an articulate recent analysis of the centrality of women in Shakespeare's comedies.

7. Note the similarity between Kate's descriptions of the ideal husband—far from Petruchio's shrewish behavior thus far—(a “prince,” a man “that cares for thee and for thy maintenance,” someone who is “loving” and “honest,” and who “commits his body to painful labor” for his wife's sake, V.ii.147-60) and Petruchio's earlier descriptions of the ideal Kate—far from her behavior at that time—(her “mildness prais'd in every town,” her “virtues spoke of,” and her “beauty sounded,” II.i.185-94).

8. Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 141.

9. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1965), p. 73.

10. The merry wives, for example, must correctly gauge their “audience's”—Falstaff's—vanity in order for their plots to succeed. Viola demonstrates a similar sensitivity to audience response when, disguised as Cesario, she explains to Olivia the way a man should present himself if he wants to elicit a woman's love (Twelfth Night, I.v.268-76). In As You Like It, the splendidly dramatic Rosalind is not only astute about her own audience, but she teaches Orlando to be more sensitive to his as well (see, for example, IV.i.44-52).

    All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

11. Bamber, p. 120.

12. Frye, A Natural Perspective, p. 72.

13. Anne Barton, Introduction to Measure for Measure in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 548.

14. Wheeler, p. 149.

15. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 164-65, 172.

16. See Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 98-100. See also Wheeler, pp. 130-32.

17. William Empson (The Structure of Complex Words [London: Chatto and Windus, 1951], p. 283) sees the Duke as a character who manipulates “his subjects as puppets for the fun of seeing them twitch.”

18. Jean E. Howard, “Measure for Measure and the Restraints of Convention,” Essays in Literature, 10 (1983), 151-52. Dr. Howard has provided immeasurable support to me in my preparation of this study.

19. Wheeler, p. 102.

20. Frye, A Natural Perspective, pp. 141-45, and Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 182-83. See also Bamber, pp. 36-38, on the relationship between the world of “holiday brilliance” (the green world) and that of “political hegemony” (the patriarchal world) in Shakespeare's comedies.

21. Anthony Dawson, Indirections: Shakespeare and the Art of Illusion (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 87.

22. Dash, p. 251.

23. English convents, offering “a haven and a vocation for gentlewomen,” were closed at the Reformation (Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957], p. 145). According to Watt, “What was most needed, it was generally thought, was a substitute for the convents.”

24. Wheeler, p. 140.

25. Sarojini Shintri, Woman In Shakespeare (Dharwad: Karnatak Univ., 1977), p. 276.

26. Christopher Marlowe (The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950], p. 9, I.iii.25-26) supplies a literary precedent for Vincentio's hypocritical disguise when he has Faustus assert that the “holy shape” of a Franciscan friar “becomes a devil best.”

27. Calvin S. Hall (A Primer of Freudian Psychology [New York: New American Library, 1979], p. 92) could be describing Duke Vincentio when he explains “reaction formation” (caused by a repressed wish to possess something): “Romantic notions of chastity and purity may mask crude sexual desires, altruism may hide selfishness, and piety may conceal sinfulness.”

28. Church-supported witch hunts were still a reality in Shakespeare's England. The playwright could hardly have been unaware of the sexual oppressiveness, latent and actual, in religious doctrine of his day. For information on the involvement of both Catholic and Protestant churches in the witch hunts, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday, 1978), pp. 35-39, or their booklet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N. Y.: The Feminist Press, 1971), pp. 6-15.

29. Richard Fly, Shakespeare's Mediated World (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1976), p. 59.

30. Claiborne Park, p. 109.

31. See Wheeler, p. 129.

32. Frye, A Natural Perspective, p. 11.

33. See Josephine Bennett, Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 131-33.

34. See Fly, p. 69, Dawson, p. 114, and Geckle, p. 168, for discussions of the problematic nature of this passage.

35. Surprise is an important element of the plot—both for the characters and for us as audience. Among the bewildered audiences that Measure for Measure leaves in its wake are Angelo and Escalus at the end of I.i, just after the Duke's sudden exit; Mistress Overdone in the following scene (“But shall all our houses of resort in the suburbs be pull'd down?” I.ii.101-2); Friar Thomas, not quite grasping the Duke's partial explanation for his abdication (“It rested in your Grace / To unloose this tied-up justice when you pleas'd,” I.iii.31-32); Isabella, hearing of her brother's imprisonment (“Woe me! for what?” I.iv.26); Escalus and Angelo, confounded by the bumbling protestations of Pompey, Elbow, and Froth (II.i.); Angelo, surprised at his awakened lust (II.ii.162); Isabella, hearing of Angelo's mistreatment of Mariana (“Can this be so? Did Angelo so leave her?” III.i.224); the Duke, shocked at Angelo's order for Claudio's immediate execution (IV.ii.120-29); the Provost, “amazed” when the disguised Duke miraculously produces a letter with the Duke's seal on it (IV.ii.204); the Duke, surprised by Barnardine's resistance and by Ragozine's conveniently appearing head (IV.iii.77); Escalus and Angelo, confused by the Duke's “uneven and distracted” letters (IV.iv.1-7); and, of course, Isabella, stupefied at the Duke's proposal of marriage, along with Angelo and Lucio, distressed at their suddenly ordered couplings.

36. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 177-79.

37. Those who view the play as exemplifying some lapse on Shakespeare's part include Philip Edwards (Shakespeare and the Confines of Art [London: Methuen, 1968], pp. 108-10), who deems the play a “failure” because of its “insistence on a happy ending in spite of the evidence.” On the other hand, critics like Howard and Fly credit Shakespeare with having purposefully created a disruptive audience experience—an argument prefigured by Michael Goldman's appendix on Measure for Measure in Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 164, in which he suggests that in Measure for Measure, as in Hamlet and Lear, audience experience is “turned against itself to produce a comment on the action.”

38. Howard, pp. 155 and 151, respectively.

39. See, for example, Marianne L. Novy, “Giving, Taking, and the Role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice,” Philological Quarterly, 58 (1979), 137-54 for a discussion of mutuality in relationships in Shakespearean comedy.

40. Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 64 (1977), 426.

41. Hans Sachs, “The Measure in Measure for Measure,” in The Design Within, ed. M. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), pp. 495-96.

42. Bamber, p. 15.