[In the following excerpt, Alexander considers the classification, structure, and historical context of Measure for Measure.]

SHAKESPEARE'S COMIC METHOD

In order, therefore to appreciate the nature of this artistic triumph and understand the problems which it poses its audience the play must be seen not as some dark aberration but as a normal and crucial stage in Shakespeare's development.

The enormous technical triumphs of Julius Caesar and Hamlet made possible, after 1599, the power and intensity of the great tragedies. It may be possible to speak of a tragic period but it would be a mistake to regard these plays as evidence of a despairing spirit or consider the comedies written at the same time as inevitably tinged with pessimism. The early comedies contain matter dark enough for any melancholic taste. Their range of thought and emotion is astonishing and the reaction of an audience to A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night may be as highly charged as their response to King Lear. Both kinds of play illumine the strong bonds of human affection and its power to transform existence even in the face of death. Shakespeare never stopped writing comedy and the plays produced during this great central period are both an independent triumph and the logical connection between the early romantic successes and the last great comic sequence on the triumph of time, composed between 1608 and 1611, which contains Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, arguably the finest plays he ever wrote.

The central comedies, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure can properly be grouped together because they share a form of construction and a method of manipulating comic convention which differs radically from Shakespeare's normal practice. It is an old principle that the art of the drama is the art of preparation. Compression of time, and the short span of human attention, compel a playwright to provide his audience with continuous predictions of what is about to happen on stage, as well as information about the action actually taking place. This structure of information and predication is one of the most vital elements in any plot. It is said that at the first performance of The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde paced backstage in an agony of apprehension until the moment when Jack enters in mourning for his brother Ernest. The audience have to appreciate that not only is Ernest a fiction but that he is a fiction who is at that very instant being successfully impersonated by Algernon captivating Cecily in the next room. The roar of laughter which greeted Jack's entrance was, therefore, sufficient indication to the author that his preparation had been successful. It is also a perfect example of the operation of incongruent information—that is, information which is known to the audience but is not shared in equal measure by the characters on stage. A character performs within a known situation but the acts and words that he considers appropriate may have another significance to an audience able to place them in a totally different context. Tragic irony is evidently one kind of incongruent information but it also forms the constant pattern of comedy.

In an excellent and important book, Shakespeare's Comedies, Bertrand Evans showed that Shakespeare used incongruent information (which he calls ‘discrepancy of awareness’) as his basic structural principle in the creation of comedy.¹ At a fairly simple level The Comedy of Errors depends upon the audience, but not the characters, knowing that there are two sets of identical twins within the city of Ephesus. In Love's Labour's Lost the comic complication depends on the incongruity of the information possessed by the Lords, the Ladies, the Pedants and the Clowns. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the lovers and mechanicals pick their way with partial sight through the coils of the wood near Athens, made even more puzzling by Puck's misapplication of love-in-idleness, to a resolution which still leaves them unaware of the beneficent fairy power imperfectly controlling their fates. As play succeeds play a distinct and recognizable pattern develops. The character who possesses the greatest amount of accurate information, and can therefore use it to manipulate the other characters, is the heroine. As Evans expresses it: ‘The heroines of Shakespeare's comedies either hold from the outset, or very shortly gain, the highest vantage-point in their worlds.’² This is evidently true of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

This statement is, in effect, a key to the nature of early Shakespearean comedy. These naturally masterful and controlling heroines invariably fall in love. Their avowed aim is to realize this love in action and their purposes are therefore usually benevolent. This good will extends throughout the action of the play and it therefore follows that the anxieties aroused by the details of the story—as Shylock's pound of flesh—are all successfully contained within this context of universal reassurance. The Forest of Arden turns out to be as enchanted as the wood near Athens, Venice and Verona belong to that Italy of the heart's desire where all ends well. What Shakespeare did with this brilliantly enchanted world (which was also a clear commercial success) was to shatter it to bits and attempt to rebuild it, not nearer the heart's desire, but nearer that truth of constraining circumstance which must limit all earthly paradises. The great triumph of the central comedies is to accomplish this transition from the world of fairy tale to the world of romance where love and beauty will endure both the tale that is told in winter and the shipwreck of the tempest. It is, therefore, significant that Evans's brilliant description of Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona is as applicable to Angelo as it is to Leontes: ‘The case of Proteus, hero bent on making a villain of himself, is typical: in the comedies villainy can but peep at what it would, for it is circumscribed and rendered impotent, if not ridiculous, by the bright-eyed heroines who, with their superior awareness, control everything in this woman's world.’³ What has changed is the degree of control exercised by the heroines. It is not a change in the nature of the girls, since Isabella, Helena, Imogen or Perdita are as interesting as Julia, Portia, Rosalind or Viola. The way in which Shakespeare altered their circumstances in the central comedies is by changing the way in which he kept his audience informed of the situation.

What Professor Evans has established is that, in the early comedies, as much information is given to the audience as early as possible. They, therefore, make up their minds about most of the main characters from an early stage and there is little that can occur to shake their faith in Portia or Rosalind. This is not true of Measure for Measure. Here information given after the event must cause a radical revision of the audience's estimate of a character. The Duke's disguise at first appears as the normal operation of incongruent information. No firm reason, however, is offered for his appointment of Angelo and the justification for that strange decision only emerges in the course of the action. Angelo himself is unlike the Duke's first description of him—not merely because of his attempted rape of Isabella but because of the rejection of Mariana. This vital clue to his personality is only released half way through the play.

Equally important is the treatment of Isabella. At the time that her virginity is required of her there is no suggestion that the sacrifice would be futile. The audience watch Isabella's interview with Claudio without any awareness that the compromise he asks is impossible since Angelo will execute him in any case. Nor is there any precedent in the early comedies for the way in which the clowns and characters of ‘low life’ are here allowed to win two major dramatic victories over the main characters before they are controlled in the final reconciliation which many critics have felt to be less than conclusive. It appears that the doubts, hesitations and provisional judgements which are such a feature of criticism of the play have their origin within its dramatic structure. It is a comedy of delayed interpretation.

This delay, I believe, is Shakespeare's method of dramatizing moral questions, the ambiguity of action and the uncertainty of choice—without losing the basic advantage of a comic structure. The heroines of the romantic comedies are not only in control of their worlds—they are by far the best and brightest people in them. The consummation of their love is devoutly wished for by both spectators and characters. The moral position is not in doubt—indeed some of the difficulties that we now experience with The Merchant of Venice may be due to the play's apparent failure to question its assumed convention of Christian virtue. Julius Caesar brings such certainty to an end. There the spectator may hope for the conspiracy's success and yet be appalled by it. Antony wins sympathy in the market place with his genuine love for Caesar at the same time as he arouses revulsion by using that love as a calculated instrument of policy. Even Cassius commands respect and understanding as he is overwhelmed by the monster he has himself created, a politic plot which can only be led by Brutus, a man incapable of successful conspiracy. The clash of swords dramatizes the opposition of claims which are both valid and irreconcilable. No one steps forward to tell the audience what they should think and feel. In the comedies there is no need; in the plays after Julius Caesar there is no point. They are designed to provoke opposing reactions. To make up one's mind about the characters in a Shakespeare play is to find one's own position in some of the great moral and political debates which have extended from the Renaissance to our own time and which our successors are likely to keep alive. Measure for Measure clearly dramatizes exactly such a divisive debate.

THE HISTORICAL SETTING

It is probably the first play Shakespeare wrote in the reign of King James VI and I. The new king had taken Shakespeare's company under his own protection and there is evidence that the dramatist had considered the taste and opinions of his royal patron very carefully. Indeed some critics believe that in striving to content the king, Shakespeare has been driven to include in his comedy things which can never please. Yet any consideration of the opposition of Angelo and Isabella, and its resolution through the intervention of Mariana under the guidance of the Duke, must emphasize how far the leading dramatist of the King's Men has gone beyond mere compliment and entertainment. Other courtly pageants of the year 1604 have faded and left no wrack behind. Measure for Measure remains to puzzle the will. Shakespeare was capable of handling its themes of justice, charity and government in a fashion undreamt of in the philosophy of James and therefore his play still proves in performance to be a dazzling theatrical device for disturbing the intellect and delighting the imagination.

The opening of the play draws attention to its proposed subject. Handing over his power, the Duke modestly declines to instruct 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)

The Duke is one of the chief instruments used by the dramatist to unfold the art of government in his fictional Vienna to an audience. The disclaimer is instructive since James rated highly his own grasp of the arts of government. In 1598 the king had composed for his eldest son, Prince Henry, a treatise which he called Basilicon Doron (a title transliterated from Greek meaning ‘The Kingly Gift’). This had been privately printed in 1599 in Scotland and in 1603, on James's accession to the English throne, it was published in London.

Louis Albrecht and David Lloyd Stevenson have drawn attention to a number of obvious similarities between the political philosophy of Basilicon Doron and the thought and conduct of the Duke in Measure for Measure.⁴ Like James, the Duke believes that a ruler ought himself to be a pattern of virtue, and that those virtues must, if they are to be of any value, be expressed in action. Such actions expose a ruler to the risk of misrepresentation and slander which the Duke, like the king, regards as one of the most detestable of crimes. The opinions of the Duke on mercy, justice, and the necessity of firm government can all be paralleled in the treatise. Professor Stevenson concludes his examination of the evidence in this way:

Duke Vincentio, though he has been variously identified by contemporary scholars as a stock character in Jacobean comedy and as a forebear of Prospero, in The Tempest, is also, and much more importantly, seen to be the figure of a Renaissance prince and autocrat, wilfully Jamesian in his views of himself and in his attitudes toward affairs of state. We are forced to conclude that Shakespeare's intentions were deliberate, that he created in the Duke a character whose acts and whose theories of government would be interesting to the new age and its new king because they were so carefully like ones which the king had identified as his own.⁵

In a further important study Josephine Waters Bennett has argued that the play was not only written with the king in mind, it was specifically commissioned to open the Christmas celebrations on St Stephen's night, 26 December 1604, the first Christmas which James had kept in London at Whitehall.⁶ There exists an extract from the accounts of the Master of the Revels which records such a performance and which is now generally accepted as genuine. There are also, as Professor Bennett points out, a number of specific references in the play to members of the court who might be expected to be present at the performance on St Stephen's night. At II.iv.78-81 the lines:

Thus wisdom wishes to appear most bright
When it doth tax itself: as these black masks
Proclaim an enshielded beauty ten times louder
Than beauty could, display'd.

probably refer to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness in which the queen and eleven of her ladies were to appear as ‘blackamoors’ in the closing performance of the festivities on Twelfth Night, 6 January 1605.

The second scene of the first act begins with this exchange:

LUCIO:
If the Duke, with the other dukes, come not to composition with the King of Hungary, why then all the dukes fall upon the King.
GENT.:
Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungary's:

The queen's brother, the duke of Holstein, had come to England in November 1604 to raise men for a force he planned to take to Hungary. There a long war had been in progress since 1593. It was a confused three-cornered struggle between the Emperor Rudolf II, one of whose titles was king of Hungary, the Turks, the Protestant province of Transylvania and Michael of Moldavia. Transylvania had been reduced by the imperial general George Basta in August 1604 and a reign of terror followed. At Christmas 1604 the king of Hungary's peace would have a particularly menacing meaning and, since the duke of Holstein remained in England till June 1605, it is probable that he would have been present at the performance.

The other court figure clearly referred to is the king himself. In 1776 Thomas Tyrwhitt pointed out that two passages, the Duke's abrupt leave-taking at I.i.68-73 and Angelo's soliloquy at II.iv.24, reflect tactfully on the discomfort James felt at the pressing eagerness of his English subjects to catch a glimpse of their new king. D. L. Stevenson quotes the account by Gilbert Dugdale in The Time Triumphant (1604) to show that these passages must refer to James.⁷ The king took coach to the Exchange in order to view the decorations and triumphal arches prepared for the royal procession to the coronation at Westminster. There he was so pressed in upon by the populace that he had to take refuge in the Exchange and have the doors closed.

These clear references, and many other features of the play, led Professor Bennett to her conclusion that the play was specifically written for the Christmas of 1604. The assembled evidence is not sufficient to make such a hypothesis certain but it is evident, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the accession of James had a profound influence upon the writing of Measure for Measure. It was composed at a moment that Gilbert Dugdale, and many others, obviously regarded as a time triumphant. The new reign was greeted with hope and optimism which perhaps gave an added sincerity to the traditional images of official pageantry appropriate to such an occasion. There are few better examples of this symbolism than the arches of triumph which James had hoped to see when he was mobbed at the Exchange. We have accounts of them by Stephen Harrison, the joiner and architect who was responsible for their construction, and by Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson who were responsible for the poetic allegories incorporated within them. The sixth of these arches, erected ‘above the conduit in Fleet Street’, is described by Dekker as having, among other figures: ‘The principal and worthiest was Astraea [Justice] sitting aloft, as being newly descended from heaven gloriously attired; all her garments being thickly strewed with stars, a crown of stars on her head, a silver veil covering her eyes.’⁸ Under her were Virtue and Fortune with Envy occupying a dark and obscure place by herself. Below them were the four moral virtues opposite personifications of the four kingdoms now thought to be united under one rule—England, Scotland, France and Ireland. The whole arch, Dekker tells us, represents the moment written of by Virgil:

Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna.

(Eclogues IV.5)⁹

The virgin who returns is Astraea, daughter of the Titan Astraeus and the Dawn, who distributed justice among men during the golden age but was forced to retire from the earth during the age of iron and become the constellation Virgo. In 1603-4 it was a common compliment to say that the king, in uniting the kingdoms, was producing a union of peace and virtue that inaugurated a new golden age.

Ben Jonson, who shared with Dekker the responsibility for the triumphal arches, makes use of similar, but more elaborate, symbolism for his first two court masques. The Masque of Blackness, as we have seen, was performed at court on Twelfth Night 1605. The Masque of Beauty, its sequel, was not performed until 1608 but it shares a common inspiration. The ‘blackamoors’ portrayed by the queen and her ladies were the daughters of Niger who had been turned black by the sun. In brief, they arrive at the court of the sun-king James who is even more powerful than the celestial body since his power can turn them white, which was, for Jonson's purposes, equated with beauty. One of the most spectacular effects of the second masque was the arrival of the throne of beauty divided into eight squares with the sixteen masquers placed by couples within them. Jonson intended more than a simple compliment to the king. As Professor D. J. Gordon has written: ‘More is involved here than the formal stereotyped gesture of the panegyrist; we are dealing here with notions more “remov'd” than the everyday apotheosis of the Crown. A grander apotheosis is adumbrated, in which James is given the position and function assigned to the Sun in the theory of Beauty held by the Florentine Platonists.’¹⁰

Jonson was later to make clear his view that Shakespeare was not a learned dramatist. Yet it seems probable that the dramatist of the company most favoured by the court should know something of the style of compliment so lavishly expended at it. It was, I believe, exactly this familiarity which led him to write a play about the trials of a just virgin. Those trials, the condemnation of her brother and her own threatened rape, illuminate in many ways the promises and engagements entered into on betrothal and marriage. They also provoke a debate about licence and liberty, love and grace, justice and mercy in the government of a state which continues throughout the action. In resolving these difficulties by the union of justice and mercy in the proposed marriage of the Duke and Isabella Shakespeare found a way of complimenting his sovereign and engaging his interest in questions which deeply concerned both prince and people without offending against the strict stage censorship of the time. The play can be taken as expressing the confident hope that the new reign will be an age of measure for measure.

As can be seen from the accounts of Dugdale, Harrison, Dekker and Jonson, the arrival of the king in London was treated as a festival and triumph. The Renaissance had adapted the honour awarded by the senate of republican Rome—permission for an unusually successful general to march his troops through the city together with the prisoners and plunder taken during the campaign—for its own court ceremonial. The form was, therefore, used for both practical and literary purposes since it admitted exactly the kind of allegorical or symbolic references required on such occasions of high solemnity.¹¹ It is interesting that the Duke, who is never named in the play, should be called Vincentio in the list of characters. If he leaves the city privately at the beginning of the play he does return in full triumphal ceremonial through the gates at its end. The name may well carry its Italian meaning of ‘conqueror’—the person most fitted to have a triumph. The clown, who is depicted as one of the chief instruments of vice in Vienna, is called Pompey. This name is used for two significant jokes. At II.i.200-10 Escalus established that his name is Pompey Bum and comments that he is ‘in the beastliest sense’ Pompey the Great. Lucio repeats the joke at III.ii.40 when Pompey is being carried to prison:

How now, noble Pompey! What, at the wheels of Caesar?
Art thou led in triumph?

The Caesar on this occasion is Elbow, the Duke's constable. The combination of a head of state called Vincentio, an Elbow, and a bum or arse end of the commonwealth whose filthy habits must be reformed looks like a comic glance at the traditional theory of the state as a ‘body politic’. The idea may have come from Basilicon Doron where the king writes: ‘For ye shall make all your reformations to begin at your elbow, and so by degrees to flow to the extremities of the land.’ (p. 85.) Vincentio does triumph over vice, and he triumphs over Angelo, the deputy who turned out to be considerably lower than the angels, but most of all he triumphs in restoring the righteous virgin who withstood both vice and tyranny. In the final union of justice and mercy the Duke brings to the body politic of Vienna the order and harmony which prevail in the macrocosm of God's universe. He has succeeded in making measure answer to measure.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare was thoroughly familiar with the Renaissance concept of a triumph since the King of Navarre's opening speech in Love's Labour's Lost celebrates the triumph of Fame. Jonson makes use of the same concept in The Masque of Queens (1609) and gives Cesare Ripa's Iconologia as his authority. Now, as D. D. Carnicelli has demonstrated, Ripa had drawn heavily on Renaissance representations of Petrarch's Trionfi—a poem that was considered his most powerful work until nearly the end of the sixteenth century.¹² Whether Shakespeare or Jonson knew Petrarch's poem is uncertain. They were certainly working in a tradition which derived from it. The Trionfi is a kind of allegorical or spiritualized autobiography which uses the imagery of a triumphal procession to mark six states of the human condition. The respective triumphs are, in order, those of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Eternity. Love conquers all, reducing everything to its service but is unable to triumph over chastity. In turn chastity must yield to death but fame, or good reputation, can outlast death until defeated by time which will in the end bring all to oblivion—were it not for the fact that time itself must come to an end with the Day of Judgement when all the virtues become one in the triumph of God's eternity. Although not slavishly followed, this triumphal progression exists in Measure for Measure. Lucio, Claudio and all Vienna are in thrall to love. Only Angelo in his virtue appears to hold out and it is for this reason that the Duke chooses him to cleanse Vienna of its lechery. Angelo, however, falls a victim to love and, as lust's servant, is resisted by the chaste Isabella. The deputy overcomes her chastity by threatening the life of her brother, and actually thinks he has killed him. He hopes to cover this crime by the strength of his own reputation and the question debated before the Duke is whether he or Isabella should be believed. It is relevant that at this point Angelo should be shown as having reduced himself below the level of the slanderer Lucio whose vices he should have suppressed and curbed. The return of the Duke in deliberately staged triumph eventually assures the victory of Isabella's reputation while the revelation of Angelo's crimes certainly threatens to bring him to oblivion and death. Time, however, also reveals that Claudio is alive and the final union of justice and mercy proclaims the final triumph of eternal grace. Isabella pleads for Angelo and the lust which nearly consumed Vienna is transmuted into the harmony of the promised marriages.

A play which ends with a triumph of eternity might indeed be thought to assert that measure answers to measure—or, if not, then the fault should be looked for in us or in our changed circumstances. It is here that Shakespeare demonstrates his brilliance as a dramatist and, arguably, his understanding of the Christian religion. It is precisely because of the triumph of eternity that measure cannot answer to measure. It is not surprising that this play should be filled with biblical quotations and overtly Christian concepts to an extent quite unusual in Shakespeare's plays. But the solution is not only in the words. The dramatist has built it into the very fabric of his play.

The relationship between grace and justice is clearly a suitable subject for a play performed before a king who had so recently been welcomed to his new kingdom with triumphant shows and festivities. Shakespeare adopted the subject, the language and the symbolism appropriate to such an occasion and fashioned them in to his own triumphal form which can certainly be read as an expression of hope that these virtues will be combined in the new government. It also reminds its audience of the difficulty of defining mercy and justice and the enormous effort required to unite them, amid the corrupted currents of this world, in the government of intractable humanity. England's first Stuart sovereigns failed to achieve the triumph of Duke Vincentio, indeed they so unbalanced the state that it cost Charles I his life. Shakespeare's choice of subject for the year 1604 is an illuminating one. The complex way in which it is handled, a plot in which measure never does quite answer to measure so that the gap between them has to be bridged by the grace of love, a grace whose operation may be called a mystery, accounts both for the play's difficulty and for its enduring achievement.

Notes

1. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford 1960).

2. Shakespeare's Comedies, 15-16.

3. Shakespeare's Comedies, 17.

4. L. Albrecht, Neue Untersuchungen zu Shakespeares Mass für Mass (Berlin 1914) and D. L. Stevenson, The Achievement of Shakespeare's ‘Measure for Measure' (Ithaca, N.Y. 1966).

5. The Achievement of Shakespeare's ‘Measure for Measure’, 162.

6. J. W. Bennett, ‘Measure for Measure’ as Royal Entertainment (New York 1966).

7. The Achievement of Shakespeare's ‘Measure for Measure’, 140-41.

8. John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James The First (London 1828) vol. I, 369.

9. Now returns the Virgin, now return the ages of Saturn.

10. D. J. Gordon, ‘The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of Beautie’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 6 (1943), 122-41.

11. Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (Cambridge 1970).

12. D. D. Carnicelli, Lord Morley's Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke: The First English Translation of the ‘Trionfi’ (Cambridge, Mass. 1971), 67.