SOURCE: Hawkins, Harriet. “Sex and Sin in Measure for Measure: Some Open Questions.” In Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, pp. 11-42. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1987.

[In the following excerpt, Hawkins examines the problematic relationship between sex, sin, vice, and virtue depicted in Measure for Measure.]

You are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct posing of a question. Only the second is obligatory for an artist. Not a single problem is solved in Anna Karenina and Eugène Onegin, but you find these works quite satisfactory … because all the questions in them are correctly posed. … The court is obliged to pose the questions correctly, but it's up to the jurors to answer them, each juror according to his own taste.

(Anton Chekhov)

Where God hath a temple, the devil will have a chapel.

(Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy)

          Where's that palace whereinto foul things
Sometimes intrude not? Who has that breast so pure
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and law-days, and in sessions sit
With meditations lawful?

(Shakespeare, Othello)

                              Let the devil
Be sometime honour'd for his burning throne!

(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)

In Measure for Measure, the internal, dramatic dialectic whereby differing questions and arguments give rise to altogether different counter-questions and counter-arguments, may explain why there is not now, and perhaps never will be, a critical concensus concerning the correct answers to any of the major questions posed in, and by, the play itself. Here, for instance, are some of the sexual, social, moral, and political questions that remain wide open to debate.

How important—or unimportant—is chastity? And what constitutes rape? How grievous a violation is it to be blackmailed or tricked into bed with someone you, personally, would not choose to have sexual intercourse with? Given a conflict between Christian virtues (like chastity and charity), which should take precedence? Should a brother allow his sister to prostitute herself in order to save him? Should a young novice sacrifice her chastity, and so jeopardise what she believes to be her immortal soul, in order to save her brother's life? And if she will not do so, should she encourage another woman to do it for her?

And what about the rule of law? Does the scriptural commandment, ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’ apply to princes and magistrates who are professionally bound to enforce the laws of the land? If so, or if not—‘'twas my fault to give the people scope’—is it right for the Duke to deputise Angelo to ‘strike and gall’ the people for what he, himself, had bid them do?—‘For we bid this be done, / When evil deeds have their permissive pass / And not the punishment’ (I.ii. 37-9). And what if certain laws ‘set down in heaven’, or on earth, conflict with the biological and psychological laws of human nature? How socially disruptive, or socially acceptable, is premarital sex? Or organised prostitution? And what about shot-gun weddings? Isn't the free consent of both parties just as important in marriage as in sex? How binding is a legal certificate if there is not a marriage of true minds?

Throughout the play, differing characters give us conflicting and contradictory answers to such questions, even as Isabella, Angelo and Claudio dramatically give each other measure for measure concerning the major conundrum debated in their confrontation scenes. Would it be a ‘sin’ or an act of ‘virtue’, for Isabella to save Claudio by yielding to Angelo? Isabella, of course, believes that it would be a mortal sin:

Better it were a brother died at once
Than that a sister, by redeeming him,
Should die for ever.

(II.iv. 106-8)

Conversely, Angelo argues that there would be a ‘charity’ in sinning to save a brother's life, and at the Last Judgement our ‘compell'd sins / Stand more for number than for accompt’ (II.iv. 57-8, 63-4). Claudio himself goes even further and tells Isabella that

What sin you do to save a brother's life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue.

(III.i. 135-7)

Isabella, in turn, insists that if her brother had any virtue, then ‘had he twenty heads’,

                                                  he'd yield them up
Before his sister should her body stoop
To such abhorr'd pollution.

(II.iv. 181-3)

‘Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?’ she asks Claudio:

Is't not a kind of incest to take life
From thine own sister's shame?

(III.i. 139-41)

Which, if any, of these characters, or arguments, is right? Given their differing personal and moral priorities and premisses, as well as their differing vested interests and desires, are all of them, in one way or another, right? Or, given the clash between differing values and virtues (such as chastity and charity), aren't there certain cases where no single option or argument can possibly be deemed right or acceptable to all of the individuals concerned? When confronted with dramatic conflicts of this kind, we in Shakespeare's audience occupy a position comparable to that of the characters themselves, in so far as our personal situations, as well as our historically or theologically (or sexually or ideologically) based opinions about the issue may, in turn, determine which of their opinions we concur with, or reject.

So complex are the issues, so powerful are the contradictory arguments, that it would seem quite impossible to prove which, if any, of the arguments he gave to Isabella, Claudio, Angelo or the Duke was deemed to be right by Shakespeare himself. Did he, for instance, view life as a fate worse than death?

                                        The best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exists on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,
And what thou hast, forget'st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And Death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.

(III.i. 17-41)

It is hard to imagine any bleaker reasons to ‘Be absolute for death’ than the ones that the Duke gives to Claudio. But then, mutatis mutandis, it is difficult to imagine any better reasons to be absolute for life than the ones that Claudio gives to Isabella:

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

(III.i. 119-33)

Thus, on the basis of counter-quotations from the same script, individual members of the audience—very like the individual characters portrayed on the stage—may arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions about the same issue; or remain torn between conflicting attitudes towards the same thing (life, death, chastity-integrity, authority, permissiveness, the rule of law, etc.). What it is almost impossible to do is to defend any one position or character or response—or interpretation of the play as a whole—without arguing against another one. The critical result is a tangle of intertwined, yet mutually contradictory, interpretations of the play based on different arguments for or against the various characters, all of which can be supported by quotations from the text itself, and so would appear to be equally valid. Yet when they are looked at in isolation from each other, they also seem equally reductive, since Shakespeare himself tends to confront his (or our) strongest case in favour of someone or something with the most powerful arguments that can be levelled against it—and vice versa—as if the pros (and indeed the play) would be incomplete without their cons. The fact that Shakespeare here would seem to have felt that the major, if not the only obligation of the artist was to assure that the various questions in the play were, and are, ‘correctly posed’, is what makes Measure for Measure so fascinating; but it also makes it difficult to reach any agreement about the rights and wrongs involved, since what one character (or critic) insists is right, another character (or critic) insists is all wrong. What makes certain conflicts even more difficult for any one—or all—of us to resolve, is the fact that the major characters in the play so often contradict themselves.

For instance, in Act 2 Scene 3, the Duke sanctimoniously arraigns Julietta's conscience for her ‘sin’ in having voluntarily had sexual intercourse with Claudio, whom she dearly loves, and to whom she had been pre-contracted (I.ii. 138-42), but had not yet finally married in church:

DUKE
Love you the man that wrong'd you?
JULIET
Yes, as I love the woman that wrong'd him.
DUKE
So then, it seems, your most offenceful act
Was mutually committed.
JULIET
                                                  Mutually.
DUKE
Then was your sin of heavier kind than his.
JULIET
I do confess it, and repent it, father.
DUKE
'Tis meet so, daughter, but lest you do repent
As that the sin hath brought you to this shame,
Which sorrow is always toward ourselves, not heaven,
Showing we would not spare heaven as we love it,
But as we stand in fear—
JULIET
I do repent me as it is an evil,
And take the shame with joy.
DUKE
                                                            There rest.

(II.iii. 24-36, my italics)

Julietta's sexual complicity (her act of love) is thus morally held against her. Yet the identical act that is here deemed by the Duke to be a ‘wrong’, a ‘sin’, a ‘most offenceful act’ to be repented as an ‘evil’, is, in the case of Mariana, proclaimed to be ‘no sin’ at all. ‘Fear you not at all’, the Duke (still disguised as a friar) tells Mariana,

[Angelo] is your husband on a pre-contract.
To bring you thus together 'tis no sin,
Sith that the justice of your title to him
Doth flourish the deceit.

(IV.i. 70-3, my italics)

Given the seemingly arbitrary and ad hoc judgements involved in the Duke's moral about-face, it is hard to see what, if any, common principle of morality or justice or equity, governs his arraignment of Julietta's conscience and the instructions and absolution he gives to Mariana. Sexual ‘sin’, the Duke seems to imply, is (or is not) whatever he says it is (or isn't). It also seems as hypocritical as it seems inconsistent—

                                                  lawful mercy
Is nothing kin to foul redemption.

(II.iv. 112-13)

                                        [Better a brother died at once]
Before his sister should her body stoop
To such abhorr'd pollution.
More than our brother is our chastity.

(II.iv. 182-5)

Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd.

(III.i. 151)

—when Isabella joins the Duke in encouraging Mariana to play the bed-trick on Angelo: ‘The image of it gives me content already’ (III.i. 250).

Yet another inconsistency involving criteria of sexual morality, justice and judgement occurs in Act 5, when Isabella argues that Angelo should not be subject to the death penalty, on the grounds that, unlike Claudio, he was guilty only ‘in intent’:

ISABELLA
                                                  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. 446-52)

Isabella is certainly correct so far as Angelo's determination to force her into sexual intercourse, and for that matter, his subsequent intention to have Claudio killed, is concerned. Yet judged by the standards of her own judgement of Claudio, who was ‘Condemn'd upon the act of fornication / To lose his head’ (V.i. 70-1), Angelo remains legally subject to the death penalty, since (as a result of the bed-trick) Angelo also ‘did the thing’ for which Claudio appeared to have died, having, likewise, had sexual intercourse with a woman to whom he was pre-contracted, but had not finally married in church.

Indeed, when seen in terms of the obvious dramatic ironies here involved, the wheels of Measure for Measure appear to have turned full circle, as it were in order to ensure that Angelo would, finally, offend against the law of Vienna in exactly the same way that Claudio did:

ANGELO
'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall …

.....

You may not so extenuate his offence
For I have had such faults; but rather tell me,
When I, that censure him, do so offend,
Let mine own judgment pattern out my death,
And nothing come in partial.

(II.i. 17-31)

DUKE
This is [Claudio's] pardon, purchased by such sin
For which the pardoner himself is in

(IV.ii. 103-4)

DUKE
Claudio, whom here you have warrant to execute, is no greater forfeit to the law than Angelo who hath sentenc'd him.

(IV.ii. 149-50)

DUKE
                    as he adjudg'd your brother—

.....

The very mercy of the law cries out
Most audible, even from his proper tongue,
‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!’

.....

Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.

(V.i. 401-9)

Although they may be necessary to display Isabella's decision to show mercy to her enemy and (perhaps?) to persuade Shakespeare's audience that Angelo should be spared the death-penalty since his acts ‘did not o'ertake his bad intent’, Isabella's arguments still seem casuistical, since the legal case against Angelo remains as valid as the one against Claudio (who ‘is no greater forfeit to the law’ than Angelo, who sentenced him), while the moral case against Angelo is stronger far. This kind of legal and moral nitpicking would seem critically absurd with reference to another kind of play; but because the characters themselves constantly indulge in it, Measure for Measure positively encourages it.

For instance, in recent years there has been a concerted scholarly effort to justify the Duke's, and Isabella's, comparatively lenient judgements of Mariana and Angelo, and comparatively severe condemnations of Julietta and Claudio, in terms of legalistic distinctions between two different kinds of Elizabethan betrothal contract (de praesenti and de futuro). Yet there is no scholarly certainty concerning what kind of pre-contract which couple had. The reason for this confusion is that Shakespeare himself, as it were deliberately, describes the two pre-contracts in virtually identical ways. Here is Claudio's account of his sexual and legal relationship with Julietta:

Thus stands it with me: upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta's bed.
You know the lady; she is fast my wife,
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order; this we came not to,
Only for propagation of a dow'r.

(I.ii. 138-43)

And here is the Duke's account of the contractual relationship between Angelo and Mariana:

She should this Angelo have married: [he] was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed; between which time of the contract and the limit of the solemnity her brother Frederick was wreck'd at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister.

(III.i. 206-9)

To demonstrate the obvious similarities consequent on the bed-trick, one need only put Claudio's statement into the mouth of Mariana, since the identical words describe her situation just as accurately as they described Claudio's: ‘Thus stands it with me: upon a true contract I got possession of Lord Angelo's bed. You know the man. He is fast my husband, save that we do the denunciation lack of outward order. This we came not to, only for propagation of a dow'r.’

If there is any difference between the kind of contract that Claudio had with Julietta, and the pre-contract between Mariana and Angelo, it is so super-subtle that one can readily understand why ‘the courts themselves in Shakespeare's day were frequently at a loss to distinguish between the two types of betrothal contract’ (see Harding 1950, p. 149). None the less, there are numerous arguments insisting that Shakespeare's original audience would have realised that what was ‘wrong’ in the case of Julietta and Claudio, was ‘no sin’ in the case of Mariana and Angelo, since the ‘type of betrothal which Claudio and Juliet had entered upon did not in law give them any marital rights, whereas Mariana's contract with Angelo did, at least in law’ (see Nagarajan 1964, p. xxx). One critic goes so far as to assert that Claudio must have been lying to Shakespeare's audience, as well as to Lucio, when he claimed to have a ‘true contract’ with Julietta (see French 1972, pp. 17-19). But no such legal or moral distinctions are made clear in the script itself. Why not?

Assuming that Shakespeare and his original audience had, in fact, based their moral judgements on technical distinctions between betrothal contracts here portrayed as so much alike that any differences between them seem so insignificant as to appear non-existent, then Shakespeare—along with his original audience—could be charged with a legalism comparable to Angelo's, to say nothing of a lack of any common sense or Christian charity or normal humane compassion with regard to Claudio and Julietta (‘O, let him marry her!’). For that matter, Shakespeare himself had a daughter born to him only six months after his own wedding (for further biographical associations, see Scouten 1975, pp. 70-1). Moreover, two of the play's major dramatic and moral ironies get lost amidst scholarly arguments about the pre-contracts, and—arguably anyway—these ironies explain why Shakespeare dramatically stresses the similarities, not the differences, between them in the text.

1. Much of the action of Measure for Measure seems contrived to force Angelo to offend against the law of Vienna in the same way, and then face judgment under the same statute by which he had sentenced poor Claudio to death (‘When I, that censure him, do so offend, / Let mine own judgment pattern out my death’). Having so offended, Angelo keeps his word when, in the end, he asks for the death penalty (‘'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it’). ‘Like doth quit like’—with a vengeance—until Angelo is granted the mercy he denied to Claudio (for further discussion, see Hawkes 1964, p. 96 and Hunter 1965, p. 219).

2. Claudio's sexual relationship with Julietta does, indeed, differ strikingly from the other sexual and matrimonial relationships involved in Measure for Measure. But it does not differ in its legality. It differs in its mutuality. For the fact is that the act of sex between Claudio and Julietta—which, paradoxically, is the one that is most emphatically, consistently and severely condemned as sinful—is the only sexual act in Measure for Measure that was undertaken with mutual consent, prompted by mutual desire and dignified by mutual love (I.ii. 147; II.iii. 26-7). By contrast, every other act of sexual intercourse that is contemplated or consummated in it involves coercion, prostitution, pandering, blackmail, force or trickery.

The inconsistent judgements by the Duke and Isabella may have resulted from a major moral and structural conundrum; that is, how not to condone premarital sex in general and, simultaneously, justify (a) the bed-trick and (b) the pardon of Angelo. The ‘conscience’ scene between the Duke and Julietta may structurally serve to confirm Claudio's insistence on mutuality (I.ii. 147) so as to make it absolutely clear to the audience that he was not guilty of ‘the forcible seduction of a virgin’ (as were his counterparts in Cinthio's Epitia and Hecatommithi—see Lever 1965, pp. xxxviii, 156-8); and to show us that Julietta is not a ‘loose’ woman; and to stress the way that even the most venial act of illicit sex involves guilt and shame on the part of Julietta and Claudio alike:

CLAUDIO
As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die.

(I.ii. 120-4)

Yet the fact remains that, even if we could find some legalistic distinction between their pre-contracts that would allow us to do so, there is no equitable or charitable or truly just way to applaud what Mariana did with Angelo and, simultaneously, condemn Claudio for a sin of heavier kind than Angelo's.

What, then, is the relationship between sex and sin and vice and virtue in Measure for Measure? Which of its characters should be condemned as malefactors, or seen as more sinned against than sinning or more to be pitied than censured? It is as if, in his treatment of sex and sin, Shakespeare here set out to develop the photo-negative reversals between virtue and vice that he had previously described in Romeo and Juliet (II.iii. 17-22):

For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse;
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime's by action dignified.

Throughout Measure for Measure, Shakespeare dramatically confronts us with specific occasions wherein ‘virtue itself turns vice’, while ‘vice sometime's by action dignified’; even as a state of complete bewilderment concerning virtue and villainy is comically encapsulated in poor Elbow's speech confusing ‘benefactors’ with ‘malefactors’;

ELBOW
I do lean upon justice, sir, and do bring in here before your good honour two notorious benefactors.
ANGELO
Benefactors! Well—what benefactors are they? Are they not malefactors?
ELBOW
If it please your honour, I know not well what they are; but precise villains they are, that I am sure of, and void of all profanation in the world that good Christians ought to have.

(II.i. 47-55)

Can its Christian context help us to resolve the play's conflicts, or does Measure for Measure itself reflect a profound historical and enduring uncertainty concerning the degree of ‘profanation in the world that good Christians ought to have’—or ought to tolerate in others? For that matter, Christ's own teachings about sex and sin seem contradictory. As Milton observed,

Where the Pharisees were strict, there Christ seems remiss; where they were too remiss, he saw it needful to seem most severe: in one place he censures an unchaste look to be adultery already committed; another time he passes over actual adultery with less reproof than for an unchaste look; not so heavily condemning secret weakness, as open malice.

(Milton [1643-8], 1959, p. 283)

In Shakespeare's own time, differing Christian denominations held—just as they still hold—conflicting views about a number of sexual and moral issues involved in Measure for Measure. For instance, if, as St Paul insisted, ‘it is better to marry than to burn’, then, Catholics argued, it is obviously better still to renounce the flesh altogether, to take Holy Orders or enter a convent or a monastery. Conversely, Protestants extolled marriage, as opposed to monasticism. And of course there were, as there always are, some downright irreligious people around in seventeenth-century England, and Shakespeare's audience may well have contained (at least) a few irreverent libertines like Lucio, or like one Thomas Webbe, who is cited by Christopher Hill as having concluded that ‘There's no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage’ (Hill 1974, p. 9).

Given the course of action in Measure for Measure, it does seem indisputably true that to attempt to expunge all profanation from the world is to invite disaster—which is precisely what the Duke of Vienna does when he summons Angelo, a ‘man of stricture and firm abstinence’ to bring back the birch of law (I.iii. 11-43). As Shakespeare reminds us elsewhere (see Sonnet 94), ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’. It is, however, when Angelo crosses it that Shakespeare most dramatically erases the fine line between virtuous and vicious forms of human psychology and sexuality that may elevate men and women or degrade them. For Angelo, a man who never feels the ‘wanton stings’ of sensuality, but ‘doth rebate and blunt his natural edge / With profits of the mind, study and fast’ (I.iv. 60-1), soon goes beyond all measure in punishing sexual offenders, and his self-righteousness almost immediately begins to manifest itself in sadism: ‘[I hope] you'll find good cause to whip them all’ (II.i. 131). ‘Punish them to your height of pleasure’, says the Duke, much later on (V.i. 238, my italics), when Angelo asks to have his ‘way’ with Isabella and Mariana (thus suggesting that the bed-trick failed to effect a miraculous reformation so far as Angelo's pleasure in punishing people is involved). Anyway, from the beginning of the play, the punishment of vice itself turns vicious, misapplied. Furthermore, virtue itself enkindles vice when the purity of a young novice ignites Angelo's desire to defile it. ‘Love in thousand monstrous forms doth oft appear’, wrote Spenser, and this is one of them:

Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? O fie, fie, fie!
What doest thou, or what art thou, Angelo?
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good? …
.....O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue.

(II.ii. 171-83)

There is a vicious circle here, since the saintlier Isabella is, the more Angelo will desire her. So any sincere refusal from her would only arouse him still further. Yet Isabella's searing refusal to lay down the treasure of her body to Angelo is charged with an erotic power that might well evoke a gleam in the eye of the most depraved marquis in the audience, to say nothing of a saint-turned-sensualist like Angelo:

                    were I under the terms of death,
Th' impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed,
That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield
My body up to shame.

(II.iv. 100-4, my italics)

In its dramatic context, this speech is peculiarly powerful. Other Shakespearian characters (such as Claudio and Antony) associate death with sex; and other threatened heroines of the time (e.g. Jonson's Celia and Shakespeare's Lucrece) prefer torture or death to dishonour. But here and only here—or so a lurid play-bill might put it—are fused the red and black extremes of passion and pain, the agonies and ecstacies of desire and martyrdom, of repression and sensuality (obviously, no commercially minded producer would dream of cutting this speech). Everything in it is associated with death, yet Isabella's fiery lines, with images of passionate sexuality underlying a prayer for martyrdom, for torture or death, for anything but sexual violation, would seem deliberately designed by Shakespeare to arouse Angelo as saint, as sensualist and as a sadist. And so, of course, they do. Here is Angelo's response, his answer, his ultimatum to Isabella:

ANGELO
                              I have begun,
And now I give my sensual race the rein:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite;
Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes
That banish what they sue for; redeem thy brother
By yielding up thy body to my will;
Or else he must not only die the death,
But thy unkindness shall his death draw out
To ling'ring sufferance.

(II.iv. 159-67)

Angelo seems to be recalling, and either deliberately or unconsciously echoing, Isabella's memory-searing lines (her speech comes less than five minutes playing-time before his). She must fit her consent to his ‘sharp appetite’ (his sexual equivalent of ‘keen whips’?). She must ‘lay by’ (strip herself of) all blushes ‘That banish what they sue for’. In short, she must come to his bed ‘as to a bed / That longing have been sick for’ (there is surely a verbal echo in the parallel phrases here). Otherwise, he will have Claudio subjected to prolonged torture, before he has him killed.

Angelo's lines are more explicitly sexual, his threats far more sadistic, than earlier propositions urging Isabella to ransom her brother with the treasure of her body. They are also far more demanding. He insists upon a completely uninhibited response, however unwilling Isabella is to give it. This is what Coleridge saw as ‘horrible’. Seeing sadism and criminal sexuality in him, it was impossible for Coleridge to accept the pardon and marriage of Angelo in Act 5: ‘For cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive of them as being morally repented of’. Whatever Shakespeare might wish him to do at the end of a play so obviously concerned with Christian forgiveness, Coleridge agreed with Dr Johnson (who was, likewise, a devout Christian as well as a great critic) that ‘every reader feels some indignation when he finds [Angelo] spared’. It has been argued (see Kirsch 1975) that no such uncharitable and fundamentally un-Christian indignation would have been felt by Shakespeare's original audience. Elizabethan Christians (Kirsch asserts) would have rejoiced in the pardon and marriage of Angelo, whose ‘libidinousness’ was miraculously transformed by the bed-trick. Yet some Elizabethans might have agreed with Coleridge's conclusion that the ending ‘baffles the strong indignant claim of justice’ in so far as

Faults should be measured by desart, but all is one in this,
The lecher fyerd with lust, is punished no more,
Than he which fel through force of loue, whose mariage salues his sore.

(George Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra, 1578)

These (and other) lines from one of Shakespeare's major sources for Measure for Measure, would appear to suggest that ubiquitous mercy might have seemed, to individual Elizabethans, in certain circumstances, to be as unjust as ubiquitous justice seemed merciless. See Promos and Cassandra, Part 1, Act 2 (reprinted in Eccles 1980, pp. 313-15), where Isabella's counterpart thus pleads the case for Claudio's counterpart:

Behold the wofull Syster here, of poor Andrugio,
Whom though that lawe awardeth death, yet mercy do him show:
Way [Weigh] his yong yeares, the force of love, which forced his amis,
Way, way that Mariage, works amends, for what committed is,
He hath defilde no nuptial bed, nor forced rape hath mou'd,
He fel through love, who neuer ment, but wiue the wight he lou'd.
And wantons sure, to keepe in awe, these statutes first were made,
On none but lustfull leachers, should, with rygrous law be payd.
.....Here is no wylful murder wrought, which axeth blood againe,
Andrugio's faulte may salued be, Mariage wipes out his stayne.

If, in the case of ubiquitous justice, we would all be denied mercy (‘Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once’), in the case of ubiquitous mercy the claims of temporal justice are unsatisfied, when (for instance) a lecher fired with lust to attempted blackmail, rape and murder, is ‘punished no more’ than he ‘which fel through force of loue, whose mariage salues his sore’. There may (on the one hand) be more rejoicing in heaven, or at the end of a tragi-comedy like Measure for Measure (or Promos and Cassandra), when sins that were as scarlet are washed as white as snow. But, on a temporal level, where ‘Faults should be measured by desart’, the rejoicing may be tempered by a recognition that this process baffles the strong indignant claims of justice.

Looked back at from a different perspective, Shakespeare's original portrayals of Angelo and Isabella in their great confrontation scenes make the subsequent action of the play seem frustrating in another way. When Angelo's ultimatum is viewed from a psychological angle, it appears obvious that he sees in Isabella the feminine counterpart of himself (see Rossiter 1961, p. 159). As he was, so she is; as he is, so she might become. As ‘black masks / Proclaim an enshielded beauty ten times louder / Than beauty could, display'd’ (II.iv. 79-81), so the saintly asceticism of her life, precisely like his own, may mask a keen appetite that could indeed give full and fit consent to his desire. As he will give the ‘sensual race the rein’, so must she: he will allow her no modesty, no nicety, no blushes to banish what he now believes they sue for. He will have a response equivalent to his own sexual passion. Could Angelo be right in attributing to Isabella a latent sensuality equal to his own? Does the fact that Angelo once believed himself immune to sex and now is obsessed with it, suggest that Isabella might fall too? Claudio has informed us that

As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint.

(I.ii. 120-2)

So might not the reverse prove true for his sister, as for Angelo? Could her restraint turn to immoderate use? Does her initial desire for more severe restraints within the convent suggest that there is something to restrain? Why does Isabella embrace martyrdom in such passionately sexual terms? Unless the line between saint and sinner, martyr and masochist, righteous severity and sadism—in short, the borderline between angelic and demonic extremes of virtue and of vice—is indeed a very narrow one and all too easy to cross? One may relish or deplore the psychological and sexual reverberations of Shakespeare's confrontations between a fiery saint and a fallen angel, but who would not be fascinated by them? ‘Where's that palace whereinto foul things sometimes intrude not?’ In the audience? On the stage? Why do Isabella's last lines in the play stress Angelo's desire for her?

It could be that, in their confrontation scenes—before Mariana's name is ever mentioned—Shakespeare establishes mysterious and powerful psychological and sexual affinities between Angelo and Isabella that make the bland domestic futures assigned them by the Duke seem incredible, if not unacceptable, to some members of the audience. If this play, in effect, transforms the audience from witnesses to participants in its tragi-comic rituals, we may emotionally participate in a kind of firelight flamenco dance between comedy and tragedy, piety and impiety, virtue and vice, wherein one may threaten, arouse, change places with, embrace—or, finally, repel—the other. For at mid-point in the action (immediately following the major confrontation scenes), there is a dramatic and virtually complete withdrawal of attention from the sexual and psychological proclivities of Shakespeare's heroine and his villain. He never again permits them a moment alone together on the stage. And so he abruptly and conspicuously parts company with his sources (see Lever 1945, pp. xxxv-lv) wherein the counterpart to Isabella always yields her body up, for one night, to Angelo's counterpart. But, then, in none of the sources is the heroine a young novice, nor is the sexual and emotional situation anything like so highly charged. Perhaps for these reasons Shakespeare summons forth the lovelorn Mariana to play the bed-trick, thus assuring that Angelo will be securely fettered to another woman by the bonds of holy wedlock, and then (ever widening the safety-zone between his incendiary pair) he has the Duke claim Isabella for his own. Yet Angelo himself asks only for death—never for Mariana—while Isabella's response to the Duke's proposal is silence. And so, in the end, as in their confrontation scenes, they still somehow seem, oddly, to be two of a kind.

Moreover, something more than Isabella's vanity may be involved in her last reference to Angelo:

                                        I partly think
A due sincerity govern'd his deeds
Till he did look on me.

(V.i. 443-5)

This could be a statement of dramatic fact, so far as the audience's verdict on Angelo is concerned. For the experience of watching an Angelo previously unmoved and invulnerable to temptation become obsessed by a young novice makes its dramatic impression on the audience before the Duke informs us of Mariana's existence. In ways comparable to the doom of Pentheus by Dionysus, it is through Angelo's great soliloquies that Shakespeare most dramatically portrays the fall of a man who has never before known or felt desire. The subsequent information about Angelo's old contracting, and the succession of intrigues based on it may, therefore, seem perfunctorily contrived. Likewise, whether we approve of extreme ascetism or not, the passion for chastity which Isabella expressed with such uncompromising conviction in the confrontation scenes makes it difficult for certain people to believe that the same woman would willingly become the bride of anyone but Christ: ‘Get her to a nunnery’, one student exclaimed. As Mary Lascelles observes, it is easy to argue that it is ‘the very idleness of criticism to ask how this play's new-married couples will settle down together’ (Lascelles 1953, p. 137), and it is certainly true that Shakespeare frequently ends his comedies with matches which no marriage counsellor would sanction. Yet none of the parties to his other matches (with the noteworthy exception of Lucio) are characters originally endowed with personalities that seem so fundamentally hostile to the wedding-bells that toll for them, as Isabella and Angelo, who neither freely choose, nor verbally assent to, their domestic destinies. Of course you could, contrariwise, argue that they will be better off wed, even as F. R. Leavis insists that we should ‘let Angelo marry a good woman and be happy’ (Leavis 1952, p. 172), while W. W. Lawrence does not believe that ‘there is any doubt that Isabella turns to [the Duke] with a heavenly and yielding smile’ (Lawrence 1931, pp. 106-7). But the choice of responses (a smile, uncertainty, shock, joy, despair, resignation, etc.) is left open to the actress playing Isabella, and the actor playing Angelo, even as the individual members of the audience are free to respond to the characters, and their destinies, in altogether different ways.

Yet, however one looks at Shakespeare's original portrayals of Angelo and Isabella, as J. C. Maxwell has observed, it is easy to see the germs of twentieth-century psychological theories in the play: ‘I have even been told of untutored playgoers who thought that it was Jonathan Miller and not Shakespeare who conceived the notion of setting it in [Freud's city] Vienna’ (Maxwell 1974, p. 3). For that matter, Measure for Measure has recently been subjected to what, to my mind, may be the most inane of all the Freudian interpretations currently being imposed upon Shakespeare's plays. For instance, several critics have felt obliged to inform us that Claudio's fear of death can be interpreted, ‘in Freudian terms’, as a fear of ‘castration’ (see Garber 1980, p. 123, and Berry 1981, p. 51). But if so, then what of it? Critically speaking, this would seem on all fours with arguing that a fear of the diagnosis ‘syphilis’ ultimately accounts for a young patient's response to the diagnosis ‘It's terminal cancer’. All one need do is glance back at Claudio's own account of all that men—and women—have feared of death itself to realise what is lost by making Freudian trifles of Shakespearian terrors: the threat to ‘splay and geld all the young men in the city’ (II.i. 218) is not the one that Claudio faces here. Moreover, if ‘fear of castration’ or ‘symbolic castration’ constitutes a psychoanalytical metaphor for a fear of, or a loss of, identity; of integrity; of potency; of face; of life itself; then it cannot, simultaneously, serve to account for the phenomena it was devised to describe: ‘Even in the analyst's office there is little room for diagnoses like the ones offered as psychoanalysis of characters—a psychoanalytic tag offered as an explanation, as though the name made the behaviour any more explicable’ (Skura 1981, pp. 38-42). Some Freudian interpretations of Measure for Measure are admittedly, albeit unintentionally, hilarious. What about, say, the costuming, headgear, etc., required to put this one on the stage?

[In the Fifth Act] the Duke's penetration of the city limits, the opening gates, the holy fountain a league below, all contribute to a powerfully sexual atmosphere. His homecoming is metaphorically portrayed in terms of a vaginal penetration.

(Sacks 1980, p. 59)

What the play we actually have would seem to demonstrate is that Freud was by no means the first to have recognised the existence of subconscious desires, or to have noted that sexual repression can result in neurosis, in a diseased imagination, in psycho-sexual aberrations. All this appears to have been just as obvious to Shakespeare, as well as his near-contemporary Robert Burton, as it is to a student of Freud. Indeed, Robert Burton's compendium of Renaissance psychological theories, The Anatomy of Melancholy, can provide us with external evidence, if any is needed, that certain sexual, social and emotional problems posed in Measure for Measure are no more amenable to solution-by-diagnosis in Freudian terms than they were amenable to a single theological or social or political solution-by-diagnosis in Shakespeare's (or in any other) time.

In his discussions of sexual and religious pathology, Burton (very like Shakespeare in Measure for Measure) brings together ‘Great precisians’ (like Angelo) and ‘fiery-spirited zealots’ (like Isabella), as well as certain types that may well have composed a large part of Shakespeare's audience, as of his dramatis personae: there are the ‘good, bad, indifferent, true, false, zealous, ambidexters, neutralists, lukewarm, libertines, atheists, etc.’ (Burton 1932, iii, p. 387). In Burton, as in Shakespeare, virtue itself may turn into vice: ‘howsoever they may seem to be discreet’, the ‘preposterous zeal’ of great precisians (like Angelo) may result in actions that go ‘beyond measure’ (iii, p. 372). In sexual matters, ‘Venus omitted’ may do just as much damage as ‘intemperate Venus’—it may cause ‘priapismus, satyriasis, etc.’ and ‘send up poisonous vapours to the brain and heart’. If the ‘natural seed be overlong kept (in some parties) it turns to poison’ (i, p. 234). To Burton, the tyranny of religious ‘superstition’ seemed as terrible as the tyranny of princes: ‘What power of prince or penal law, be it never so strict’, could enforce men and women (rather like Isabella) to do that which they will voluntarily undergo out of religious fervour: ‘As to fast from all flesh, abstain from marriage … whip themselves … abandon the world?’ (iii, p. 332). Religious and ideological zealots of this kind will endure any misery, ‘suffer and do that which the sunbeams will not endure to see, religionis acti furiis’; ‘endure all extremities’, ‘vow chastity’, ‘take any pains’, ‘die a thousand deaths’ (iii, p. 350).

According to Burton, organised religion itself may provide dispensations that are spurious, ways out that are too easy. As a Protestant, Burton deplored the ‘general pardons’ issued by Catholics, and complained that their ‘ghostly fathers’ all too easily ‘apply remedies … cunningly string and unstring, wind and unwind their devotions, play upon their consciences with plausible speeches and terrible threats, … settle and remove, erect with such facility and deject, let in and out’ (iii, pp. 403-4). I have never seen, anywhere, what appears to be a better gloss on the dubious contrivances of Shakespeare's Duke-disguised-as-a-friar, as he plays upon the consciences of the other characters; sets up, and then removes, the rod of law; arbitrarily orders people into, and out of, death-row; and finally issues general pardons for all offences. One could, using Burton's arguments, write an essay concluding that Shakespeare himself intended us to be comparably critical of the Duke. But it is just as easy to argue the opposite case: given the structure of the play, Shakespeare appears to be on the side of the Duke, whose compromises, contrivances, improvisations, and intrigues may be necessary in order to maintain any semblance of stability or order or justice or mercy in a fallen world (see Schleiner 1982). Yet markedly unlike the Duke, Shakespeare's play itself ‘does not’ (my terms are again from Burton) ‘repeal a fornicator’ (like Julietta), ‘reject a drunkard’ (like Barnardine) or ‘resist a proud fellow’ (like Lucio), but ‘entertains all, communicates itself to all (iii, p. 413). It is in this spacious humanity that Shakespeare himself might be said to reflect the amazing grace of God. Yet he also pays dramatic tribute to ‘the devil's burning throne’, and the falling, fallen, Angelo stands among the greatest of all his creations.

For here as elsewhere, Shakespeare was not about to subordinate his apprehension of a most protean reality to the dictates of any single dogma, doctrine or dramatic form. Thus the order superimposed on the play in the end is challenged by the recalcitrance of certain characters (like Lucio) even as the Duke's order, ‘Love her, Angelo’, raises questions as to whether affections can be so ordered.

To interpose a jurisdictive power upon the inward and irremediable disposition of man, to command love and sympathy, to forbid dislike … is not within the province of any law to reach.

In whom therefore either the will, or the faculty is found to have never joined, or now not to continue so, 'tis not to say, they shall be one flesh, for they cannot be one flesh [though wedlock try all her golden links, and borrow to her aid all the iron manacles and fetters of law, it does but seek to twist a rope of sand].

(Milton, ed. Sirluck, 1959, pp. 346, 606; the interpolation is from p. 345)

So far as the ‘inward and irremediable disposition of man’ is concerned, you can whip a Lucio, or force him to marry the whore he got with child, but short of hanging him, there's no way to stifle his jeers at all authority. You can pull down all the brothels in the suburbs, but the trade will only move elsewhere, and the brothels in the city that some ‘wise burgher put in for’ will still stand (I.ii. 91-102): the pimp will not be ‘whipt out of his trade’ (II.i. 242). Yet commercial prostitution here seems relatively innocuous when compared to Angelo's ‘salt appetite’ and ‘sharp imagination’ that desires to raze the sanctuary and pitch its evils there: ‘For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness … These are the things which defile a man.’

And so Shakespeare provokes speculation about the ways of an imaginary world (not altogether unlike our own) wherein ‘Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall’ (II.i. 38), and the same individual may ‘become much more the better / For being a little bad’ (V.i. 438-9), and the same thing may ‘make bad good, and good provoke to harm’ (IV.i. 15). Included among the creatures who inhabit it are spiders and flies, burrs that stick, the basest of weeds, and lilies that fester. In this teeming terrain—and not in an ending which appears to have tidied everything up—may lie the source of the play's vitality, of its enduring relevance. To my mind anyway, what seem least significant about Measure for Measure, and certain critical interpretations of it, are the solutions officially offered us, whereby ‘all difficulties are but easy when they are known’ (IV.ii. 192-3) and all its moral, sexual, psychological conundrums can be resolved through substitutions, bed-tricks and marriage certificates. What seem most significant are the open questions posed throughout the play.

For the fact is that, whether Shakespeare intended them to or not, the kinds of solutions to the problems offered to us at the end of Measure for Measure seem obviously inadequate in the face of the psychological, social, sexual and moral conflicts they are supposed to have resolved. By contrast, it seems just fine when, for instance, certain problems posed in the beginning of The Comedy of Errors are solved when twin finally meets twin, and Aegeon is spared. For the death-threat to Aegeon was, from the outset, amenable to a practical solution (i.e. the payment of 1,000 marks), even as the dramatic complications arising from the mistaking of one twin for another can, instantaneously, be unravelled when both twins finally appear together on the stage.

Count Otto von Bismarck described politics as ‘the art of the possible’, and Sir Peter Medawar has described scientific research as ‘the art of the soluble’, and both these descriptions could be applied to a certain kind of dramatic art, in which the playwright poses problems, however complicated they may appear to be, that are finally amenable to a dramatic resolution. On the other hand, a very different kind of dramatic art operates at certain crucial points in Measure for Measure, and it might be most accurately described as the ‘art of the insoluble’. Perhaps a quick account of the way Measure for Measure differs from John Marston's The Malcontent can illustrate the differences between the two kinds of dramatic art.

It is obvious at a glance that the general outlines of Measure for Measure and The Malcontent are similar. Within the corrupt societies of both plays, a disguised duke manipulates characters and intrigues so that the outcome of a play which might otherwise have developed in the pattern of revenge tragedy results in mercy and harmony. Here the similarity ends, and some illuminating differences emerge. Where the ending of Measure for Measure creates difficulties, the conclusion of The Malcontent leaves the audience satisfied, or at least comparatively few commentators have objected to the way the conflicts are resolved. Where Marston's characterisation and style are consistent, the characters, the language and the action of Shakespeare's play sometimes appear at odds with each other. Marston's characters pose no insoluble problems for anyone familiar with Elizabethan drama.

His disguised Duke, Altofronto, speaking as Malevole, sounds enough like Jonson's Macilente and other characters of the same type to be readily accepted as the play's satiric spokesman from the moment he opens his mouth. The villainous usurper Mendoza is a nicely portrayed Machiavel with a Marlovian flair for overstatement; and the other characters need no more detailed introduction to any audience or reader even superficially familiar with their dramatic predecessors and contemporaries. We have Celso, the loyal friend and confidante; Bilioso, the doddering old man; various licentious courtiers; a virtuous duchess; a fool; a bawd. However bitter Marston's portrayal of this upside-down world may be, its inhabitants are old dramatic friends whose ancestors, siblings and progeny people many of the most popular plays on the Elizabethan stage. We know exactly what to expect from them, and they live up to our expectations (in the manner of Jonson's ‘humour’ types). All Marston has to do, given his skilful depiction of these well-known types, is to set them in action in a series of interesting intrigues. And his characters are such conventionally theatrical figures, that even when the action moves in an ominous direction, nobody in the audience really worries. The highly theatrical posturing, running about, double murder assignments and masque are great fun to watch. Marston's world is certainly out of joint, but it is so obviously a theatrically disordered world that there is no surprise when the playwright—via his spokesman and agent, Malevole/Altofronto—manages, theatrically, to set it right. For any problems created by the dramatic intrigues of one set of characters may be effectively solved by the dramatic intrigues of another group of characters, even as dramatic ‘humours’ can be dramatically expelled. In the Prologue, Marston stresses the lively action of the play, and rightly describes it as a comedy, since, however dark and devious his dramatic world may be, the emphasis falls on the dramatic intrigues, not on the suffering, which it causes.

By contrast, the action of Measure for Measure involves extreme suffering, and if Shakespeare exaggerates the traits of certain characters, he does so in ways significantly different from Marston's stylised exaggeration. Where Marston anchors his characters and action in the dramatic tradition, Shakespeare looses our dramatic moorings at the same time that he disturbs familiar ethical and moral assumptions. For instance, morally speaking, Barnardine is awful (‘Unfit to live or die’: IV.iii. 60). But Shakespeare's drunken, impenitent murderer, this death-defying, Duke-defying, ‘careless’, ‘reckless’, ‘fearless’, ‘insensible’ and ‘desperately mortal’ jailbird elicits an emotional and imaginative approbation that transcends critical and moral and ducal judgements alike. ‘Whether the qualities that have made [Barnardine] deathless in the imagination of many readers were part of Shakespeare's design, or came from that bounty which he could hardly deny any of his creatures—here lies no certainty, nor the hope of any’ (Lascelles 1953, p. 113). No one writes that way about any minor character in The Malcontent. The same holds true for the major characters.

Where Marston gives us old dramatic acquaintances, Shakespeare gives us characters different from the dramatis personae in his own works or in those of his contemporaries. There are numerous Elizabethan and Jacobean villains like Marston's Mendoza, and there are plenty of pure heroines like his Maria. There are none like Angelo or Isabella. Until III.i. 153, Angelo, Isabella, and Claudio (when he faces death) behave with the intensity of tragic protagonists, as if they were impelled by elemental forces (the force of Eros, the will-to-autonomy, the will-to-live) and so are capable of surprising and shocking the audience, each other, themselves. All three are associated with absolutes. Angelo is absolute for the letter of the law, then for Isabella. Isabella is absolute for chastity. Claudio soon becomes absolute for life. And an audience that has witnessed their confrontations is left, not with a vague impression, but with an absolute conviction that, given their situations, each would choose to bring tragic suffering upon each other, themselves, etc., that Angelo would, without doubt, defile Isabella in spite of his own horrified conscience; that Isabella would never yield to Angelo, even to save her brother's life; that Claudio could not willingly choose death, even to save his sister from a fate worse than death.

Thus, on the one hand, Shakespeare creates a desire to watch these characters face the tragic truths and consequences of their own decisions and desires and, on the other hand, creates a counter-desire to see how he—or the Duke—is going to save them from death, dishonour, each other, themselves, and so on. So far as dramatic form is concerned, Kenneth Burke has described the ways differing forms of dramatic art create, and satisfy, differing appetites, needs and desires on the part of the audience (Burke 1964, pp. 20-33). Shakespearian comedy can satisfy us like a wish-fulfilment dream, wherein all losses are restored and sorrows end; tragedy can satisfy a desire to go all the way, to see its characters confront the worst consequences of various passions and actions. Measure for Measure can be generically classified as a tragi-comedy since it creates, and attempts to satisfy, both desires. But in drama, as in life, the satisfaction of one desire may, necessarily, entail the frustration of the opposite desire. It may be impossible to arrive at a critical consensus about Measure for Measure because of the differing appetites it arouses, and satisfies, and frustrates, in differing individuals.

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