[In the following essay, Widmayer discusses themes of justice, law, and Christian mercy illustrated by Isabella's petition that Angelo's life be spared in the final scene of Measure for Measure.]

Few speeches have evoked such extensive critical commentary as Isabella's plea for Angelo's life in the final scene of Measure for Measure. Implored by Mariana to “but kneel by me!” (V. i. 445),¹ Isabella does far more: she assumes the role of attorney for the defense, arguing that Angelo is not guilty of the same crime for which Claudio was sentenced to death:

                                                  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 perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects,
Intents but merely thoughts.

(V. i. 456-62)

“Merely,” Mariana echoes, suggesting she perceives the same legal distinction as Isabella does and as Shakespeare presumably anticipated his audience would. But in the eyes of many critics the distinction remains elusive. After all, like Claudio and Juliet, Angelo and Mariana engaged in sexual intercourse following mutual promises of marriage. Thus, their marriage is valid, but not licit (or church solemnized). Yet, while Claudio is sentenced to death, the Deputy, according to Isabella, has committed no crime. Furthermore, though Juliet is convicted and imprisoned, the question of whether Mariana should be tried for the same offense never even arises.

How are we to account for this apparent inconsistency? Numerous critical studies attempt to make sense of Isabella's plea by examining de praesenti and de futuro contracts,² with the usual aim of demonstrating that the marriage contract between Angelo and Mariana is more binding or valid than that of Claudio and Juliet. However, despite much scrutiny of Elizabethan marriage laws and customs, Harriet Hawkins writes, no consensus of opinion has been reached about either the exact nature of the contract each couple made or the legalities involved. Hawkins goes on to say this lack of agreement is understandable, given both Shakespeare's vague descriptions of the contracts and the confusion over them among experts in church law:

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. …”³

Critical examinations of the two types of marriage contracts are not without merit: some in the audience, including members of the Inns of Court, might have perceived a distinction between the contracts and, as Craig A. Bernthal writes, welcomed such “‘fictonal questions’ which furnished the beginning of debate rather than the end.”⁴ But if a difference between the contracts was important to legal experts, apparently it was not important enough to Shakespeare to discuss in the play. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that at the climactic moment when Isabella kneels and pleads for her enemy's life, the dramatist would have left most of his audience scratching their heads over a fine legal distinction.

Much of the controversy surrounding Isabella's plea can be traced, I believe, to a misunderstanding of the nature of her brother's offense. Critics have long taken for granted that “Claudio is sentenced to death by Angelo for the crime of fornication.”⁵ Certainly Claudio and Juliet have committed fornication, or, more aptly, ante-nuptial fornication, but so have Angelo and Mariana. However, the outcome of their sexual behavior, rather than the nature of their marriage contract, makes Claudio and Juliet legally culpable, while Angelo and Mariana are not. To my mind, recognizing the nature of Claudio's offense can clarify Isabella's plea for Angelo and the play as a whole, which seems concerned, in part, with the inequity of a statute, both fictional and real, that condemned some yet let others go free for the same behavior.

The play provides six descriptions of Claudio's offense, beginning with Overdone's announcement that the young man has been sentenced “for getting Madam Juliet with child” (I. ii. 70-71). In the same scene, Pompey enters, and Overdone asks, “what's the news with you?”:

POMPEY.
Yonder man is carried to prison.
OVERDONE.
Well, what's he done?
POMPEY.
A woman.

Given Overdone's question and Pompey's reply, there can be only one interpretation of “done,” especially in the mind of an “over-done” lady. Had Shakespeare wanted his audience to believe that the man had been convicted for simple fornication, the talk of his offense could end here. But Overdone, taking for granted that the prisoner could not have been convicted merely for fornication, requires more information:

OVERDONE.
But what's his offense?
POMPEY.
Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.
OVERDONE.
What? Is there a maid with child by him?
POMPEY.
No, but there's a woman with maid by him.

(I. ii. 85-92)

Overdone's final question assumes that the prisoner is guilty of fathering a child by the maid, a fact Lucio punningly confirms.

Pompey goes on to inform Overdone of the proclamation under which all “houses” in the suburbs are to be closed. Critics generally regard this proclamation and the statute under which Claudio and Juliet are punished as one and the same. If they are the same, we should expect the bawd to be at least as worried over losing her head as her business, especially since when Pompey comes on the scene, he voices his intention to disobey the proclamation by seeing to it that Overdone maintains her “taphouse” (“Though you change your place, you need not change your trade; I'll be your tapster still” [I. ii. 107-08]). Yet, neither before nor after their arrest do the bawds express any concern about meeting the same deadly fate as Claudio. The statute under which Claudio and Juliet are convicted seems to be one thing, while the proclamation, which Overdone and Pompey break by maintaining a “house,” is another.

The third description of the offense comes from Claudio himself, who tells Lucio what has happened:

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
Remaining in the coffer of her friends,
From whom we thought it meet to hide our love
Till time had made them for us. But it chances
The stealth of our most mutual entertainment
With character too gross is writ on Juliet.

(I. ii. 142-52)

“With child, perhaps?” Lucio asks, evidently baiting Claudio, since the condition of Juliet, standing nearby and soon to give birth, is readily apparent. “Unhappily, even so,” Claudio answers and goes on to explain that Angelo “Awakes in me all the enrolled penalties” of a “drowsy and neglected act” (I. ii. 167-71).

According to Claudio's explanation of the offense, he and Juliet followed what was in Shakespeare's age the fairly widespread, though not church-sanctioned, practice of exchanging promises of marriage, then engaging in intercourse prior to solemnization.⁶ The marriage was not solemnized, Claudio explains, only for lack of Juliet's dowry, held by her “friends” from whom they decided to conceal their love “Till time had made them for us.” Why the friends would not have approved the relationship, despite Juliet's long friendship with her “cousin,” Isabella (I. iv. 47-48), might be accounted for by the couple's youth; however, Claudio's association with Lucio and other denizens of the “taphouse” or alehouse (OED) suggests another explanation. When Mistress Overdone tells Lucio and the other gentlemen that Claudio was “worth five thousand of you all” (I. ii. 59-60), she is expressing admiration for his integrity. But the phrase takes on additional meaning in the context of the gentlemen's discussion of the money Lucio has been spending at the taphouse. In this context, the implication is that Claudio “was worth” an impressive amount of money that Overdone's use of the past tense suggests is gone. The fact that Overdone has such knowledge could mean that Claudio has lost all or most of his money under her roof. This would link Claudio to Lucio and the other gentlemen, who spend their time and money at the alehouse, as well as to Froth, another young heir whose father is dead and has fallen in with an “idle” companion.

Like Escalus, who warns Froth to stay away from tapsters, justices of Shakespeare's age repeatedly spoke of the danger of alehouses. Perhaps Claudio may be likened to those “accounted Gallants young Gentlemen” condemned by Justice Edward Coke for frequenting alehouses, where “by their intemperate riot, love to spend their inheritance before they come to inherit.”⁷ Shakespeare may have intended his audience to assume that Claudio's “riotous youth,” as Angelo calls it (IV. iv. 29), resulted in indigence—as Coke and many of the respectable sort believed was the inevitable result of alehouse-haunting. Claudio's loss of his inheritance could explain why the couple concealed their vows from her friends and were unable to afford to solemnize their union, even when Juliet found herself with child—a child who, under English law, would be considered illegitimate because the marriage, though valid (“she is fast my wife”), has not been made licit by solemnization (“outward order”).⁸

Shakespeare seems to have based the situation of Claudio and Juliet on a common dilemma faced by couples during his age. Much to the consternation of parents and ecclesiastical authorities, the late sixteenth century saw a considerable increase in the numbers of “private spousals”—so called because, as in the case of Claudio and Juliet, the marriage promises were made without the knowledge of “friends” (guardians, parents, or other relatives). Sometimes, these private spousals took place at alehouses where, records indicate, a number of young couples exchanged vows in direct opposition to the wishes of “friends.” John Gillis goes on to say that one of the reasons for the increase in private contracts is that “self-betrothal was a way of neutralizing parental and communal power.”⁹ Since sexual intercourse made valid promises of marriage immediately and fully binding,¹⁰ a young woman like the fictional Juliet could use private spousals to make her own marriage choice, irrespective of the disapproval of “friends.”

The increase in the number of private spousals may have contributed to what historians have described as a sharp rise in illegitimacy in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹¹ Moralists of the period tended to associate bastardy with “whoredom.”¹² However, indications are that the high rate of illegitimacy was more often due to circumstances like those of Claudio and Juliet. From what Keith Wrightson has found, most couples who produced illegitimate children had intended to solemnize their unions, but later discovered they could not, typically because they lacked the financial means to marry.¹³

Claudio's offense is next described by Lucio who informs Isabella that her brother is in prison:

ISABELLA.
Woe me! For what?
LUCIO.
For that which, if myself might be his judge,
He should receive his punishment in thanks:
He hath got his friend with child.

(I. iv. 26-29)

Isabella's immediate solution to the problem—“O, let him marry her” (I. iv. 49)—was not an acceptable remedy for bastardy as far as many rate-payers of the age were concerned. Yet, the belief that England was being overrun by “breeding beggars and multitudes of poor children,”¹⁴ resulting in a variety of direct and indirect restrictions designed to limit access to marriage among the impoverished,¹⁵ no doubt prevented many unwed parents from legitimizing their children's births and thus contributed to the bastardy problem.

The fifth description of Claudio's offense is offered by the Provost. As Juliet approaches him in the prison, he says to the disguised Duke,

Look, here comes one: a gentlewoman of mine,
Who, falling in the flaws of her own youth,
Hath blistered her report. She is with child,
And he that got it, sentenc'd—a young man
More fit to do another such offense
Than die for this.

(II. iii. 10-15)

Like Overdone, Pompey, Claudio, and Lucio, the Provost describes the young couple's offense in terms of Juliet's pregnancy: “She is with child, / And he that got it, sentenc'd.” The Provost's sympathetic understanding of the couple's crime is in sharp contrast to Angelo's comparison of bastardy to murder (“'Tis all as easy / Falsely to take away a life true made / As to put metal in restrained means / To make a false one” [II. iv. 46-49]) and Isabella's preference for death over bastard-bearing: “I had rather my brother die by the law than my son should be unlawfully born” (III. i. 191-93).

Claudio's offense is not spoken of directly again until the final scene when Isabella refers to her brother as having been “Condemn'd upon the act of fornication” (V. i. 74). Her diction suggests it was not fornication itself but what followed upon it—the conception of a bastard child—that accounts for his condemnation.

In Shakespeare's age, fornication or antenuptial fornication could lead to penetential punishment by the church courts,¹⁶ but it was not a criminal offense punishable by justices of the peace. Bastardy was quite a different matter. Joan Kent writes that in 1576 Parliament passed the first of what over the next fifty years would become a plethora of statutes against personal conduct offenses such as swearing, drunkenness, alehouse haunting, and bastardy.¹⁷ “The first and ferocious part” of the original bastardy statute, observes Frank Milton, “seems to show Parliament using the criminal law for the purpose of suppressing immorality, but the main aim of the legislation was to reduce the numbers of paupers.”¹⁸ Indeed, the poor seem to have been the usual target of justices like William Lambarde,¹⁹ particularly as Parliament, while willing to punish those whose illegitimate children might become a burden to rate-payers, openly opposed punishing “men of quality” for bastardy.²⁰ Ultimately, however, the decision about who would be punished for bastardy rested with the individual justice. In the opening scene of Measure for Measure, the Duke informs Angelo, “Your scope is as mine own, / So to enforce or qualify the laws / As to your soul seems good” (I. i. 65-67). The kind of discretionary power the Duke gives his deputy was not ordinarily allowed English justices,²¹ except when it came to personal conduct statutes of the kind regulating bastardy and alehouses, many of which were bawdy houses in disguise.²² While the audience is not told to what laws the Duke is referring, perhaps it is no coincidence that the only laws we see applied under Angelo's magistracy relate to unwed parents and to the keepers of an alehouse.

Convinced that the country was being impoverished by “misbegotten bastards,” William Lambarde encouraged justices to rigorously enforce personal conduct legislation.²³ Those most likely to comply were “godly magistrates,” men with strong puritan leanings like Shakespeare's “precise” deputy, who felt it their duty to use their discretionary power to punish bastardy and other forms of “rough behavior”:

The ideal of the “godly magistrate,” a man who saw himself as a partner with the monarch in a fight against all forms of corruption typified a new approach to the notion of good governance … “godly” officers of the parish, as well as “godly” magistrates, could use the law as a weapon against “rough” behavior.²⁴

Angelo's abhorrence of bastardy, which he describes as equal in seriousness to murder (II. iv. 42-49), was shared by many sixteenth and seventeenth authorities who, in the words of one historian, were “almost morbidly obsessed” with the subject.²⁵ This obsession could manifest itself in increasingly severe, even savage punishments of unwed fathers and, especially, unwed mothers:

Given the hostilty of rate payers to “great bellied wenches,” it is not surprising to find the treatment of sexual offenders becoming more severe. Before 1580, the only punishment for offenders—at least if they were willing to support the child—was a few hours in the stocks. Then, in 1588, the Quarter Sessions rolls record the first case of an unwed mother being whipped at the cart's tail, although the strokes were to be “moderately given.” After 1600 the sentences grew harsher: women were to be whipped until their backs were bloody. After 1610 they were sent to the House of Correction for a year.²⁶

Since detecting the fathers of illegitimate children was extremely important to rate-payers, unwed mothers might also be subjected to harsh inquisitions during labor:

… in childbed they found themselves surrounded by midwives charged to refuse to assist them until they declared, often with the accompaniment of bloodcurdling oaths … the name of the father of the child. It is scarcely surprising that some girls faced with these terrors concealed their pregnancies, bore their children alone and then exposed, abandoned, or deliberately killed them.²⁷

Parents or others who gave sanctuary to unwed mothers and fathers risked prosecution by the church courts²⁸ and intimidation by local officials like an overseer who threatened to burn a mother's house down if she did not send her pregnant daughter out. The girl, like many unwed mothers, fled her community: her child was born in a barn in another town.²⁹ A. L. Beier writes that unwed mothers were often “encouraged” to take to the roads by parish officials, masters, and even by parents who wanted to rid themselves of the burden of “great bellied wenches” unable to support their children.³⁰ No more welcome in neighboring parishes than their own, unwed mothers might find themselves driven from one parish to another:

Elizabethan and early Stuart parishes engaged in long, expensive and cruel disputes in which mother and baby were shunted back and forth. The result was a great traffic of girls, their infants, and the fugitive fathers. Somerset girls went as far as Wales to have their bastards, and to London they came from all parts of the country.³¹

Considering the increasingly brutal treatment of bastard bearers in some English towns, Claudio's death sentence for bastardy, though a fiction, was not altogether implausible—particularly at a time when a person could be executed for the theft of a shilling.³²

Somewhat closer to reality is the harshness displayed towards Shakespeare's unwed mother by two of his Justices of the Peace. Publicly humiliated by being paraded through the streets, Juliet goes into labor in the city prison. Only at the intercession of the kindly Provost, who asks Angelo, “What shall be done, sir, with the groaning Juliet? / She's very near her hour,” does the Deputy think to “Dispose of her / To some more fitter place, and that with speed. … See you the fornicatress be removed. / Let her have needful but not lavish means” (II. ii. 18-27). As she waits for the Provost to conduct her to this place, she encounters the Duke in disguise. A common law justice usurping the role that properly belongs to a priest, he appoints himself her confessor, even though his primary purpose is not to minister to afflicted souls as he claims, but to discover the nature of the inmates' crimes so he can determine whether Angelo is enforcing Vienna's strict statutes as the Duke hopes. Later in the play, when he has learned greater humility and felt the first stirrings of love, the Duke will speak more like a true minister of souls to Barnardine (“Sir … I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you” [IV. iii. 51-52]); however, during his interview with Juliet, there is no comfort or prayer in his mouth: much like Angelo, and in sharp contrast with the caring Provost who defends the couple against the law that has condemned them, the Duke is a self-righteous, “respectable” prosecutor and judge who puts Juliet's soul on trial.

The Duke's insensitivity in this scene is underscored by his heedlessness of the young woman's physical and emotional suffering. Not far removed from those who subjected actual unwed mothers to inquisitions during labor, the Duke questions, expostulates, and admonishes, heaping new agony on the girl when she most lacks the strength to bear it. The Duke begins to “minister” to Juliet's afflicted spirit by asking whether she repents “of the sin you carry” (II. iii. 19). The “sin” is that of her soul, but it is also the child she carries, who—as in Angelo's speech against “evils” hatched and born (II. ii. 95-104)—is condemned simply for coming to life. Apparently because Juliet bears her shame “most patiently” (II. iii. 20), the Duke decides her repentance may be false and begins a lesson in soul-searching: “I'll teach you how you shall arraign your conscience, / And try your penitence, if it be sound, / Or hollowly put on” (II. iii. 21-23). Not only does the Duke assume he knows the proper condition of Juliet's conscience, he believes he can see into the young woman's soul. Her response reflects her simple humility: “I'll gladly learn” (II. iii. 24). “Love you the man that wrong'd you?” the Duke asks (25), evidently trying to establish whether Juliet's penitence is genuine by implicitly asking her to reject Claudio, together with her sin. But she does not attempt to exonerate herself by turning against her husband: she answers that she loves Claudio as she loves herself, says the sin was mutually committed, but takes on the burden of blame. When the Duke then threatens to embark upon a lengthy sermon about the necessity for her to feel sorrow towards heaven, rather than sorrow for herself, Juliet effectively cuts him off: “I do repent me as it is an evil, / And take the shame with joy” (II. iii. 35-36).

Apparently satisfied at last with Juliet's admission of wrongdoing, the Duke goes on to say, “Your partner, as I hear, must die tomorrow, / And I am going with instruction to him. / Grace go with you, Benedicite!” (II. iii. 38-40). His blessing is all the more chilling considering he has at every moment the power to relieve Juliet's suffering by ordering his Deputy to rescind Claudio's death sentence. In contrast to the Provost, who seems to have kept from Juliet the information that Claudio is about to die, the Duke speaks almost casually of the impending execution, manifesting shocking indifference to the dangerous condition and feelings of the young woman who has only just spoken of her love for her “partner.” In ministering to Juliet, the Duke robs her of all hope: “Must die tomorrow! O injurious love, / That respites me a life, whose very comfort / Is still a dying horror” (II. iii. 41-43). Her love is “injurious” because her pregnancy has given her the legal right to live, while Claudio, her life's comfort, is a “dying horror.” The Provost's use of an ambiguous pronoun in his response to Juliet's tortured exclamation—“'Tis pity of him” (II. iii. 43)—could be intentional on Shakespeare's part: given the Duke's conduct towards Juliet, we might wonder who deserves more pity: the overly passionate Claudio or the callously dispassionate justice.

The exchange between the Duke and Juliet reveals that the respectable Duke's “virtue,” like that of his Deputy, is a meager, self-serving thing that pales beside the genuine love and patience of the unwed mother. Nowhere else in the play does she speak: however, through this brief exchange, Shakespeare seems determined to enlist our sympathies for Juliet. The audience is forced to look past the stereotypical image of the “great-bellied wench,” threatening to burden rate-payers with her offspring, and see instead a suffering young woman who may be more worthy than the judges who condemn her.

The visible presence of the very pregnant Juliet combined with the several descriptions of Claudio's offense would undoubtedly have told a contemporary audience that the young couple, like many poor, unwed parents in England, were convicted for bastardy. If the offense is interpreted this way, the reasoning behind Isabella's plea for Angelo becomes clear. Claudio is unquestionably guilty of fathering an illegitmate child: “My brother had but justice, / In that he did the thing for which he died” (V. i. 456-57). On the other hand, she argues, Angelo's trial (in fact, a mock trial) centers on quite a different offense: the extortion of sexual favors from a woman in exchange for her brother's life.

For Angelo,
His act did not o'ertake his bad intent,
And must be buried but as an intent
That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects,
Intents are merely thoughts.

(V. i. 458-62)

Despite Angelo's “bad intent,” he did not defile Isabella, but had intercourse with her willing substitute, his betrothed wife. Furthermore, because the bargain he offered Isabella was not fulfilled, Angelo did not renege on his promise when he ordered Claudio's execution. The law, Isabella rightly says, must judge the deeds of an individual, not his intentions or conceptions, however illegitimate. Thus, while Claudio was sentenced to die for a crime he did not intend but nevertheless did commit (bastardy), Angelo is exonerated for failing to commit the crime he intended (sexual extortion).

Isabella's speech has often been criticized for its “legalism.” Ernest Schanzer, for example, writes that “Isabel is here pleading for a judicial pardon, and not on the Christian grounds of the need to show mercy … but on the legalistic grounds that Angelo is technically innocent of the crimes for which he is condemned to die.”³³ However, Isabella's “legalism” seems entirely appropriate here. Her bastard-bearing brother's guilt under the law leaves Isabella no choice except to appeal for mercy, as she does earlier in the play. On the other hand, Angelo's innocence under the law makes a plea for mercy superfluous. Despite his intentions to the contrary, the Deputy failed to extort sexual favors from Isabella and must be acquitted if civil justice is to be served.

This is not to say the audience is likely to believe moral justice is served by Angelo's acquittal. On the contrary, Shakespeare seems determined to evoke the opposite response. Hawkins writes that Measure for Measure is largely designed to put Angelo in the same situation as the man he sentences to death (“When I, that censure him, do so offend, / Let mine own judgment pattern out my death”).³⁴ Yet, rather than fulfill audience expectations in this regard, the play invites us to consider the moral justice of enforcing a statute that condemns one couple and exonerates another for the same act. Claudio and Juliet are convicted while Angelo and Mariana are acquitted—not because the law perceives any significant difference in their marriage contracts—but simply because Juliet became pregnant and Mariana, for all anyone knows, did not. Thus legal guilt under this statute depends upon the chance event of pregnancy. Intent is altogether irrelevant. Claudio's intent is to marry validly the woman he loves: Angelo's intent, on the other hand, is to defile a would-be nun.

As Isabella's plea suggests, the Viennese statute under which bastard-bearers are punished is inequitable because it allows for the same sexual conduct to be treated with drastically different legal consequences. England's bastardy statutes were no different. Not only were poor bastard-bearers far more likely to be prosecuted by justices than were those who could afford to support their illegitimate offspring, those, like Angelo, who engaged in fornication or antenuptial fornication but produced no children paid no criminal penalty for their conduct. The same was true of men like Lucio who escaped the law by denying their fatherhood.

In agreement with a number of other critics, T. F. Wharton says Shakespeare's play “depicts a moral experiment, with the Duke as the experimenter” and Angelo functioning as a sort of “second self” of the Duke.³⁵ Lucio serves as a ubiquitous reminder to Vincentio of why he deemed such an experiment necessary. As Marilyn Williamson points out, the fantastical gentleman is like those bastard-bearers described by Philip Stubbes in The Anatomy Abuses (1583) who, after impregnating women, “showes them a faire pair of haeles, and away he goeth.”³⁶ Overdone reveals she is raising Lucio's child by Kate Keepdown, a woman to whom he promised marriage. Brought before the Duke “for getting a wench with child,” Lucio denied being the father because “They would else have married me to the rotten medlar” (IV. iii. 168-69; 172). Having easily escaped detection, Lucio becomes convinced that in the Duke he has found a kindred spirit: “Ere he would have hang'd a man for the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid for the nursing a thousand” (III. ii. 113-16). Judging from Lucio's case, the Duke's efforts to control bastardy failed because, having “ever loved the life removed” (I. iii. 8), he was too distant from his people to carry out a sufficiently close investigation of the facts. Tracing the failure of his government to his leniency rather than to his remoteness, he becomes convinced that stronger remedies are needed and appoints Angelo with the expectation that the “precise” Deputy will do what he himself has been reluctant to do: enforce Vienna's “strict statutes and most biting laws” (I. iii. 19). But long before the final scene, it becomes clear that the Duke's decision to set aside his earlier remedy for bastardy and employ a precise justice to turn sin into crime has been an experiment gone wrong. His “second self” uses his new power for the purpose of sexual extortion and sees to it that the only citizens to suffer severely under the strict statutes are a betrothed, unwed mother and a father who openly admits to his paternity. Rather than remedy the bastardy problem, the “strict statutes” contribute to it by preventing unwed parents who wish to marry from doing so and allowing bastard-bearers like Lucio to escape legitimizing their offspring.

On the other hand, the experiment does have its benefits. When he disguises himself as a friar and goes out among his subjects, the Duke eventually blunders upon an important lesson about governing. The effective justice is not one like the early Duke who has “ever lov'd the life removed” (I. iii. 8), values his reputation above all, and denies his own humanity. Rather, like Escalus of II. i., he is a patient investigator who allows himself to come into direct contact with members of the community in order to discover the truth. By coming to know those he rules, Vincentio not only learns the truth about Angelo, he accidentally gathers evidence against Lucio—something the Duke was remiss in doing when Kate Keepdown came before him. Armed with Overdone's testimony and Lucio's unwitting confession, the Duke, having abandoned his experiment, reverts to his old remedy for bastardy: forced marriage. On occasion, this remedy was used by actual justices of Shakespeare's age:

… it is known that, in the early modern period, Justices of the Peace (either at the petition of the pregnant woman, her representatives, or local Poor Law officers) sometimes coerced men into marrying women they had made pregnant as an alternative to being dealt with under the bastardy statutes.³⁷

In opposition to most members of the House of Commons and those justices who, at least where the poor were concerned, would turn sexual sin into crime, Measure for Measure seems to argue on behalf of applying the traditional remedy of the church, which, in the manner of the Duke of the final scene, used public humiliation and marriage to counteract bastardy.

Arthur C. Kirsch has written of Measure for Measure that “without an understanding of the play's ideas and their connotations for an Elizabethan audience, its dramatic experience is often inaccessible or unintelligible.”³⁸ Interpreting Isabella's plea for Angelo in light of the bastardy statutes can help us appreciate the topical relevance of the play and make it somewhat more accessible and intelligible; however, this is not to say a contemporary audience would have found Isabella's defense of Angelo any less unsettling than we do. But perhaps a lingering sense of uneasiness is built into the plea and Measure for Measure as a whole. From beginning to end, Shakespeare seems intent upon evoking audience sympathy for the very human Claudio and Juliet and growing hostility towards the judge who prosecutes their sin of bastardy to the full measure of the law. Perhaps by leaving their sense of moral justice unsatisfied at the close of the play, Shakespeare hoped to extend his audience's compassion from his fictional unwed parents to those of England, where, for years to come, justices would continue to prosecute some sexual offenders under statutes that put others guilty of the same or worse conduct safely beyond the law's grasp.

Notes

1. All textual references are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

2. For discussions of marriage contracts, see, for example, J. Birje-Patil, “Marriage Contracts in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 106-11; Ernst Schanzer, “The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 13 (1960), 81-89; Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure: A Reconsideration,” Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 129-44.

3. Harriet Hawkins, Measure for Measure (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), pp. 20-21.

4. Craig A. Bernthal, “Staging Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of Measure for Measure,” Studies in English Literature, 32 (1992), p. 262.

5. Wentersdorf, p. 129.

6. Though by pre- and post-Reformation church law, engaging in sexual intercourse between the time of contract and solemnization was considered sinful, country customs sometimes taught otherwise. In fact, for a couple to have relations prior to the “limit of solemnity” was on at least one court occasion defended as being required by “the common use and custom within the countie of Leicester.” See John Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 45-46.

7. Sir Edward Coke, His Speech and Charge: With a Discourse of the Abuses and Corruption of Officers. 1607. Fascimile Edition (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1972), sig. H3. For a discussion of the belief on the part of parish and town officials that the alehouse was “an engine of impoverishment,” see, for example, Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830 (London: Longman Press, 1983), pp. 166-67.

8. See Alan Macfarlane, “Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in English History,” Bastardy and Its Comparative History, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), p. 73.

9. Gillis, pp. 44-46. Since many alehouses featured sleeping rooms that could be used for casual sexual liaisons or the consummation of private spousals, the alehouse contributed to the high rate of illegitimacy in England; in quite the literal sense, the alehouse was, as it was termed by moralists, a “nurserie of naughtiness.” For a discussion of the alehouse in Measure for Measure, see my essay, “Mistress Overdone's House,” Subjects on the World's Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. David Allen and Robert White (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1995), 181-99.

10. Martin Ingram, “Spousals Litigation in the English Ecclesiastical Courts c. 1350-c. 1640,” Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), pp. 35-38.

11. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village (New York: Academic Press, 1979), p. 127.

12. Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 84.

13. Wrightson, p. 84. See also Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1986), p. 82.

14. Byegones, qtd. in Gillis, p. 23.

15. For example, the age at which apprenticeships could be completed was fixed to prevent “over hastie marriages and oversone settyng up of households of any by the youthe.” Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family: 1470-1700 (London: Longman Press, 1984), p. 67. Furthermore, by withholding housing, employment, and rights of settlement, local authorities curtailed marriages by couples who might present a future charge on the poor rates (Gillis, pp. 86-87). Ingram writes that even the Church's requirement that banns be read could be used to prevent the poor from marrying: “ministers, in league with more substantial parishioners, frequently refused to read the banns or conduct marriages between poor people who might burden the poor rates. This practice was undoubtedly against the law of the Church, but apparently ministers who so acted were rarely prosecuted” (pp. 55-56).

16. F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1973), 2-24.

17. See Joan Kent, “Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulation of ‘Personal Conduct’ in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 46 (1973), 41-71.

18. Milton, The English Magistracy (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 103.

19. For examples of Justice Lambarde's attitude towards and judicial treatment of bastard bearers, see William Lambarde and Local Government: His “Ephemeris” and Twenty-Nine Charges to Juries and Commissions, ed. Conyers Read (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962).

20. Kent writes that a 1593 proposal to empower justices to whip, stock, and jail unwed parents without regard to economic status met with strong opposition by the Commons on the grounds that, as one member argued, “gentlemen or men of quality” should not be “putt to such a shame” as to be whipped. Other members agreed, pronouncing such punishment “slavish” when brought against a “liberal man.” The proposal was defeated. See 49-50.

21. See William Lambarde's Eirenarchia or the Office of the Justices of the Peace. 1581. Fascimile Edition (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970), pp. 63-64.

22. Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 147-50.

23. Lambarde warned justices and juries that many bastard children were conceived at alehouses, “nurseries of nautiness,” that attracted “wanton youths.” “Ephemeris” and Twenty-Nine Charges, p. 70.

24. Cynthia Herrup, “Law and Morality in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, 106 (1985), pp. 104-05.

25. Milton, p. 103.

26. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), p. 76.

27. Wrightson, English Society, p. 86.

28. Emmison, p. 25ff.

29. Hunt, p. 75.

30. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 53.

31. Beier, p. 53.

32. The play's several associations between Claudio's offense and theft suggest that Shakespeare may have had the draconian penalty for the theft of a shilling in mind.

33. Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 102.

34. Hawkins, p. 19.

35. T. F. Wharton, qtd. in Stephen Derry, “Time and Punishment in Measure for Measure,” Notes and Queries, 41 (1994), p. 489.

36. Williamson, pp. 86-87, p. 82.

37. Ingram, p. 51.

38. Arthur Kirsch, “The Integrity of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), p. 91.