[In the following essay, Bache examines the social and ethical concerns outlined in Measure for Measure and contends that the drama points to self-sacrificing love as a remedy for the excesses of human liberty.]

In Measure for Measure the Shakespeare ethic of love and duty operates on dark, brutal life. Each character begins with a selfish attitude toward the world and the ways of the world, and the Duke in the guise of Friar tries, and is made to try, to do what he can to preserve life so that it may become human. Escalus and the Provost and Elbow, who represent descending levels of temporal power, have good intentions but are in themselves ineffectual. The caught characters range from Angelo, who in the first scene is given full temporal power by the Duke, down to Barnardine, who is so lost that he cannot be instructed but is finally freed. The play brilliantly catches life as it actually, essentially is: devious, disordered, uncontrolled. Within the kind of realistic world rendered by the play, the characters are forced or led or allowed to enact human justice. And the chief instruments of the resultant goodness are the Duke and Isabella, the finest human beings in the play, who realize themselves most fully as they are forced or enabled or allowed to serve God, to love, and to mend. They become able, and are best able, to extend themselves beyond themselves, to enforce the Shakespeare ethic of love and duty.¹

The essential plot problem of Measure for Measure, which the farcical subplot extends and magnificently ramifies, is at the heart of the Shakespearean achievement: how man is to live and how society is to be ruled. In this play this problem is specifically and significantly expressed by the Duke as a riddle: “There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accurst—much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world.”² The Duke was a poor ruler because he was too lenient, too kind, and because a loveless, “seeming” world is too much for any ruler. At first Angelo is a bad ruler because he has no feeling, no heart; later he is a worse ruler, a tyrant, because he wishes to deny the guilt that results from his aroused feelings, the guilt that causes him to put himself above his office. The Duke as Friar uses craft to counteract the growing vice of Angelo, and thus, paradoxically, erring humanity is brought to a secure, true world.

In the first scene, as he turns the city over to Angelo, the Duke says:

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.

In the second scene Claudio has just been arrested because Angelo, now acting as the Duke, has enforced an old law against fornication. Claudio is talking to Lucio:

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.

In the fourth scene Lucio has gone, at Claudio's behest, to Isabella, Claudio's sister, as she is about to enter the cloister of Saint Clare. He speaks to her:

As those that feed grow full—as blossoming time,
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
To teeming foison—even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.

The three passages³ are difficult and multiply meaningful and ironic: they reach out to the ends of the play. In the first place there is a simple causal relationship: because the Duke gives power to Angelo, Angelo enforces an old law, which catches Claudio; because Claudio appeals to Lucio to be his messenger to Isabella, Isabella is persuaded to go to Angelo, who is then caught by Isabella and her goodness; because of Angelo's importunity, the Duke is able to substitute Mariana, Angelo's rejected betrothed, for Isabella at an assignation. As Angelo's vice grows, the Duke's craft must be more wide-ranging and devious and, it should be added, more desperately dependent upon others.

Each of the three passages is realized in a specific context. The Duke is giving advice; Claudio is bitter at having been caught; Lucio is trying to persuade Isabella to do something that she doesn't want to do. Further, each of the three passages is seen in an enlarging context. The Duke's lines are predicated on an ethical, inclusive view of man, man as true human being. Claudio's lines give a limited view of man, man as animal. Lucio's lines give a limited, amoral view of human beings, of man as husbandman and of woman, metaphorically, as a kind of garden. Thus, in a larger sense, each of the three passages gives a different view of human nature; each presents a different view of responsibility, of the nature of the relationship of the individual to himself, to others, to society, and even to God. One of the remarkable aspects of the passages is that Lucio's seems a perversion of the others.

Now as a matter of fact, Claudio's statement and Lucio's can be seen as being imagistically and mutually compatible: one does not deny or cancel the other. Animal life depends on plant life. “As those that feed grow full” precedes “surfeit,” and both food and surfeit are related to “appetite,” a concept of wide sensual associations, as Troilus and Cressida makes clear. Claudio and Lucio express different conclusions about life for obvious reasons: Claudio is caught, and Lucio wants to engage Isabella. Both passages image life at a grange: “seedness,” “fallow,” “tilth,” “husbandry,” and “rats” are all part of grange life. The rat is simply a necessary, natural addition to Lucio's description. And Claudio's prior passage provides the rat. It is at a grange then that a rat is the enemy and needs to be poisoned, if the harvest is to be protected.

The way of life imaged in the two passages is the way of life that would be enacted at the moated grange, a setting that is suddenly introduced into Measure for Measure at the beginning of Act IV. Mariana, like Sebastian in Twelfth Night, is the character that the poetic logic of the play demands: she is the explicit means, the implicit answer. Mariana forces the equation of Angelo with Claudio: Mariana is to Angelo what Juliet is to Claudio. And Mariana is a substitute for Isabella at the assignation. Mariana makes possible the paired lovers, the couples who are presented in descending human order at the end of the play: The Duke and Isabella; Claudio and Juliet; Angelo and Mariana; Lucio and Kate Keepdown.⁴ Grange life underlies the life with which the play expressly deals; it is the natural life outside the city upon which the human community inside the city depends. It is only after Mariana comes into the city that the marriages can be effected. And marriage is the symbolic sanction Shakespeare has religion pay to the human community in order to secure it.⁵ After the characters have been corrected and instructed, they are brought to the city gate, and now, only at the end, can the ceremony of marriage be properly performed, and that ceremony is off stage (with Mariana and Angelo) or in the future.

In a manner of speaking, Mariana also brings Barnardine into the city with her as part of grange life. For it is instructive that Barnardine, the most irreligious person in the play, is mentioned for the first time in the second scene of Act IV. In the following scene Barnardine's angry, brutal voice is twice heard before his attendance is announced by Pompey's remarkable “He is coming, sir, he is coming. I hear his straw rustle.” Imagistically, Barnardine is from the barnyard; he is the rat from the grange. And since he is several times equated with Claudio, Barnardine is what Claudio can become. And if this is true for Claudio, then it is also true for Angelo and Lucio. Barnardine is what man is when he has lost his soul. He is existential man, man as animal. Barnardine doesn't want power, like Angelo; he doesn't want to subvert society, like Lucio; he doesn't even want security, like Claudio. He simply wants to be let alone, to drink and to sleep: to him life is as meaningless as death. He has become almost inhuman, and he seems incapable of correction. He will not feel and he cannot see.

But we aren't allowed to forget that Barnardine is still, after all, a human being. And if Barnardine is imagistically part of grange life, he is only part: Mariana has her saving graces. When she is discovered at the grange, a boy is singing to her:

Take, O, take those lips away
          That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
          Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again, bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.

In order to help make clear the complexity of the song, I quote the following from William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity:

In that he must take his lips away he is already in her presence; she is actually telling him to go, and keeping command of the situation; or if he is only present in her imagination, because she cannot forget him, still the source of her fantasy satisfaction is to pretend that he is already in her presence, that she is in a position to repel him, or pretend to repel him; and her demand would be satisfied both by an expression of her resentment and by a forgetting of her desire. But he cannot be in her presence already, because he must come and bring again her kisses; and thus, when he is not present, she confesses that she wants more of them. But, again (if perhaps he is present, and she is sending him back to fetch the things), he must not bring her new kisses, but only her old ones back, so as to restore her to her original unkissed condition. Notice that the metaphor from seals does not keep up this last pretence, which seems to be her main meaning; it is no more use giving back a seal when it has been broken than a kiss when you wish to revoke your kisses.

The specific reference in the song is to Angelo, to his lips and his eyes, to the light in his eyes “that do mislead the morn.” The song echoes the Duke's passage that has already been given: “Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, / Not light them for themselves.” Angelo's eyes have led him to this evil. After Mariana agrees to take Isabella's place, the Duke ends the scene with a clear echo of Lucio's passage: “Come, let us go. / Our corn's to reap, for yet our tithe's to sow.” Mr. Empson might have suggested, if he were interested in the total play, that “sealed in vain” indicates the solution to the plot problem of the play, for everyone in the play has to break his own seal of vanity or pride before any viable social order is possible. The range of vanity in men is from Angelo's complete concern for self down to Barnardine's complete unconcern for life or death. The range of pride in women is from Isabella's early but complete rejection of the world down to Kate Keepdown's complete acceptance of it.

At the end of Act III and at the beginning of Act IV, Shakespeare presents then a shorthand statement of the dialectical movement of the play. He does this by employing three different modes: first, the riddle, upon which runs much of the wisdom of the world, the riddle posed by an uninstructed, inhuman world; second, the counter to actual vice, the recognition by the Duke of the necessity of his using craft against vice, an answer explicitly stated in octosyllabic couplets; third, not just, as in the couplets, a measure against a measure, but an affirmative, positive answer that obviates the riddle by changing the world. It may be said, I think, that in order to get the answer to the riddle, the world must be given new characters, a new setting, and the harmony of song, words added to music. As the song makes clear, the seals of vanity must be broken if the world is to be human in any meaningful way.

The song is the answer, but the song has to come from outside and out of pressing human needs, and the song has to be implemented, has to be made workable, and the world must find or be luckily given the means of its salvation. After the song the Duke enters as a “man of comfort.” The Duke comes in order to bring again the kisses of Angelo to Mariana, for the Duke has already provided the way for the kisses to be brought again to Mariana. Thus, further, again is a gain. The bringing of the kisses demands that desire be aroused in Angelo, that Isabella give her aid, and that the Duke be more than the Friar, at least ultimately. The song, as it is worked out and enforced, will constitute a real gain for the world, for humanity. The means of the gain are extensive and elaborate.

Angelo is the ostensible Duke. Amoral Lucio operates with vicious effectiveness under Angelo's rule, for Angelo's law is just without being merciful or understanding and can be conveniently used by one who, like Lucio, knows how to play the game. Thus, Lucio is a kind of licensed rat in the city. Like Lucifer he deals in slander, putting a bad light on goodness and virtue and a good light on vanity, in order to bring good down and in order to promote self-interest. To him fellowship is a means, and security makes his operations possible. Lucio is at Isabella's side during her first interview with Angelo because, in addition to wanting to help Claudio, he wants Isabella to undermine Angelo. The Provost, with his asides, is there as Lucio's opposite, for the Provost is concerned with others, with a higher law: he serves the true Duke.

Lucifer means light-bringing,⁶ and the torch and light image in the Duke's passage looks toward Lucio. For it is one of the central ironies of the play that Lucio unwittingly works for good. By calling Isabella from the cloister and by bringing her back to the city, Lucio brings Isabella to realize herself, to go so far as to be willing to serve Mariana and ultimately to join the Duke in marriage. Lucio is the one who uncovers the Friar at the end, in this way symbolically making the Duke what he has always potentially been; Lucio brings the Duke dramatically back to the world.

In II, 2, during the first interview with Angelo, these lines are spoken:

ISAB.
I would to Heaven I had your potency
And you were Isabel! Should it then be thus?
No, I would tell what 'twere to be a judge,
And what a prisoner.
LUCIO.
[aside to Isabella] Aye, touch him, there's the vein.

Lucio's observation is like that of a prospector who discovers rich ore: the relationship of judge to prisoner and what being a judge and being a prisoner mean are pregnant considerations, a rich vein, to Lucio and for us. The play always seems to work from a tension between judge and prisoner. Isabella's first sentence above firmly establishes the equation of Angelo with Isabella, for both of them are initially self-righteous. In addition, Lucio is getting at Angelo, using Isabella to get at Angelo (I “touch him”). Lucio is doing here what the Duke will do with Isabella and Mariana in IV, 1. There the Duke will adopt the means of Lucio, but for an entirely different purpose.

Vein in Lucio's line is picked up by vain in the song, as if vanity is to be seen in Lucio's line here, just as vein is to be seen in the song there. Primarily, however, the reference in “Aye, touch him, there's the vein” is, I think, to a blood vein. Angelo, we see, is moved, impassioned, feeling blood. Lucio perceives the place of touching the vein. Thus the reference seems to be to a shambles (in which case Lucio and Isabella are butchers) or to another place of bloodletting, the prison (in which case Lucio and Isabella are executioners) or to still a third place of bloodletting (in which case Lucio and Isabella are doctors, intent upon curing illness by letting blood). The place of death or the place of health has been found, and Lucio's advice to Isabella can be seen as the advice of one butcher to another, of one executioner to another, of one doctor to another. A butcher is a natural addition to grange life; an executioner is a natural addition to city life; a doctor is a natural addition to human life.

The sealed-in vain must be released, just as the sealed-in vein must be touched. The idea of blood as well as perhaps even, by a kind of witty extension, the idea of blood sports fuses with the insistence on perception. Blood and sight push us into taking seals and sealed in the song as being seels and seeled, the notion from falconry of sewing the eyes of a hawk shut. Vanity or blood seels, prevents any human sight, forestalls the possibility of meaningful perception. Angelo was blinded by self-love, and now he has been made blind by a different love, by his desire for Isabella. Angelo's love is still only vain, in a number of senses: this vain love must be controlled and constrained, or else it will be wantonly destructive, very bloody. In a sense, the sides of Measure for Measure are sonnet 129, lust, and sonnet 116, true love. Of specific pertinence here is the recognition that, metaphorically, Angelo must be kept hooded or seeled until it is time for him to see, that, paradoxically, Angelo has been and will be protected through his being seeled in vain.

In order to best approach the play it seems to me essential to turn quite early to G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire: Its moral of love is, too, the ultimate splendour of Jesus' teaching.

Measure for Measure is indeed based firmly on that teaching. The lesson of the play is that of Matthew, V. 20:

For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall
exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees,
ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The play must be read, not as a picture of normal human affairs, but as a parable, like the parables of Jesus. The plot is, in fact, an inversion of one of those parables—that of the Unmerciful Servant (Matthew, Xviii); and the universal and level forgiveness at the end, where all alike meet pardon, is one with the forgiveness of the Parable of the Two Debtors (Luke, Vii). Much has been said about the difficulties of Measure for Measure. But, in truth, no play of Shakespeare shows more thoughtful care, more deliberate purpose, more consummate skill in structural techniques, and, finally, more penetrating ethical and psychological insight. None shows a more exquisitely inwoven pattern. And, if ever the thought at first seems strange, or the action unreasonable, it will be found to reflect the sublime strangeness and unreason of Jesus' teaching.

It is part of the poetic meaning of the play that in a sense Lucio becomes “the light of the world” (an overtone of the Duke's passage that the rest of the play renders) and that Angelo, the angel, must fall before he can become a man. The Duke's lines hint at the future of Lucio and Angelo; the rest of the play uses Lucio and Angelo as two developments of the lesson contained in the Sermon on the Mount, and, once they are introduced, we should not forget Claudio, who is to be saved, and Barnardine, who apparently cannot be reclaimed. The final scene takes place at the city gate, where hidden truths are revealed and accepted.

The play then works from parallels and contrasts, from parable characters, from a series of related characters, and from comparable situations. The caught men present an order in despair and an order then is reclamation: Claudio is more repentant than Angelo; Angelo is more repentant than Lucio; Lucio more than Barnardine. Each is isolated, trapped, and each is released. Claudio, Angelo, and Lucio move into another kind of control, a control signified by the marriage tie. When the Duke is added, almost a complete list results, for security is offered by and through the trapped women: Isabella, Juliet, Mariana, Kate Keepdown. They secure the men and, through the men, society. Barnardine is just released, let go. The test of every character in Measure for Measure is the distance he can move into human awareness, into self-knowledge. It is the test of every character in every Shakespeare play.

At the end, Isabella performs the ultimate act of human kindness and understanding, of human awareness; thinking her brother a forfeit to the law, she kneels beside Mariana before the returned Duke, who now to her is temporal power, and begs for Angelo's life:

                                                                                                    Most bounteous sir,
Look, if it please you, on this man condemned
As if my brother lived. I partly think
A due sincerity governed his deeds,
Till he did look on me. Since it is so,
Let him not die. My brother had but justice,
In that he did the thing for which he died.
For Angelo,
His act did not o'ertake his bad intent,
And must be buried but as an intent
That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects,
Intents but merely thoughts.

“For Angelo”—that short, strange line—can go with the preceding thought: “My brother had but justice, / In that he did the thing for which he died. / For Angelo.” Claudio has to be “dead” in order for Angelo to feel remorse, to be really penitent, and in order for Isabella to make her marvelous gesture: Claudio must be “dead” in order for the world to humanly live. Isabella admits the right of justice, and she is herself, at the moment, the instrument of true mercy. In the face of what Isabella believes that justice has done, she can still plead to this bounteous sir for mercy.

Intents would seem to allow us to see the word as being intense, and this makes Isabella's argument extreme. It doesn't make any difference how intense the thoughts are: so long as they remain simply thoughts, they should not be punished as if they were accomplished acts. Further, Angelo wanted Claudio dead because Angelo intended to protect only himself. Angelo intended to destroy Claudio, but the Duke used craft in time in order to control Angelo's intent. Thoughts are worked out as deeds in time. Action has been submitted to time, and the audience has watched the Duke working in time, using time, finally controlling time, providing the world this particular occasion in time. A time consideration has demanded that the Duke enlist the services of the Provost, Isabella, and Mariana. We are meant to understand the pertinence of time to justice and mercy, the ultimate tension of Measure for Measure. At the very end when the Duke accepts his authority, he is then submitting the now-secure world to time—to time where man both comes to maturity and is destroyed, as sonnet 60 makes clear.

Exceedingly relevant to Measure for Measure is E. M. W. Tillyard's notion that the full pattern in a Shakespeare play presents three stages—prosperity, destruction, re-creation.⁷ For in Measure for Measure an initial “sophisticated” world is presented; that world is destroyed, and out of that destruction emerges a real world, a truly human world. The society at the beginning of Measure for Measure is one of false prosperity, of “seeming”; it is divorced from actual life. And the movement of the action is in the direction of making the world more consonant with true life, with human reality. The characters are corrected and instructed. The movement is toward reality and into truth. The characters move into the light and to the city gate: roles become proper at the very end.

It may be argued, I believe, that the symbolic movement of every Shakespeare play is a movement back to an ordered world, to a garden, to a Garden of Eden existence, to a purified state. Then re-creation must submit itself to prosperity. For in a garden, life is idealized, what life only ideally is. Paradoxically, human life must leave the green world, the garden. Paradise must be lost if Heaven is to be won. At the end of As You Like It, for example, the secure world will leave the Forest of Arden and will return to the envious court. At the end of The Tempest secure society will go back to Naples and Milan: the lessons learned on the magic isle must be submitted to the uncontrolled and uncontrollable real world.

Clearly, Measure for Measure is about human action and human beings, about honor and dishonor, about freedom and responsibility, about being and becoming. The dialectical problem posed by the play can be stated in Eliot's terms: man must be both an individual and a member. If he is just an individual, the result tends toward anarchy; if he is only a member, the result tends toward communism. The essential problem then is one of liberty—the extremes of which are anarchy and tyranny—as the quoted passages by the Duke, Claudio, and Lucio make clear. The social answer is a society that allows maximum human freedom for the individual as member. The Shakespearean answer given in Measure for Measure may be said to be found in the family. And it is toward the family, an enlarged family, that the symbolism of the play moves.

Measure for Measure doesn't lie about the nature of life, about the huge difficulty of finding any kind of human solution to existence. It doesn't, for instance, say that we can truly live in this world by ignoring the problems of living. It doesn't say that we can do what we can get away with, with due regard for the policeman around the corner. It doesn't advocate “the stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires.” The sides of the play are self-centeredness and sacrifice, vanity and love. The essential human problem rendered by the play is how man is to live, to be ruled, and to rule. And the enormously complex solution to this problem is the Shakespeare ethic of love and duty in operation.

Notes

1. For an excellent discussion of the ethical presuppositions of the play see Elizabeth Marie Pope, “The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 2 (1949), 66-82.

2. All quotations are from Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by G. B. Harrison (New York, 1952).

3. See the discussions of the Claudio and Lucio passages by D. A. Traversi (in An Approach to Shakespeare (New York, 1956), pp. 108-110) and by S. Nagarajan (in the Introduction to Measure for Measure in the Signet Classic Shakespeare Series (New York, 1964), pp. XXIV-XXV).

4. Though Kate Keepdown is mentioned, she never appears on stage. At any rate, the order of the couples in Measure for Measure is prefigured by the explicit order of the paired lovers in As You Like It: Orlando and Rosalind; Oliver and Celia; Silvius and Phebe; Touchstone and Audrey.

5. “Shakespeare's comedies also begin with trouble, end in joy and are centered in love, albeit human love. The joyful solemnitas of marriage is an image of happiness that ends his comedies almost as invariably as death ends a tragedy.” (Nevill Coghill, “Comic Form in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), 18.) J. W. Lever expands the observation: “Whatever Shakespeare's religion may have been, the main body of his work from the early comedies to The Tempest suggests that in his view consecrated marriage signified not only the ‘happy ending’ to a play but the gateway to man's fulfillment of his primary function in the natural world.” (J. W. Lever, Introduction to the Arden Measure for Measure (London, 1965), p. XCI.)

6. Roy Battenhouse discusses the significance of many of the names (Roy Battenhouse, “Measure for Measure and the Christian Doctrine of the Atonement,” Publication of the Modern Language Association, LXI (1946), 1029-59, passim). In a footnote to his article on comic form, Mr. Coghill remarks that Mr. Battenhouse thinks Lucio's name suggests lightness (levity) not light (Lucifer). Mr. Coghill says that Lucio is a minor fiend (Coghill, p. 24).

7. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Last Plays (London, 1951), particularly “The Tragic Pattern,” pp. 16-58, passim.