In the opening scene of Measure for Measure Duke Vincentio is curiously reticent about divulging his motives for leaving Vienna in such haste. The urgency of immediate departure is, in fact, invoked as the reason that there is no time even for the briefest explanation, and Angelo and Escalus receive their several "commissions" (the warrants confirming their new authority) very much in doubt as to the nature and extent of their delegated powers. A little later, speaking privately to Friar Thomas (who, it is implied, has insinuated that the Duke is seeking an opportunity for a clandestine love-affair) the Duke says Angelo supposes him travelled to Poland, for that is the destination he has "strewed … in the common ear";¹¹ his hidden agenda or real purpose, he confides, is to permit Angelo ("a man of stricture and firm abstinence") to enforce the "strict statutes and most biting laws" (1.3.12, 19) which he, the Duke, reproaches himself for having allowed to fall into desuetude. We should note that he has invested Angelo with his full ducal power, telling him "Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue and heart" (1.1.43-44), and repeating the point by advising Angelo that he may "enforce or qualify the laws / As to your soul seems good" (1.1.64-65). His words to the Friar, however, indicate that he fully expects, and even hopes, that Angelo will be far less lenient and permissive than he had been and will, in the "ambush" of the Duke's name, "strike home," that is, impose the law to the letter. When he later learns of Angelo's "severity" toward rampant sexual transgression, the Duke approves of it, and calls it necessary (3.3.100-01). It may also be that the "commission" Angelo received from the Duke explicitly commanded him to be strict. When he gives Escalus his "commission" the Duke directs him not to deviate from it (1.1.13-14), suggesting that it contains written instructions.¹²

Taking the Friar even further into his confidence, the Duke promises to give him "moe reasons" for his departure (although he never actually does so in the course of the represented stage action), and offers what appears to be an additional reason:

              Lord Angelo is precise,
Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone. Hence we shall
   see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers
   be.
                                 (1.3.50-55)¹³

These lines, the focal point of this essay, have been widely interpreted as providing not simply a refinement of motive but a second and an altogether different motive: that the Duke is leaving in order to test Angelo. In Wharton's view the words "confesses" and "seemers" seem to imply that Angelo "is at best repressed, at worst a hypocrite, and that his appetites are indeed as strong as other men's." Wharton continues: "When [Vincentio]goes on to speak of seeing if power will change purpose, he is directly speaking of an experiment on Angelo. Having placed this suspect character in a position of influence he will test the proposition that all authority corrupts" (1989, p. 63). One's first response is that Vincentio would have had ample opportunity to test whether "all authority corrupts" during his own years in office. At first glance, however, there seems little reason to doubt the apparently interdependent notions that the Duke is contriving a test for Angelo, that he is testing him because he suspects him of hypocrisy, and that his hypocrisy takes the form of some kind of sexual fallibility perspiring under the mask of frigid puritanism and punctiliousness.

The idea of a "test" seems to announce itself at the outset. In the first scene the Duke tells Angelo that "spirits are not finely touched / But to fine issues" (1.1.35-36), a line which, although ambiguous, may be interpreted as meaning that the quality of a man can be tested by his actions as the purity of gold is tested by a touchstone or refined in a cupel (known technically as a "test").¹⁴ In his diffident and self-deprecating response Angelo takes up the metaphor of testing gold coins. "Let there be some more test made of my mettle," he implores the Duke, "Before so noble and so great a figure / Be stamped upon it" (1.1.47-49).¹⁵ Other images of testing occur later in the play: the Duke-as-Friar assures Claudio, rather mendaciously, that Angelo "had never the purpose" to corrupt his sister and was only making "an assay" of her virtue in order "to practice his judgment with the disposition of natures" (3.1.161-62)¹⁶ (exactly what most critics think the Duke is "assaying" with Angelo). It might be granted that the Duke is testing both Claudio (by concealing from him the possibility he may be saved from execution) and Isabella (by keeping her unaware that her brother is still alive). Even Juliet, we might agree, is being tested by the Duke when he seeks to discover whether her penitence is sincere or feigned. Neither is it difficult to regard Angelo as a "seemer"¹⁷ or hypocrite, since three major characters denounce him as being one. Isabella reproaches him for his "Seeming, seeming!" (2.4.149), and for being "an outward-sainted deputy" (3.1.88); during her public accusation of him, she labels him "an hypocrite" (5.1.41, 52-59). The Duke refers to "this well-seeming Angelo" (3.1.222), and his convoluted (and possibly corrupt) lines, "That we were all, as some would seem to be, / From our faults, as faults from see[m]ing, free!" (3.2.39-40) may be glossed as a reference to Angelo. He is certainly alluding to Angelo when he comments, octosyllabically: "O, what may man within him hide, / Though angel on the outward side!" (3.2.271-72). Even Angelo admits to his own "false seeming" (2.4.15).¹⁸

It is also undeniable that the word "purpose" often has an unambiguously sexual connotation in this play¹⁹ : Escalus asks Angelo to consider whether "the resolute acting of your blood / Could have attained th'effect of your own purpose" (2.1.12-13); "My words express my purpose," Angelo says to Isabella, who replies, belatedly catching the drift, "And most pernicious purpose" (2.4.147, 149); Angelo, the Duke tells Claudio, "had never the purpose" to "corrupt" Isabella (3.1.160-61); and finally Isabella, pretending that she had yielded to Angelo, states that "the next morn betimes, / His purpose surfeiting, he sends a warrant / For my poor brother's head" (5.1.101-03).²⁰ With these connotations in our ears it is no wonder that so many critics have read "purpose" in "if power change purpose" as referring implicitly to Angelo's aim to remain chaste.²¹

Despite the cumulative weight of such presumptive evidence, however, I think that the theory of a "test," on closer examination, has very little solid ground to stand on. Based almost exclusively on an exiguous portion of text and a good deal of conjecture, it fails to take satisfactory account of the ambiguity of the phrase "if power change purpose," of the non-sexual connotations of "purpose" also present in the play, and perhaps most tellingly, of the stubborn intractability of the plural word "seemers." Yet such stumbling blocks do not deter critics from asserting, particularly on the basis of lines 53 and 54 ("Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose, what our seemers be") that the Duke is deliberately testing Angelo, or testing the validity of a hypothesis about him. Of course it would be manifestly absurd to argue that Angelo is not undergoing a test—all major characters in Shakespeare, like people in real life, are continually being tested insofar as all experience is a kind of test of a human being's mettle. The Duke frankly acknowledges that, as a result of his designs on Isabella, the "corrupt deputy" will be "scaled" or weighed in the balance, judged, tested (3.1.255). What can and should be denied is the suggestion that the Duke is deliberately or purposely setting out to test his deputy. Granted, Shakespeare often represents characters testing each other for serious or trivial purposes: for example, in The Taming of the Shrew Kate, wishing to test whether Petruchio is a gentleman, strikes him to see if he will retaliate (2.1.217-21); in Hamlet Polonius devises tests to confirm his theory that Hamlet's "transformation" sprang from Ophelia's rejection of him; in The Tempest Prospero tests Ferdinand lest Miranda be won too easily. Examples could be multiplied further. Whether these tests succeed or fail, and whether or not they are reliable, whether or not they are justified, the fact remains that they are set in motion explicitly and deliberately—the "test" of Angelo, on the other hand, is purely circumstantial and fortuitous. There is no hint of a deliberate test of Angelo in any of Shakespeare's sources for Measure for Measure, if only for the simple reason that they contain no character whose role corresponds closely to that of Shakespeare's Vincentio.²²

In his function as "contriver," the Duke admittedly spends much of his time directing the actions and destinies of other characters, although not, I think, with quite the magisterial authority of Prospero, let alone (pace G. Wilson Knight and others) of providence or God.²³ Mesmerized by the lure of establishing a neat and unifying teleological pattern, critics like Knight exaggerate the significance of the element of testing in Measure for Measure; although undeniably present in the play, it is not as omnipresent as they make out, and is certainly no more important than the "testing" which runs through other Shakespeare plays. To regard the Duke as considerably more than a purely incidental tester, as Knight, Coghill, Schleiner, and Wharton do, is to succumb to a very general and imprecise use of the word "test" and thereby distort the play in the interest of a thematic pattern or theological paradigm. The unstated syllogism at the back of their minds might run something like this: God is the supreme tester, Duke Vincentio acts as a kind of God, therefore the Duke is a supreme tester. Unlike Time, which is presented in Shakespeare as the most persistent and formidable tester of all,²⁴ the Duke deals only intermittently and opportunistically with characters, like Claudio and Juliet, in a way which will illuminate what kind of people they are. The main "testing," if we retain the question-begging term, is not carried out by the Duke, but by Angelo: after all, it is he who orchestrates the situation in which Claudio and Juliet are forced to confront the consequences of their past actions, and it is he (together with Claudio) who confronts Isabella with a terrible choice—the "tests" of her chastity, her courage, and her integrity are not instigated by the Duke, who intervenes after they have been set in motion. And even if Angelo is seen as instigating tests of Claudio and Isabella, testing them is not his main purpose: his main purpose is to punish the one and violate the other—the "tests" are inevitable concomitants of Angelo's actions, not their major objectives. Far from being the primum mobile, the Duke is not even as instrumental as Angelo is: he is limited, for the most part, to improvising methods of "damage-control," that is, trying to remedy or palliate situations unilaterally brought about by Angelo, and trying to extricate those entangled in them. In fact, the Duke's supposed role as principal "tester" is sometimes transmogrified into that of an occasional and disgruntled "testee," particularly at the ungentle hands of Lucio, who doesn't readily concur with his inflated estimate of himself or, like the uncooperative Barnardine, who resists being cajoled into being hanged: "I swear I will not die today for any man's persuasion" (4.3.59-60). It is salutary to remember that on leaving Vienna the Duke expressed no intention of being either a "tester" or a "testee"—his purpose of adopting disguise was, as he informs Friar Thomas, for visiting "both prince [=Angelo] and people," "to behold [Angelo's] sway" (1.3.43-45).²⁵ Although he initially intended simply to be a detached observer, the Duke is forced by events to intervene in the affairs of his subjects. Compelled intervention is a curious position for a primum mobile to find itself in.