Let me return to the nub of my inquiry, the so-called "test" of Angelo. According to Wharton, the "initial experiment" is over once Isabella has told him of Angelo's designs: "The Duke has discovered what he imagined he would discover: that a priggish but also suspect man placed in a position of absolute power would be corrupted by it" (1989, p. 69). But if the Duke is engineering a test, what might the Duke supposedly be testing Angelo for? Is virtue, like gold, being assayed, or (Wharton's reading) is vice or the propensity to vice being exposed? Four major answers present themselves, two pertaining to Angelo as governor (virtue), and two pertaining to his private life and personal conduct (vice).

The first two are political considerations which apply equally well to Escalus, who is also being entrusted with a position of authority. Angelo is being tested for his capacity to govern well, to discharge his responsibilities fairly and conscientiously, but also for his incorruptibility. According to Coghill, Angelo "of course falls at the first fence" [italics mine]: "He falls at the test of faithfulness in elementary matters of justice, when he is to adjudicate in the case of Mr. Froth and Pompey Bum; instead of doing his duty he exhibits the insolence of office, refuses the tedium of sifting evidence and departs with a pun and a flick of cruelty, leaving the patient Escalus to do his work for him" (Coghill, p. 19). Even if this is as serious a dereliction of duty as Coghill makes out, the Duke, absent from this scene, never comes to learn of it—it is a very odd kind of "testing-master" who sets tests without being privy to the test results. Moreover, despite Isabella's threat to "discover his government" (3.1.193-94) and his own reference to "the corrupt deputy" (3.1.254-55), the Duke takes relatively little notice of Angelo's abuse of authority and does not punish it at the end of the play. If he, admittedly in pretense, can think of discharging the provost from his office for failing to obtain a special warrant for Claudio's execution, surely Angelo deserves (in addition to the suffering he feels) some formal punishment for his corrupt abuse of authority. It would seem, then, that if anything is deliberately being tested, it is not Angelo's fitness to govern.

The other two aspects of Angelo that might be tested concern his private life. As I have noted, the Duke's "Hence shall we see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be" is cited as evidence that Angelo is a "seemer" or "dissembler" by critics who remind us that Angelo jilted Mariana when her dowry was lost in a shipwreck in the Duke's version of events, "by pretending in her discoveries of dishonour" (3.1.227).²⁶ In the words of Coghill: "Of course the Duke knows, before the play begins, that there is some reason to suspect Angelo's integrity; indeed he gives him the strongest possible hint that he knows of his not wholly creditable past when he tells him that one who has observed his history could unfold his character. ['There is a kind of character in thy life, / That to the observer doth thy history / Fully unfold' (1.1.27-29).] The hint wears a polite veil of ambiguity, but it is a warning to him none the less" (p. 19).²⁷ It is likewise perceived as ironic that Isabella should say to the Duke-Friar: "But O, how much is the good duke deceived in Angelo! If ever he return and I can speak to him, I will open my lips in vain, or discover his government" (3.1.191-94). The irony, as Wharton rightly points out, is that "she is already speaking to the Duke and disclosing Angelo's government." But a further irony Wharton detects ("that the Duke was not deceived in Angelo in the least") lacks foundation (1989, p. 69). If the Duke is already convinced that Angelo is a dissembler, isn't it redundant to put him to trial again?²⁸ Wharton finds this "a troubling question" and answers it by a rather tendentious and exaggerated argument without textual support: "The Duke wants stronger proof of Angelo's worthlessness, wants him to commit some outrage, wants to see him break moral limits. He puts him in the ideal position for these things to happen" (1988, p.
38). I cannot accept either that Angelo is "worthless" or that the Duke thinks he is; nor can I accept that Angelo's being in a position of authority will necessarily expose his "worthlessness."

A more moderate approach might be to say that the Duke is seeking to expose Angelo as a dissembler and to subject him to public humiliation. But even this he is not entitled to do because Angelo is not a dissembler: callous, selfish and even immoral as his behavior may have been, it was not sinful or criminal, nor (although out of expediency rather than natural predisposition an element of pretense was involved) was it demonstrably hypocritical: a hypocrite, according to a typical definition, is "a person who pretends to have desirable or publicly approved attitudes, beliefs, principles, etc. he does not actually possess." Only if Angelo had publicly claimed to be a man who treated women honorably, and who said he always abided by his words and commitments, could his actions be construed as hypocritical. Pretending to be better than one knows oneself to be, and pretending that a woman is worse than one knows her to be, are horses of a very different color—indeed, damaging a woman's reputation by falsely accusing her of promiscuity may well be thought more shamefully immoral than any kind of hypocrisy. Angelo's initial account of his relationship with Mariana is, in some respects, very different from the Duke's and Mariana's: there was, according to him, not a marriage contract, but only "some speech of marriage" between them, and it was (unilaterally?) broken off, partly because she could not provide the full dowry she had first promised, but chiefly because "her reputation was disvalu'd / In levity" (5.1.217-22). "Disvalu'd" by whom? we might ask. Believing in a rumor about Mariana's promiscuity (or using it as a convenient pretext) is not the same as putting such a rumor in circulation. Even if the contract were a binding one, and later Angelo admits having been "contracted" to Mariana (5.1.376-78), Angelo would have had every right to dissolve it on suspicion of promiscuity.

Angelo's supposed lack of "integrity" in his cruel desertion, and slandering, of Mariana cannot be the object of a test in any sense: in deciding to appoint Angelo his deputy the Duke could not have anticipated that Angelo's past conduct would become a matter of public knowledge (if that was what the Duke wished to happen), and if he wanted it to happen he could easily have done so without making Angelo his deputy. Equally, he could not have anticipated that Angelo's breach of promise to Mariana would be replicated in breaking his word to Isabella that Claudio would live if she yielded to him. It is a crucial mistake to ironize the Duke's initial declaration of confidence in Angelo by invoking his knowledge of the jilting—the two episodes are, thematically and temporally, quite discrete—and it would be impossible for any audience, on learning about the jilting after a lapse of more than an hour of stage time, to ironize the opening scene in the light of this fresh knowledge. The jilting of Mariana is likely to recall the bedtrick stratagem, not the issue of Angelo's competence to govern, or any doubt about that competence on the part of the Duke.