Whether the "testing" is thought to relate to political or to sexual matters, semantic analysis of the Duke's lines at 1.4.50-54 casts serious doubt on the theory of a "test." The five lines can be broken down into a description of Angelo's temperamental coldness in which the Duke elaborates on his earlier one-line depiction of him as "a man of stricture and firm abstinence," and a deduction ("hence"=therefore), or prediction ("hence"=henceforward), of what will happen once Angelo assumes the reins of power. To those who maintain that Angelo is being tested, the conditional phrase "if power change purpose"³⁵ means that the possession of power might change Angelo's purpose—that he might take advantage of his position to satisfy his repressed sexual urges. But there is no reason for the Duke or for us to think that Angelo will abuse his authority in this way. It is more likely, given that his interest in Mariana was more an interest in her dowry, that he would use his office for financial gain.³⁶ Like every other Viennese citizen, Angelo would have had every opportunity for sexual activity and the concealment of such activity during the period of lax enforcement of the laws.

A better meaning of the phrase "if power change purpose" would be "if the laws are more stringently enforced," so that Angelo is to be seen as the agent or instrument of harsher measures, not as the subject of a change in his personal conduct. "What our seemers be" is elliptical for "what our seemers might be," the auxiliary "might" being omitted,³⁷ and the relative pronoun "what" can be construed either as a substitute for "who" or as an ellipsis for "what kind of persons." For advocates of the moral experiment, "seemers" (=hypocrites) should constitute a problem, for if the Duke is testing Angelo specifically it is hardly appropriate for the word to be in the plural. If he means that Angelo and Escalus may turn out to be "seemers," only seeming to possess the capacity to govern well, why does he preface his reference to "seemers" with an irrelevant allusion to Angelo's cold and unsexual nature while saying nothing, relevant or irrelevant, about Escalus? At this early stage of the play, despite his knowledge of Angelo's despicable conduct towards Mariana, the Duke does not and cannot suspect Angelo of being a "seemer." Even his later punning exclamation "O, what may man within him hide, / Though angel on the outward side" (3.2.272-73), although it is spoken after the Duke has learnt of Angelo's dishonorable intentions toward Isabella, is not accurate as an accusation of hypocrisy. Doesn't Isabella accuse Angelo of being a hypocrite? Yes, she does, but that is part of her rhetorical strategy to bring him to justice. Later, in a different context when she is imploring the Duke to spare Angelo's life, she cannot bring herself to accuse him of downright, inveterate hypocrisy: "I partly think," she says, "A due sincerity governed his deeds / Till he did look on me" (5.1.447-49). Until the encounter with Isabella there is no shred of evidence that Angelo has been a hypocrite in the sense of practicing vice while preaching virtue; were this the case, Angelo's cool and controlled reply to Isabella's threat to expose him ("Who will believe thee, Isabel?"³⁸) would lose much of its dramatic force: the encounter with Isabella has simply revealed him to be a fallible man who has, against all expectation (including his own), felt irresistible sexual desire for the woman least likely to excite or accommodate it. As already indicated, the Duke evinces surprise at Angelo's sexual misdemeanour,³⁹ and Escalus is equally shocked: "I am, more amazed at his dishonor / Than at the strangeness of it" (5.1.332-33).⁴⁰ Angelo is not so much a practitioner of hypocrisy (which involves habitual and active deceit) as a victim of self-deception.⁴¹

So, if in this speech Angelo is not being referred to as a "seemer," who is? Not, we can agree, the comic characters in the play, for they "avoid all 'seeming' or pretence to a virtue they do not possess."⁴² The "seemers" the Duke is alluding to are, I suggest, those citizens of Vienna who have managed during the old dispensation to engage in pre- or extramarital sex while maintaining an untarnished reputation for virtue; it is these people, the Duke concludes, who will be exposed as hypocrites if Angelo, as he confidently expects and has perhaps commanded in his written "commissions," chooses to exercise the full weight of the law. Given that Angelo "scarce confesses / That his blood flows,"⁴³ he is just the man, the Duke thinks, to expose and suppress sexual offences and the kind of hypocrisy which habitually attends them.⁴⁴ It would be easier to make a case that Claudio and Juliet have been exposed as "seemers" (that is, not chaste lovers) as a direct result of the new rigidity that Angelo is imposing. The "wise burgher" (1.2.103) who saved the brothels in the city (by means of intercession, purchase, or bribery) may also have been a "seemer."

Another candidate is the Duke himself. It is an abiding comic irony that the man who is anxious for "seemers" to be exposed is himself, in his masquerade as friar-confessor, an unequivocal "seemer." "We should note," writes Leech, "that he claims to know Angelo's mind by virtue of being Angelo's confessor. One does not have to be deeply religious to be affronted by this piece of impertinence" (Leech, p. 70). What is most offensive is not his false pretences, but the implied willingness to betray the secrets of the confessional: he is similarly indiscreet when, after having doffed his disguise, he says: "Joy to you, Mariana. Love her, Angelo; / I have confessed her, and I know her virtue" (5.1.528-29). In a way (although not as a result of appointing Angelo his deputy) he is also exposed as being a "seemer"⁴⁵ in the sense that critics think Angelo is. After all, the man who unctuously tells Friar Thomas not to believe that "the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom," maintaining that his departure "hath a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth" (1.3.2-6), and who repudiates Lucio's accusations that "he had some feeling of the sport" by declaring that "he was not inclined that way" (3.2.120, 123), ends up by suddenly proposing to the same novitiate who had involuntarily thawed Angelo's icy blood. To see the Duke as "testee" rather than "tester" also exonerates him from any charge of wilful irresponsibility in choosing Angelo as his deputy, and obviates what might otherwise appear as inconsistencies or contradictions in the conduct of the plot.