The theory of a "test" is, I conclude, highly suspect: each part of it has been arrived at by extrapolating, retrospectively, elements which occur at a later stage of the play. One of these is the revelation about Angelo's conduct toward Mariana; another is the prominence given to Angelo and the effects of his actions on other characters, a prominence which usurps the stated aim of the Duke's departure: to facilitate the clampdown on sexual license in Vienna. Perhaps what has most misled critics is the impression that in his words to Friar Thomas, the Duke is offering not just a refinement of a motive but an additional one. I take him to be saying, first, that Angelo, being the kind of man the Duke thinks he is, is the right man to prevent future offenses from occurring, and second, as an elaboration of his first position, that Angelo is also the right man to detect and punish offenses committed in the past and since concealed. However arbitrary and unfair we may think it to be, the arrest of Claudio and Juliet is an example of this course of action. But it is only one in a play which could have seen far more: taking "seemers" to refer to Angelo deflects attention away from the fact that the promise (and premise) of moral and social regeneration with which the play started has not been followed through—as so often in Shakespeare, character conflict has pushed thematic concerns into the background. Furthermore, at no point in the play does the Duke make it clear that his main or even subsidiary purpose is to test Angelo. And, although it would be foolhardy to base an argument solely on as botched an ending as that of Measure for Measure, there is no acknowledgment in the denouement of any such a test having taken place, or that the moment is ripe to evaluate it. It may be, as Rosalind Miles has said, that the whole idea of "testing" is "alien, even repugnant,"⁴⁶ to modern sensibility. But that is not a compelling reason to resist it—a better reason is that it is spurious. For those like myself who remain unconvinced of the centrality or even the existence of the theme of a "test," Angelo is, or rather is not, a test case.

Notes

A shorter version of this paper was presented in May 1992 at a session of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies at the Annual Conference of Learned Societies, Charlottetown, P. E. I.

¹ Clifford Leech, "The Meaning of Measure for Measure," Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950), 67-68.

² Coles Editorial Board, Measure for Measure (Toronto, 1987), p. 24. What helps to make this source representative is that it is explicitly designed for students' use.

³"Measure for Measure and the Gospels," in The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930), p. 79. Cf. T. F. Wharton: "The idea of law-enforcement is simply [the Duke's] device to entrap and break Angelo," Moral Experiment in Jacobean Drama (London, 1988), p. 41. Long before Knight and Wharton, Richard G. Moulton had claimed that by withdrawing from Vienna the Duke "is designedly contriving special conditions in which he will be able to study the workings of human nature." See The Moral System of Shakespeare (London, 1903), pp. 148-49.

⁴ "Comic Form in Measure for Measure, " Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955), p. 19. Like Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (New York, 1963), pp. 126-27, I find no evidence for any test of Isabella.

⁵ With the exception of Lucio, who "is the only major character who is not tested; no assay is made on whatever virtue he may be thought to have" (p. 22). Ernest Schanzer has pointed out that Angelo is the very opposite of Lucio, "the lapwing and jester, the reckless scandalmonger, the debauchee, and the loving friend" (p. 84).

⁶ Coghill, pp. 24, 21.

⁷ "Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure," PMLA, 97 (1982), 227, 228, 229. Schleiner's essay was thought sufficiently important to be included in the "Modern Critical Interpretations" series on the play, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1987). Coghill's was reprinted in an earlier casebook, "Measure for Measure ": Text, Source, and Criticism, ed. Rolf Soellner and Samuel Bertsche (Boston, 1966).

⁸ Wharton offers the same view in his monograph entitled Measure for Measure (London, 1989).

⁹ F. R. Leavis, "Measure for Measure, " in The Common Pursuit (London, 1952), pp. 160-72; Peter Ure, William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (London, 1961), p. 30; Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, 1962), p. 178.

¹⁰ "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," in Elizabethan Essays (New York, 1964), pp. 33, 34.

¹¹Measure for Measure (1.3.35), ed. S. Nagarajan, in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1963). All references to Shakespeare are to this edition. Lucio, for one, does not believe the rumor, telling Isabella that he has it on good authority that the Duke's "givings-out were of an infinite distance / From his true-meant design" (1.4.54-55). See also

¹² For evidence that a "commission" can convey "an exact command," see Hamlet 5.2.18-25.

¹³ "Both reasons cannot be true: if, as the last lines seem to imply, Angelo is not going to be a good magistrate, because of personal failings of one kind or another, then the Duke cannot be serious in expecting him to administer the laws harshly but scrupulously. Neither the Duke, nor the play in which he appears, attempts to reconcile these flagrantly different statements of intent; nor is it clear whether the inconsistency is a hit at the Duke or simply an oversight." A. L. French, Shakespeare and the Critics (Cambridge, Eng., 1972), p. 14. Leech makes a similar point, p. 68.

¹⁴ Shakespeare is very fond of the "touchstone" idea—he uses it again in Measure for Measure (2.2.150), and in a number of other plays: Richard III (4.2.8-9); King John (3.1.25-26); The Merchant of Venice (2.7.52-53); I Henry IV (4.4.9-10); Timon of Athens (3.3.6, and 4.3.390), and Pericles (2.2.36-38). An alternative reading of 1.1.35-36, and one consistent with the lines that follow, is: "A human being is never endowed with fine qualities unless he is intended to be exercised in matters requiring the finest powers of discrimination and judgement."

¹⁵ "But the Duke, reversing the usual sequence, prefers to test his metal after the figure is stamped upon it, in order to see 'if power change purpose, what our seemers be'. … His handing over to Angelo could have been sufficiently motivated, as it partly is, by his desire to test and watch him" (Schanzer, pp. 96, 114).

¹⁶ In the same scene the Duke tells Isabella that Angelo "will avoid your accusation: he made trial of you only" (196-97). Perhaps there is an ellipsis here and the words "he will defend himself by saying that" should be inserted after the colon to complete the sense.

¹⁷ Shakespeare never uses this word in the singular, and his one use of "seemers" occurs in Measure for Measure.

¹⁸ He may even be accusing Isabella of "seeming" (see 2.4.77-80, and 158-66).

¹⁹ See under "purpose" in Franklin Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance, 2nd ed. (London, 1989).

²⁰ In his edition of 1854 James O. Halliwell suggested that "purpose" here "may simply be" his purpose of releasing my brother now cooling, quoted in Measure for Measure, New Variorum Edition, ed. Mark Eccles (New York, 1980), p. 243.

²¹ As, e.g., Oscar James Campbell does in his gloss: "if power change its aim, whether he is what he seems to be." See The Living Shakespeare (New York, 1949).

²² Norman N. Holland has argued that in four respects (including the test on Angelo) the "underlying situations" in Measure for Measure and the story of Remirro de Orco in Innocent Gentillet's so-called "Anti-Machiavel" of 1576 are substantially the same. However, I cannot see that Gentillet's "pious hope" that "Iudges be not suspected nor passionai" implies a reason for appointing and testing Angelo. See Holland's "Measure for Measure: The Duke and the Prince," Comparative Literature II (1959), 16-20.

²³ Nagarajan hesitates to accept the Duke as Providence: "Providence never had such a narrow escape from defeat at human hands" (p. 1141).

²⁴ Cf. As You Like It (4.1.198), and The Winter's Tale (4.1.1).

²⁵ He never visits Angelo unless we believe him when he says that he is "confessor to Angelo" (3.1.165-66). He may have confessed Angelo even though his report of that confession is totally fabricated. In any case, what Angelo allegedly told the Duke (about only making "an assay" of Isabella's virtue) is not strictly a confession, since there is nothing sinful about it.

²⁶ Henry Hallam complained as long ago as 1839: "It is never explained how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret, and being acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and confidence in Angelo." Quoted in Eccles, p. 397.

²⁷Cf.: "[The lines] 'Hence we shall see, / If power change purpose, what our seemers be' offer a clear indication that the Duke already knows Angelo to be a dissembler, and the revelations in 3.1 about his treatment of Mariana, which can scarcely rest on freshly acquired knowledge, establish that this is so." Measure for Measure, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 38-39 (see also ). And also:

²⁸"If the Duke knew all along that Angelo had jilted Mariana … he would hardly have needed to test for flaws in the facade." Harriet Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama (Oxford, 1972), p. 62.

²⁹Wharton (1989), p. 38. The same point is made by Leech (p. 68): "We will not stay to consider whether, in view of these suspicions, the appointment of Angelo should have been made."

³⁰Wharton (1989), p. 38. Hawkins notes that the Duke's motive for leaving Vienna "hardly entitles him (morally or dramatically) to put Angelo to a test, or to cause unnecessary suffering for a number of his subjects merely to find out what might lie behind Angelo's stony exterior" Likenesses, p. 62 (see also ). On these grounds Robert Ornstein (one of the few critics to deny Angelo's integrity is being tested) denies that a test is underway: "No intelligent ruler tests his subordinates by giving them power of life and death when he knows beforehand their lack of simple humanity." See The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison, 1960), p. 255.

³¹Escalus tells Angelo he believes him to be "most straight in virtue" (2.1.9).

³²Nigel Alexander, Shakespeare: "Measure for Measure" (London, 1975), pp. 41-42. Cf. Leavis' remark that Angelo "was placed in a position calculated to actualise his worst potentialities" (p. 172).

³³There is a similar (very modern) reluctance to grant Isabella the right to choose a life of chastity.

³⁴Cited in Eccles, p. 398.

³⁵Note Shakespeare's characteristically strict use of the subjunctive for something hypothetical, not necessarily true or uncertain. Regarding "if as equivalent to "whether" A. E. Thiselton places a colon after "purpose" to make "what our seemers be" a second object of the verb "see." Some Textual Notes on "Measure for Measure" (London, 1901), p. 12. Following Thiselton, J. W. Lever objects to the "fatuousness" of the commas Rowe placed after "see" and "purpose." Measure for Measure (London, 1965), p. 22n. Contentious issues of punctuation do not, I think, affect my argument.

³⁶It is even doubtful that Angelo would have accepted money for services rendered—although he misunderstands the tenor of Isabella's words, he angrily repudiates the suggestion he might be open to a bribe (2.2.146-47).

³⁷In Elizabethan English, writes N. F. Blake, "almost any part of speech may be omitted." Shakespeare's Language: An Introduction (New York, 1983), p. 126.

As an example of an auxiliary being omitted, "may" is omitted before "Thy" in the Countess' blessing on Bertram: "Thy blood and virtue contend for empire in thee" (All's Well That Ends Well, 1.1.66-67).

³⁸Angelo continues by saying that his "unsoiled name" and the "austereness" of his life will vouch against her (2.4.153ff.).

^{39 I} cannot agree with Mansell (p. 272n.) that the Duke is only pretending amazement at Angelo's fall from grace.

⁴⁰That is, "more amazed at his lapse from virtue in trying to possess a nun, than at the bedtrick which revealed the lapse." Later Escalus turns to Angelo directly, expressing regret that "one so learned and so wise … [s]hould slip so grossly" (5.1.472,474). "Slip" in Shakespeare is often a sexual slip—see Isabella's use of "slipped" (2.1.65) and The Winter's Tale (1.2.85, 273).

⁴¹I am aware that critical opinion is sharply divided over the issue of whether or not Angelo is to be regarded as a hypocrite. See Eccles, pp. 420-27, esp. p. 426.

⁴²Herbert Weil, Jr., cited in Bloom, p. 70.

⁴³Cf. Lucio's "a man whose blood / Is very snowbroth" (1.4.57-58).

⁴⁴Since the Duke oscillates between the first person singular and the royal (or ducal) "we," it is difficult to ascertain whether "hence shall we see" and "our seemers" refers to private or public knowledge.

⁴⁵The point has been made by M. C. Bradbrook, who adds: "The difference between the Duke's seeming and that of Angelo is of course that the Duke's is purely an external change." Cited in Bloom, pp. 16, 17.

⁴⁶The Problems of "Measure for Measure" (London, 1976), p. 279.

Source: "Questionable Purpose in Measure for Measure: A Test of Seeming or a Seeming Test?" in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 26-44.