More clearly than any other characters in the play, Angelo and Isabella discover themselves to be puppets of desire. They mediate "righteous" indignation to spectators. With less prominence, Claudio functions as a model-rival to these two characters, although he himself is conspicuously susceptible to models. While both Angelo and Isabella exhibit the full effects of passing judgment, Isabella's role makes the progression from judgment to doubling more perceptible. In addition, two of her speeches comment on the theme of mimetic bondage. While I do not examine the comic characters in this article, many of them, particularly Lucio, undergo mimetic oscillations similar to their graver counterparts. In contrast to these reluctant disciples, Duke Vincentio, who avoids unwanted models, is minimally imprisoned in psychological judgment. He functions rather to turn our attention to the play's spectators and their desires.

Angelo's response to Vienna's antifornication statute marks the undoing of a personality that thrives on overdifferentiating responses.¹⁴ What appears as a legal judgment unveils the reciprocity of a moral judgment. The statute Angelo enforces eventually governs him, unleashing forces that transform him from lifelong frigidity to newly awakened concupiscence. This degeneration reveals the underlying moral logic of the play. In his first soliloquy (2.2.162-87), he remarks that his chastity, up to meeting Isabella, has come easily. He has not been pretending sexual purity:

Never could the strumpet
With all her double vigour, art and nature,
Once stir by temper: but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite. Ever till now
When men were fond, I smil'd, and wonder'd
 how.
                                  (2.2.183-87)

Shakespeare carefully registers this change in Angelo as shocking not only to himself but also to other characters. Claudio is taken by surprise. Hearing about Angelo's sexual extortion of Isabella, Claudio exclaims, "The precise Angelo!" (3.1.93). Duke Vincentio, also, is surprised: "but that frailty hath examples for his falling, I should wonder" (3.1.185-86). Finally, Lucio's explanation of Angelo's birth reinforces the unlikelihood of an outbreak of passion: "Some report, a seamaid spawned him. Some, that he was begot between two stock fishes. But it is certain that when he makes water, his urine is congealed ice; that I know to be true. And he is a motion ungenerative; that's infallible" (3.2.104-08). This polyphony of voices, each surprised by Angelo's fall, warrants our attention. Intentionally, it seems, we are asked to ask, "How is it that now, for the first time in his life, Angelo feels passion for a woman?"

Whereas the psychoanalytic answer would focus on the object of that (hitherto repressed) passion, interdividual psychology looks at Angelo's circumstances and discovers a significant model. Before Isabella, Claudio is. Although Shakespeare allows Angelo to claim he is merely carrying out his duty to enforce the law that "hath slept" (2.2.91), the play indicates how tendentious is the selection of Claudio. Vienna is teeming with sexual transgressions. The contrast between Claudio and the play's innumerable overlooked candidates for arrest raises the question of Angelo's motivation. If, as I propose to argue, Angelo is attracted to Claudio as a model and entrapped by Claudio as an obstacle, which traits in Claudio attract Angelo and which traits entrap him? Claudio's sensuality piques Angelo's interest, while Claudio's engagement to a dowerless woman causes Angelo to stumble. The sensuality provides the basis for Angelo's overdifferentiating judgment (which takes the guise of a legal judgment). The engagement makes Claudio an inimitable model of enduring commitment to one's fiancée. Judgment against Claudio's sensuality brings Angelo face to face with Claudio's integrity; recognition of Claudio's integrity makes Angelo sensual. Angelo fails to see that whether he attempts to imitate "enduring commitment" or brute sensuality, his stoicism will frustrate either course he chooses, causing him finally to find victims who might bridge the inevitable gap between desire and fulfillment.

On the surface, Angelo judges Claudio because of their dissimilarities. Claudio, like a rat, pursues lechery, whereas Angelo, until meeting Isabella, would smile "when men were fond" and wonder "how?" The confidence with which Angelo arrests Claudio depends upon a difference whose importance Angelo overestimates: he has never slept with a woman. His mental act of overdifferentiation might be expressed thus: "I would never be like Claudio—without self-control, wanton, carnal." At one point in the dialogue, Angelo says something suspiciously similar. Refusing Isabella's request for mercy, Angelo says, "I will not do't" (2.2.51). Do what? Pardon? Fornicate? For Angelo, the two are inextricably bound. To refuse pardon (in light of Angelo's motivations) locks him into a trajectory that points toward extortion, fornication, slander, and intended murder. Thus the original difference between Angelo and Claudio necessarily disappears.

In spite of their initial differences, a similarity unites these male characters. Both men have been engaged to dowerless women. They, of course, wear their discontent with a difference: a slanderous breaking off for Angelo, a premature consummation for Claudio. But it is this similarity that sustains Angelo's overdifferentiating reaction. The past celibacy that permits Angelo to distance himself from Claudio is inseparable from the broken engagement that attests to Angelo's bad faith. Consequently, his moral grounds for sentencing Claudio argue at the same time for Claudio's pardon. Worse, his judgment of Claudio eventually foregrounds Claudio's relatively superior treatment of his fiancée. Whereas Claudio's "sin" mediates sensuality to Angelo, Claudio's fidelity mediates a desire for a lost integrity to Angelo. When we recall that Angelo is a character who takes "pride" in his "gravity" (2.4.9-10), a character who must have the endorsements of others in order to (mimetically) value his own piety, we can see the propensity for rivalry between him and Claudio.

Thus, while the arrest of Claudio gives Angelo immediate moral and political distinction ("'tis surely for a name," 1.2.160), it subjects Angelo to a disturbing desire and a scandalous rival. Contaminated by Claudio's concupiscence, Angelo experiences a desire he has never known. Because Angelo has concealed his failure with Mariana by fashioning himself as a stoic, he cannot imitate Claudio. Unable to follow Claudio's steps without relinquishing his gravity, Angelo cannot get beyond the rival-obstacle in his path. Where the path toward acquisitive mimesis is blocked, the way of conflictive mimesis remains open. Angelo's authorization to put Claudio to death is perfectly convenient because, in one legal action, he can memorialize Claudio's moral lapse and at the same time eliminate a living rival. These motivations of course are unrecognized by Angelo, which is why, later, his passion toward Isabella mystifies him.

Although Claudio is Angelo's model of desire, the moral backlash in Angelo's life need not be sexual. He could simply become colder and still be chained reciprocally to Claudio. But Shakespeare makes the mirroring explicit by making Angelo hot. The smallest trickle of desire will reduce his difference/distance from Claudio. Physiologically, the passion in Angelo is simply awakened. Structurally, the passion is recreated, passion for passion, because he has judged or condemned a man for yielding to his passions. Angelo's judgment supplies the form (which is imitation); Claudio's predicament supplies the content (which is fornication). Both as a model of conjugal love and as an object of differentiation, Claudio becomes the basis for Angelo's life. No matter the particulars of Isabella's beauty, purity, personality, or dress, Angelo is already destined to experience unwanted desire when he meets this character who reminds him of Claudio.

Arriving soon after Angelo's legal and moral judgment against Claudio, Isabella unintentionally precipitates his fall in two ways. First, she provides an object for the desire he has unknowingly borrowed from Claudio. Second, she reinforces Angelo's slavery through a second mimetic triangle. She has what Angelo wants: gravity. Apparently, she possesses it in a purer form, one that does not require public recognition, one that allows her to seek a life of seclusion in the convent. Therefore, not only is Isabella an object of desire to precise Angelo, but she also is a model of desire to the fallen Angelo, who still desires his reputation. Being both object of a lascivious desire and model of an austere desire endows Isabella with extraordinary influence upon Angelo. While he wants to satisfy his carnal yearnings, he cannot do so without encountering Isabella's gravity. He must have her unlawfully in order to sever her beauty from her integrity. As with Angelo's rivalry with Claudio, so is the case with Isabella: if he cannot possess what she possesses, he can at least lower her as a rival, robbing her of her virtue. The act of fornication, then, satisfies both Angelo's acquisitive mimesis toward Isabella as object and conflictive mimesis toward her as rival. The more she protests, the more intent he will be on destroying her. Words avail nothing. Whether she commends the mercy with which Claudio would treat Angelo if their positions were reversed (2.2.64-66), or more directly commands Angelo, "Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That's like my brother's fault" (2.2.137-39), it is too late. The doubling has been completed. Engrossed by Claudio as model-obstacle and mesmerized by Isabella as rival-object, Angelo's "sense breeds with" her words (2.2.143). He will "raze the sanctuary / And pitch our evils there" (2.2.171-72).

The play would be interesting, but not nearly so alarming if Angelo were the only victim of his own judgment. No sooner does Isabella diagnose Angelo's error as one of overdifferentiation, than she falls into the same trap. Critics often explain Isabella's likeness to Angelo in terms of the two saints' relatively fixed characterological and religious traits. Although such similarities are at moments striking, these essentialist comparisons stultify the drama. Interdividual psychology offers a less reductive explanation that is anticipated thematically in the play. Whatever Isabella supposedly shared in common with Angelo prior to their first meeting is nothing compared to the dynamic imitation that follows their second meeting. Early in that interview when Angelo is unmoved by her pleas, she judges him:

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.
                                      (2.2.67-70)

She would never be as he … never as ruthless and inflexible. Formulaically, she binds herself to Angelo with the consequence that she will imitate his violent intentions, finding herself entangled in conflictive mimesis, not only with Angelo but also with Claudio, who himself desires her body, though differently.

This mimetic entanglement accounts for both her anger and her eroticized language. Angelo's alarming proposition that she copulate with him in exchange for her brother's pardon causes her to seek Claudio's support in the rapidly altering situation. The ensuing scene is over-charged with conflictive mimesis. In turning toward Claudio, she yields to her mimetic dependency upon another for approval and thus opens the door wide for the expression of unwanted desires. Looking to Claudio to authenticate her decision, she soon imitates Angelo's style, controlling the dialogue with Claudio, just as Angelo controlled the dialogues with her.

Initially, she assures Claudio of her desire to see him set free, though not at the cost of her virginity:

O, were it but my life,
I'd throw it down for your [Claudio's]
 deliverance
As frankly as a pin.
                                    (3.1.103-05)

At the outset, Claudio agrees that she should not consider Angelo's proposition. However, as Claudio begins to consider the uncertainty of his existence after death, he alters his tack and begins to reconsider Angelo's proposition. Within moments he recognizes Angelo as an ally. This "model" of virtue in Vienna—"he being so wise" (3.1.112)—becomes for Claudio a model of desire. Angelo's desire for Isabella's cooperation is appropriated by Claudio, so much so that Claudio's speech echoes Angelo's. Whereas Angelo earlier said, "Might there not be a charity in sin / To save a brother's life" (2.4.63-64), Claudio pleads:

What sin you do to save a brother's life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue.
                                 (3.1.133-35)

When Claudio aligns himself with Angelo, Isabella undergoes two radical changes. First, she sees Claudio no longer as her brother, the offspring of her father, but as Angelo's double, someone of his stock and quality. Second, and even more significant, she reacts to Claudio as mercilessly as Angelo had reacted to her. Even her speech replicates Angelo's. She says to her brother,

Take my defiance,
Die, perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed.
I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death;
No word to save thee.
                                  (3.1.142-46)

Just as Angelo has claimed he would condemn his own brother to death, so Isabella does condemn her brother, refusing even to bend down to save him. She echoes Angelo's "You but waste your words" with her line, "I'll pray … no word to save thee." Thus she is transformed. Her renunciation of any effort to save Claudio, even if it requires only "bending down" (3.1.143), contrasts darkly with her earlier appeals for mercy and her willingness to throw her life down "as frankly as a pin." The plot provides a sympathetic context in which we might place Isabella's change, but the dialogue indicates that she has become, in addition to a Roman Catholic novice and a victim of sexual harassment, an imitator of Angelo.

Isabella and Angelo are doubles in their rigid judgment against Claudio, and, similarly, she becomes split within herself in her response to fornication. Regarding acts of fornication, she remains inflexible as we have seen ("Take my defiance, / Die, perish"), yet she inadvertently intimates erotic interests—although these have been distorted in some psychoanalytic critiques.¹⁵ Only in the heat of conflictive mimesis does she use eroticized language, such as "Hark, how I'll bribe you" (2.2.146). By the second interview, her intimations become even more detailed:

Th'impression of keen whips I'd wear as
 rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield
My body up to shame.
                                  (2.4.101-04)

As many commentators note, she casts her repulsion in terms that psychoanalytic theory readily accepts as deferred desire.¹⁶ Rather than attributing the sexual metaphor chiefly to her own resources of libidinous desire, however, the mimetic hypothesis traces it to Angelo, from whom she unwittingly borrows it. The difference, according to my argument, is the difference between the play depicting a bestiality that is only masked by morals and revealing a rationality that is easily demoted to the level of the nearest model.

In spite of Isabella's captivity to Angelo, two of her speeches thematize the dynamics of mimetic desire. During their second interview, Angelo states, "Nay, women are frail too" (2.4.123). While he intends this statement to deflect her accusations of his likeness to Claudio, she takes it as a cue to expostulate on the vulnerability of women to bad (male) models. She theorizes how women, being constructed through relationships mediated by men, depend on external, mimetic examples to establish their identity. Women are

⁦ as the glasses where they view
 themselves,
Which are as easy broke as they make forms.
Women?—Help, heaven! Men their creation
 mar
In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times
  frail;
For we are soft as our complexions are,
And credulous to false prints.
                                (2.4.124-29)

Within her admission that women are "soft," she tucks another accusation: that men deliberately abuse this frailty. Her claim that men mar their source as divine creations by "profiting" from women has as its subtext the successive failures of three central male models in her life (a dead father, weak brother, and corrupt magistrate). All have been removed or corrupted. She can think only of Heaven as a means to deliver her from the mediation of false prints. On a more generalized level, this speech is as applicable to men as to women. It describes the human susceptibility to mimetic desire. An individual's character is "as easy broke" through conflictive mimesis as an individual's emotions "make forms" for desire through acquisitive mimesis.¹⁷ Because the models of desire are themselves contingent, being disciples of other models, almost every major character in the play turns out to be "credulous to false prints." As Shakespeare represents the situation, the more a character denies his or her susceptibility, the greater the damage that occurs. Acquisitive and conflictive mimesis have monstrous effects, especially upon the "proud"—another name for those who imagine themselves to be beyond mimesis.

This generalized interpretation of women's frailty is borne out by an earlier speech. During their first interview, Isabella sums up the mimicry of desire as it confounds the proud. On this occasion, "man," not "women," is the specified subject:

               But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
                                   (2.2.118-23)

Paraphrased, the first lines might state that those who think themselves least susceptible to the influence of others prolong this illusion under the guise of political power. Their blindness increases according to their misplaced self-confidence, a confidence that is necessarily misplaced because their nature is mimetic. What better phrase to sum up the mimetic nature of humans than "glassy essence"? The enduring quality of this species is its mirrorlike, reflective, protean propensity. It leads to duplicitous, reciprocal, and sporadic character traits that Measure portrays.

Duke Vincentio serves the playwright as an antidote to these "fantastic tricks" of monstrous doubling. He is not, however, completely immune to judgment. He judges others for their need to marry. His lines, "Believe not that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom" (1.3.2-3), might be paraphrased, "I will never marry like these. I will only enforce marriages." Like Angelo, who seeks to put fornicators to death, the duke seeks to put them together. Concerning the duke's own marriage proposal, critics frequently comment that it appears to be a Shakespearean afterthought. With more accuracy, we might imagine that Shakespeare designed the proposal as an unavoidable ducal afterthought.¹⁸ In spite of this small instance of reciprocity, Duke Vincentio exhibits little of the mimetic oscillation and slavery to desire that the other main characters do. His detachment sets him apart from the violence adhered to by most of the characters and by many spectators who grow impatient with his pacifism. He resists the procedure of finding a victim for Vienna's "sacred" institutions, both secular and religious. He is unable to kill anyone, even after inclining himself toward violence by appointing Angelo in his place. The play's one sacrificial death suggests his repulsion toward violence. If all the victims of the world were like Ragozine—already dead—the Girardian thesis would be irrelevant.

By scripting much of Measure's action, Duke Vincentio remains above most of the mimetic contamination in Vienna. This insular position makes him incredible by comparison to the other, struggling characters. While he remains one of the characters within his own drama, he transcends them by plotting their courses according to his craft, maintaining a concern for the whole and not just the part. Having initiated a crisis of degree both through his neglect of Viennese law and through his temporary absence, he must intervene in the affairs of Vienna without becoming trapped in reciprocal relations. He therefore attempts to stage corrective desires in order to achieve what Stephen Greenblatt calls "salutary anxiety."¹⁹ Lucio's description of him as "the old fantastical duke of dark corners" (4.3.156) aptly describes the marginalized, histrionic role he fills. Not his political power, but his dramaturgy protects him from the implacable throes of mimetic desire into which Angelo, Claudio, and Isabella fall.

The playwright within the play—the duke—is endowed with a moral impunity that seems unfair. His function is well defined by Cynthia Lewis, who asserts that "the Duke's efforts to bring 'dark deeds' to light can easily awaken our own private feelings of guilt and our own sense of vulnerability to sudden, unexpected castigation."²⁰ Like my reading, Lewis's insists upon the interpenetration of literary figures with spectator psyches. "Unexpected castigation" relates most directly to parental anger, often paternal wrath. According to Lewis's scenario, our judgments against fathers (and other authority figures) color our perceptions of the duke, recreating him as a much more malicious figure than he is. From Lewis's point of view, by opposing ourselves to the duke, we become little Angelos:

But if we allow our impression of the Duke to be conditioned too much by these subjective fears and—out of self-protection and under the mask of anger—project these fears back onto the Duke, then we will miss the experience in which Shakespeare invites us to participate, with the Duke, as he becomes a vital part of Vienna's body politic. And having done so, we will remain nervous, suspicious, and repressed, as does Angelo, who, in dreadful and guilty anticipation of Vincentio's return, hastily transfers his own "distraction" onto the Duke: "pray heaven his wisdom be not tainted!" (IV.iv.4-5)²¹

If our reactions to Duke Vincentio lock us into moral judgment of him instead of into participating in civic judgment with him, we become that much more petty—that much more like the duke we create. In this function, the figure of the duke turns our attention from the representations of desire on stage to the overshadowing reproduction of desires among spectators.