Perhaps of all Shakespeare's plays, Measure for Measure causes spectators, both present and past, male and female, to side most intensely with or against its characters. Most spectators have a vested interest in desires that are clustered around activities that begin life (sexuality), degenerate life (compromise and lying), renew life (forgiveness), and end life (death). Moreover, these desires are presented vividly through the characters' dialogue and soliloquies. Except for Duke Vincentio, these characters are not staging desire but instead are desperately struggling with desires, often against their wills and beyond their understanding. This lack of theatricality in the play makes the incarnation of its themes within its characters more insistent. The characters' struggles become ours.²²

According to my thesis, the verbal and behavioral doubling that occurs among the characters is mirrored by the emotional doubling that occurs between the characters and Measure's spectators. Unfortunately, the most compelling evidence for "live" doubling is seldom documented, remaining available primarily to those who have led open discussions of the play among students.²³ The most available source of evidence is the commentary of literary critics, who, especially through their unresisted asides, supply the most durable evidence of the play's effects. A secondary source, studies of live productions, offers only limited help because most productions use cut texts and deploy "modern" significance by suggesting parallels to contemporary social and political concerns. These production studies tell us as much about the "spin" of a particular production as about the Shakespearean text.

Throughout approximately two centuries of recorded responses to the play, every generation is sharply divided among itself. Although every critical period uniquely uncovers aspects of the play, including dramatic, textual, religious, political, and psychological ones, historical boundaries do not define or delimit the judgments that the play evokes. A brief survey of critical antipathy directed toward Angelo, Isabella, and Duke Vincentio will sufficiently document the influence of conflictive mimesis in spectator responses.²⁴ The commentary on Isabella is the most interesting and detailed because although she is not an obvious villain as in Angelo, she is often perceived as one. The way to read these responses is, of course, to note moments when the critic resembles the object of criticism. The pervasive emotional tones are those of intolerance, repulsion, and condescension—the very responses censured in the characters.

While many critics realize Angelo is no model of virtue, those who are worth quoting imply that Angelo is categorically worse than they. For example, Charlotte Lennox (1753) claims that by Shakespeare's treatment of "the vicious and hypocritical Angelo," the playwright "shews Vice not only pardoned, but left in Tranquility." She recommends that Shakespeare should have treated his source plot quite differently, so that Angelo, "deprived of his Dignity, in Disgrace with his Prince, and the Object of Universal Contempt and Hatred, to compleat his Miseries, he should feel all his former Violence of Passion … renewed, and falling into an Excess of Grief … stab himself in Despair." Samuel Johnson (1765) similarly believes "every reader feels some indignation when he finds [Angelo] spared," and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1800) concurs that "our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape." William Hazlitt (1820) writes, "Mariana is also in love with Angelo, whom we hate." Early in the twentieth century, Agnes Mackenzie (1924) finds Mariana as well as Angelo reprehensible: "But it is to be hoped they had no children." According to Una Ellis-Fermor (1936), Angelo's "impudence leaves the beholder breathless." Wilbur Dunkel (1962) finds him, "So despicable … that only Mariana could forgive him."²⁵

Isabella evokes the strongest and most significant denunciations. One of the earliest and most quoted detractors of Isabella is Lennox, who claims that Isabella "is a mere Vixen in her Virtue … [whose] coarse and unwomanly Reflexions on the Virtue of her Mother [and] exulting Cruelty to the dying Youth, are the Manners of an affected Prude." Denouncing Isabella, Richard White (1854) manages to stereotype and malign a number of women: "Such is Shakespeare's marvellously truthful portraiture of a type which, sad to say, does exist among womankind … . Isabella is a woman with too much brain or too little heart [who] becomes unfeminine, repulsive, monstrous." Continuing into the twentieth century, we hear Brander Matthews (1913) labeling her "deficient both in feeling and in intelligence." Arthur Quiller-Couch (1922), one of her severest critics, first detaches himself from comment. He admits "the critics can make nothing of her" and urges that we let "the opinions of two of her own sex" assist our assessment. He chooses two detractors, Mrs. Jameson (Isabella is "less attractive and more imposing" than Portia) and Charlotte Lennox (whom I have quoted above). Then, unable to leave the matter in these women's words, he begins to rail: "Still, it has to be admitted that [Isabella] is something rancid in her chastity; and, on top of this, not by any means such a saint as she looks. To put it nakedly, she is all for saving her own soul, and she saves it by turning, of a sudden, into a bare procuress." He continues, authoritatively, "She is chaste, even fiercely chaste, for herself, without quite knowing what chastity means."

Finally, he concludes his imaginary relationship with her thus: "In effect, Isabella disappoints."²⁶

Another critic, Jacqueline Rose, has already commented on G. Wilson Knight's (1930) reactions to Isabella.²⁷ She remarks how in Knight's essay, Isabella quickly moves from being considered "more saintly than Angelo" to being a "fiend." Knight's appreciation of the play and of (at times) the character Isabella is belied in his commentary by emotional oscillations similar to those undergone by characters in the play. In addition to Rose's citations, we read in Knight that "she is cold …. Isabella's self-centered saintliness is thrown … into strong contrast with Lucio's manly anxiety for his friend" and that "it is significant that [Isabella] readily involves Mariana in illicit love: it is always her own, and only her own, chastity that assumes, in her heart, universal importance."

Unlike Knight's ambivalent estimate, Ellis-Fermor's assessment is univocally harsh, maintaining that the character of Isabella "seals our impression of a world-order ineradicably corrupted and given over to evil." Weak as Claudio is, "his self-indulgence cannot stand comparison with hers, with the pitiless, unimaginative, self-absorbed virtue which sustains her." According to H. B. Charlton (1949), "She makes herself unattractive," speaking at times as a "self-possessed hussy." E. C. Pettet (1949) cannot understand how "such a shallow, cold-blooded creature as Isabella, aware only of an abstract and formal virtue" could "utter lines like those [2.2.114-22 'Merciful heaven … angels weep'], so warm, pitiful and extensive in vision." Bertrand Evans (1960) speaks of Isabella's "snow-broth," "outraged inhumanity," and "frozen humanity." An interesting take, impassioned yet methodically distanced, is presented by Patrick Swinden (1973), who claims, "The main point about her is neither her frigidity nor her inhumanity, but her ridiculousness." Anne Barton (1974), by contrast, finds her frigid: "Beneath the habit of the nun there is a narrow-minded but passionate girl afflicted with an irrational terror of sex which she has never admitted to herself."²⁸

Following psychoanalytical currents, twentieth-century directors disarm Isabella's threat to their audience's ethos by accentuating her sublimation of aggression and eroticism beneath a religious exterior. John Barton's 1970 Royal Shakespearean Company production was colored by religious skepticism, presenting an Isabella whose "defense of virtue conceals an intense spiritual pride and selfishness." Keith Hack's 1974 RSC Isabella was valuable to Vienna primarily because of "her ability to manipulate male desire." Following a Freudian model of desire more explicitly, Robin Phillips, in his 1975 Stratford, Ontario, production, portrayed an Isabella who vacillated between an absolute repulsion of sex and an avid, even incestuous appetite.²⁹

Duke Vincentio shares with Isabella the severest condemnation, and often the two are indicted together. According to Lennox, "the Character of the Duke is absurd and ridiculous." Johnson, perhaps recording his response before reading the final lines of the play, writes, "After the pardon of two murderers, Lucio might be treated by the good duke with less harshness; but perhaps the poet intended to show, what is too often seen, that men easily forgive wrongs which are not committed against themselves." White anticipates much of twentieth-century criticism: "The Duke, a well-meaning, undecided, feeble-minded, contemplative man, needed somebody to act for him and govern him." Such reactions continue into recent criticism, including that of Marco Mincoff (1966), who calls the duke "an excrescence who ruins the play," and that of Marcia Riefer (1984), for whom "the 'savior' in Measure for Measure turns out to be a villain as well."³⁰

Stage productions of Measure during this century capitalize on representations of Duke Vincentio as politically incompetent and, at times, sexually incontinent. In the 1906 Oscar Ashe production, "The character of the Duke is criticized as 'idiotic,' and reviewers complain that 'we cannot like a Duke who deserts his post just to see how a substitute will behave in his place.'" According to Michael Scott, Barton's 1970 RSC production presented an "impotent ruler" who, according to Bock, was "completely deluded about his power to correct and instruct his subjects." More extreme than Barton's in its "subversion" of the duke was Hack's 1974 RSC production. Duke Vincentio's manipulation was "a conscious, vicious exercise of absolute power carried out by a sociopathic ruler who is intoxicated by the joys of exploitation." According to Berry, this "demoniac Duke" had, according to Bock, a "delight in sleazy sexuality," which, according to Scott, was evidenced by the duke "fondling Isabella whilst pretending to comfort her, lustfully encompassing her in the folds of his cloak." According to Berry, a similar emphasis on lechery was achieved in Phillips's 1975 Stratford, Ontario, production. The interest in staging a sexually deviant duke imitates, of course, Lucio's slander in the play, and it reciprocates the duke's notorious employment of Angelo to uncover promiscuity in Venice.³¹