Pinciss, G. M. “The ‘Heavenly Comforts of Despair’ and Measure for Measure.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 30, no. 2 (spring 1990): 303-13.

I

To a modern audience the notion expressed in Measure for Measure that being reduced to a state of despair can result in “heavenly comforts” (IV.iii.109) sounds paradoxical if not down-right contradictory; like the imprisoned Claudio sentenced to die, we might well ask “What's the comfort?” (III.i.53).¹ Yet the words come from the ruler of Vienna, who combines political power and religious authority. To his mind this painful spiritual condition is highly desirable. And his view is scarcely idiosyncratic: the benefits that can come out of despair are hard to overestimate, for the belief that losing hope in one's salvation can be a necessary first step to gaining it is confirmed in the Articles of the Church of England and in the sermons of influential English clergymen in the late sixteenth century.

In Renaissance thinking, despair can produce two opposing spiritual states. On the one hand, unqualified despair, doubting God's power to grant remission for one's sins and demonstrating a lack of faith, results in eternal damnation. But on the other hand, qualified despair can be positive, marking the very start of one's spiritual recovery.² According to Susan Snyder, both Luther and Calvin found “a kind of self-despair as prerequisite to salvation,” and, no doubt with their encouragement, Protestant sermons stressed the need for fallen humanity, aware of its unworthiness, to be reborn through the experience of positive despair to a complete dependence on God: in the words of William Tyndale, “For except thou have borne the cross of adversity and temptation, and hast felt thyself brought unto the very brim of desperation, yea, and unto hell-gates …, it shall not be possible for thee to think that God is righteous and just.”³ Despair, as Robert Burton explained in The Anatomy of Melancholy, could affect even “God's best children.”⁴ As a result, the spiritual struggle of working through a deeply troubled conscience to arrive at a renewed faith in God is a process much discussed in the devotional literature of Shakespeare's time.⁵ According to such ministers as Robert Cleaver, rector of Drayton, Oxfordshire, in 1598, “hearts must bee crushed and broken,” for “till the heart bee broken for sinne, there can be no plaine confession of sinne, and therefore no repentance.”⁶ With similar imagery the anonymous author of The Sicke-mans Comfort (1590) describes how the truly penitent can acquire faith in the power of God's merciful forgiveness of sin:

once made conscience-stricken by the enormity of his sins, “pearced to the heart with sorowe, we must then laye to his wounde some asswaging medicine, & do as the Masons do when they hewe their stone: first they give great blowes with their hammer … & then they poolish it over so … that the strokes are no more seen: so must we do, after we have handled the sick patient roughly & thrust him downe to hel by the rigorous threats of the lawes: we must comfort him, and fetch him againe by the sweete amiable promises of the Gospel, to the end that the sowplenes of this oyle may asswage the nipping sharpnes of the law.”

(p. 61)⁷

The same spiritual condition is also discussed by the influential William Perkins, fellow of Christ's College and popularizer of Calvin's doctrines, when he encourages his congregation to experience the state of “holy desperation” felt by the truly penitent before they throw themselves on the mercy of God. Perkins warns his audience, moreover, that even among the Elect lapses of faith or “spiritual desertions” are common: “This sorte of desertions, though it bee but for a time, yet no part of a Christian man's life is free from them; and very often taking deepe place in the heart of man, they are of long continuance.”⁸ Naturally, there is great danger that the despairing soul might so doubt God's mercy that he believes his sins cannot be forgiven. Failure to believe in God's forgiveness and in the sacrifice of Christ constitutes a loss of Christian faith, and, as a consequence, such a despairing soul is bound for hell eternally.

Since despair was an important concern for Renaissance Englishmen, the manifestations of this spiritual state were frequently demonstrated in contemporary literature. For instance, Spenser's Redcrosse Knight is saved from Despair's persuasive argument in favor of self-destruction only by Una's reminder of the forgiveness and salvation promised in the New Testament (Faerie Queene I.ix.53).⁹ In the theater the negative power of despair is dramatized in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. In the words of its hero: “My heart is hardened, I cannot repent,” and, in consequence, he realizes: “damned art thou, Faustus, damned; despair and die!” For other characters, however, despair can revive hope by taking away everything but what is ultimately the only essential—trust in God alone. Unlike Faustus, those predestined to be saved will progress out of despair to arrive at true repentance, forgiveness, and the remission of sins. This process is shown by Edgar's treatment of his father in King Lear. Gloucester must be brought to understand the need to trust in divine providence—“thy life's a miracle”—and to believe that heaven alone determines the timing and conditions of our arrival and departure, our “coming hither” as well as our “going hence.”¹⁰

Recognizing the widely held Renaissance belief in the benefits of despair we can better understand the behavior and intentions of the curious ruler of Vienna in Measure for Measure, one who “would have dark deeds darkly answered.”¹¹ We should keep in mind that this discussion of Protestant theological notions is especially appropriate here, for, as Louise Schleiner points out, in no other play of Shakespeare's do we find that the “central characters evoke specific biblical passages and theological concepts to explain their crucial deeds; in no other are the allusions so prominent; in no other do they define so distinct and consistent a pattern. … This is Shakespeare's most theological play.”¹²

II

If not the central figure, Duke Vincentio is surely the moving force of the action in Measure for Measure. Although the deceptions and deceits by which he operates have aroused considerable criticism and complaint, most of his motives are generally regarded as straightforward.¹³ On some occasions at least, his behavior is unambiguous and laudable. By feigning absence from his city, he can test the character of his deputy, Angelo; by using the bed-trick and replacing Isabella with Mariana, Angelo's former fiancée, the Duke can order Angelo to marry her; and by substituting Ragozine, a notorious pirate who died of a “cruel fever,” for Claudio, Isabella's brother, the Duke can save the young man's life.

But Duke Vincentio's actions and intervention are not so easily understood in every instance. In fact, a number of times his words and actions strike one as irrational or perverse. In particular, he seems nearly obsessed with teaching men to confront their death.¹⁴ It is a lesson he repeats almost compulsively. He lectures Claudio on the need to “be absolute for death”—even eavesdropping to learn if his sermon has been effective—and he does not leave until Claudio is, in the Duke's words, “resolved to die” (III.ii.242). The Duke also intends to deal with the drunken prisoner Barnardine to “persuade this rude wretch willingly to die” (IV.iii.80). And, before the Duke is through with him, Angelo, too, says he is very ready to end his life: “I crave death more willingly than mercy; / 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it” (V.i.474-75).

The Duke's eccentricities are evident not only in these examples of his meddling but also in his treatment of Isabella. His explanation for his treatment of her appears cruel, if not almost incomprehensible. Although one may not approve, one can understand that he keeps from her the truth of her brother's fate in order to test her capacity to forgive Angelo: will she join Mariana and plead for the deputy's life even when Isabella believes him responsible for her brother's death? But Duke Vincentio's expressed motive for deceiving her, verbalized in soliloquy, is, in the judgment of Philip Edwards, an “appalling justification.”¹⁵ According to what the Duke tells us, he “will keep her ignorant of her good, / To make her heavenly comforts of despair, / When it is least expected” (IV.iii.108-10). For Edwards, “God works in mysterious ways, but this beats all—willingly to cause despair in order to show the beauty of divine consolation.” Other students of this play also express irritation with the Duke's behavior. Harriett Hawkins finds his action “so patronizing as to be more infuriating, in intent, than satisfying when dramatically realized.”¹⁶ And Richard A. Levin thinks that when the Duke claims he will make “heavenly comforts of despair,” his “rationale seems strained, his cruelty sadistic.”¹⁷ The reaction of these critics to the Duke's words is quite understandable, for if his language is divorced from its theological meaning, then the comic intrigues that will result in a happy ending—“the beauty of divine consolation”—cannot be reconciled with the notion of providential intervention into human affairs that is also being implied here—“willingly to cause despair.” To quote Edwards once more, “The distance between the contrivances necessary for the fulfilment of the comedy and the workings of God which they are meant to suggest is impossibly great.”¹⁸ In effect, the concept of the fortunate fall does not usually include the notion that a masochistic Providence takes as much delight to chastise humanity as to save it.

Yet by appreciating that out of a qualified despair can come positive spiritual growth, we may be better able to explain the Duke's course of action. And we should recall that at this point in the play the Duke, now dressed as a friar, may well be providing some religious instruction by what he does. His insistence on the “comforts of despair” expresses what he has in mind since, as we have seen, Christian theology teaches that through despair we can acquire the faith to believe that we will be saved not through our goodness but God's.

III

Regarded in this context, the Duke-as-friar tests the spiritual health of each of the principal characters in the play, acting the part of religious teacher. First in his interview with Juliet, Claudio's pregnant fiancée, he evaluates her spiritual state and approves of her resolution, combining repentance and acceptance. The state of her conscience and her penance reflect her concern for her spiritual condition rather than for her self-image or her reputation in the world: “I do repent me as it is an evil, / And take the shame with joy” (II.iii.35-36).

Next he turns to Claudio in an effort to make him understand that peace can be achieved only through the same combination of repentance and acceptance. Claudio thinks he has learned the friar's lesson: “To sue to live, I find I seek to die, / And seeking death, find life. Let it come on” (III.i:42-43). But his willingness to “let it come on” is difficult to sustain. When Isabella tells him that Angelo has offered to exchange Claudio's life for her chastity, Claudio remembers that “death is a fearful thing,” and he pleads with his sister to save him by yielding to the deputy.¹⁹ Once more the Duke must urge Claudio to become reconciled to his plight: “Do not satisfy your resolution with hopes that are fallible.” And once more Claudio will seek for pardon and resignation: “I am so out of love with life, that I will sue to be rid of it.” Through the Duke's efforts, Isabella's brother “most willingly humbles himself to the determination of justice” and has “discredited” the “many deceiving promises of life” (III.ii.237-40). Having been brought to this positive state of despair, Claudio is ready for the rebirth that will be enacted in the final scene of the play.

With the prisoner Barnardine, “a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep,” who is both “insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal” (IV.ii.140-43), the ruler of Vienna has a more difficult time. His offers of comfort and prayer are rejected out of hand, and with comic determination Barnardine swears he “will not die today for any man's persuasion.” To spare him from damnation, Barnardine's jailors grant the Duke-as-friar more time so that he can “persuade this rude wretch willingly to die” (IV.iii.80). Although we watch Duke Vincentio effectively lead some souls onto the path of salvation, we are never witnesses of his success in this instance. After all, not everyone will despair, not everyone will find comfort, and not everyone, ultimately, will be saved; in truth, Barnardine seems rather one of those “unfit to live or die.” The final resolution for the Duke in the closing moments of the play is to offer Barnardine pardon for his crimes on earth, extending to him the utmost mercy and leaving him to make his own peace with heaven.

Unlike his failure with Barnadine, the Duke causes Angelo to experience a series of emotional states that ultimately affect his spiritual well-being. Although a man of conscience and moral awareness, Angelo has yielded to the temptations of lust and power. Forced to confront the painful truths of his actions, he suffers from both shame and guilt. These emotions lead him to a new sense of self and enable him to have his turn at the positive aspects of despair. His feelings of sorrow, regret, self-hatred, and repentance leave him in his own self-estimation deserving of death:

I am sorry that such sorrow I procure,
And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart
That I crave death more willingly than mercy:
'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.

(V.i.472-75)

This acknowledgement of his guilt and worthlessness is preparatory to his reformation, a necessary preliminary to understanding that salvation can be attained only through acceptance and faith.

Publicly admitting his guilt and still believing himself responsible for Claudio's death, Angelo has now arrived at the point where his character can be reformed:

No longer session hold upon my shame,
But let my trial be mine own confession.
Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death
Is all the grace I beg.

(V.i.369-72)

In this spiritual state he can only turn to God with absolute dependence on His mercy; like Claudio, he must learn that salvation arrives through despair. As the Duke says, “your evil quits you well.”

In the same final scene, the Duke determines that Lucio, the slanderer and wastrel, is to be put to death after he has been married to “one whom he begot with child,” a judgment that recalls Claudio's original plight as well as the Duke's sentence on Angelo before the intercession of Mariana and Isabella. Ultimately, Lucio's life, like Angelo's, will be spared by the pleas of a woman who loves him, Kate Keepdown; and by confronting his own death, Lucio, too, will be granted the opportunity to be reborn to a new and reformed life.

IV

The positive aspects of despair are fostered by Duke Vincentio not only in the men but also in Isabella, whose development is carefully monitored by him. The men in the play must be brought to confront their own end, but in her case Isabella must confront the deaths of others. Believing her brother executed at Angelo's order, she must respond to the Duke's sentence of “An Angelo for Claudio, death for death” (V.i.407). The severity of this command perfectly reflects the severity of her attitudes in the early scenes—her desire for even greater strictness among the nuns of her convent, her prudishness about sexuality, her intolerance for human frailty. The Isabella of the first half of the play might well be expected to approve of the justice of “death for death”; in Mary Lascelles's words, “There is a singular rigidity in her bearing.”²⁰

Yet by the end of the play Isabella supports Mariana's plea for mercy and argues that Angelo should be forgiven. Like her brother and the deputy, Isabella has reached a new understanding of life, and like them she has grown under the tutelage of the Duke. For one “in probation of a sisterhood,” she has had to deal directly with some of the more seamy aspects of human relations, exactly those furthest removed from her fastidious and priggish nature. …

Then, for reasons that the Duke never makes clear and even against her own instincts—“To speak so indirectly I am loth” (IV.vi.i)—Isabella must publicly admit to committing “what I abhor to name,” “a vice that most I do abhor”:

                                                                                                    the vile conclusion
I now begin with grief and shame to utter.
He would not, but by gift of my chaste body
To his concupiscible intemperate lust,
Release my brother; and after much debatement
My sisterly remorse confutes mine honour,
And I did yield to him.

(V.i.98-104)

The shame and embarrassment of her situation are compounded, for the Duke, sitting in judgment, rejects her accusation and orders her to prison.

As in his treatment of Claudio and Angelo, Duke Vincentio's intention in all of this is constant: he has told Isabella that her experience is “a physic / That's bitter to sweet end.” He has repeatedly encouraged her: “Show your wisdom, daughter, / In your close patience” and, rather than give way to anger, “give your cause to heaven.” His instruction and her experience have clearly taken root, for Isabella, as she is arrested, expresses the kind of trust in Providence that the Duke nurses out of the far side of despair:

                                                  O you blessed ministers above,
Keep me in patience, and with ripen'd time
Unfold the evil which is here wrapped up
In countenance!

(V.i.118-21)

As Darryl Gless explains, “the Duke's manipulations of Isabella result in a loss of all hope in worldly aid and a consequent real and utter dependence on divine ordinance.”²¹

This complete trust in heaven to resolve matters that are beyond the power of men to understand or control is the positive outcome of despair: to use Duke Vincentio's own words, “Do not satisfy your resolution with hopes that are fallible” (III.i.167-68). Instead, one must rely on faith alone, a faith that is both tested and strengthened through despair. In the words of Richard Hooker: “Too much honey doth turn to gall; and too much joy even spiritually would make us wantons. Happier a great deal is that man's case, whose soul by inward desolation is humbled, than he whose heart is through abundance of spiritual delight lifted up and exalted above measure.”²²

Shakespeare dramatizes how the chief characters in this play, following different paths, all arrive at a point where they despair of their own powers. Stripped of all earthly assurance, they must learn to trust in heaven to achieve positive spiritual growth, to become in Hooker's words “happier a great deal.” Only out of despair can they receive those “heavenly comforts” that come when “least expected.” Through the good offices of the Duke, the action of Measure for Measure traces this spiritual progress.

Notes

1. All references to Measure for Measure are to the Arden edition, ed. J. W. Lever (London: Methuen, 1965).

2. In the section on Faith (#31) in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin wrote that only after the penitent “have divested themselves of all arrogance through recognition of their own poverty, have wholly cast themselves down, and have plainly become worthless to themselves, then at last they may begin to taste the sweetness of mercy which the Lord holds out to them” (trans. and annotated by Ford Lewis Battles, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), pp. 63-64. For a discussion of the progression from despair to a state of “assurance of salvation,” see M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 393ff. As Rowland Wymer explains, “The sorrow for sin which could bring a person to despair was also a necessary first step to achieving a state of grace.” Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (New York: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 6. For an allied discussion see Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984). Susan Snyder has pointed out: “The whole Protestant emphasis on man's complete unworthiness and helplessness tended to reinforce the paradox of despair, to make it at once more necessary and more terrible. Luther in particular, proceeding from his own past agonizings over the inadequacies of confession and penance and the awful justice of God, his sudden seizures and black despondencies, placed despair of self at the very core of Christian experience.” “The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965):18-59, 23-24.

3. Snyder, p. 28. William Tyndale, “Prologue Upon the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans,” Doctrinal Treatises as quoted in Wymer, p. 6.

4. According to Article 16 of the Thirty-nine Articles, which defined the doctrines of faith of the Church of England: “After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again and amend our lives. And therefore they are to be condemned which say, they can no more sin as long as they live here, or deny place of forgiveness to such as truly repent.” The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1928).

5. For a discussion of these works and their popularity, see Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1935), ch. 8, and Beach Langston's account of books of devotion for the comfort of the dying (pp. 112-18) in “Essex and the Art of Dying,” HLQ 13 (1950):109-29.

6. Robert Cleaver, Four Godlie and Fruitful Sermons: two preached at Draiton in Oxfordshire (1611).

7. As quoted by Langston, pp. 115-16.

8. William Perkins, Works 1:455-69 (1616-1618); A treatise tending unto a declaration whether a man bee in the estate of damnation, or in the estate of grace (London, 1591), pp. 6-7.

9. For further discussion, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 152-55, and Kathleen Williams, Spenser's World of Glass (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), p. 27.

10. One can suggest a number of reasons why Shakespeare frequently presents characters who struggle with their despair: it was a concern of widespread interest for his audience; it often affected men in an extremely emotional and therefore highly dramatic manner; and since it is a subject of Corinthians, one of his favorite New Testament books, it may have attracted him personally.

11. A problematic work whose central character is a ruling duke disguised as a friar naturally raises questions about the nature of political power as well as religion. As a consequence this play is especially appealing to new historicists, for example Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), and Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986). Greenblatt's discussion, for example, analyzes how both the church and the state benefitted from keeping the public “in a condition of what we may call salutary anxiety. … For the ruling elite believed that a measure of insecurity and fear was a necessary, healthy element in the shaping of proper loyalties, and Elizabethan and Jacobean institutions deliberately evoked this insecurity. Hence the church's constant insistence upon the fear and trembling … that every Christian should experience; hence too the public and increasingly spectacular character of the punishments inflicted by the state” (pp. 135-36). Ultimately, in Greenblatt's view, “the duke's strategy has not changed the structure of feeling or behavior in Vienna in the slightest degree,” and the play dramatizes Shakespeare's “ironic reflections on salutary anxiety” (pp. 141-42). Other critical approaches continue to find this play especially congenial: the psychoanalytic in Meredith Skura's The Literary Use of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981) and the literary and symbolic in Paul Hammond's “The Argument of Measure for Measure,” ELR 16 (1986):496-519, and in Alexander Leggatt's “Substitution in Measure for Measure,” SQ 39 (1988):342-59.

12. Louise Schleiner, “Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure,” PMLA 97, 2 (March 1982):227.

13. For a discussion of the Duke's character and a summary of critical judgments about him, see Cynthia Lewis, “‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered’: Duke Vincentio and Judgment in Measure for Measure,” SQ 34 (1983):271-89.

14. For a discussion of the various attitudes toward death expressed in the play, see Phoebe S. Spinrad, “Measure for Measure and the Art of Not Dying,” TSLL 26 (1984):74-93.

15. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 118.

16. Harriett Hawkins, Measure for Measure, Twayne's New Critical Introductions (Boston: Twayne, 1987), pp. 104-105.

17. Richard A. Levin, “Duke Vincentio and Angelo: Would ‘A Feather Turn the Scale’?” SEL 22 (Spring 1982):257-70, 268.

18. Philip Edwards, pp. 118-19.

19. In his article “More Light on Measure for Measure,” MLQ 23 (1962):309-22, Warren D. Smith finds, interestingly enough, that fourteen critics approve and thirteen disapprove of Isabella's conduct with her brother in this scene.

20. Mary Lascelles, Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure” (London: Athlone Press, 1953), p. 88.

21. Darryl J. Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 190.

22. Richard Hooker, Sermon on the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect, included with Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (New York: Dutton, 1907), 1:6.