May 10, 2024

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was performed before King James I in 1604, and has struggled for popularity ever since. In terms of reputation, it could be described as respected, yet neglected. At the other end of a spectrum from perennial crowd pleasers such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado about Nothing, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was designated one of the ironic and relatively realistic “problem comedies” that Shakespeare wrote during the period of his great tragedies. It is one of my favorites, and I have taught it over the years despite the fact that many students have never even heard of it. But something startlingly different happened when I taught it in the spring semester just ended. Both in class discussion and in their essays, the women in a very talented class flatly rejected its ending and its theme of forgiveness and reconciliation. Measure for Measure is about gender and power relations. This is the first time I have taught it after #MeToo, and I have no doubt that that helps account for the changed response. Its period of relative neglect may be over, judging by the fact that both my own university and the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival will have mounted productions within the space of a year. Measure for Measure is on the verge of becoming a play for our time—despite the fact that a contemporary audience seems likely to say that Shakespeare is at least partly wrong, wrong here and wrong in other plays about mercy and forgiveness.

I encouraged the women to write what they really think, though of course their opinions had to be both textually supported and logically argued. I was surprised by the expressions of gratitude. The freedom to be honest unleashed a remarkable energy, resulting in a couple of cases in the best that the students had ever written for me. Students do not have to agree with me, only make a strong case for their point of view. In this instance, I found myself partly agreeing with them and partly not. It is no news that Shakespeare can be sexist, as a glance at The Taming of the Shrew or Two Gentlemen of Verona will confirm. But those are early plays, and Shakespeare grew a great deal in his treatment of gender by the time he reached Measure for Measure. In particular, he showed that male anxieties that women are not trustworthy and are likely to be unfaithful to their men are almost invariably unfounded, neurotic, and destructive. The exception is Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s play about the Trojan War, another of the “problem comedies” and the bitterest of all his plays. Cressida is, like Helen of Troy, legendary for her infidelity. But she is the exception that proves the rule. Elsewhere, in play after play, women are accused by men—and found innocent, the spectacular example being of course Othello, written a year or so after Measure for Measure. In fact, both plays are based on works by the same author, an Italian named Cinthio.

But although the women are exonerated, what I myself have been uncomfortable with, long before this semester, is the way that the falsely accusing men face no consequences for their behavior. In this I agree with my women students. In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio accuses Hero of infidelity based on what Othello called “ocular proof”—a staged scene of someone climbing through Hero’s bedroom window that should not have deceived a five-year-old. He breaks off with her in the most sadistic way possible, publicly shaming her at their wedding ceremony, yet he gets to marry her anyway, without even an apology, just a remark that he was “mistaken.” Just before he kills himself, Othello makes a long speech so contorted that it is unclear what he is even saying, on the one hand accusing himself but on the other describing himself as a man “not easily jealous”—though we have watched Iago turn him against his wife in half a page of dialogue.

In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio pretends to leave town, bestowing his authority in the meantime on a young, untried Angelo. The Duke proclaims that Angelo embodies “Mortality and mercy in Vienna,” meaning justice and mercy, a phrase that became the title of Thomas Pynchon’s first published story. Angelo immediately proceeds to corrupt himself when Isabella, a woman who is on the verge of entering a convent but who has not yet taken final vows, shows up in a nun’s habit to plead for the life of her brother Claudio, condemned to death under a draconian law for getting his fiancée Julietta pregnant before the legal marriage ceremony. In a remarkably twisted scene—they don’t call it a problem comedy for nothing—Angelo attempts to extort sex from an almost-nun, promising to spare her brother’s life if she sleeps with him. To make a long story short, Angelo’s attempt is thwarted by an old folktale device, the bed trick, in which one woman is substituted for another in the dark, the other woman being Mariana, who was jilted by Angelo but wants him back anyway. Then Angelo tries to double cross Isabella by having her brother executed after all, lest he try to take revenge. When all this is publicly exposed, shall we say, Angelo admits he deserves death, yet his expression of remorse is limited to the bare phrase “my penitent heart” (5.1.486). Nonetheless, his life is spared, and he will marry Mariana, because both women plead for mercy and forgiveness. It is Isabella’s speech asking forgiveness for the man she thinks killed her brother after attempting to rape her that my students would not accept. Isabella, in their view, is simply bowing to overwhelming social pressure. Men get a “get out of jail free” card because it is the woman’s role to forgive, to be a sister of mercy—literally, in Isabella’s case. This is not justice but rather the corrupt system at work.

I use the present tense deliberately. During the semester I taught the play, Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was overturned, and porn star Stormy Daniels testified about having sex with Donald Trump, accepting $130,000 for keeping quiet about it because, as she put it, it was the only way to get out of the trailer park. Unfortunately, no bed trick was possible to enable her to avoid going through with it. There is no doubt in the world that Angelo is of the same ilk and does not deserve forgiveness, no doubt also that Shakespeare intended it that way. That is because he is concerned with larger issues than the immediate case, issues that my students tended to ignore, although I had attempted to foreground them during class discussion. Their anger and frustration at the injustice of Angelo’s pardon riveted them to the image of a woman’s role in enabling yet another male predator to get off scot free. I did not grade them down for this—my own version of following the spirit rather than the letter of the law—but did end up writing lengthy comments urging them to see that there is a Big Picture framing Angelo’s case, and that it is not simply an intellectual rationalization of a bad system. There are urgent questions looming that in the end cannot be ignored.

The larger picture can be envisioned as two concentric circles expanding beyond the individual instance. The first is social. If you argue that Isabella should have refused to plead for Angelo’s life, does that mean you are advocating the death penalty? Critical thinking demands that, to have an informed opinion, we have to think all of its ramifications through. Are you simply saying, “Off with his head”? I am fairly sure my students did not intend that. Instead, where that leads, or ought to lead, is towards a critique of the irrational legal system of Viennese society. Why is there only a choice between the extremes of total pardon and death? The reason is that Angelo is being judged according to the terms of an absurd law that has been on the books for either 14 or 19 years (there is a textual inconsistency) but understandably never enforced until in his zeal he started enforcing it. The law says that sex outside of marriage is a capital offense. Isabella’s brother Claudio is facing execution for getting his fiancée Julietta pregnant, despite the fact that they have signed an agreement and are legally contracted to each other, and have merely procrastinated about fulfilling the requirement for a public announcement and ceremony. The secrecy is for coolly practical reasons: they stand to lose a dowry by their marriage, and hope, given time, to win the approval of the parties that control the money. They have not been promiscuous, merely practical, unless you call all sex before marriage promiscuous.

Unfortunately for Claudio, the only person in Vienna other than Angelo who has that attitude is his sister. This sets up a parallel between Isabella and Angelo: they are purists, moral absolutists. My students argued that Isabella’s forthcoming vow of virginity is a declaration of freedom from the social pressure to marry and reproduce, which means they are arguing against the premise of the play, which sets these two up as mirrors of each other. I do not think they interpret Isabella’s sleeping with Angelo as a sin, in the way that she herself does, or at least claims to do, but as a loss of freedom, though a freedom that, paradoxically, is bought at the price of strict exclusionary rules. Isabella is choosing to live in an all-female world in which, once she takes her vows, she will not even be allowed to talk to men. And yet she says to the nun in charge that she wishes for even stricter rules. The play clearly hints, at least to me, that she regards the convent more as a kind of women’s shelter than a place of religious vocation. It is a place to hide, not only from men but from a dangerous involvement with life, which is full of all sorts of moral ambiguities and uneasy compromises. When the necessity of pleading for Claudio pulls her out of the convent, she wishes that “this poor maid” might be taken from the horrible world.

Claudio and Julietta became sexually involved a bit imprudently, but in doing so they were obeying, Northrop Frye says, the logic of comedy, which is a social form whose happy ending consists of multiple connections, unions, and reunions. And it is fair to add that Claudio’s case is also disguised autobiography, for when the 18-year-old William Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, she was already pregnant. Shakespeare, or at least the logic of comedy, consistently portrays isolation and chastity as a running away from life. It is used as a dire threat by Hermia’s father in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: either marry the man I approve of or spend your life in a convent “Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon,” something clearly to be regarded as a fate worse than death. In Twelfth Night, Olivia uses grief over the death of her brother as a way to justify isolating herself for seven years, very much like a nun, even to the point of wearing a veil. But the grief is only a pretext: it is forgotten the minute that “Cesario,” Viola disguised as a male, walks into the room. It is interesting to speculate—perhaps in a future newsletter, hint—how changing social conditions may be altering this kind of attitude, which survives both in romcoms and society as the attitude that “of course” people will get married and have kids. And yet the statistic has been circulating that as many as 30% of the population are now single and living alone.

To return, however, to the issue of the extreme law mandating death for non-marital sex, surely the first thing to do is to repeal it and reform the legal system. After all, another character, Pompey, is only given a prison sentence because, after a repeated warning, he continues to help run a whorehouse. Why not a prison sentence for Angelo, in which case Mariana could still marry him if she wishes? At this point, however, the social perspective begins to expand into the further circumference of the religious perspective, in which Measure for Measure continues a line of thought that was begun earlier in The Merchant of Venice. Human society is dependent for social order on the law. No matter, however, whether the law is believed to come from God or is a human construct: there is always a distinction between the letter and the spirit of the law. The Merchant of Venice adopts the anti-Semitic point of view that Jews believe only in the letter of the law, or in what is called legalism, represented in the play by Shylock demanding his pound of flesh. Christianity, on the other hand, believes in the spirit of the law, identified with mercy and love as legalism is identified with strict justice. This is a parody of Judaism, but was imported into Christian belief by Paul, a converted Jew: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” It also quickly became hypocritical, as Christianity from the start developed its own legalistic system, starting with the doctrine that no one can be saved without Christian baptism, with Christianity quickly becoming as rule-bound as any Pharisee could wish. Portia, disguised as a lawyer, makes an eloquent courtroom speech on mercy, but Shylock, consumed by his hatred, will have none of it and demands strict justice. In time, this doctrine of forgiveness expanded to become the theological foundation of Christianity, according to the doctrine known in Catholicism as original sin and in Calvinism as innate depravity. Its main premise is the inadequacy of the law for salvation and the consequent dependence on God’s mercy, manifested as grace, saving us even though not a single member of the human race deserves to be saved according to the judgment of the law.

The inadequacy of the law is twofold, and both factors are reflected in Measure for Measure. First, the law is imperfect. Any law is general, but every case is individual and different. Therefore, applied legalistically, the law catches the wrong people. It condemns the harmless Claudio to death while sending Pompey off to prison and letting Angelo escape altogether because even the best legal system can be corrupted by corrupt judges. The law needs interpretation and adaptation to the individual case. A good judge, like the wise and elderly Escalus, advocates mercy for Claudio to an unheeding Angelo, lets Pompey off with a warning the first time and only jails him on a repeat offense, moderating the severity of the law’s justice with qualified mercy. This may seem like humane good sense, but there are always people who see it as mere laxity. Their attitude is that the law is the law, and you do not need mercy or forgiveness if you do not fall. “It is one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall,” Angelo says coldly (2.1.17-18). And it is clear that Isabella shares this attitude, however unconsciously. The Trickster figure Lucio not only has to haul her out of the convent to plead for her brother but initially has to coax her from the sidelines: “You are too cold” (2.2.60). Indeed, when she first begins speaking, she more or less admits her ambivalence in a speech so cryptic that Angelo doesn’t even know what she is talking about:

There is a vice that I do most abhor,
And most desire should meet the blow of justice, 
For which I would not plead, but that I must; 
For which I must not plead, but that I am
At war twixt will and will not.  (2.2.32-36)

To which Angelo understandably says, “Well, the matter?” To be fair, she does much better when she warms to the task, but there is clearly a part of her that is disillusioned and impatient with her brother for being imperfect, a part that takes literally Jesus’s counsel “Be ye therefore perfect,” which is why she lashes out at him in fury when, in the terror of death, his nerve breaks and he begs her to sleep with Angelo to save his life. Before visiting Claudio in prison, Isabella has rather easily decided, “Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die” (2.3.185), and she is contentedly sure her brother has a “mind of honor” such that he will have no problem with this. She is convinced that this is high-mindedness, and it does not occur to her that it could be a form of selfishness. She gets to retain her virtue at the expense of Claudio’s life, and she thinks that is of course how things should be. When Claudio in hysterical terror begs, “Sweet sister, let me live,” her immediate response is, “O you beast!” (3.1.138). Then she goes on to excoriate him in terms that are self-revealing:

Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister’s shame?  What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother played my father fair!
For such a warpèd slip of wilderness
Ne’er issued from his blood.  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…O fie, fie, fie!
Thy sin’s not accidental but a trade.   (3.1.141-51)

While I sympathize with my students when they feel the forgiveness of Angelo is not fair, they also see Isabella favorably in this scene—and I frankly find her repellent. I do not mean that I think she should give in and be willing to sleep with Angelo. She has no obligation to martyr herself that way, every right to feel that her virginity is a divine obligation. She also has the right to point out Claudio’s selfishness: he is indeed willing to pimp his sister in order to live. All of the main characters in Measure for Measure learn inconvenient truths about themselves that they are going to have to live with: the play is, in Jungian terms, about the confrontation with the shadow, the repressed and largely unacknowledged dark and selfish side of ourselves, and Claudio is going to have to live with the knowledge that he was unheroically willing to sacrifice his own sister. What shocks and repels me in this speech is the self-righteousness of its manner, a self-righteousness that devolves by the end into outright hatred. To say, “I’ll say a thousand prayers for thy death” indicates to me that Isabella has no genuine religious vocation. Christ forgave those who crucified him—“They know not what they do.” Isabella knows theoretically that the second reason that the law is necessary but not sufficient is that human beings are too imperfect to live by it. When she first argues with Angelo, she says all the right things: “If he had been as you, and you as he, / You would have slipped like him” (2.2.69-70), which is why “all the souls that were were forfeit once” (2.2.78). Since the Fall, human nature is corrupt: Claudio states this at the beginning of the play:

Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.  (1.2.128-30)

Human desire is like rat poison. We cannot resist it, and then we die of it. Even the most “harsh and biting” laws will not be sufficiently deterrent. We cannot be perfect, and therefore must hope for God’s grace to forgive us. Moreover, what we owe to one another is compassion, which is what the New Testament means by agape, the word translated love or charity. The whole meaning of the play is summed up by a transvaluation of the title phrase. In the final revelation scene, the Duke proclaims,

“An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!” 
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.  (5.1.417-19)

There, the phrase “measure for measure” means the Old Testament “An eye for an eye.” But the whole point of Christianity is that, if God applied that principle, no one, as Hamlet says, would ‘scape whipping. Such legalism is replaced by the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Isabella could have turned her brother down humanely and compassionately, having enough empathy to see that he is a young man about to die the next day for no good reason at all, leaving behind a wife and child, and he is seized by terror. He goes through a long recitation of the horrors of physical death, followed by fear of punishment in hell with imagery drawn unmistakably from Dante’s Inferno. She could have cut him some slack, and said, “Dear brother, I know you’re scared, and I’m so sorry. But I simply cannot do what you ask. It would not be right. I hope you will come to see that. I love you, but it would be wrong.” You don’t have to be a nun or saint to say such a thing, not even a Christian, just a halfway decent human being. An analyst would point out that Isabella’s reference—not for the first time—to a supposedly perfect father against whom all men are measured and found wanting is a symptom of a father complex which she has projected as an absolutist religious perfectionism.

This scene and this speech are necessary as a stark contrast to Isabella’s great speech at the end in which she begs for Angelo’s life, the speech that the whole play leads up to, the moment that makes the play. Her “reason,” that Angelo did not really succeed in extorting her, and that Claudio’s death was after all mandated by the law, is not really a reason. She is asking for mercy simply for its own sake. Mercy such as we hope God shows to us, because, if we are honest, we know we sorely need it. That is at once the essence of Christianity—not the Last Judgment and punishment of all the wicked, as so many Christians are tempted to think, perhaps including Dante—and yet paradoxically an attitude to live by even if one does not believe in a supernatural power, only in the power of love that comes not from the heavens but from within us. Isabella has changed. She has had, to use the exact word, a conversion. Where did it come from? What caused it? Why is she not praying a thousand prayers for Angelo’s death? Well, no doubt not being trapped any longer in a nightmarish and seemingly hopeless situation helps. She is a graceful winner, also the exact word, and she owes her winner’s status to the Duke. As textual footnotes will tell you, the proper way to address a duke is as “Your grace.” There is one more factor, however: Mariana. As he does in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare pays tribute here to the importance of friendship between women. He is almost unique in this. The beauty of friendship between men, passing the love of women, has been celebrated since David and Jonathan. Two Gentlemen of Verona takes it so far that the one gentleman is willing to give up the woman both love to the other, unfortunately without asking the woman what she thinks of the matter.

In a sense, Mariana displays that kind of generosity in reverse. She enables Isabella to preserve her valued virginity by doing what Isabella thinks is a sin: sleeping with a man she is not married to, even if it is true she was once engaged to Angelo before he broke it off—for monetary reasons, because she lost her dowry, thus making a nicely ironic parallel with Claudio and Julietta. Jung criticized Christianity’s counsel of perfectionism, which he said always leads to neurosis precisely because it is beyond the human condition, preferring instead an ideal of imperfect “completeness.” Perhaps Mariana teaches Isabella something by example. When the Duke gives her financial security, “To buy you a better husband,” she replies, “O my dear lord, / I crave no other, nor no better man” (5.1.433-34). She says more:

They say best men are molded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad.  So may my husband.  
			(5.1.447-49)

We may dismiss this as abused housewife syndrome, more of that “stand by your man” stuff that keeps women down. Don’t think you’re going to change him by marrying him, lady.

But this play, like other Shakespeare plays, challenges the notion that “You can’t change human nature.” If human nature is unchangeable, conservatives say, we have to have harsh and biting laws to keep it under control, because there is no limit to what people will do if not controlled. On the other end of the political spectrum, anarchist sleazebags like Pompey will say that human nature is unchangeable, so you might as well give up trying to control it and let us all do as we please. When Escalus tells him the law does not allow prostitution, Pompey asks whether he means “to geld and splay all the youth of the city.” When Escalus says not, Pompey replies, “Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to’t then.” (2.1.232-33). But to ask whether human nature is innately good or bad is the wrong question. Human nature is not an essence but a potential, a power of becoming good or bad depending on the choices we make. What can be done in this world, then, is to attempt to educate people to choose the better over the worse—adding that the education must be experiential, not just intellectual. We learn through life’s experiences, good and bad, but it is especially the bad, the ordeals we suffer, that may transform us, purify us, purge us. That is why Dante’s Inferno is followed by the Purgatorio, for purgatory is a third realm, in which people are put through ordeals that transform them until they are worthy of salvation. Purgatory is not in the Bible, but life is purgatorial. And this gives hope that change is possible, both individual and social.

The Duke puzzles both the other characters and the audience by his behind-the-scenes manipulating. But what he is doing is putting the other characters through ordeals, through trials and temptations that will force them to confront who they really are rather than what they try to think they are. He has given the arrogant and overconfident Angelo unsupervised power to see if he will abuse it. He allows Claudio to think he is going to die in order to show whether he is willing to sacrifice his sister for the sake of his own life. He tempts Isabella into dropping her holier-than-thou mask to see the cruel self-righteousness that is really driving her. He gives Mariana a way to leave her life of solitude in a mysterious “moated grange,” a solitude that, in Tennyson’s haunting poem “Mariana,” verges upon the suicidal, in exchange for the risk of marrying an extremely problematic man. We may ourselves be tempted to think she is merely exchanging one kind of misery for another. But I always connect Mariana with lines from W.H.Auden’s great poem “As I walked out one evening”: “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.” Because there is no straight neighbor: we are what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the crooked timber of humanity. Love is an ordeal, and demands commitment to staying in an imperfect situation and working on it.

Love is in fact one of the purgatorial powers that change people. Dante goes through the wall of fire at the top of the mountain of purgatory because his love Beatrice is on the other side. If we go through multiple love relationships, each is a step on a purgatorial journey. No, she is not Dante, nor even Patti Smith, and she is the first to tell you so, but that is why Taylor Swift keeps writing about her past relationships—because writing about them is a way of understanding how they changed her. In a good, or at least a good-enough society, the laws may be set up in such a way, aided by public education, as to put people through life’s rites of passage in a way that fulfills their basic needs and leads them to self-actualize themselves. Law may be a benevolent power, symbolized in literature by wise figures like Dumbledore. Religion, and religion’s secular counterpart, therapy, may also be purgatorial. And, last but not least, the arts, are fueled by that power of purgatorial illusion that we call the imagination.

No, art—like love, education, and religion—does not necessarily change people. Art, love, education, religion, and the social rituals by which we treat one another with respect and care: all of these are based on illusion. But illusion is not the same as delusion. Illusions are not lies. They are images of what we are invited to make true, to realize by committing to them. Apprehending the villains and reforming the laws of Vienna are necessary, but not sufficient, because they are merely external actions. People must change inwardly. The word translated “repentance” in the Bible, metanoia, literally means a change of orientation. Collectivists will tell you that inward change is a hopeless prospect, because it means changing one person at a time. They believe in mass solutions, whether religious or political or both, and in the end are predisposed to becoming authoritarian. But a teacher knows that, though you may teach 75 students at once, in the end you teach one student at a time. The same is true of the social worker, the therapist, the doctor, the parent. It often seems pitifully inadequate in the face of the enormous misery of the world. But it is power, the power to change both ourselves and others, and it is a power we all have. We are all “deputy dramatists,” in Northrop Frye’s phrase describing characters like the Duke, or Prospero in The Tempest. Central to the purgatorial process is forgiveness, because to forgive someone essentially wipes away their guilty self and, in a strange sense, enables them to become innocent again, to begin again reborn. That is why Desdemona refuses to call Othello guilty as she dies, why Cordelia, when Lear says she has cause to hate him, says, “No cause, no cause.” Accusation of sin leads only to the eternal state of torment we call hell. Not for nothing is its lord called “Satan,” which means “Accuser.”

However, Shakespeare learned by the end that forgiveness has to be mutual, not just women’s duty. In the late romance The Winter’s Tale, Leontes spends 16 years of miserable, guilty repentance, thinking he is responsible for his wife’s death in a fit of irrational, unfounded jealousy that is clearly meant to echo Othello’s. Only then does his lost wife “come back to life” by stepping off a pedestal where she pretended to be a statue. Maybe next time I will teach The Winter’s Tale after Measure for Measure, to see what my passionate, deeply engaged women students have to teach me, both about Shakespeare and about life.

Reference

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. 4th Edition. Edited by David Bevington. HarperCollins, 1992.

Postscript—

Tech support regretfully acknowledges the tardiness of this newsletter and begs the readers’ pardon; it was by no fault of the author.