Measure for Measure

Summary

Measure for Measure is set in a Vienna where, by the Duke's own admission, strict laws have gone unenforced for fourteen years and the city's brothels flourish. Vincentio announces a sudden journey and leaves his authority to Angelo, a deputy famed for cold self-discipline, with the older counsellor Escalus as second. Secretly the Duke stays behind disguised as a friar, partly to see whether power will change Angelo. Angelo at once revives a statute that makes fornication a capital crime and condemns Claudio, a young gentleman whose betrothed, Juliet, is visibly pregnant; the couple had married by private contract but delayed the public ceremony over a dowry. Claudio's friend Lucio fetches Claudio's sister Isabella from the convent of the Poor Clares, where she is about to take vows. Her two interviews with Angelo are the core of the play. In the first she argues from Christian mercy that no judge could survive being judged as he judges; in the second Angelo, newly overwhelmed by desire for the very purity he admires in her, offers Claudio's life in exchange for her body, and tells her that no one will believe her if she accuses him. Isabella refuses, and when Claudio, terrified of death, begs her to yield, she turns on him with fury. The disguised Duke, who has overheard, proposes a substitution: Mariana, whom Angelo had abandoned years earlier when her dowry was lost at sea, will keep the assignation in Isabella's place. The bed-trick succeeds, but Angelo breaks his word and orders Claudio's execution anyway. The Duke and the Provost try to substitute the head of the drunken murderer Barnardine, who refuses to be executed that day; the convenient death of a pirate, Ragozine, supplies the head instead. In the long final scene the Duke returns in his own person, lets Isabella and Mariana accuse Angelo publicly, appears to reject them, and then is unmasked as the friar by the slanderous Lucio. Angelo confesses and asks for death. The Duke orders him married to Mariana and then sentenced to die, quoting the law of 'measure still for measure'; Mariana begs Isabella to kneel for him, and Isabella, still believing her brother dead, pleads for Angelo's life. Claudio is produced alive, Angelo is pardoned, Lucio is forced to marry the woman he wronged, Barnardine is released into the friar's care, and the Duke twice proposes marriage to Isabella, who gives no answer in the text. The title comes from the Sermon on the Mount: 'with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again' (Matthew 7:2). The play stages that verse literally, then asks whether mercy can ever be measured at all.

Plot or Argument

• Act 1: the Duke withdraws and the old statute wakes

  Vincentio hands his commission to Angelo, saying that virtues like torches are lit to shine outward. In a street full of bawdy talk Lucio and the gentlemen learn that Claudio has been arrested and the suburban brothels are to be pulled down. Claudio explains to Lucio that he and Juliet are married in all but public form. At a monastery the Duke tells Friar Thomas that his laxity has let liberty pluck justice by the nose and that he will watch Angelo in disguise. Lucio finds Isabella at the nunnery on the eve of her vows and sends her to plead.

• Act 2: two interviews

  Escalus argues with Angelo for proportion and then tries the comic case of Elbow the constable, the tapster-bawd Pompey and the foolish Froth, letting Pompey off with a warning. Isabella's first plea, prompted by Lucio, moves from formal reluctance to the great speeches on mercy and 'man, proud man'. Alone, Angelo discovers his desire. The disguised Duke questions Juliet about her repentance in the prison. At the second interview Angelo states his bargain plainly; Isabella resolves to keep her chastity and prepare Claudio to die.

• Act 3: death argued twice

  The friar-Duke counsels Claudio to be 'absolute for death' in a speech that argues life away. Isabella tells Claudio of Angelo's offer; he first resolves to die, then breaks into terror at the thought of death and pleads with her to save him, and she denounces him. The Duke intervenes with the Mariana plan. Outside, Pompey is carried back to prison, Lucio slanders the absent Duke to the friar's face, and Escalus commits Mistress Overdone. The act ends with the Duke's rhymed soliloquy on the ruler who bears the sword of heaven.

• Act 4: the moated grange and the prison

  At Mariana's house a boy sings 'Take, O, take those lips away' and the women agree to the substitution. In the prison the executioner Abhorson takes Pompey as his assistant. Angelo's order for Claudio's early execution arrives; Barnardine, roused for death, refuses to die while hungover, and Ragozine's head is sent instead. The Duke lets Isabella believe Claudio dead and sends letters to arrange his own return at the city gate.

• Act 5: the public reckoning

  At the gate the Duke receives Angelo with praise, hears Isabella's accusation, and pretends to disbelieve her and Mariana. Re-entering as the friar, he is unhooded by Lucio. Angelo confesses; the Duke sentences him to death after a hasty marriage to Mariana, invoking 'measure still for measure'. Isabella kneels with Mariana for Angelo's life. Claudio is revealed, pardons and marriages follow, Lucio alone is punished with a marriage he dreads, and the Duke offers Isabella his hand.

Characters

• Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, ruler, disguised as Friar Lodowick

  A prince who has let the law decay and who chooses to reform the city through a deputy while watching in a friar's habit; he manipulates almost every character and controls the ending, and the play leaves open whether he is a providential governor or a meddling stage-manager.

• Angelo, deputy

  A man of rigid outward virtue who condemns Claudio without hesitation and then, tempted by Isabella's purity, commits the very sin he punishes and worse; his soliloquies trace self-knowledge arriving too late to stop him.

• Isabella, novice of the Poor Clares, Claudio's sister

  A young woman about to take vows who argues for mercy with real theological force, refuses Angelo's bargain, condemns her brother's fear harshly, and at the end kneels for the man she believes killed him.

• Claudio, condemned young gentleman

  Betrothed to Juliet and sentenced under the revived statute; his speech on the terror of death is among the most famous in the play.

• Escalus, senior counsellor

  Experienced, moderate and humane, he urges Angelo toward proportion and handles the comic police cases with patience.

• Lucio, a 'fantastic', Claudio's friend

  A witty libertine who genuinely helps Isabella, slanders the Duke to the disguised Duke himself, and is the only character punished at the end.

• Mariana, Angelo's abandoned betrothed

  Living in seclusion at the moated grange after Angelo broke their contract over her lost dowry; she takes Isabella's place and begs for Angelo's life.

• Juliet, Claudio's betrothed

  Pregnant and imprisoned; she confesses her fault to the disguised Duke and speaks very little.

• Pompey, Mistress Overdone, Elbow, Froth, the city's underworld and its constable

  The tapster-bawd, the brothel-keeper, the malapropping constable and a foolish client, whose comedy shows the law as it actually meets ordinary vice.

• Barnardine, condemned murderer

  A prisoner of nine years, drunk and indifferent to death, who simply refuses to be executed and is finally released for counsel.

• The Provost, keeper of the prison

  A decent officer who pities Claudio and helps the friar save him at risk to himself.

Lessons

• Mercy argued from redemption

  Isabella's strongest argument is not that Claudio's fault is small but that every soul was once forfeit and was redeemed by the One who 'might the vantage best have took'. If God judged Angelo as Angelo judges, he too would be lost. Students can trace how she moves from a weak opening, in which she almost agrees with Angelo, to an argument grounded in the Christian doctrine of grace, and can ask why Angelo has no answer except 'It is the law, not I'.

  • Why does Isabella begin by saying she wishes her brother's vice punished? Is that a tactic or a conviction?
  • Angelo separates himself from the law he enforces. Is that humility or evasion?
  • Lucio coaches Isabella to be warmer. Does her eloquence depend on his prompting, and what does that suggest about persuasion?

• The tempter who baits with saints

  Angelo had never been moved by the 'strumpet'; what undoes him is goodness itself. His soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Scene 2 is a careful account of temptation working through a person's virtues, not merely through his appetites. The play's moral seriousness lies in letting the audience watch a man know exactly what he is doing and do it anyway, and then in Act 2, Scene 4 threaten the woman with his reputation: 'my false o'erweighs your true.'

  • What does Angelo mean when he calls the 'cunning enemy' one who 'with saints dost bait thy hook'?
  • At what point could Angelo still have turned back, and what keeps him from doing so?
  • How does his threat that no one will believe Isabella turn private sin into an abuse of public office?

• Facing death: the friar's counsel and Claudio's terror

  Act 3, Scene 1 sets two speeches side by side. The disguised Duke argues, in a mood close to Seneca and to the medieval contempt of the world, that life is worth so little a wise man will not grieve to lose it. Claudio accepts this, until Isabella's news gives him a chance to live, and then pours out a vision of death as cold obstruction, fiery floods and thick-ribbed ice. Neither speech names Christ or resurrection, though both are spoken in a play about grace. Students can ask what a fuller Christian consolation would add.

  • Does the Duke's argument actually make death easier, or simply life less valuable?
  • Why does Claudio's imagination of the afterlife frighten him more than the Duke's reasoning comforts him?
  • Is Isabella's anger at Claudio just? What does it reveal about her?

• Rule by substitution

  The play is full of stand-ins: Angelo for the Duke, the friar for the Duke, Mariana for Isabella, Ragozine's head for Claudio's. The Duke solves the crisis by deception, and his own rhyming soliloquy calls it 'craft against vice'. Students should weigh whether a good end justifies the means here, and should notice that the play's comedy depends on lucky accidents such as the pirate's fever. Whether Vincentio models wise rule or uncomfortably godlike manipulation is one of the play's long-standing debates.

  • Why does the Duke not simply return and dismiss Angelo once he learns of the bargain?
  • Is the bed-trick a deceit against Angelo, a rescue for Mariana, or both? Does the prior contract between them change your judgment?
  • Why does the Duke let Isabella believe her brother is dead?

• Kneeling for an enemy

  The ending turns on a request the Duke deliberately makes hard: Mariana asks Isabella to plead for the man who, as far as Isabella knows, executed her brother. Isabella's speech is restrained and legal in form; she grants that Claudio 'had but justice' and argues that Angelo's intent, not carried out, should not be punished as a deed. The play thus answers its title by showing mercy that refuses to repay like with like, at a cost to the one who gives it.

  • Why does Isabella kneel? Consider her reasons, Mariana's plea and the silence before she speaks.
  • Is 'Thoughts are no subjects; / Intents but merely thoughts' a sound principle, and how does it fit the Sermon on the Mount?
  • Isabella says nothing to the Duke's proposal. How should a production stage her silence, and what would each choice mean?

Context

The play draws on a story known across Europe of a corrupt magistrate who demands a woman's body in exchange for a prisoner's life. Shakespeare's main sources were George Whetstone's two-part play Promos and Cassandra (1578) and its prose version in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), behind which lies a novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi (1565). Shakespeare added the novice heroine, the bed-trick with Mariana, and the disguised ruler. That last device had several contemporary analogues, and many critics connect the Duke's dislike of crowds and his interest in the conscience of rulers with James I, whose treatise Basilikon Doron (1599, reprinted in London in 1603) was widely read. The play's marriage questions turn on the difference, real in English and canon law of the period, between a binding contract made privately by words in the present tense and the public solemnization of a church wedding. The closing of the suburban brothels echoes a 1603 proclamation for pulling down houses in the London suburbs during plague.

Composition

The Revels Accounts record a performance at Whitehall by the King's Men on 26 December 1604, and the play is usually dated 1603-1604. It was first printed in the First Folio (1623), apparently from a transcript by the scribe Ralph Crane. Many editors believe Thomas Middleton revised the text around 1621, adding or altering parts of Act 1, Scene 2 and possibly moving the song in Act 4, Scene 1; this is a scholarly inference, accepted in the Oxford Collected Middleton, but not certain. The Project Gutenberg text used here follows the conventional act and scene divisions.

Reception

The play was adapted by William Davenant as The Law Against Lovers (1662), which merged it with Much Ado About Nothing, and by Charles Gildon (1700). Coleridge called it the most painful of Shakespeare's plays. F. S. Boas grouped it in 1896 with All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida as 'problem plays', a label still in use. G. Wilson Knight's essay in The Wheel of Fire (1930) read it as a Christian parable of the Gospels, with the Duke as a figure of Providence; later critics have read him instead as a study in political control. Peter Brook's 1950 Stratford production, which held a long silence before Isabella knelt, made the ending a famous theatrical problem. The Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990) included it in volume 27.

Comparisons

• The Merchant of Venice

  Portia's 'quality of mercy' speech and Isabella's plea to Angelo both argue from God's mercy to the judge's duty, but Portia speaks as a disguised lawyer who then wins on a legal technicality, while Isabella speaks as herself and loses the argument; Shylock insists on the letter of a private bond, Angelo on a public statute he himself breaks.

• Hamlet

  Claudio's 'Ay, but to die, and go we know not where' answers Hamlet's 'undiscovered country' from a few years earlier: both fear what follows death, but Hamlet reasons himself toward endurance while Claudio's terror drives him to ask his sister to sin for him.

• All's Well That Ends Well

  The two plays were written close together and share the bed-trick, in which a wronged woman takes another's place to bind a reluctant man; both end in marriages so abrupt that critics since Boas have called them 'problem plays'.

• The Scarlet Letter

  Hawthorne's Puritan Boston, like Angelo's Vienna, publicly punishes sexual sin while a respected man conceals his own; Dimmesdale and Angelo both preach rectitude in secret guilt, but Hawthorne's minister finally confesses of his own will, while Angelo is exposed by the Duke.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Measure for Measure is not a medical play, but it is unusually concentrated on mortality and on the bodily consequences of the sexual trade the law is trying to suppress. The 'absolute for death' speech is a set piece of consolatio, cataloguing the diseases and decline of age (gout, serpigo, rheum, palsy) as reasons not to cling to life; Claudio's reply is a study of acute dread of death and the imagined afterlife. Lucio's opening banter with the gentlemen is a run of jokes on venereal disease (the 'French crown', 'hollow' bones, sciatica), common Jacobean shorthand for syphilis. Barnardine's habitual drunkenness is presented as a moral and spiritual numbness to mortality. A fever, finally, supplies the plot's convenient corpse. Calling Claudio's terror anxiety in a modern clinical sense would be a reading, not the play's own category.

• Act 1, Scene 2

  Lucio and the two gentlemen trade jokes about diseases caught in Mistress Overdone's house, the French crown, hollow bones and sciatica.

  Syphilis Venereal
• Act 3, Scene 1

  The disguised Duke's consolation to Claudio, listing gout, serpigo, rheum and palsied age among the miseries that make life not worth keeping.

  Philosophy AS Therapy Death Dying Aging Senescence
• Act 3, Scene 1

  Claudio's speech on the terror of death and the possible torments of the afterlife, ending with age, ache, penury and imprisonment as preferable to it.

  Death Dying Neurosis Anxiety
• Act 4, Scenes 2-3

  The Provost and Pompey describe Barnardine, drunk for days at a time and indifferent to execution; he refuses to die while unfit.

  Alcohol Death Dying
• Act 4, Scene 3

  The Provost reports that the pirate Ragozine died that morning of a cruel fever, and his head is substituted for Claudio's.

  Fever Infection

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Isabella and Mariana at the moated grange on the night of the substitution, in which each explains why she is willing to do what she is about to do.

• Essay

  The Duke says he will apply 'craft against vice'. Using three scenes, argue whether his methods are justified by their results, and whether a ruler is held to the same standard as a private person.

• Classroom

  Read Act 5, Scene 1 aloud from Mariana's 'Sweet Isabel, take my part' to the end of Isabella's plea. Try three lengths of silence before Isabella kneels and discuss how each changes the meaning of her choice.

• Poetry

  Write a sonnet in Angelo's voice on the morning after he learns that the friar was the Duke, using the image of a scarecrow or of torches from earlier in the play.

• Fiction

  Retell the Barnardine scene from the point of view of Abhorson the executioner, keeping to what happens in Act 4, Scene 3.

Further Reading

• Promos and Cassandra, George Whetstone

  Shakespeare's chief source (1578); compare the heroine who yields with Isabella who refuses.

• The Wheel of Fire, G. Wilson Knight

  Contains the influential essay 'Measure for Measure and the Gospels' (1930), reading the play as a Christian parable.

• Shakspere and His Predecessors, F. S. Boas

  The 1896 study that grouped this play among the 'problem plays'.

• The Gospel according to Matthew, chapters 5-7, Matthew the Evangelist (traditional attribution)

  The Sermon on the Mount, source of the title and of the play's arguments about judging.