The story of a woman who, in seeking to save the life of a male relative, arouses the lust of a man in authority was an ancient one that reached literary form in the mid sixteenth century. Shakespeare may have known the prose version in Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi’s Gli Ecatommiti (1565, translated into French in 1583) and the same author’s play Epitia (1573, published in 1583), but his main source was George Whetstone’s unsuccessful, unperformed two-part tragicomedy Promos and Cassandra, published in 1578.

Shakespeare’s title comes from St Matthew’s account of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: ‘with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again’. The title is not expressive of the play’s morality, but it alerts the spectator to Shakespeare’s exploration of moral issues. His heroine, Isabella, is not merely, as in Whetstone, a virtuous young maiden: she is about to enter a nunnery. Her brother, Claudio, has not, as in Whetstone, been accused (however unjustly) of rape: his union with the girl (Juliet) he has made pregnant has been ratified by a betrothal ceremony, and lacks only the church’s formal blessing. So Angelo, deputizing for the absent Duke of Vienna, seems peculiarly harsh in attempting to enforce the city’s laws against fornication by insisting on Claudio’s execution; and Angelo’s hypocrisy in demanding Isabella’s chastity in return for her brother’s life seems correspondingly greater. By adding the character of Mariana, to whom Angelo himself had once been betrothed, and by employing the traditional motif of the ‘bed-trick’, by which Mariana substitutes for Isabella in Angelo’s bed, Shakespeare permits Isabella both to retain her virtue and to forgive Angelo without marrying him.

Although Measure for Measure, like The Merchant of Venice, is much concerned with justice and mercy, its more explicit concern with sex and death along with the intense emotional reality, at least in the earlier part of the play, of its portrayal of Angelo, Isabella, and Claudio, creates a deeper seriousness of tone which takes it out of the world of romantic comedy into that of tragicomedy or, as the twentieth-century label has it, ‘problem play’. Its low-life characters inhabit a diseased world of brothels and prisons, but there is a life-enhancing quality in their frank acknowledgement of sexuality; and the Duke’s manipulation of events casts a tinge of romance over the play’s later scenes.

Measure for Measure’s subtle and passionate exploration of issues of sexual morality, of the uses and abuses of power, gave it a special appeal in the later part of the twentieth century. Each of the ‘good’ characters fails in some respect; none of the ‘bad’ ones lacks some redeeming quality; all are, in the last analysis, ‘desperately mortal’ (4.2.148).

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

Vincentio, the DUKE of Vienna

ANGELO, appointed his deputy

ESCALUS, an old lord, appointed Angelo’s secondary

CLAUDIO, a young gentleman

JULIET, betrothed to Claudio

ISABELLA, Claudio’s sister, novice to a sisterhood of nuns

LUCIO, ‘a fantastic’

Two other such GENTLEMEN

FROTH, a foolish gentleman

MISTRESS OVERDONE, a bawd

POMPEY, her clownish servant

A PROVOST

ELBOW, a simple constable

A JUSTICE

ABHORSON, an executioner

BARNARDINE, a dissolute condemned prisoner

MARIANA, betrothed to Angelo

A BOY, attendant on Mariana

FRIAR PETER

FRANCESCA, a nun

VARRIUS, a lord, friend to the Duke

Lords, officers, citizens, servants

Measure for Measure

1.1 Enter the Duke, Escalus, and other lords DUKE Escalus.

ESCALUS My lord.

DUKE

Of government the properties to unfold

Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse,

Since I am put to know that your own science

Exceeds in that the lists of all advice

My strength can give you. Then no more remains

But this: to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,

And let them work. The nature of our people,

Our city’s institutions and the terms

For common justice, you’re as pregnant in

As art and practice hath enriched any

That we remember.

He gives Escalus papers

There is our commission,

From which we would not have you warp.

(To a lord) Call hither,

I say bid come before us, Angelo. Exit lord

(To Escalus) What figure of us think you he will

bear?—

For you must know we have with special soul

Elected him our absence to supply,

Lent him our terror, dressed him with our love,

And given his deputation all the organs

Of our own power. What think you of it?

ESCALUS

If any in Vienna be of worth

To undergo such ample grace and honour,

It is Lord Angelo.

Enter Angelo

DUKE

Look where he comes.

ANGELO

Always obedient to your grace’s will,

I come to know your pleasure.

DUKE

Angelo,

There is a kind of character in thy life

That to th‘observer doth thy history

Fully unfold. Thyself and thy belongings

Are not thine own so proper as to waste

Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,

Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues

Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike

As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched

But to fine issues; nor nature never lends

The smallest scruple of her excellence

But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines

Herself the glory of a creditor,

Both thanks and use. But 1 do bend my speech

To one that can my part in him advertise.

Hold therefore, Angelo.