Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition)

Citation preview

MEASURE FOR MEASURE, 1783-1920

SHAKESPEARE:

THE CRITICAL

TRADITION

GENERAL EDITOR: BRIAN VICKERS

Centre for Renaissance Studies, ETH Zurich

King John Joseph Candido Richard II Charles R. Forker A Midsummer Night's Dream Judith and Richard Kennedy Measure for Measure George L. Geckle

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Measure for Measure Edited by GEORGE L. GECKLE

THE ATHLONE PRESS London and New York

First published in 2001 by The Athlone Press A Continuum imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10017-6503 © George L. Geckle 2001 George L. Geckle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 485 81001 2 HB Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Measure for measure / edited by George L. Geckle III p. cm. - (Shakespeare, the critical tradition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-485-81004-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Measure for measure. 2. Brothers and sisters in literature. 3. Chastity in literature. 4. Comedy. I. Geckle, George L. II. Series. PR2824. M433 2001 822.3'3-dc21 2001018895

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Acorn Bookwork, Salisbury, Wiltshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, www.biddles.co.uk

FOR

MY WIFE, JUDY, AND MY SONS, GEORDIE AND RICHARD

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE PREFACE INTRODUCTION

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

JOSEPH RITSON, correcting Shakespeare's editors, 1783 WILLIAM RICHARDSON, Isabella 'pious, . . . determined, and eloquent', 1789 EDMOND MALONE, topical allusions in Measure for Measure, 1790 GEORGE STEEVENS, identifying the main source, explaining the text, 1793 FRANCIS DOUCE, on the play's sources, 1807 HENRY JAMES PYE, a faulty play, 1807 MRS. ELIZABETH iNCHBALD, character and characterization, 1808 A. w. VON SCHLEGEL, 'the triumph of mercy over strict justice', 1815 WILLIAM HAZLITT, Measure for Measure in performance, 1816 NATHAN DRAKE, Isabella, a 'lovely example of female excellence', 1817 WILLIAM HAZLITT, 'a general system of cross-purposes', 1817 THOMAS BOWDLER, the Family Shakespeare, 1818 P. P., character and morality in Measure for Measure, 1822 AUGUSTINE SKOTTOWE, the play's major source, 1824 GEORGE DANIEL, a play about mercy, 1826 ANNA BROWNELL JAMESON, Isabella compared to Portia, 1832 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, a 'hateful' and 'painful' play, 1835, 1836 HENRY HALLAM, a struggle between drama and philosophy, 1839 CHARLES KNIGHT, an introduction to the play, 1840 j. PAYNE COLLIER, on the play's date and sources, 1842 JOSEPH HUNTER, striking passages in a play that gives little pleasure, 1845 HERMANN ULRici, an expression of New Testament morality, 1846 GULIAN c. VERPLANCK, 'this remarkable drama', 1847 j. o. HALLIWELL, the betrothal contracts and their significance, 1850 H. N. HUDSON, dispraise for Angelo, praise for Isabella, ambivalence about the Duke, 1851 WALTER BAGEHOT, Angelo a natural hypocrite, 1853 RICHARD GRANT WHITE, sympathy for Angelo, criticism of Isabella, 1854 WILLIAM WATKISS LLOYD, an uncongenial play, 1856 CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE, on Isabella, the epitome of goodness, and some minor characters, 1863

X XXXV 1

31 34 36 39 42 45 47 49 51 53 56 58 60 63 70 74 80 82 84 94 96 99 106 113 115 121 123 135 141

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

GEORG GOTTFRIED GERViNUS, a play expressing equity, not justice, 1863 WALTER PATER, 'the central expression' of Shakespeare's 'moral judgments', 1874 EDWARD DOWDEN, a dark and bitter play, 1875 DENTONJ. SNIDER, mediation by the monastic life, 1875 F. j. FURNIVALL, the place of Measure for Measure in Shakespeare's canon, 1877 GEORGE WILKES, Measure for Measure and Roman Catholicism, 1877 j. o. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS, on the play's analogues and early performance, 1880 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, a tragedy, 1880 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Measure for Measure as dramatic literature, 1886-1909 HENRY MORLEY, a lesson from the Sermon on the Mount, 1889 ARTHUR SYMONS, the 'painfulness' of Measure for Measure, 1889 ANDREW LANG, a 'disconsolate and bitter' play, 1891 BARRETT WENDELL, a recapitulation of Shakespeare's earlier work, 1894 FREDERICK s. BOAS, a problem play, 1896 GEORG BRANDES, Measure for Measure and Puritan hypocrisy, 1898 SIDNEY LEE, Shakespeare elevated 'a degraded and repellent theme', 1898 c. H. HERFORD, a play 'full of prophetic intimations', 1899 HAMILTON WRIGHT MABiE, a 'painful and repellent' play, 1900 RICHARD G. MOULTON, Measure for Measure as 'a moral experiment', 1903 A. c. BRADLEY, miscellaneous comments, 1904 H. c. HART, a critical introduction, 1905 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, an 'unclassifiable play' with a 'half satirical title', 1905 E. K. CHAMBERS, 'the limits of comedy . . . sorely strained', 1906 MORTON LUCE, Measure for Measure and 'the philosophy of morals', 1906 ROBERT BRIDGES, on the 'inconsistency in the character of Angelo', 1907 SIR WALTER RALEIGH, Shakespeare's representation of 'a weak world', 1907 ANDREW j. GEORGE, a play dramatizing 'the central truth of Christian morality', 1907 A. B. WALKLEY, a play better read than acted, 1907 FRANK HARRIS, Duke Vincentio as Shakespeare's alter ego, 1909 CHARLOTTE PORTER, 'a dramatised Sermon on the Mount of Genius', 1909 MARY SUDDARD, an attack on Puritanism, 1909 GEORGE SAINTSBURY, 'an early, half finished piece', 1910 ELMER EDGAR STOLL, historical criticism and Measure for Measure, 1910 JOHN MASEFIELD, 'one of the greatest works of the greatest English mind', 1911 C.E.MONTAGUE, William Poel's 'Elizabethan' production, 1911 EDGAR c. MORRIS, characterization, style and structure, 1912 viii

152 161 168 172 182 186 192 194

196 199 201 205 215 219 229 236 239 242 244 254 257 261 263 268 271 274

281 286 289 295 300 309 311 313 316 319

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

66 67 68 69 70

STOPFORD A. BROOKE, an 'eminently disagreeable' piece of cynicism, 1913 BRANDER MATTHEWS, a play 'as painful as it is ill-shapen', 1913 WILLIAM WINTER, a play 'unfit for the modern Theatre', 1913 LAFCADIO HEARN, Measure for Measure and 'the ethical spirit of western literature', 1915 BENEDETTO CROCE, the 'happy ending . . . fails to persuade', 1920

338 340

NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

343 363

INDEX

373

ix

323 332 336

General Editor's Preface

The aim of this series is to increase our knowledge of how Shakespeare's plays were received and understood by critics, editors, and general readers. His work, with its enormous range of represented situations, characters, styles, and moods, has always been a challenge, both to the capacity of readers and to their critical systems. Two main reactions may be expected: either the system is expanded to match the plays, or the plays are reduced to fit the system. If we study his reception in the neo-classic period, as I have done in my six-volume anthology of primary texts, Shakespeare: the Critical Heritage, 1623-1801 (London and Boston, 1974-81), we see his plays being cropped — literally cut, drastically adapted — to accommodate the prevailing notions of decorum and propriety. If not hacked about for the stage, they were evaluated by literary-critical criteria which seem to us self-evidently anachronistic indeed and inappropriate, and were found wanting. Yet despite this frequent mismatch between system and artefact, the focus of neo-classic critical theory on issues of characterization, structure and style did enable many writers to respond to the experience of reading or seeing his plays in a fresh and personal way. Since most of the eighteenth-century material has been dealt with in the previously-mentioned collection, the main emphasis in this series will be on documenting the period 1790 to 1920. While the major Romantic critics (Coleridge, Hazlitt, Keats) have been often studied, and will need less representation here, there are many interesting and important writers of the early nineteenth century who have seldom attracted attention from modern historians. As one moves on chronologically, into the Victorian period, our knowledge becomes even more thin and patchy. But there was a continuous, indeed constantly increasing stream of publications in England, America, France, and Germany, hardly known today. This period saw the founding of the Shakespeare Society by J. P. Collier in 1840, which produced a huge number of publications by 1853, when it unfortunately collapsed, following Collier's exposure as a forger. In 1873 the New Shakespere Society was founded by F. J. Furnivall, and over the following twenty years produced some eight series of publications, including its Transactions, which contain many important critical and scholarly essays, a group of reprints of early quartos, allusion books, bibliographies, and much else. This was also the period in which the first journals devoted exclusively to Shakespeare appeared, some short-lived, such as Shakespeariana (Philadelphia 1883) and Poet-Lore (Philadelphia 1889-97), Noctes Shakspeariana (Winchester College, 1887), or New Shakespeareana (the organ of the Shakespeare Society of New York), but at least one still with us, the Jahrbuch of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, which appeared X

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

as such from 1865 to 1963, was divided into separate volumes for West and East Germany in 1964—65, but happily reunited in 1991. Shakespeare's plays were constantly edited and reprinted in this period. Of the complete works, the first great peak was Malone's 'third variorum' edition, posthumously edited by James Boswell, Jr. (21 vols, 1821), the apotheosis of the eighteenthcentury tradition. The second, even more influential, was the Cambridge Shakespeare, the first volume of which was edited by William G. Clark and John Glover, the remaining eight by Clark and W. Aldis Wright (9 vols, 1836-66), which represented a completely fresh evaluation of the text. In its one-volume format, christened 'The Globe Shakespeare', with its act, scene, and line-numbering, this became the most widely used edition throughout the English-speaking world over the next century. The Cambridge edition presented Shakespeare's text with minimum annotation, breaking the eighteenth-century practice of reprinting all the important footnotes from every earlier edition, an incremental process which burdened the page but certainly led to a great dissemination of knowledge about Shakespeare's plays. That service was recommenced on a new and more coherent plan in 1871 by Dr H. H. Furness with his New Variorum Edition. Between 1871 and 1907 Furness edited fourteen plays, being succeeded by his son, H. H. Furness, Jr., who edited a further five plays from 1908 to 1928. In 1936 the Modern Language Association of America took over the series, which still continues. But in addition to these outstanding scholarly editions, a vast number of competing sets of the plays were issued for and absorbed by an apparently insatiable public. Their popularity can be judged by the remarkable number of reprints and reeditions enjoyed, for instance, by Charles Knight's 'Pictorial edition', drawing on the latest advances in lithography, which was published in fifty-five monthly parts between 1838 and 1843, and then collected into eight volumes. This 'Pictorial' edition was reprocessed to form Knight's 'Library edition' (12 vols, 1842-44), itself re-christened the 'National edition' in 1850—52, and not easily distinguishable from Knight's own 'Cabinet edition' (16 vols, 1847—48), not to mention his 'Imperial edition' and 'Blackfriars edition', all of which were followed by a host of spin-offs of their constituent material. Similar multiple editions were produced by J. P. Collier (8 vols, 1842-44; 6 vols, 1858; 8 vols, 1878 - now described as having 'the Purest Text and the Briefest Notes'), and Alexander Dyce (6 vols, 1857; 9 vols, 1846-47; 10 vols, 1880-81, 1895-1901). Other notable editions came from J. O. Halhwell (16 vols, 1853-65); Howard Staunton (3 vols, 1856-60; 8 vols, 1872; 6 vols, 1860, 1873, 1894; 15 vols, 1881); John Dicks, whose 'shilling edition' (1861) had reputedly sold a million copies by 1868, but was undercut by the 'Shakespeare for Sixpence' edition (Cardiff, 1897); Nicolaus Delius (7 vols, 1854-61), the text of which was re-used by F. G. Furnivall for his one-volume 'Leopold edition' (1877, '100th Thousand' by 1910). Valuable scholarly editions included those by Edward Dowden (12 vols, 188283); F. A. Marshall and Henry Irving, the 'Henry Irving' edition (8 vols, 1888-90); C. H. Herford's 'Eversley edition' (10 vols, 1899); the 'Stratford town edition' by A. H. Bullen and others (10 vols, 1904-07); the 'University Press' edition with notes by Sidney Lee and important introductions to the individual plays by over thirty critics (40 vols, 1906—9); and many, many more, as yet unchronicled by bibliographers. xi

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

America also launched a vigorous tradition of Shakespeare editing, starting with Gulian C. Verplanck, who emulated Charles Knight by issuing an edition in monthly parts from 1844 to 1847, collecting them to form the 'Illustrated Shakespeare' (3 vols, New York, 1847). H. N. Hudson produced a substantial edition, at first in 11 volumes (Boston, 1851-56), then expanded to 20 (1880-81). R. Grant White produced a 12 volume edition (Boston, 1857—66, 1888), re-issued in more compact form as the 'Riverside edition' (3 vols, Boston, 1883). J. A. Morgan edited the 'Bankside' edition (22 vols, New York, 1888-1906), which included parallel texts of the plays from the quartos and folio. W. J. Rolfe produced a larger edition (40 vols, New York, 1871-96), and a smaller or 'Friendly edition' (20 vols, New York, 1884), both of which were revised and frequently re-issued: 'Rolfe's texts from 1870 to 1911 formed the standard text for many American classrooms'. Finally, America produced two notable Shakespeare editions by women, Mary Cowden Clarke's (2 vols, 1860; 4 vols, 1864), and the 'First Folio edition' by Charlotte E. Porter and Helen A. Clarke (40 vols, New York, 1903—13). These editions often included biographical material, illustrative notes, accounts of Shakespeare's sources, excerpts from contemporary ballads and plays, attempts to ascertain the chronology of his writings, and much else. The fortunate - largely middle-class - purchasers of these sets had access to a surprisingly wide range of material, much of it based on a sound historical knowledge. In addition to the complete works, there were countless editions of the individual plays and poems, many of them of a high scholarly standard. The school texts market was dominated by the 'Temple Shakespeare', annotated by Israel Gollancz (1902), but Oxford, Cambridge and other publishers issued competing series. At a higher level, designed for University students and serious scholars, was the 'Arden edition', general editors W. J. Craig and R. H. Case, in which each play had a different editor (39 vols, 1899—1924). Throughout this period numerous facsimiles of the Folio and Quarto appeared, with ever-improving technology. The more we study the Victorian period, the less likely we shall be to indulge such facile dismissals of it as Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). Where Strachey could follow the common practice of rejecting the values of the preceding age, we now should have sufficient historical distance to place the scholarly and critical output of that period into a coherent perspective. Nineteenth-century scholars produced a number of studies that held their place as authorities for many years, and can still be used with profit. For Shakespeare's language there was E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian grammar (1869; many editions), Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare-Lexicon (Berlin, 187475, 1886), revised and extended by Gregor Sarrazin (2 vols, Berlin, 1902), and Wilhelm Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik (Halle, 1898-1900, 1909; Heidelberg, 1924). It is only very recently that modern works, such as Marvin Spevack, A Shakespeare Thesaurus (Hildesheim, 1993), have added anything new. On the fundamental issue of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, such as his collaboration with John Fletcher in Henry VIII, the division of labour independently proposed for that play by Samuel Hickson and James Spedding in 1847 and 1850 has been largely confirmed by Jonathan Hope in The authorship of Shakespeare's Plays (Cambridge, 1994). In other areas we now have more reliable tools to work with than the Victorians, but it was they who laid the basis for many of our scholarly approaches to Shakespeare. xii

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

As for their Shakespeare criticism, while a few authors are still known and read — A. C. Bradley for his Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Walter Pater for his essay on 'Shakespeare's English Kings' in Appreciations (1880) — the majority are simply unknown. Among the English critics who clearly deserve to be revalued are Richard Simpson for his essays on Shakespeare's historical plays, R. G. Moulton for his Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885; 3rd edn 1906), Edward Dowden, and F. S. Boas. As for the many German critics whose work was eagerly translated into English — A. W. Schlegel, Hermann Ulrici, G. G. Gervinus, Karl Elze, Wilhelm Creizenach who today can give any account of their writings?

In this volume Professor George L. Geckle has drawn on the full range of responses to Measure for Measure produced between the 1780s and 1920. Readers will find here excerpts from major editions of the complete works of Shakespeare by Malone (No. 3), Steevens (No. 4), Thomas Bowdler's 'Family Shakespeare' (No. 12) — who achieved his full expurgation (including omitting the whole of Lucio's part) only at the third attempt (1823). We also find material drawn from Charles Knight's popular 'Pictorial edition' (No. 19), J. Payne Collier's text, 'Formed from an Entirely New Collation of the Old Editions' (No. 20), and the editions by J. O. Halliwell (No. 24), S. W. Singer (No. 28), F. J. Furnivall's 'Leopold Shakespeare' (No. 34), the 'Henry Irving' Shakespeare (No. 40), C. H. Herford's 'Eversley' edition (No. 46), the 'Red Letter Shakespeare' of E. K. Chambers (No. 52), A. H. Bullen's 'Stratford Town' edition (No. 54), and the 'University Press Shakespeare', master-minded by Sidney Lee (No. 56). Of the American editions Professor Geckle has drawn on those by G. C. Verplanck (No. 23), H. N. Hudson (No. 25), and the 'First Folio Edition' by Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke (No. 59), not to mention individual editions of the play by Henry Morley (No. 39), H. C. Hart (No. 50), and E. C. Morris (No. 65). In addition to other American critics — R. G. White (No. 27), the Hegelian Denton Smder (No. 33), the Catholic George Wilkes (No. 35), Barrett Wendell (No. 42), H. W. Mabie (No. 47), and E. E. Stoll (No. 62), we find three formidable and influential Germans - A. W. von Schlegel (No. 8), Hermann Ulrici (No. 22), and G. G. Gervinus (No. 30), one Danish critic, Georg Brandes (No. 44), one Italian, Benedetto Croce (No. 70), and the honorary Japanese citizen, Lafcadio Hearn (No. 69). As one might expect, Professor Geckle's selection includes many of the leading Shakespeare scholars and critics of this period: Francis Douce (No. 5), Hazlitt (No. 11), Coleridge (No. 17) — the most often-cited verdict on the play, inspiring agreement and disagreement in equal measure, J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps (No. 36), F. S. Boas (No. 43), Sidney Lee (No. 45), R. G. Moulton (No. 48), A. C. Bradley (No. 49), Morton Luce (No. 53), and Stopford Brooke (No. 66). More surprising, perhaps, is the large number of literary men who were drawn to the play, important figures in the world of books: Walter Bagehot (No. 26), Walter Pater (No. 31), Edward Dowden (No. 32), A. C. Swinburne (Nos. 37, 51), Arthur Symons (No. 40), Andrew Lang (No. 41), Robert Bridges (No. 54), Walter Raleigh (No. 55), Frank Harris (No. 58), George Saintsbury (No. 61), and John Masefield (No. 63). It seems xiii

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

that Measure for Measure has always attracted readers far beyond the professional class of Shakespeare editors and scholars. Its fortunes in the theatre have been less auspicious, but Professor Geckle has been able to include some illuminating reviews of two performances in London, one at Covent Garden in 1816, by William Hazlitt (No. 9), the other at the Adelphi in 1906, by A. B. Walkley (No. 57), and a notice by C. E. Montague (No. 64) of the epoch-making 1908 production at the Gaiety, Manchester, in which William Poel tried to abolish the proscenium arch and recreate an Elizabethan apron stage. Recovering this material is not an historical or archaeological exercise, however. Modern Shakespeare criticism began in the nineteenth century, and the issues first addressed here continued to absorb, and divide, critics right through the twentieth century and into our own. It may be that a work's very nature determines the direction that much criticism will take. In discussing King Lear it would hardly be possible to avoid thinking about the nature of life, the positioning of the self with or against others, the difference between good and evil (and our ability to distinguish them), the formative and deformative relationships between parents and children. Experiencing Measure for Measure inevitably concentrates our thoughts and feelings on human sexuality, on law and its proper administration, on power and corruption. These are all powerful issues, well likely to reveal differences of opinion, and perhaps the first thing we notice, reading this collection, is that these critics are all engaged in passionate agreement or disagreement with each other, and with Shakespeare's play. Indeed, the range of divergent opinions expressed here seems to be unusually great, testifying to the power that Measure for Measure still possesses, to disturb readers and theatregoers. For the German critic Gervinus (No. 30), the play was 'a defence' of corrective punishment; for the Englishman, Charles Cowden Clarke (No. 29), a contemporary of Dickens, the character of Barnardine proved 'the immorality, as well as the futility, of visiting crime with the indiscriminate punishment of incarceration'. Such diametrically opposed positions regularly recur in discussions of Measure for Measure. F. S. Boas (No. 43), extending the play beyond its conclusion, opined that the future Vienna will be a healthy society, thanks to Isabella's 'leavening presence at the core of the state'. But Stopford Brooke (No. 66) was convinced that 'After the close of Measure for Measure, the social state will worsen'. In the painful scene where Isabella rejects Claudio's pleas for his life - 'O, faithless coward! O, dishonest wretch!' - Anna Brownell Jameson (No. 16) judged Isabella's indignation 'extreme', but 'perfectly in character'. Andrew Lang (No. 41), however, objected: 'Is this a natural mood? Could a girl speak thus to a brother, degraded as he is?' Those totally opposed positions are typical of the polarization that Measure for Measure has always provoked. Such radical critical disagreement might be the sign of a poorly integrated play. Stopford Brooke saw the play's 'moral aim' conflicting with its 'artistic one', producing a 'broken, unequal work'. Ten years earlier E. K. Chambers (No. 52) had described it as 'the random and tentative exercise, in various directions at once, of a mordant analysis, resulting in a somewhat intricate design of unresolved and interwoven themes'. Critics who cannot make sense of a play in their own terms are prone to blaming the dramatist for not making it easier to understand. Yet the xiv

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

cumulative study of the play's sources showed that Shakespeare's alterations to the plot were deliberate and consistent. Important work on the sources was produced in every generation covered here — indeed, one of the fascinations of this collection is that it shows us writers responding to a scholarly problem afresh, sometimes in ignorance of their predecessors. The pioneer was Augustine Skottowe in 1824 (No. 14), the first to show in detail how Shakespeare used Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra. Other valuable discussions of Shakespeare's treatment of his sources were produced by G. G. Gervinus (1863; No. 30), Henry Morley (1889; No. 39), Andrew Lang (1891; No. 41), F. S. Boas (1896; No. 43), Georg Brandes (1898; No. 44), Sidney Lee (1898; No. 45), C. H. Herford (1899; No. 46), and Charlotte Porter (1909; No. 59). Critics agreed that Shakespeare's major changes to his source were the invention of Mariana, and the retaining of Duke Vincentio to play a major role in the action (in both Cinthio and Whetstone the Deputy is left alone). Both changes carried major consequences for the plot. The invention of Mariana allows the 'bed-trick', in which she is bedded by the man to whom she is contracted, and to whom she can finally be given in marriage; and it frees Isabella for marriage with the Duke. Also, it allows Shakespeare to clearly differentiate Isabella from Whetstone's Cassandra, who yielded sexually to the Deputy in order to save her brother's life. Shakespeare makes Isabella's chastity into a major dramatic issue, a change affecting the play's whole balance, as many critics saw (Skottowe, No. 14; Pater, No. 31; Furnivall, No. 34; Morley, No. 39). In Sidney Lee's words, 'the central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chastity' (No. 45), a judgment echoed by Andrew George (No. 56) and Charlotte Porter (No. 59), who described 'the transcendancy of Isabella over Cassandra'. Keeping the Duke within the play, Henry Morley commented, 'going to and fro as a good genius', takes away 'from the tragic incidents every suggestion that there may be an unhappy end' (No. 39). Georg Brandes (No. 44) described the Duke as 'a wise and invisibly omnipresent prince, an occidental Haroun-al-Raschid', with the important advantage that, in his disguise, he 'is witness from the beginning of Angelo's abuse of his power'. Charlotte Porter drew attention to 'the important constructive change' forming the basis of Shakespeare's new plot, namely 'the Duke's intuitive suspicion of Angelo', and the role he takes on as 'private detective', one who discovers 'unsuspected good' as well as evil. Porter described the Duke as 'the very pivot of the new plot, of its new spirit and conclusion'. As Skottowe put it, study of the sources enables 'the attaining of an insight into Shakespeare's process in the construction of his play'. The critics represented here noted that, in addition to these major changes, Shakespeare built into the plot a number of deliberate parallels and contrasts. Skottowe, so perceptive on Shakespeare's development of the Isabella - Angelo relationship from the imperfect hints of Whetstone, said of Barnardine that 'a character more unnecessary for the advancing of a plot was never placed in a list of dramatis personae', and Walter Raleigh (No. 55) judged him 'a mere detail in the machinery'. However, other writers saw that his indifference to death made a deliberate contrast with Claudio's fear of it, including Verplanck (No. 23), Hudson (No. 25: Claudio is 'a generous spirit walled in with overmuch infirmity, . . . Barnardine, a frightful petrifaction of humanity'), Lang (No. 41) and Brooke (No. 66), who vividly described Barnardine as 'the XV

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

brutal man, hopelessly material', who 'thinks less of the deprivation of life than he thinks of the deprivation of drink. .. . The sketch is rapid and vivid. No one can mistake Shakespeare's intention to contrast him with Claudio'. Critics who pointed out the contrast between Escalus and Angelo in their attitude to justice included F. S. Boas (No. 43), describing the 'divided counsels on the judgement-seat', and R. G. Moulton (No. 48). Another deliberate plot-parallelism was seen to be that between Claudio and Angelo in their attitude to contracts. Boas (No. 43) described as 'one of the dramatist's most subtle and original uses of parallelism' the fact that, in Shakespeare's re-shaped plot, 'Claudio's relation to Juliet had been almost of a piece with that of Angelo to Mariana', Angelo's leaving 'his already affianced bride in the lurch' being contrasted with Claudio's 'generous impetuosity', which 'preferred disregard of an outward form to heartless desertion'. Denton Snider (No. 33) pointed out that, at the end of the play, 'four pairs are brought up before us, representing various phases of marriage'. Other critics, including Ulrici (No. 22) and Hudson (No. 25), noticed a 'fundamental point of contrast' between Isabella's virtue and Angelo's, and saw that Isabella and Mariana represented 'opposites' (White, No. 27), as do Lucio and the Provost (Clarke, No. 29). In fact, some saw the principle of character parallels and contrasts as central to Measure for Measure. As Gervinus put it, the 'doctrine of the harmful excess of all and even good things' which runs through the play was also expressed in the characters and in the contrast of their position with regard to each other. The single character of Angelo, with the unnaturally overstrained exaggeration of his nature, counterbalances alone a series of contrasts; his severity counterbalances the mildness of the Duke, his sobriety the levity of Claudio, his heartlessness the tender weakness of his faithful Mariana, and his anxious adherence to the appearance of good, Lucio's indifference to the basest reputation. C. H. Herford (No. 46) found further proof of'Shakespeare's refining art' by placing Claudio at the centre of a series of oppositions. He 'is relieved with exquisite delicacy against the hideous throng whose sin the law identifies with his. His first words of keen humiliation instantly distinguish him from the brazen Lucio. . . . His imagination is as rich as Isabel's, but his will takes the colour of its changing visions', and he is clearly contrasted with Angelo, both of them 'failures in opposite schools of life'. With so much evidence of Shakespeare's deliberate planning in the creation and disposition of character, it becomes harder to indict him of 'random' or 'tentative' plotting. Indeed, an impressive number of critics commented on the directness with which he confronted the issues that he had raised. John Masefield praised the play's 'penetrating . . . unflinching thought' (No. 63), and Gulian Verplanck (No. 23) argued that even negative judgments on the play, such as Coleridge's, were 'an acknowledgment of the severe unity of feeling and purpose which pervades the piece, and the impressive power with which it enforces revolting and humbling truths'. Walter Bagehot (No. 26) agreed with Hazlitt that Measure for Measure had been written con amore, making it 'one of the plays which take hold of the mind most easily and most powerfully', while Andrew Lang (No. 41) judged that Shakexvi

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

speare 'seldom probes the human heart more deeply; seldom displays the upper and inner layers of consciousness so clearly as in Measure for Measure', and Brooke (No. 66) saw Shakespeare as being 'driven to create extremes of human nature'. The play's starting-point, as H. N. Hudson (No. 25) observed, was the Duke's declared purpose 'in assuming the disguise of a monk, . . . to unmask the deputy, and demonstrate to others what himself has long known'. G. G. Gervinus (No. 30) agreed with this diagnosis, as did Lang (No. 41), F. S. Boas (No. 43), and Andrew George (No. 56). Lang added that a character such as Angelo's 'is with difficulty unmasked; he is at once too wary, too selfish, and even too cold' for anyone to perceive his true nature: 'absolute power will make him show himself as he is'. Critical agreement that the testing of Angelo forms the play's point of departure was given a more challenging formulation by R. G. Moulton, who described it as 'perhaps the purest example in poetry of a moral experiment' (No. 48). The action of the play, he observed, does not derive from 'a crisis arising of itself in the course of human events'. Rather, the Duke, in his withdrawal from Vienna, is designedly contriving special conditions in which he will be able to study the workings of human nature. But the scientific experimenter knows that nature is infinitely complex in its operations; he can determine for himself what forces he will set to work, but as to the mode in which they will manifest themselves he must be prepared for the unexpected; he must watch his experiment, use means to keep it within the channel he desires, and be prepared with resources to meet what may arise of the accidental. In particular, Moulton argued, the Duke wishes to study 'the relationship between law and the personality of those who administer justice', Angelo and Escalus representing 'unpitying strictness' and 'considerate clemency' respectively. 'But neither the Duke nor anyone else could foresee the exact issues that would arise as particular cases set these forces in operation', and the crime of Claudio at once polarizes the judges' 'opposing principles'. In other words, the play's polarities are not only part of the initial plot-structure, but also arise out of its dynamic development. The really crucial element, as Moulton pointed out, is the fact that 'Claudio has a sister Isabella, who pleads with Angelo for her brother: at once new moral issues appear of the deepest interest'. Moulton analyzed with exemplary clarity the effect that Isabella's purity and zeal has on Angelo, the resulting division within Angelo, the conflict in Isabella 'between passionate purity and brotherly love', and the unforeseen way in which Angelo plunges 'from one crime to another'. While recognizing that 'both the complication and the resolution of the plot have their chief motive force in the Duke', Moulton showed that at the point when the play reaches an impasse, in the painful scene where Isabella rejects Claudio's pleas for his life, the Duke must intervene, 'the experimenter must come to the aid of his own experiment', improvising new expedients to deal with the unforeseen, and being aided by a fortunate accident (the death of Ragozine). Moulton's analysis of the play, marked by all the clarity and penetration that he brought to the study of drama, remains an impressive demonstration of Measure for xvii

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Measure's coherent design. Moulton approached it from the perspective of the organizing character, the Duke being, so to speak, a surrogate dramatist, and he drew attention to one of Shakespeare's supreme skills, his power to show characters changing under the pressure of experience. Anne Barton has contrasted Jonson and Shakespeare as dramatists, Jonson using 'stereotyped humour characters whose obsession may be brutally shattered but who are fundamentally incapable of growth or change, measured against Shakespearian characters who learn from their experiences, becoming wiser and better in the course of five acts...' — but also worse. Indeed, it is the successive deterioration of Angelo, Isabella, and Claudio under the pressure of desire, disgust, and the fear of death that has troubled so many readers of the play, and continues to disturb. Andrew Lang (No. 41), who disliked the play, acknowledged that 'with all its gloom, Measure for Measure is at least rich, and perhaps too rich, in dramatic situations. The changes and turns of character under the stress of different emotions are almost too frequent'. Many of the critics represented here, including Moulton, testify to the play's 'interest', or describe it as 'interesting': they include Hazlitt (No. 11) - denying that the play arouses 'a cordial interest', Thomas Bowdler (No. 12), 'P. P.' - probably George Daniel (No. 13), Anna Brownell Jameson (No. 16), Charles Knight (No. 19), G. C. Verplanck (No. 23), William Watkiss Lloyd (No. 28), Charles Cowden Clarke (No. 29), and Charlotte Porter (No. 59 — on 'the dramatic interest of the plot'), among others. Our awareness of what these writers meant is damaged by the fact that 'interest' and 'interesting' have lost much of their force in modern times. Throughout the nineteenth century 'interest' still carried the sense of 'a feeling of concern for . . . a person or thing', while 'interesting' meant something 'important', that 'concerns, touches, affects', can 'engage attention, or appeal to the emotions' (O. E. D.}. The high 'interest' that Measure for Measure still generates in its readers can be seen in the intensity with which these critics respond to the main characters, an intensity of approval and disapproval scarcely matched elsewhere in Shakespeare. However, critics then, as now, were prone to losing sight of Shakespeare's over-all design, and judging his characters as if they were people in real life, or assimilating them to some pre-existing conception, such as the sentimentalized worship of Shakespeare's women. Isabella has suffered most from such attention, being described as embodying 'angelic purity' (Clarke, No. 29), 'gentleness, modesty, and reserve' (Richardson, No. 2), 'heavenly purity' (Schlegel, No. 8), 'humility . . . purity . . . martyr-like determination' (Knight, No. 19), 'strictness . . . purity . . . unapproachableness' (Ulrici, No. 22), having a character 'as nearly approaching perfection as is consistent with possible reality' (Halliwell, No. 24), 'in some respects the very finest in Shakespeare's matchless cabinet of female excellence' (Hudson, No. 25), and so on through a cloying series of testimonies from Lloyd (No. 28), Clarke (No. 29), Gervinus (No. 30) - who found Isabella unique in the play as 'a type of complete human nature', Dowden (No. 32 — 'this pure zeal, this rectitude of will, this virgin sanctity'), Furnivall (No. 34 — 'the highest type of woman that Shakespeare has yet drawn'), Wilkes (No. 35), Boas (No. 43), Hart (No. 50), Luce (No. 53), George (No. 56), Morris (No. 65 - 'one of Shakespeare's most ideal women'), and Winter (No. 68 - her character 'exacts the . . . final force of intrinsic nobility'). xviii

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

These critics, we might say, have idealized the Isabella of her first scene, and not attended to the dynamic character change that she undergoes when caught between two apparently irreconcileable demands. On the one hand Angelo insists that she consent to a degrading sexual liaison, threatening to execute her brother if she refuses, his psychological pressure on her being increased by Claudio pleading for his life (and naively assuming that Angelo would keep his promise to save the brother, after he has seduced the sister); on the other, Isabella cherishes her spiritual vocation, according to which intercourse with Angelo would have been a mortal sin. Under pressure, and wishing to save her soul, Isabella decides against both men, only to be then attacked by critics who see her decision as springing from some fault of character. Hazlitt declared himself to be not 'greatly enamoured of Isabella's rigid chastity, though she could not act otherwise than she did. We do not feel the same confidence in the virtue that is "sublimely good" at another's expense, as if it had been put to some less disinterested trial' (No. 11). In 1822, 'P. P.' expressed reverence for Isabella, but judged her as if the matter at issue were merely an insignificant sexual favour: 'Had her tenderness for her brother operated so strongly as to have overcome her virtue, though she would have sunk considerably in our opinion as a saint, she would have risen greatly in our esteem as a woman'. In 1824 Augustine Skottowe described Isabella's 'spotless and austere chastity' as 'not exciting our love, for her self-involved virtue needs no human sympathy' (No. 14). Several critics gave wholly unsympathetic accounts of Isabella. R. G. White (No. 27) pithily described her as 'a pietist in her religion, a pedant in her talk, a prude in her notions, and a prig in her conduct'. He found her 'more chilling than a North West Passage', her 'frigidity with Angelo . . . unredeemed by any tenderness to her brother'. Her firmness in defending her chastity 'would be to her honor', White judged, 'were not the spirit in which she does it so pitiless, so utterly uncompassionate. ..'. W. W. Lloyd (No. 28) also found her 'cold and unimpressible when approached through her affections', quite lacking in sisterly love. R. G. Moultoii (No. 48), to his credit, saw that the split within Isabella was not a basic part of her personality but a consequence of the plot-development by which her pleading with Angelo had aroused his lust: 'the crisis of the story distracts Isabella between claims of kinship and defence of outraged purity: we see the overbalanced nature in the cruel rage with which she turns upon her brother in his moment of weakness'. Shakespeare has deliberately brought Isabella to this breaking-point, and confronted readers and theatregoers with her dilemma. Many critics, even though they know that Angelo cannot be trusted to keep his side of any contract, simply argue that, faced with a choice between her brother's life and her chastity — which is crucial to her spiritual vocation — she should yield her virginity. Stopford Brooke (No. 66) vigorously attacked her value-system, protesting that 'chastity such as hers, which repudiated all union with a man, as impure, was directly against nature, and has always induced into its advocates and practisers an unnaturalness in their actions and judgments'. The Rev. H. N. Hudson, however, challenged Henry Hallam, and others like him, who disapproved of Isabella's values, asking 'whether she would have not suffered a still greater depreciation in his esteem, if she had yielded to Angelo's proposal'. While expressing pity for Claudio, not xix

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

blame, 'whatever course he had taken in so terrible an alternative', Hudson found Isabella's conduct every way creditable to her. Her reproaches were indeed too harsh, if they appeared to spring from any want of love; but as it is, their very harshness does her honour, as it shows the natural workings of a tender and deep affection, in an agony of disappointment at being counselled, by one for whom she would die, to an act which she shrinks from with noble horror, and justly regards as worse than death. We have here the keen anguish of conflicting feelings venting itself in a severity which, though certainly undeserved, only serves to disclose the more impressively the treasured riches of her character. A similar divergence of opinions attended Isabella's willingness to go along with the plot involving Mariana, through which, the Duke assures her, 'you may most uprighteously do a poor wrong'd lady a merited benefit', and 'redeem your brother from the angry law' (3.1.199-201). W. W. Lloyd (No. 28) protested that Isabella here 'lends herself to the accomplishment of an intrigue' that she should 'have repulsed and revolted from', and argued that, by agreeing to the bed-trick involving Mariana and Angelo, she becomes 'accessory to a transgression several degrees worse than that of Claudio and Juliet'. But G. C. Verplanck (No. 23) defended the 'very venial artifice' of Isabella's agreement as only a slight blemish, while F. S. Boas (No. 43), describing Isabella's 'recoil' from Claudio's pleading as 'the elemental rage of unsophisticated purity against sin', argued that her agreement 'to the Duke's stratagem . . . to save her brother', and secure Mariana's happiness, 'proves that her outburst of defiance to Claudio does not spring from callousness to his sufferings'. On the other side, Andrew Lang found Isabella's virtue both 'austere' and 'selfregarding. It is not only her maiden pride, but her immortal soul that Isabella is chary of (No. 41) — as if that should have been an irrelevant consideration. In 1907 Walter Raleigh (No. 55) described her as 'severe, and beautiful, and white with an absolute whiteness', but also 'touched . . . by Shakespeare's irony. She stands apart, and loses sympathy as an angel might lose it, by seeming to have too little stake in humanity: Then Isabel live chaste, and brother die; More than our brother is our chastity. [2.4.184-5] Perhaps it is the rhyming tag', Raleigh observed, that gives this speech ' a certain explicit and repulsive calmness'. Still, it was obviously a deliberate decision of Shakespeare's to aggravate the conflict within Isabella to the highest point. Some critics, accepting the plot donnee of her vocation, would defend her on the grounds of Christian belief, that losing one's soul was truly the greatest, the irrecoverable loss. Others might retort, as A. B. Walkley did, that 'we do not take the historic standpoint in the theatre, we are subject to the sympathies and antipathies of the moment, and one undoubtedly feels a certain antipathy, along with one's admiration, for this "thing ensky'd and sainted" [1.4.34]'. Yet, given the enormous pressure that the situation put on Isabella, in which Shakespeare pushes to its utmost the antitheses of XX

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

soul and body, self and other, we ought to feel some sympathy for her vulnerability, caught in this impossible dilemma. Luckily, the dilemma is soon dissolved by the Duke, regaining control over his experiment, imposing order on events. Critics attentive to Shakespeare's design regard the Duke as an organizing and stabilizing force. Schlegel (No. 8) welcomed the fact that 'the Duke, in the disguise of a Monk, is always present to watch over his dangerous representative, and to avert every evil which could possibly be apprehended; we look to him with confidence for a happy result'. Gervinus (No. 30) shared Schlegel's confidence in the Duke — watching this 'circumspect man .. . playing the part of Providence, has the effect of rendering us prepared and calm as the events unfold before us', an opinion shared by George Brandes (No. 44) — 'the spectators are thus reassured in advance as to the final issue', and Arthur Symons (No. 40), who saw the Duke as 'a Prospero working greater miracles without magic', guiding us 'through the labyrinths of the play by a clue of which he has the secret'. R. G. Moulton, the best of these critics who kept sight of the play's over-all design, drew attention to that 'fresh stage in the plot', by which 'the experimenter comes to the aid of his own experiment', the prose passage immediately following Claudio's anguished 'Ay, but to die' speech, and Isabella's even more anguished response — 'O faithless coward!. .. . Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?' (3.1.117—51). Here the Duke tells her about Mariana, abandoned by Angelo, and outlines the subterfuge that can resolve both problems. The Duke/Friar is here given prose for the first time, the change of media matching a change of mood, and having a definite dampening effect after such great emotional stress. It is significant that the following sixty lines, in which the Duke describes Mariana and explains his plan, contain no metaphors, it being 'somehow reassuring that he should use such ordered language and appeal only to Isabella's reason, not to her disturbed emotions'. When the Duke begins to describe in detail his subterfuge, and the benefit it will bring, the logical and rhetorical devices he uses create a sense of order and predictability. Critics who do not approach Measure for Measure with a sense of Shakespeare's design, however, and judge the Duke not as a character in a play but as if he were someone from everyday life, were disturbed by his 'experiment'. Hazlitt objected that the Duke 'is more absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state; more tenacious of his own character than attentive to the feelings and apprehensions of others' (No. 11) — although neither charge is true. Anna Brownell Jameson (No. 16) saw the Duke as 'bringing about justice by a most unjustifiable succession of falsehoods and counterplots', a judgment echoed by Edgar Morris (No. 65). R. G. White (No. 27) dismissed him as 'well-meaning, undecided, feeble-minded', while W. W. Lloyd (No. 28) saw him as fit only for 'dark management and behind scene intermeddling'. Such criticisms, splitting off a character from its function in the play, essentially misdescribe it. H. C. Hart (No. 50 — the first Arden edition, 1905) complained that the Duke's 'didactic platitudes and his somewhat overdone pompousness' got on his nerves, and described him as 'plunging into a vortex of scheming and intrigue' but achieving nothing, except gaining 'a wife who is a million times too good for him'. E. K. Chambers (No. 52), unable to take the plot seriously, suggested that Shakespeare used the Duke solely for purposes of xx i

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

'ridicule' and 'travesty', in that he erected 'a structure of superfluous mystification and intrigue', and resumed his true identity only 'to reward the evil-doers'. For A. B. Walkley the play should never be experienced in the theatre, for then 'the childishness of the plot is thrust under our noses and the absolutely idiotic behaviour of the Duke is ... rubbed into us' (No. 57). The dynamics of character-change in this play are extreme, with three major characters, Angelo, Claudio, and Isabella each being brought to breaking point. As Andrew Lang (No. 41) described it, Shakespeare treated the play 'as an opportunity for the display of character — a chance to show all the naked passions of the heart wrestling in open conflict...'. Given the changes produced in these characters under convergent pressures, it becomes a test for critics to distinguish the various stages through which the plot pushes them, and to judge them charitably. Unsurprisingly, few commentators in this period could find any redeeming features in Angelo. Mrs Inchbald (No. 7) found Shakespeare guilty of 'a most disgraceful improbability, in representing the deputy Angelo a monster, instead of a man', but most critics have found him all too human. Thomas Bowdler, in his Family Shakespeare (No. 12), described Angelo as a 'monster of iniquity', his 'wickedness . . . atrocious'. Charles Cowden Clarke ringingly denounced 'the vile and cold-blooded hypocrisy of virtue in Angelo - the more heart-sickening from that hypocrisy, as palpable disease is preferable to the scrofulous treachery of roseate health, when the work of death is at the core' (No. 29). Other critics who described Angelo as a hypocrite included Hazlitt (No. 11), 'P.P.' (No. 13), Walter Bagehot (No. 26), and Stopford Brooke (No. 66). George Wilkes (No. 35) found it 'hardly possible for language to picture a more base, bloodthirsty, and unpitying miscreant than Angelo', an indignation shared by H. N. Hudson (No. 25), F. S. Boas (No. 43), Morton Luce (No. 53), and many others. But if critics err by judging Isabella according to the first stages of her presentation, they make the reverse error with Angelo, judging him for what he becomes. A few more observant critics attended to the earlier stages of Shakespeare's presentation of the deputy, before desire undoes him. R. G. White (No. 27) observed that 'Angelo is not all hypocrite at first. His gravity, his preciseness, and his respectability, are not mere shams. He is naturally sober, formal and austere; and having never encountered exactly the sort of temptation which alone could betray him into impropriety, he has been exceedingly proper all his life'. Having observed his 'naturally formal and unbending character of mind' in the first two Acts, we can judge the degree to which 'the cold surface of his soul has been ruffled by passion', once confronted by 'this virtuous maid' (2.2.184). Other critics emphasized the importance of the scenes (1.4, 2.2) where Lucio urges Isabella to intensify her pleadings to Angelo, with the persuasion ironically taking a course that she could no longer control. (Shakespeare several times shows the power of persuasion in a questionable light. ) Previous to his encounter with Isabella, Arthur Symons (No. 40) argued, Angelo 'is not a hypocrite: he has no dishonourable intention in his mind; he conceives himself to be firmly grounded on a broad base of rectitude'. But it is precisely this side of his character that is aroused by Isabella's pleading, 'it is the nobility of Isabella that attracts him; her freedom from the tenderest signs of frailty, xxii

her unbiassed intellect, her regard for justice, her religious sanctity; and it is on his noblest side first, the side of him that can respond to these qualities, that he is tempted. . . . Once tainted, the corruption is over him like leprosy, and every virtue withers into the corresponding form of vice'. Georg Brandes (No. 44) argued that Shakespeare, 'at this stage of development . . . is far too great a psychologist to depict a ready-made, finished hypocrite. No, he shows us how weak even the strictest Pharisee will prove, if only he happens to come across the temptation which really tempts him...'. Robert Bridges (No. 54) also used the term 'Pharisee', seeing Angelo as 'a hard, cold, austere professor of virtue, with an introspective, logical mind of considerable intelligence and ambition'. For Bridges the key psychological feature was Angelo's 'over-regard for his reputation . . . he deems himself a saint: he is consequently a self-deceiver, and presumably a sincere one'. His confrontation with Isabella is 'a strange experience, which something hitherto unsuspected or repressed within him converts into a temptation', and 'he commits horrible crimes'. But 'his fall works his salvation, for he is thereby undeceived, and, knowing himself, repents, and is pardoned, and, we suppose, reformed'. Bridges introduced the term 'selfdeception', a diagnosis soon echoed by Walter Raleigh: Angelo 'is considerately and mildly treated; his hypocrisy is self-deception, not cold and calculated wickedness. Like many another man, he has a lofty, fanciful idea of himself, and his public acts belong to this imaginary person. At a crisis, the real man surprises the play-actor, and pushes him aside'. E. C. Morris (No. 65) found that, through the Duke's device of substituting Mariana for Isabella, 'the self-deception of Angelo is ... made intensely effective', but 'its over-emphasis makes a comedy solution only the more forced'. (The play's ending has aroused much disagreement, as we shall see.) These are all intelligent, perceptive analyses, which a contemporary critic could be proud to have made. The third character whose personality collapses under pressure is Claudio. To many critics Claudio, as the lover of Juliet, has seemed a sympathetic figure, especially after J. O. Halliwell's retrieval of Elizabethan attitudes to marriage, in which a pre-nuptial contract was held to be mutually binding (No. 24). But his moral and psychological collapse under threat of imminent death, as he abjectly pleads with Isabella to save his life, produces a scene that many readers have found disturbing. Several critics expressed disgust at Claudio's collapse. Augustine Skottowe (No. 14) drily observed that 'the fear of death . . . proves fatal to his virtue', but later writers were more censorious. Andrew Lang (No. 41) observed that Claudio has 'half schooled himself to die bravely', but 'how rapidly, by what swift and unperceived gradations, he slides into consent, and a fearful coward's vision of the universal end of all'. As Lang put it, Claudio's resolution collapsed 'at the slightest glimmer of a dishonourable hope', and Benedetto Croce (No. 70) echoed him: 'Claudio clutches hold again of life at that glimmer of hope, of hope stained with opprobrium'. If readers and theatre-goers have been upset by how Claudio behaves, they have been even more disturbed by what he says, that visionary account of the state of death as experienced by a dead person lying in the grave, insensible yet somehow aware of the progress of decay. This very original idea — in which Shakespeare subverted one of the main arguments in the traditional consolatio against death, that at least it brings xxiii

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

extinction to the senses — has haunted many sensitive people. Arthur Murphy left a vivid record of Dr. Johnson's fear of death: The contemplation of his own approaching end was constantly before his eyes; and the prospect of death, he declared, was terrible. For many years, when he was not disposed to enter into the conversation going forward, whoever sat next his chair might hear him repeating, from Shakespeare. Ay, but to die and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods... Indeed, in Johnson's own discussions of the fear of death (remorselessly elicited by Boswell), we hear echoes of that scene. On 17 April 1778, in the course of a conversation in which Johnson agreed with Boswell that 'death is a terrible thing', Anna Seward objected that 'there is one mode of the fear of death, which is certainly absurd; and that is the dread of annihilation, which is only a pleasing sleep without a dream', to which Johnson replied: 'It is neither pleasing, nor sleep; it is nothing. Now mere existence is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain, than not exist.' We recall Claudio's words: The weariest and most loathed wordly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death. (3.1.128-31). As an afterthought Johnson added: 'The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists'. This echoes Isabella's earlier attempt to console Claudio: Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension. . . . (16-80) Johnson's fear of death, and his stubborn rejection of consolation, found expression through the words of a scene where both brother and sister are pushed beyond their psychological limits. This scene continued to arouse comment in the following century. The antiquary Francis Douce (No. 5) provided some valuable parallels to the second theme in Claudio's speech, the description of the pains of purgatory (or hell) from classical and late medieval accounts. Pater's allusion to Orcagna's celebrated fresco of the Last Judgment on the wall of the Campo Santo in Pisa (No. 31) was entirely appropriate to this tradition. Joseph Hunter (No. 21) added that 'some critics have thought that . . . Shakespeare had certain passages in Dante in his mind', although it is not improbable that he confused Dante and Virgil (see p. 348, note [10]). Many commentators admired the speech. Hazlitt (No. 9) approved Claudio's 'fine xxiv

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

description of death as the worst of ills', Nathan Drake (No. 10) described Claudio's list of 'the horrible possibilities which may follow the extinction of this state of being' as 'an enumeration which makes the blood run chill'. F. J. Furnivall (No. 34) judged Claudio to be a 'self-indulgent, life-loving' character, for whom 'death is the greatest terror', but he acknowledged that 'in expression of apprehension he stands even above Hamlet. His words on after-death are among the most poetical in Shakespeare'. In Walter Pater's almost ecstatic evaluation of this 'flowerlike young man' (No. 31), Claudio 'gives utterance to some of the central truths of human feeling, the sincere, concentrated expression of the recoiling flesh. Thoughts as profound and poetical as Hamlet's arise in him; and but for the accidental arrest of sentence he would descend into the dust, with perhaps the most eloquent of all Shakespeare's words upon his lips'. Charles Cowden Clarke (No. 29) judged that 'the grandest writing . . . in the play' appears in this scene, the Duke's advice constituting 'a cool, a frigid ratiocination', while Claudio's represented 'an awful and terrible reality. More powerful lines than these can never have been uttered'. Sidney Lee (No. 45) described Claudio's protest as 'one of the greatest speeches . . . in the range of Shakespearian drama', and the drama critic C. E. Montague (No. 64) agreed that it might qualify for 'the place of finest speech in Shakespeare, were such competitions decent'. The unanimity of critical opinion shows how the breaking-points of these characters can still disturb readers and theatregoers. But how to cope with that disturbance is another matter. Critics who retained a sense of the play's overall design — Shakespeare deliberately creating parallel and contrasting situations of two dislocated love-marriage plots (Angelo — Mariana, Claudio —Juliet), and two strongly opposed attitudes to death (Claudio and Barnadine) — were (and are) more likely to accept the ending as one in which, as R. G. Moulton put it, 'the complication of this exquisite plot has reached its adequate resolution; the moral problem has been fully solved, and the reconciling force emerges as Mercy in its many-sidedness'. Moulton argued his case well, bringing out the many oppositions within the play, those antitheses of 'purity and passion', 'the law and the individual', which, for him, were brought to 'complete reconciliation' in the climax (No. 48). Other readers, unable or unwilling to recognize the play's underlying structure of oppositions, could detect no reconciliation. The two most troublesome aspects of the conclusion have been Angelo's pardon, and the Duke's marriage to Isabella. Moralists angered by Angelo's misdeeds, and his even worse intentions, have echoed Dr. Johnson: 'I believe every reader feels some indignation when he finds him spared' (Vickers, CHS, v. 105). Coleridge (No. 17) protested that 'the pardon and marriage of Angelo . . . baffles the strong indignant claim of justice' - 'for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of. Such complaints that Angelo was not 'adequately punished' (Knight, No. 19), were regularly repeated, by Thomas Bowdler (No. 12), George Wilkes (No. 35), Swinburne (No. 37), Symons (No. 40), Brandes (No. 44), Herford (No. 46), Bridges (No. 54), Saintsbury (No. 61), Edgar Morris (No. 65), Stopford Brooke (No. 66: 'Angelo, whose criminality is almost overdone, . . . is saved, married, and lives at ease in Vienna. .. . We are defrauded of justice; and we feel with indignation that we are defrauded'), and Brander Matthews (No. 67). XXV

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Yet, on the other side, several critics drew attention to the climactic scene where — contrary to Coleridge's denial that Angelo's crimes are not 'morally repented of — the Duke's removal of his disguise instantly evokes from Angelo an honest admission of guilt, and the recognition that he deserves punishment (a reaction which, in this play of contrasts, sets him at the opposite pole to Lucio): Ang. O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, To think that I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your Grace, like pow'r divine, Hath look'd upon my passes. Then, good Prince, 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. (5.1.366-74) The Duke ignores his request, sends him off to marry Mariana, and on his return sentences Angelo to death, refusing the appeals of Mariana and Isabella for mercy. Isabella pleads that Angelo is not guilty of having seduced her, since, in this respect at least, 'His act did not o'ertake his bad intent' (431). But she, like everyone else — including Angelo - believes that Claudio has been executed, and in this belief Angelo again expresses his readiness to accept the punishment he deserves: 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. (5.1.474-7) But Measure for Measure, like The Tempest, reverses the expected outcome, giving 'mercy' more willingly than 'death', for 'The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance' (Tempest, 5.1.27—8). Francis Douce (No. 5), writing in 1807, was one of the first critics to argue that, if Angelo had died, it wrould have been outmeasuring measure; as it is, the administration of justice is duly balanced, and both he and Claudio are equally punished in imagination. The Duke, too, who knew all the circumstances, deserves credit for some ingenuity in his arrangements to protect the innocent, and, if not rigidly to punish the guilty, at least to save a sinner. Nor will any one contend that Angelo has escaped punishment: the agonizing state of uncertainty in which he long remained after the mock sentence, the bitter reproof of his colleague, and the still severer language of the Duke, will, it is to be hoped, conduce to satisfy every feeling and humane spectator of this fine play, that the poet has done enough to content even the rigorous moralist, and to exemplify, in his own divine words, that 'earthly power doth then seem likest heaven's, / When mercy seasons justice' [The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.1967]. xxvi

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

In 1826 George Daniel (No. 15) agreed that Angelo 'does not escape punishment. The mental agony he endures under the mock sentence — the deep shame and humiliation that overwhelm him in the severe reproofs of Escalus and the Duke — may be said almost to expiate his crimes'. Seventy years later F. S. Boas (No. 43) commented that Angelo's 'discovery that the Duke, "like power divine" [5.1.369], has beheld his "passes" [5.1.370], completely crushes him, and he begs for immediate sentence and sequent death. The shrine of outward respectability at which he had worshipped so zealously is shivered, and in the agony of his humiliation he may well crave to be buried among its ruins'. Stopford Brooke (No. 66) added that the last scene shows us 'how a man feels with regard to death, when, having been on the summit of repute, he is cast hopelessly down into an abyss of shame'. In Angelo's sudden and total humiliation, 'death is welcome'. In this play death provokes the sharpest contrasts: Claudio feared it, Barnardine despised, it, Angelo begs for it. Perhaps we can agree with Robert Bridges (No. 54) and with H. C. Hart (No. 50), that 'Shakespeare intends us to forgive Angelo, and regard him as a converted character'. An impressive number of critics in the hundred and thirty years covered by this collection welcomed the concluding triumph of mercy, from Schlegel (No. 8) and Ulrici (No. 22) to Andrew George (No. 56). Many commentators accepted, if without much enthusiasm, the Duke's dispensation of forgiveness to Barnardine and punishment for Lucio. But the Duke's allocation of Isabella to be his bride has aroused more dissent than agreement. A. C. Bradley (No. 49) described it as 'a scandalous proceeding' on Shakespeare's part, and C. E. Montague (No. 64) judged that 'the final pairing-off is a sorry business all round'. According to Brander Matthews (No. 67), the fact that Isabella, resolved as she was to enter a nunnery, . . . should pair off with the Duke at the end of the play, so that the so-called comedy may end with three weddings, leaves her in our memory as a figure sadly diminished from the heroic. The Duke has not wooed her, and apparently he has never given her a thought as a possible consort. She has shown no liking for him; and yet she accepts him offhand, practically selling herself for rank, although she had refused to sell herself to save her brother's life. That is all of a piece with the huddled confusion of the final act and with the topsyturvy morality which underlies its conclusion. Although it was unfair to ascribe the worst of motives to Isabella ('selling herself for rank'), Matthews spoke for many critics dissatisfied with this 'happy ending'. Arthur Symons (No. 40) judged the conclusion 'hurried, and the disposal of Angelo inadequate. I cannot but think that Shakespeare felt the difficulty, the impossibility, of reconciling the end which his story and the dramatic conventionalities required with the character of Angelo as shown in the course of the play, and that he slurred over the matter as best he could'. E. C. Morris (No. 65) believed that the 'overemphasis' of Angelo's self-deception 'makes a comedy solution only the more forced. That these elements might have been made to seem harmonious is quite possible; but they are certainly not so composed here. The end of the play is endurable only on the supposition that all has been meant in fun'. These, and other critics xxvii

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

of the play's ending, recognized that Shakespeare, having plunged his characters into profound and agonizing life-dilemmas, was merely returning to the conventions of comedy. A legitimate response to their complaints, then, could be made by examining the history of Elizabethan drama. E. E. Stoll (No. 62), just beginning his important work on theatrical conventions, made the simple but fundamental distinction that, to modern readers and theatregoers, 'the most interesting thing is the characters' of a play, whereas 'Shakespeare's interest . . . lay in story'. The fact that, in Renaissance drama, 'story is thus pre-eminent over character', helps to explain why the endings of several Shakespeare comedies seem to us 'anti-climaxes', since we judge the characters with expectations drawn from modern life and modern drama. Stoll's later work, together with that of Muriel Bradbrook, educated generations of students in the grammar, so to speak, of Elizabethan drama, in which realistic psychology, as we would understand it, could be suspended in the interests of a plot resolution. Still, these scholarly insights were not fully adopted until the 1930s, after intensive studies of play texts in their historical context, so that we can readily understand why otherwise sensitive readers such as Swinburne (No. 37) or C. H. Herford (No. 46) should complain that the ending reverts to comedy. Here a further historical insight was pending, as Professor Geckle shows in his full survey of criticism since 1920, the belated recovery of the genre tragi-comedy, that peculiar Renaissance hybrid. Admittedly, the play's conclusion is crammed into too little space, but if we rightly understand the spirit in which Shakespeare meant it, Angelo deserves charitable treatment. Further, the Duke's marriage to Isabella shows that the dramatist Shakespeare was at least not recommending chastity — a fact that critics of Isabella's value-system ought really to welcome! — and that, in the words of a modern scholar, Shakespeare 'presented marriage as the most valuable of human relationships, and women, even the youngest and most inexeprienced, as the natural embodiments and guardians of the values central to a good society'.10 Looking at the play's reception between 1790 and 1920 in terms of what followed, we can endorse Professor Geckle's judgment that 'by the beginning of the twentieth century most of the major problems and interpretations of Measure for Measure had been broached'. Reading his survey of criticism since 1920 leaves one simultaneously impressed and frustrated. On the one hand, historical criticism made several important contributions to our understanding of the play. The discussion of marriagecontracts unearthed rich material on early modern social customs and attitudes, although (of course) no writer is ever obliged to represent actual social practices in his work, and nothing else. As Margaret Scott argued, the play's law is not historical but rather 'storybook' law, not to be taken as exactly representative of correct practice. Scholarly disputes about the exact significance of the contracts in English canon law expect more exactitude than drama affords. In any case, this seemingly authentic socio-legal material co-exists with the 'bed-trick', which derives from literary sources, such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, and has to be accepted by readers and theatregoers as a dramatic convention existing on an entirely different plane to social reality. Unfortunately, looking at recent studies of the play, it seems as if the xxviii

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

work of E. E. Stoll, Muriel Bradbrook, and Madeleine Doran in defining the conventions of Renaissance drama, another important achievement of historical criticism, is in danger of being forgotten. Some contemporary critics have difficulty in dealing with Shakespeare's hybrid art, which could blend realistic and conventional elements at will. At the same time, it seems to me, historical approaches were misused both by those critics who claimed Measure for Measure as a 'topical' play, addressing specific aspects of James I's rule — a distortion well described by Richard Levin, " and by those who placed it in overtly Christian contexts. This theological approach came to the fore in the 1930s and 1940s, in the work of G. Wilson Knight, Francis Fergusson, and R. W. Battenhouse, but it persists to the present day, as can be seen most easily from Bruce Sajdak's invaluable survey of the nearly 200 essays on Measure for Measure published between 1959 and 1983.14 Scholars in 1960 (FF4) and 1964 (FF32) saw the play as illustrating Catholic and Anglican doctrines of contrition; in 1965 it was taken to exemplify the Christian 'medicine of mercy' (FF41); in 1972 it was related to the parable of the Sower [Mark 4: 3-20], with the Duke as a Christ figure (FF87); in 1974 one scholar saw the Duke as 'an allegorical Christ at the Last Judgment' (FF93), while another read the play as 'an allegory based upon the Parliament of Heaven' (FF97), and a third described the Duke's role as 'semi-allegorical' (FF99). In 1975 Measure for Measure was described as a series of Christian parables (FF103); in 1976 it became 'a truly Christian tragedy, in which Claudio, Isabella, and Angelo receive redemption after purgation from their tragic flaws', the Duke being 'a Christ-like figure who averts tragedy [sic] by the experience of repentance and redemption' (FF110); in 1978 the play was said to be built on Christian ethics but was not a Christian allegory (FF133); in 1979 it was 'indeed a Christian allegory', with Angelo as 'a Devil', Isabella betrothed to Christ, the whole scheme being 'complementary to that of mystical vision as seen in the Canticle of Canticles' (FF135); in 1980 it was expounded as 'Shakespeare's commentary on the Pauline theology of the Epistle to the Romans' (FF143); in 1981 it was simultaneously 'a play about the harrowing of hell in which the Duke saves the worthy souls of a fallen world (Vienna) from ultimate damnation' (FF151), and an allegory of the 'temptation of Christ' — because the Duke describes 'Angelo's appetite in terms of bread and stone' (FF152); in 1982 the Duke was said to be the 'manifestation of a stoic rather than a Christian ethic' (FF164); in 1983 one scholar linked the play to medieval drama through its 'portrayals of old vs new law, the Four Daughters of God, and Christ's true sovereignty' (FF171), while another described it as 'a Christmas play', with Isabella's chastity helping 'the ultimate regeneration', bringing 'the light of the Incarnation out of the darkness of sin and corruption' (FF175). It is easy to diagnose the faults of such approaches, imposing alien interpretative categories on to a secular drama, dehumanizing characters by giving them allegorical status. s But similar simplifications of Measure for Measure's complex design have been created by each of the sharply-defined, self-conscious critical schools which have emerged since the 1970s. The strange phenomenon to be observed recently is that each school picks out just those elements of a play which speak to their current preoccupations and ignores the rest, rewriting the play in terms of their own agenda. xxix

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Psychoanalytical criticism continues on its predictable path, despite the complete discrediting of Freud, applying external doctrines to the plays,16 often contradicting each other, as Professor Geckle shows. Feminism, so important as a political force, having made considerable achievements in some areas of Western society but still leaving many huge inequalities, continues to have a reductive effect in literary criticism. Literary works of the distant past are interpreted solely in terms of current preoccupations, the silencing of the woman, the evils of patriarchy, describing men as misogynistic, expressing their fears of women or anxieties about their own sexuality by trying to control 'the mother'. 17 Indeed, as Professor Geckle's survey shows, Shakespeare's ability to anticipate the agendas of modern feminism is quite striking. The related approaches of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism,18 focussing on such issues as power, the machinery of state control, and sexuality, have an obvious relevance to Measure for Measure. But in both, modern agendas are imposed on to the play, not recognising that Shakespeare's goals were different. The New Historicists Tennenhouse and Mullaney, in the wake of Foucault, effectively reduce the play to an allegory of power, desire, and anxiety, so giving 'the demons of abstraction' free reign. The Cultural Materialist Dollimore, concerned with 'the formative power of social and ideological structures', was curiously unable to discuss Measure for Measure in these terms, falling back on an old stand-by, Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, while putting in a good word for 'the most exploited group in the society which the play represents', the prostitutes, who 'have no voice, no presence'. This seems a trivial objection, given the mimetic richness of the scenes involving Mistress Overdone, Pompey, and their clients. The manifestos of both Historicists and Materialists sound grand, but in practice they fail to register the play's real focus, which is ethical. Angelo's desire for Isabella is an instance of natural sexuality, all the more powerful for a lifetime's repression, but he perverts both the state's concept of justice and private human relations by misusing his power over Claudio's life to satisfy his appetite. Like Lucio's treatment of his whore, Angelo instrumentalizes his desire, exploiting Isabella, treating her — in Kant's terms — as a means to an end, not as an end in herself. This fundamental violation of male-female relations is not registered by Historicist or Materialist approaches, which are essentially amoral, concerned with abstractions and intellectual equations. After reading the editor's summary of responses to Measure for Measure over the last eighty years, no one will deny that literary criticism has changed. But it can hardly be said to have progressed; indeed, in some ways it it seems to have regressed, as earlier insights have been occluded in the fragmentation of critical discourse which has taken place since the 1970s. One of the lessons learned from scholarly work on dramatic conventions was that all the diverse materials which Shakespeare drew on had to be fused into a play, a dramatic structure which could seize the audience's attention for two or three hours and send it home elated, or disturbed, but certainly more aware of key issues in life and society. The study of the sources has shown that one of Shakespeare's major changes was to make Isabella implacable in the defence of her chastity, a fundamental part of the vows she was about to take as a nun. As we have seen, several nineteenth-century critics, unable to accept this as an essential element in the play's structure, exposing Isabella to enormous pressure from Claudio XXX

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

on one side, Angelo on the other, simply argued that she should have yielded to Angelo's desire. In a recent debate in the columns of an online Shakespeare discussion group, the 'Shakespeare Electronic Conference' (or SHAKSPER), an American highschool teacher provoked a discussion on Isabella's chastity. Having taught the play again after many years, he found that student reactions had changed: 'All students now agree that Isabella should have sacrificed her chastity to save her brother, that the brother's life is much more important', whereas forty years earlier students had set her chastity higher. The immediacy of the issue can be judged by the vigorous debate that followed, which documented in some areas a wide indifference to the virtue of chastity in our time, co-existing with the divergent belief that its loss ought to take place within a meaningful human relationship. Predictably, the discussion developed in several different directions, homilies on the responsibilities of parentage being delivered alongside statements about respecting the 'feminist agenda' and 'the designs of mainstream feminism', the discussions several times degenerating into personal quarrels. The significance of this debate for the historian of Shakespeare criticism is the extent to which contemporary discussions can be seen echoing those of the nineteenth century. Those participants who disapproved of Isabella defending her chastity from Angelo's 'sharp appetite' (2.4.160), like their predecessors, were ready to criticize Isabella for her 'fanaticism', her 'life-denying ideal', 'rigidly puritanical', her 'faulty character', her chastity being 'an emblem of her righteousness', showing 'a desire for self-gratification at someone else's expense': in short, 'a hypocrite'. Like their forerunners, at a far more innocent stage of literary criticism and literary theory, these commentators express moralizing disapproval as if Isabella were a character in real life, whose behaviour could be awarded a pass or fail. A few discussants pointed out that her soul is also at stake, and others recalled that the issue was not simply limited to whether or not Isabella should surrender her virginity, since 'what Angelo had in mind is, in our world, rape'; or at least 'coerced sex' or 'sexual blackmail'. Others reminded the discussion list that even if Isabella had slept with Angelo he would have broken his promises. This level of debate about Measure for Measure is one that could have taken place at any time in the preceding two hundred years, ignoring all questions of Shakespeare's intentions, treating characters in drama as autonomous entities. When other participants brought consideration of Shakespeare's design into discussion, they did so, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, by comparing the play with the sources. G. G. Gervinus made this comparison in 1863, admiring Shakespeare's 'boldness in bringing the very noblest characters' into 'painful' and 'odious intricacies, just as if he aimed at multiplying the difficulties and contradictions of the plot!' (No. 30). His successors in the year 2000 realized afresh the significance of these changes. In the same posting [SHK 11.1055] Judy Kennedy pointed out that in other versions of the story it is 'usually married chastity, rather than virginity' that Angelo attacks; Annalisa Castaldo noted that 'Shakespeare deliberately complicated the straightforward story to highlight the unfairness of what is being asked of Isabella', and Janet MacLellan observed that 'Shakespeare makes Isabella a nun-to-be, just to complicate our decision'. Graham Bradshaw made the larger point that 'by departing from his xxxi

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

source materials, Shakespeare complicates [the play's] legal / moral / divine "frame" in various other ways', which modern criticism has difficulty dealing with: 'our "interpretations" too often work to simplify what Shakespeare worked to complicate' [SHK 11.1068]. As these recent critics discussed in more detail the ways in which Shakespeare complicated his source plot, they echoed nineteenth-century critics again by discovering that Shakespeare had built into the play significant parallels and contrasts between characters. Ann Carrigan argued that Isabella develops, in the course of the play, from one of Shakespeare's 'likeable but misguided zealots' into a woman who discovers her humanity and is willing to fulfil natural desires in marriage: 'When Isabel herself pleads for Angelo's pardon, it's as if she's declaring to the Duke that she's a different woman than she was before; her plea for pity on Angelo neatly reverses the judgment she made on her own brother' [SHK 11.1055]. Graham Bradshaw, referring to his published essay on the play, observed that 'Shakespeare invents three overlapping legal cases, two of which (Claudio's and Angelo's) involve dowries, and two of which (Claudio's and Lucio's) involve illegitimate children' [SHK 11.1068]. In a subsequent intervention Bradshaw spelled out the legal and moral implications of these parallels. Of the plots involving dowries: 'In legal terms, Angelo does not commit the same crime as Claudio when he fornicates. In moral terms, abandoning Mariana when she could not deliver the promised dowry is horribly callous, but not a legal crime in Elizabethan law (although it would have been if Angelo had slept with Mariana — hence the Duke's machinations)'. Of the plots involving illegitimate children: 'In legal terms, Lucio does commit the same crime as Claudio when he fathers an illegitimate child by Kate Keepdown. In moral terms, Lucio's is far worse: he doesn't love Kate, refuses to support the child, and even contrives to set the law against the woman who has looked after his infant bastard...'. By inventing and juxtaposing these plot-elements, Shakespeare 'worked to complicate what our (or the Duke's) interpretations work to simplify', challenging audience and readers 'to think about how these three cases overlap, and differ' [SHK 11.1100]. Bradshaw's structural analysis emulates R. G. Moulton in its clarity and perception. This recent discussion only dealt with a few elements in the play, but it is striking how it reverted to topics and problems that have occupied critics since the early nineteenth century, repeating some readings, extending others. Disappointingly, no contributor invoked the notion of theatrical conventions, and only one (Michael Skovmand) drew on the theory of genre, pointing out that Measure for Measure is what we call 'a problem play' up till the moment when the Duke intervenes in the confrontation between Isabella and Claudio, solving all the problems, turning it into a comedy. As he observed, 'this generic complexity . . . shows up the limitations of a "Bradleyan" character analysis of Isabella. She is a vehicle for a principled dramatisation of power and personal ethics, but she is also a character in a comedy in which the incongruities between abstract morality and personal interest are dramatised', Shakespeare's energies being devoted to resolving the multiple plot elements, rather than maintaining 'unity of character' (SHK 11.1061). The term 'multiple' was also used by Patrick Dolan, who described teaching such a complex play to undergraduates as a xxxii

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

process of setting up a simple interpretative framework, then proceeding to 'the multiple frames that history can show us (the sources, Tudor / Stuart discourse on sex and death), and then to the multiple frames that Shakespeare provides. It's an additive process', but at the college level, at least, it is regrettably 'forced to leave out the multiple frames that the history of criticism' can add (SHK 11.1072). This volume, I am glad to say, provides a freshly selected series of such frames, drawn from the work of largely forgotten critics, who will surprise many contemporary readers by the passion and insight with which they responded to this challenging play.

NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 [0 [1 12

[3 14

See my select bibliography of the 'History of Shakespeare Criticism' in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Third Edition, Volume 2: 1500-1700, ed. Douglas Sedge (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). George Walton Williams, 'The Publishing and Editing of Shakespeare's Plays', in John F. Andrews (ed.), William Shakespeare. His World. His Work. His Influence, 3 vols (New York, 1985), III, pp. 589-601, at p. 598. 'Shakespeare and Jonson', in Essays, mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, 1994), p. 287. Cf. J. Maxwell, 'Measure Jor Measure: "Vain Pity" and "Compelled Sins" ', Essays in Criticism, 26 (1966), 253-5. Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London, 1968, 1979), pp. 319-23. Sec Brian Vickers, ' "The Power of Persuasion": Images of the orator, Elyot to Shakespeare', in J. J. Murphy (ed.), Renaissance Eloquence. Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1983), pp. 411—35, especially pp. 424-5. Many of the earlier commentators on this play failed to see the irony of Isabella's appeals for mercy arousing Angelo's lust: cf. Richardson (No. 2), Drake (No. 10), Jameson (No. 16), Knight (No. 19), Verplanck (No. 23), Clarke (No. 29), and even Andrew George (No. 56). The first critics to use the term 'irony' in connection with Measure for Measure were Barrett Wendell in 1894 (No. 42), F. S. Boas in 1896 (No. 43), and Georg Brandes in 1898 (No. 44). See Brian Vickers, 'Shakespearian Consolations', Proceedings of the British Academy, 82 (1993), 219-84. Murphy, Arthur, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson (1792), in G. B. Hill (ed.), Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols (Oxford, 1897; New York, 1966), I, p. 439. Boswell's Life of Johnson, cd. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1952), pp. 949-51. See also pp. 416, 426-7, 579, 839, 842. Barton, op. cit., p. 287. '"Our City's Institutions": Some Further Reflections on the Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure', ELH, 49 (1982), 790-804. See, e.g., E. A. J. Honigmann, 'Shakespeare's Mingled Yarn and Measure for Measure', Proceedings of the British Academy, 67 (1981), 101—21, for a stimulating account of Shakespeare's virtuosity in mixing genres, plots, perspectives, and other elements. See, e.g., R. Levin, 'The King James Version of Measure for Measure', Clio, 3 (1974), 12963, and his debate with Battenhouse, ibid., 7 (1978), 193-215, 217-26. Bruce T. Sajdak, Shakespeare Index. An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Articles on the Plays 1959-1983, 2 vols (Millwood, NY, 1992), I, pp. 509-28. In citing essays summarized by Sajdak, I follow his reference system, numbering the essays FF1—FF177. xxxiii

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

15 16 17 18 19 20

On the deficiencies of Christian (and Marxist) allegorical approaches see Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven and London, 1993). Ibid., pp. 272—324, on psychoanalytical criticism. Ibid., pp. 325—71, on feminist criticism. Ibid., pp. 214-71, on New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. This discussion list operates at . The debate ran from 12 May 2000 [posting SHK 11.1031] to 27 June 2000 [posting SHK 11.1294]. See G. Bradshaw, Shakespeare's Scepticism (Ithaca, NY, 1987), ch. 5: 'Tempering Mercy with Justice: Measure for Measure' (pp. 164—218).

xxxiv

Preface

This volume expands upon the historical scholarship begun by Brian Vickers in his six-volume Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623—1801 (London and Boston, 1974— 81) by selecting critical responses to Measure for Measure from 1783 to 1920. Because the Critical Tradition series emphasizes criticism in English, continental criticism is represented only when it was deemed important enough to be translated into English. Past performance history of Measure for Measure is included in cases where it represents contemporary interpretation or reception of the play. The introduction traces the early responses and critical appraisal of Measure for Measure from its first mention by John Dry den in 1672 to current judgments of the play. Earlier examinations of these critical trends can be found in the unpublished 'A History of the Literary Criticism of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure' (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1965) by the editor of this volume and in Josephine Miles's The Problem of 'Measure for Measure': A Historical Investigation (New York, 1976). The most detailed compendium of information on the play, including textual and literary criticism, as well as stage history, can be found in Mark Eccles's invaluable Neu^ Variorum Shakepeare edition of Measure for Measure (New York, 1980), to which the editor of this volume contributed. The texts reproduced in this collection are taken from either the first printed or last revised edition, as noted in the headnotes. The following editorial changes have been made silently: (1) 'Shakespeare' and 'Shakespearian' are standardized throughout; (2) italicization and non-standard spellings of characters' names has been disregarded; (3) single quotation marks are used throughout, with double marks for quotations within quotations; (4) quotation marks in set-off quotations have been omitted; (5) some short set-off quotations have been incorporated into the text; (6) aside from proper names, differences in American and British spelling have not been normalized. In general, the character of the original text has been preserved as far as possible in a volume subject to the house style of the publisher. The footnotes of the original documents have been retained unless irrelevant. Interpolated notes by the present editor are distinguished from the original notes by enclosure in square brackets: e.g., 1, 3, and 5 indicate notes by the original author; [2], [4], and [6] indicate my inserted notes. Summarized omitted material is placed within square brackets. Ellipsis dots signify omission from the original. Interpolated references to acts, scenes, and lines of Shakespeare's works are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edn (Boston, 1997). Shakespearian passages quoted within the original documents are reproduced as printed. XXXV

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Quotations from other sources, such as classical authors, are documented when possible in the explanatory notes. I owe debts to many institutions and individuals for their help in the preparation of this volume. The University of South Carolina provided me with a sabbatical and the College of Liberal Arts with some travel money during the spring of 1999, during which I devoted my time to this book. I am grateful for the assistance of the librarians and staff of The British Library, The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Library of Congress, and the Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina. I owe special thanks to Nelson Rivera of the Interlibrary Loan Department of the Thomas Cooper Library. Without the invaluable help of several research assistants, this volume would still be in progress; these include Rachel Lee Hayes, Caitlin Jorgensen, Randy Miller, Jon Pope, Melissa Reen, and Denise Shaw, but especially Joanna Tapp Pierce, who scanned and corrected all original documents and performed myriad other editing tasks. I owe special thanks to Professor Brian Vickers, who has rightly described himself as a 'hands-on' general editor. This volume is in many ways better because of his meticulous and detailed corrections and suggestions.

xxxvi

Introduction

i DRYDEN TO JOHNSON The first explicit literary criticism of Measure for Measure came from the pen of John Dryden in 1672, in his 'Defence of the Epilogue: Or an Essay on the Dramatick Poetry of the Last Age'. As the title indicates, the essay defended opinions Dryden had expressed in his 'Epilogue to the Second Part of The Conquest of Granada (1672), in which he had compared the Elizabethan dramatists unfavorably with those of his age, accusing them of coarseness, meanness, and a lack of refinement in wit. In the 'Defence' Dryden reiterates his position, then finds extenuating circumstances: But the times were ignorant in which they lived. Poetry was then, if not in its infancy among us, at least not arrived to its vigour and maturity: witness the lameness of their plots; many of which, especially those which they writ first, (for even that age refined itself in some measure), were made up of some ridiculous, incoherent story, which in one play many times took up the business of an age. I suppose I need not name Pericles Prince of Tyre, nor the historical plays of Shakespeare: besides many of the rest, as The Winter's Tale, Love's Labour Lost, Measure for Measure, which were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment. If I would expatiate on this subject, I could easily demonstrate that our admired Fletcher, who writ after him, neither understood correct plotting, nor that which they call the decorum of the stage. Although Dryden is himself less than lucid here, The Winter's Tale is probably the example of a plot 'grounded on impossibilities'. Love's Labor's Lost and Measure for Measure, 011 the other hand, seem to fit the second category, examples ol plays 'so meanly written that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment'." Dryden's remarks on Measure for Measure may seem negligible at first glance, but they are representative of his age, which did not like its sense of decorum violated, either in plotting or in language. He is also important in anticipating one of the major, albeit negative, attitudes towards the play. In 1691 Gerard Langbaine made the observation that 'Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, however despis'd by Mr. Dryden with his Much Ado about Nothing, were believ'd by Sr. William Davenant . . . to have Wit enough in them to make one good Play'." Davenant, whose The Law against Lovers was first performed on 15 February 1662, excised all of the comic characters from Measure for Measure, as well as 1

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Mariana, made Lucio into a Restoration gentleman, and turned Benedick and Beatrice from Much Ado into Angelo's younger brother and heiress ward, both of whom assist Isabella and the lovers, Claudio and Juliet. Setting the play in fashionable Turin instead of sordid Vienna, Davenant also replaced Shakespeare's long concluding trial scene with a rebellion led by Benedick against Angelo and a reconciliation under the Duke's guidance. If Langbaine - also the first critic to note that Measure for Measure is 'founded on a Novel in Cynthio Giraldi: viz. Deca Ottava, Novella 5"' (p. 459) - were a man noted for 'wit', we might imagine he was being ironic in his appraisal of Davenant's play. But he was probably being serious, for he also says that 'where the Language is rough or obsolete, our Author has taken care to polish it', giving as an example (pp. 108—9) Davenant's pedestrian adaptation of the Duke's 'I love the people' speech (1.1.67-72). At least one of Davenant's contemporaries approved of his first 'refinement' of Shakespeare. In the entry to his diary for 18 February 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote that he 'saw The Law against Lovers, a good play and well performed, especially the Little Girle's (who I never saw act before) dancing 4 and singing. Surprisingly enough, the next critic to discuss Measure for Measure in explicit literary terms had also produced an adaptation of it: Charles Gildon, whose Measure for Measure, or Beauty the Best Advocate, was acted in 1699-1700. Gildon also left an extended critique of all Shakespeare's plays in 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare' (1710) — added to the 1709 edition by Nicholas Rowe — which show his stock neoclassical principles: 'For the Business of Poetry is to copy Nature truely, and observe Probability and Verisimilitude justly; and the Rules of Art are to shew us what Nature is, and how to distinguish its Lineaments from the unruly and preposterous Sallies and Flights of an irregular and uninstructed Fancy'.5 In his 'Remarks' Gildon applied his formulations to Measure for Measure and, unlike Dryden, found Shakespeare's play pleasing. There are some little under Characters in this Play, which are produced naturally enough by the Severity of the new Law, as that of the Bawd and the Pimp; as well as of Lucio, which character is admirably maintain'd, as Shakespeare does every where his Comic Characters, whatever he does his Tragic. The Unities of Action and Place are pretty well observed in this Play, especially as they are in the Modern Acceptation. The Design of the Play carries an excellent Moral, and a just Satire against our present Reformers.... The Scene betwixt Isabella and Angelo in the second Act is very fine; and the not bringing the Yielding of Isabella to Angelo on the Stage, is Artfully manag'd, for it wou'd have been a Difficult Matter to have contriv'd it so, that it shou'd not have given a slur to her Modesty to the Audience tho' they knew it Dissembled. Allowing for some Peccadillos the last Act is wonderful, and moving to such a Degree, that he must have very little Sense of Things, and Nature, who finds himself Calm in the reading it. The Main Story or Fable of the Play is truly Tragical for it is Adapted to move Terror, and Compassion, and the Action is one.6 2

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Gildon's adaptation of the play was acted eight times at Lincoln's Inn Fields during the season of 1699-1700, with the illustrious Thomas Betterton in the role of Angelo. Although Gildon does not mention the fact, the character list in his play reveals that he not only adapted Shakespeare but also drew on Davenant's version. As in Davenant, the scene is set at Turin, and Balthasar (Don Pedro's attendant in Much Ado about Nothing) is retained from The Law against Lovers. The description of the dramatis personae also reveals that Mariana (deleted in Davenant's version) has been restored, and that she is 'secretly Marry'd to Angela', a change which, of course, allows Gildon to use the bed trick with propriety. Moreover, Claudio is himself 'privately Marry'd to Juliet '(sig. A2; see also Vickers, II, pp. 130—1). Gildon was as concerned as Davenant had been with morality and respectability. Although Gildon made several comments on the play's structure and characters, John Upton in 1746 became the first critic to appraise a character in specific terms: The unity of action is very visible in Measure for Measure. That reflection of Horace, Quid leges sine moribus Vanae proficiunt? [What do vain laws accomplish without mores?] is the chief moral of the play. How knowing in the characters of men is our poet, to make the severe and inexorable Angelo incur the penalty of that sanguinary law, which he was so forward to revive? In his concern with the rules of art, and with moral instruction, Upton was typical of his age. In his person Angelo points up the problem of the necessary relationship between public law, justice, and personal morality. Upton, perhaps registering the new vogue for Longinus, believed that 'the moral should shine perspicuous in whatever aims at the sublime', and chose as an example 'Isabella's moralizing on men in power abusing their authority' (p. 96). In 1753 Charlotte Lennox disagreed with Upton's verdict on the play's structure, declaring that it lacked unity. After outlining the main plot, Lennox dismissed 'the rest' as 'all Episode, made up of the extravagant Behaviour of a wild Rake, the Blunders of a drunken Clown, and the Absurdities of an ignorant Constable'. Lennox complained that the low-comedy elements have 'no Dependance on the principal Subject', because 'great and flagrant Crimes, such as those of Angelo, in Measure for Measure, are properly the Subject of Tragedy' (I, p. 27; Vickers, IV, p. 112). She summed up her disapproval with a scathing, albeit amusing, indictment: 'That Shakespeare made a wrong Choice of his Subject, since he was resolved to torture it into a comedy, appears by the low Contrivance, absurd Intrigue, and improbable Incidents he was obliged to introduce, in order to bring about three or four Weddings, instead of one good Beheading, which was the consequence naturally expected' (I, p. 28; Vickers, IV, p. 112). But Lennox judged the main plot a failure, too, because in Angelo Shakespeare 'shews Vice not only pardoned, but left in Tranquility' (I, p. 25; Vickers, IV, p. 111). She would have revised the play so that the villain, out of 'Violence of Passion', would fall into 'an Excess of Grief and 'stab 3

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

himself in Despair' (I, p. 26; Vickers, IV, p. 111). The ending would then provide 'Unity of Action, which the Laws of Criticism require', so that 'This Fable also, would not be destitute of a Moral, which as Shakespeare has managed it, is wholly wanting' (I, p. 27; Vickers, IV, p. 111). Predictably, Lennox found the individual characters lacking probability and verisimilitude. The Duke is a sneak and a coward, 'afraid to exert his own Authority', guilty of 'corrupting one of the principal of his Magistrates, and teaching him how to deceive his Delegate in Power' (I, p. 29; Vickers, IV, pp. 112—13). Strictly in terms of plot, how can the Duke know about the Angelo-Mariana relationship (as he must if Mariana can report that the DukeFriar has known her for a long time) and yet seem ignorant of Angelo's moral character, as he seems to be at the beginning of the play? (I, p. 30; Vickers, IV, p. 113). Not only is the Duke 'absurd and ridiculous' and Angelo 'inconsistent to the last Degree' (I, p. 31; Vickers, IV, p. 114), but - in one of the most notorious critical comments ever delivered against this character - Lennox castigated Isabella as 'a mere Vixen in her Virtue' (I, p. 32; Vickers, IV, p. 114). Concluding her diatribe, Lennox judged Angelo 'intentionally guilty of perverting Justice' and that 'Intention . . . constitutes Guilt', so that 'This Play therefore being absolutely defective in a due Distribution of Rewards and Punishments; Measure for Measure ought not to be the Title, since Justice is not the Virtue it inculcates...' (I, pp. 36—7; Vickers, IV, p. 116— 17). Elizabeth Griffith also had difficulty with the play's title, admitting in The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (1775) that she could not see 'what moral can be extracted from the fable of this Piece'. Griffith obviously believed Angelo to be guilty, and was disappointed that he was not being punished, implying that Shakespeare has not produced 'Measure still for Measure' (5.1.411), as the Duke had promised. Samuel Johnson was the first major critic to offer an extensive commentary on Measure for Measure, in his edition of Shakespeare (1765). Johnson's 'General Observation' on the drama is as follows: Of this play the light or comick part is very natural and pleasing, but the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labour than elegance. The plot is rather intricate than artful. The time of the action is indefinite; some time, we know not how much, must have elapsed between the recess of the Duke and the imprisonment of Claudio; for he must have learned the story of Mariana in his disguise, or he delegated his power to a man already known to be corrupted. The unities of action and place are sufficiently preserved. Johnson's detailed remarks on the play, however, record more dissatisfaction than approval. In the Duke's speech advising Claudio to abandon life, Johnson was unhappy with the lines 'Thy best of rest is sleep, / And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st / Thy death, which is no more' (3.1.17—19), commenting: 'I cannot without indignation find Shakespeare saying, that death is only sleep, lengthening out his exhortation by a sentence which in the Friar is impious, in the reasoner is foolish, and in the poet trite and vulgar' (Vickers, V, p. 104). Johnson is particularly unhappy with Isabella's forgiveness of Angelo (5.1.445—47: 'I partly think / A due sincerity governed his deeds, / Till he did look on me'), objecting: 4

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

That Angela had committed all the crimes charged against him, as far as he could commit them, is evident. . . . Angela's crimes were such as must sufficiently justify punishment, whether its end be to secure the innocent from wrong, or to deter guilt by example; and I believe every reader feels some indignation when he finds him spared. . . . I am afraid our Varlet Poet intended to inculcate that women think ill of nothing that raises the credit of their beauty, and are ready, however virtuous, to pardon any act which they think incited by their own charms. (Vickers, V, p. 105) Johnson's dismissal of Shakespeare's low social level ('our varlet poet') aroused indignation, William Kenrick objecting in 1765 to the 'base or opprobrious' term used to describe Shakespeare as 'a mean, sorry, or rascally poet' (Vickers, V, p. 209). Still, it did express Johnson's belief, following Horace, that 'The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing' (Preface; Vickers, V, p. 61), and that 'since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot be easily persuaded that the observation of justice makes a play worse' (End-note to King Lear; Vickers, V, p. 139). The dominant concern of the eighteenth-century critics of Measure for Measure was ethical, not structural. Gildon and Upton were both in agreement that the play had a moral — Angelo was sufficiently penalized to satisfy them. Mrs. Griffith was uncertain as to what the moral might be, but Mrs. Lennox and Johnson felt that Shakespeare had deliberately and inexcusably pardoned a morally corrupt man. Paradoxically, although Johnson and the other critics were undoubtedly good Christians, and believed in a universe ruled by Providence, none of them could understand that the play might be concerned not only with justice and punishment but also with mercy and forgiveness. It remained for nineteenth-century critics to recognize the connection between the title, Measure for Measure, and Christ's Sermon on the Mount.

II SCHLEGEL TO PATER Subsequent to Johnson's commentary, English critics had little to say on Measure for Measure. In the early years of the nineteenth century we find what might be termed transitional criticism, reflecting earlier approaches and adumbrating newer ones. In 1807 Francis Douce (No. 5) summarized both the then-known literary sources and historical analogues for the measure-for-measure story and, citing The Merchant of Venice, raised the issue of the theme of mercy versus justice. Henry James Pye (No. 6), reflecting Johnson, objected to the 'faults' of the play, including Isabella's inconsistency of character and other 'mortal sins against the probability of the drama'. Isabella received some support in 1808 from Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald (No. 7), who pointed to her ability to reason, and her seeming lack of passion. Whereas Inchbald retains an eighteenth-century perspective on Angelo as 'a most disgraceful improbability', a 'monster, instead of a man', she also reflects a new uneasiness over the comic characters. 5

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

One of the most influential critical studies of Measure for Measure was made by August Wilhelm von Schlegel (No. 8), in his lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature, delivered in 1808 and published in 1809—11. His basic approach to Shakespeare reflects a fundamental break with earlier criticism, as M. H. Abrams has shown, emphasizing 'the self-conscious and calculating element in Shakespeare's inventive process'. Schlegel took further the psychological and aesthetic analysis of character begun by Mackenzie, Johnson, and Richardson, paying more attention to the characters' internal motivation. He was the first to suggest that the play 'takes improperly its name from punishment; the true significance of the whole is the triumph of mercy over strict justice', although he failed to connect the title with the Sermon on the Mount. Like Richardson (No. 2), he found Isabella without fault, and intelligently described the Duke in terms of his dramatic function: 'he unites in his person the wisdom of the priest and the prince'. Moreover, the simile Schlegel used to describe the Duke - 'like an earthly providence' - anticipated some of the allegorical readings of the twentieth century. Although Schlegel's work was soon well-known, William Hazlitt went out of his way to differ, both in a review of a performance of Measure for Measure at Covent Garden in 1816 (No. 9) and, a year later, in his Characters of Shakespear's Plays (No. 11). Although he (rather provokingly) approved of the play's least moral characters, such as Barnardine, Lucio, and Pompey, Hazlitt disliked several things in Measure for Measure, complaining in 1817 that 'there is in general a want of passion' in the play, that the major characters are too cold and unconcerned, and fail to generate sympathy. Coleridge liked the play even less, describing it in 1827 as a 'hateful work' (No. 17). Like Johnson, Coleridge was distressed on moral grounds by Angelo's pardon, and was equally unable to see that the title of the play might reflect a New Testament attitude to forgiveness. For Coleridge the play's comic parts were 'disgusting', the tragic parts 'horrible', and the whole piece was 'degrading to the character of woman'. Here, as I have argued elsewhere (using information from John Payne Collier [No. 20]), it is probable that Coleridge was referring to Isabella's part in the bed-trick involving Angelo and Mariana.13 Early nineteenth-century criticism continued to be preoccupied with a limited range of topics: Isabella and Angelo, the play's mixture of tragedy and comedy, and its attitude to justice. In 1817 Nathan Drake (No. 10) followed Richardson in extending unqualified praise to Isabella, also echoing Schlegel (who had termed Isabella 'a very angel of light') by describing her as 'a ministering spirit from the throne of grace'. A more sophisticated piece of criticism was produced by 'P. P.' (No. 13) in 1822, who found the serious parts faulty, but its comic parts excellent. Whereas Hazlitt declared himself not 'greatly enamoured of Isabella's rigid chastity', but argued that 'she could not act otherwise than she did' (No. 11), P. P. suggested that if Isabella had, 'to do a great good, done a little wrong, she would unquestionably have partaken of our sympathy far more largely than she does at present'. P. P. appeared to extend his sympathy to Angelo, but in rather ambivalent terms (used by Milton to describe Satan14), arguing that he 'had at least the tyrant's plea - necessity — to offer in his defence' — that is, his decision to execute Claudio after promising Isabella that he would save him. 6

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

In 1826 George Daniel (No. 15) became the second English critic to suggest that Measure for Measure is about mercy as well as justice. Francis Douce had said that 'if Angelo had died, it would have been outmeasuring measure' (No. 5), and Daniel followed him (unacknowledged) by remarking that 'had [Angelo] paid the forfeit of his guilt, he might have excited pity; and thus, by outmeasuring Measure, have weakened the moral effect of this fine play'. Daniel was also one of the first to relate the play to contemporary religious attitudes, suggesting that Shakespeare 'regarded with no favourable eye the growing puritanism of the age', and that in Angelo 'we recognize a perfect likeness of sanctimonious hypocrisy'. Daniel and P. P. are little known today, but Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson (No. 16) has enjoyed a considerable reputation as the nineteenth century's answer to Mrs. Lennox. While the one depreciated Shakespeare, the other eulogized him. In her frequently reprinted Characteristics, of Women (1832), Jameson grouped Isabella with Portia, Beatrice, and Rosalind as 'characters of intellect'. Her eulogy of Isabella reached new heights, finding her behaviour exemplary in all respects, even her attack on her brother in 3.1 and her participation in the bed-trick, a device which, according to Jameson, does not diminish Isabella, but only the 'fantastical Duke of dark corners' (4.3.157). Defending Isabella against the charges of Mrs. Lennox and Hazlitt, Jameson presented Isabella not as an agent in the action of the play but as a separate creation, an ideal of femininity. This moving outside the play can be seen again in Henry Hallam (No. 18), the first critic to discuss Measure for Measure as an objectification of Shakespeare's inner feelings. Hallam conceived the play as theatrical biography, with the Duke embodying one of the many aspects of Shakespeare's farreaching mind, his 'philosophical character'. In Hallam's eyes the other characters took on a lifelike quality, independent of their function in the play: Isabella's virtue, 'inflexible and independent of circumstance, has something very grand and elevated'. The American Gulian C. Verplanck (No. 23) developed Hallam's biographical approach in 1847, suggesting that during the period of the great tragedies (1602—9) Shakespeare suffered 'some deep wound of the affections — some repeated evidence of man's ingratitude and heartlessness . . . — bringing home . . . the living sense of the world's worthlessness, and opening to his sight the mysterious evil of his own nature'. The biographical approach of Hallam and Verplanck made the play serious, even pessimistic, but for Hermann Ulrici (No. 22), a German critic of considerable influence in his time, it expressed a fundamental Christian ethos. Schlegel had argued that it reflects the 'triumph of mercy over strict justice', but Ulrici went much further, declaring 'the internal centre of the artistic organism' to be 'love, that inner and close communion of spirit which embraces all men'. He concluded that the play's title did not endorse the 'jus talionis' but rather meant that 'the measure by which he himself hopes to be measured, he ought to apply to others'. Although Ulrici did not cite the biblical text, he must have been thinking of the Sermon on the Mount. Ulrici's analysis of Measure for Measure explained the play in terms of parable or allegory, but left unanswered the concrete problems concerning government, justice, law, and authority which are raised during the five acts. These issues were partly addressed by Georg Gottfried Gervinus (No. 30), who emphasized Schlegel's point that the Duke controls the action throughout. Gervinus was the first critic to recog7

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

nize that 'Angelo's doom would not be in law altogether in conformity with justice' because his 'double crime — the disgrace of Isabella and the death of Claudio — had indeed not been carried out', an argument that effectively answered the complaints of Mrs. Lennox, Johnson, and Coleridge. Gervinus summed up the Duke's forgiveness of the characters as demonstrating 'circumspect equity alone, which suffers neither mercy nor the severe letter of the law to rule without exception, which awards punishment not measure for measure, but with measure'. Readers who expect a continuous process of innovation in literary criticism will often be disappointed, in the mid-nineteenth century as now. Such writers as Charles Knight (No. 19) and J. O. Halliwell (No. 24) recycled accepted judgments, and occasionally came up with something new. Halliwell, countering Ulrici's contention that Claudio 'had seduced his mistress before marriage' (the phrasing in the 1846 translation by A. J. W. Morrison), became the first scholar to note that in Shakespeare's day 'the ceremony of betrothment was usually supposed to confer the power of matrimonial union'. In his 1851 edition H. N. Hudson (No. 25) repeated the new information on betrothal contracts, but failed to give Halliwell credit. Unfortunately, the historical approach was used only intermittently, most critics contenting themselves with straightforward judgments on the play's characters, positive or negative. Richard Grant White (No. 27) explored the character of Angelo ('not all hypocrite at first') at length and in depth, and went to extraordinary lengths to denounce Isabella ('a woman with too much brain or too little heart') before concluding that she and the Duke — 'a well-meaning, undecided, feeble-minded, contemplative man' — deserve each other. White's iconoclastic view was matched by Walter Bagehot's verdict (No. 26) on Angelo as 'nothing but a successful embodiment of the pleasure, the malevolent pleasure, which a warm-blooded and expansive man [that is, Shakespeare] takes in watching the rare, the dangerous and inanimate excesses of the constrained and cold-blooded'. In 1856 William Watkiss Lloyd (No. 28) criticized Isabella in the same sarcastic manner as White had done, calling her 'cold and unimpressible, when approached through her affections', but all too ready to get involved in the bed-trick, which 'she should, in the first instance at least, have repulsed and revolted from'. Like White, Lloyd let his judgment of Isabella direct his appraisal of the whole play. Angelo is characterized as a precisian of 'not only weakness, but meanness', the Duke 'is in his element of dark management and behind scene intermeddling'. Lloyd argued, against the scholarly consensus, that Measure for Measure is an early play, a detail that excused its problematic ending, in which Mariana is united with 'one so stained with falsehood and baseness as Angelo'. In sharp contrast with Lloyd and White, Charles Cowden Clarke (No. 29) is more of a throwback to earlier, less critical approaches, simply asserting the despicableness of some characters — 'the brutal stupidity of Barnardine', 'the cruel and practical indifference of Abhorson', 'the vile and cold-blooded hypocrisy of virtue in Angelo', and the laudableness of others — 'the benevolent-hearted Provost', 'the well-meaning and patriotic, but certainly weak Duke', and, of course, 'the angelic purity of the sainted Isabella', who is also 'very young . A refreshing change to pure character criticism was offered in 1874 by Walter 8

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Pater, in a remarkable prose poem (No. 31). Pater revived an eighteenth-century issue, the concept of 'poetical justice' and how it relates to the essence of the play, making the astonishing assertion that Shakespeare's Measure for Measure 'might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgments'. Pater elaborated on the point in arguing that this play 'deals . . . with mere human nature', presenting 'a spectacle of the fulness and pride of life' which yet 'inspires in us the sense of a strong tyranny of nature and circumstance'. He claimed that 'the main interest in Measure for Measure is not . . . in the relation of Isabella and Angelo, but rather in the relation of Claudio and Isabella'. Pater gave a sympathetic account of Isabella, who 'stands before us clear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties of the piece', and (unusually) expressed concern for Claudio, 'a flowerlike young man' who is 'called upon suddenly to encounter his fate'. The play's title, he argued, implies 'the subject of poetical justice', 'the true justice of which Angelo knows nothing', that justice which 'is in its essence a finer knowledge through love', a 'true justice . .. dependent on just those finer appreciations which poetry cultivates in us'. Pater's definition of 'poetical justice' was not that of Johnson or Coleridge — the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice — but, rather, that refinement of feeling which led Hazlitt (No. 11) to argue that Shakespeare 'was a moralist in the same sense in which nature is one'. Because Measure for Measure was constructed with an underlying 'halfhumorous equity', Pater judged, it 'remains a comedy'.

Ill DOWDEN TO CROCE Throughout the ninteenth century the adjectives 'painful', 'dark', and 'bitter' were continually used to characterize this play. Edward Dowden (No. 32) expressed this typical attitude in 1875, in his widely-read Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art . In it Shakespeare 'was evidently bidding farewell to mirth; its significance is grave and earnest'; he is about to enter a 'dark and dangerous tragic world', illuminated by Isabella's 'saintliness', which makes her able at the end to 'preside over this polluted and feculent Vienna'. In a later edition (1879) Dowden described Measure for Measure as 'dark and bitter', and became the first critic to group it with All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, as 'serious, dark, ironical' works. Dowden's linking of the three plays was given permanent authority by Frederick S. Boas in 1896 (No. 43), who wrote that in all of them 'we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome'. In order to explain this effect Boas decided to borrow 'a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and classify them together as Shakespeare's problem-plays', so opening a long-lasting scholarly debate. Boas derived the term from the nineteenth-century theatre perhaps from Bernard Shaw's 'The Problem Play - A Symposium' (1895)15 - and it was soon taken up by Morton Luce in 1906 (No. 53), becoming a standard critical category from the 1930s on. Shaw himself (No. 38) understood the term 'problem play' to refer to the ocuvre of Ibsen, Pinero, and himself, describing Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida as plays 'in which our 9

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

William anticipated modern dramatic art by making serious attempts to hold the mirror up to nature' (1897). In such works 'we find him ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him' (1898). Other late nineteenth-century critics looked at the play's overall meaning, accepting the ending as resolving the issue. In 1875 Denton J. Snider (No. 33) saw it as a sort of allegory in which the characters are 'saved from a tragic fate by the intervention of the World of Mercy'. Henry Morley (No. 39) wrote in 1889 that the 'whole atmosphere' of the ending is one 'of pardon and of kindly consideration', and that 'the sacred lesson of the play' derives from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1—2). Morley thus became the first critic to specifically identify the New Testament allusion in the title Measure for Measure. In the same year Arthur Symonds (No. 40) concluded that although 'the final word of Shakespeare in this play is mercy', nonetheless 'it is granted and accepted in humiliation'. During this period some critics used a historical approach, discussing the play's relation to Puritanism. George Wilkes (No. 35) saw Isabella and the Duke as the means by which Shakespeare is able 'to develop . . . his views of the beautiful philosophy of the Catholic religion', in contrast with Angelo, that 'perfect picture of Puritan hypocrisy'. In 1894 Barrett Wendell (No. 42) found the play an 'unwitting exposition of Calvinism', while C. H. Herford (No. 46) believed that Angelo and Claudio 'foreshadow the characteristic weaknesses of the Puritan and the Cavalier'. Puritanism became a major point of discussion for Georg Brandes (No. 44) in 1898, who argued that Shakespeare was 'attracted' to the 'unpleasant subject' of Measure for Measure because of his 'indignation at the growing Pharisaism in matters of sexual morality which was one outcome of the steady growth of Puritanism among the middle classes'. In an essay showing both historical and literary breadth, S. J. Mary Suddard (No. 60) at the age of twenty wrote in 1909 that in Angelo Shakespeare 'meant to show the passage of supreme power into the hands of the Puritans', arguing that Measure for Measure 'may be safely accepted as a forecast of the effects of Puritan rule on England'. Isabella, of course, 'represents Puritanism under its most favourable aspect'. The biographical approach continued to flourish. In 1900 H. W. Mabie (No. 47) asserted that during the period of 'The Later Tragedies' Shakespeare was 'now in the depths of the deep stirring of his spirit', while the renowned A. C. Bradley (No. 49) declared that 'in Measure for Measure perhaps, certainly in Troilus and Cressida, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness'. A year later H. C. Hart (No. 50) was 'almost tempted to suggest that the loss of [Shakespeare's] royal mistress, and the advent of that heavy-witted pedant James I, had for the moment smitten our poet's spirits hip and thigh'. Other biographical explanations were not so specific, being content with general evocations of Shakespeare's darkening mood, such as E. K. Chambers's remark in 1906 (No. 52) that the play reflected 'a particular phase in the poet's shifting outlook upon humanity', a time when 'the rose-red vision gave place to the grey'. Stopford A. Brooke (No. 66) diagnosed the play as representing a period in which 'there was a twist in Shakespeare's life .. . which turned into gloom and sometimes into a transient cynicism the charming nature of the man'. 10

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Many critics recorded their impression of the play as 'disconsolate and bitter' (Andrew Lang: No. 41), the pardon of Angelo offending Robert Bridges (No. 54) and George Saintsbury (No. 61) in particular. In 1913 Brander Matthews (No. 67) declared Measure for Measure to be 'as painful as it is ill-shapen; and at the core of it is a distasteful device'. The posthumous remarks of Lafcadio Hearn (No. 69; published in 1915) recorded how 'the nerves of the spectator or the reader are kept in a state of extreme tension, which sometimes accentuates into real pain', and Benedetto Croce (No. 70) spoke of being confronted by 'painful or terrible motives . . . not easily overcome in the course of the development of the work'. Drama critics shared this negative view of the play. In 1906 A. B. Walkley (No. 57) complained that 'there are many moments in Measure for Measure which are anything but pleasurable'. Not long after, C. E. Montague (No. 64) spoke disparagingly both of the play's ending and its plot, while in 1913 the American drama critic William Winter (No. 68) also described Measure for Measure as 'grim and painful', adding that it was a play 'that might well be spared from the Stage'. Yet Shakespeare has never lacked defenders. In 1898 Sidney Lee (No. 45) argued that Shakespeare had given 'dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme'. In 1911 John Masefield (No. 63) described the play as 'one of the greatest works of the greatest English mind', being 'concerned with the difficulty of doing justice in a world of animals swayed by rumour'. In 1907 Andrew J. George (No. 55) asserted that 'Shakespeare nowhere presents so definitely as in Measure for Measure the central truth of Christian morality'. And in 1909 Charlotte Porter (No. 59) wrote one of the most detailed essays on the importance of the New Testament background of the play, which constituted 'a dramatised Sermon on the Mount of Genius, that is brother to the Sermon on the Mount', the source of the play's title and 'its spirit'. Her analysis anticipated a large number of twentieth-century interpretations relating it to New Testament doctrine.

IV 1920 TO THE PRESENT By the beginning of the twentieth century most of the major problems and interpretations of Measure for Measure had been broached. The diversity of opinion concerning the Duke, Isabella, and Angelo anticipated practically all subsequent critical attitudes toward these characters. The basic theme of the play had elicited a multitude of approaches: Measure for Measure as a satire on Puritanism, as a dramatic presentation of Christian principles and ideals, as a complex discussion of the problems of government. Other historical issues, such as the interpretation of the bed-trick and Elizabethan betrothal contracts, the morality background of the play, the seeming structural defects, and the perplexing conclusion had all been discussed. However, although the twentieth-century critic has often been anticipated (in many cases unaware of the fact) by an earlier scholar, a great amount of elaboration, revision, and refinement has taken place. Furthermore, a number of new modes of critical discussion have been developed in our time. The most important has been the 11

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

historical approach, exemplified by such scholars as Walter Raleigh (No. 56), E. E. Stoll (No. 62), W. W. Lawrence, R. W. Chambers, and E. M. Pope. An ignorance or rejection of the historical background and conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama led many nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century critics to treat Shakespeare as a contemporary: historical criticism transcends this subjective approach. Another reaction against the nineteenth-century subjective and biographical readings can be seen in the work of G. Wilson Knight, F. R. Leavis, L. C. Knights, and D. A. Traversi. These writers, however, did not practise historical criticism but analyzed literary works in terms of thematic structure and symbolism, usually with close attention to imagery and diction. The main characteristic of twentieth-century criticism of Measure for Measure is its sheer volume and diversity. Every conceivable interpretative approach has been proffered. Since the 1960s we have seen the rise of 'new historicism', 'cultural materialism', feminist, psychoanalytic, and text-in-performance criticism. Each group has included critics who have expressed opinions for and against the play. Some writers condemn it as a 'dark' or 'cynical' demonstration by a temporarily bitter Shakespeare; others see it as a joyous drama of forgiveness and Christian mercy. Some critics regard it as a successful assimilation of realistic and conventional elements; others disagree. The multitude of comments on the play sometimes make it hard to tell whether or not a critic is being original. As the volume of criticism on Measure for Measure has grown - Mark Eccles's New Variorum edition (published in 1980) cited hundreds of editions, books, articles, reviews, and notes on the play, while the MLA International Bibliography listed 485 items between the years 1963 and 2000 - it is charitable to assume that scholars independently arrive at conclusions echoing earlier discoveries. The following pages attempt to record something of the diversity of modern criticism, without pretending to be comprehensive. In some respects the early twentieth century continued Victorian biographical interpretations. In 1922 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, co-editor of the New (Cambridge) Shakespeare, surmised that around 1604 Shakespeare was preoccupied with sexual matters because something had happened to 'torture his mind'. Quiller-Couch was particularly perplexed by Isabella, 'conceived as a heroine' yet having 'something rancid in her chastity',16 a divided judgment which recalls Mrs. Lennox's 'a mere vixen in her virtue'. Ten years later J. Dover Wilson described Shakespeare as subject to 'a dominant mood of gloom and dejection' from 1601 to 1608, Measure for Measure witnessing to a crisis in which he 'would well have understood Mr T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land'}7 Wilson was followed in 1936 by U. M. Ellis-Fermor, who stated that 'In Measure for Measure the lowest depths of Jacobean negation are touched'. She added that Angelo represents 'that division of mind that beset the Jacobeans' and that Shakespeare represents the period's 'denial, not only of the nobility of man, but of the very laws which pretend to guide him'.18 In the 1930s three essays appeared, by G. Wilson Knight, W. W. Lawrence, and R. W. Chambers, which continued to influence critics through the 1960s. Knight, whose approach subordinated plot and character to theme and symbol, argued that the play had 'a careful dramatic pattern, a studied explication of a central theme: the 12

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

moral nature of man in relation to the crudity of man's justice, especially in the matter of sexual vice' (p. 73). He spent the rest of his essay relating the play to the Sermon on the Mount, apparently unaware of similar approaches by earlier critics, Schlegel (No. 8), Ulrici (No. 22), Hudson (No. 25), Morley (No. 39) and Charlotte Porter (No. 59). Knight, like Snider (No. 33) and Moulton (No. 48) before him, interpreted Measure for Measure allegorically and symbolically (the Duke is throughout compared with Christ), arguing that it 'must be read, not as a picture of normal human affairs, but as a parable, like the parables of Jesus'(p. 96). The second of these three influential readings came from W. W. Lawrence, who devoted a forty-four-page chapter of his Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931) to Measure for Measure. Lawrence elaborated on F. S. Boas's concept of a 'problem play', in which, as he defined it, 'a perplexing and distressing complication in human life is presented in a spirit of high seriousness. . . . [And] the theme is handled so as ... to probe the complicated interrelations of character and action, in a situation admitting of different ethical interpretations. The "problem" is ... one of conduct, as to which there are no fixed and immutable laws. . . . Familiar illustrations may be found in the prose dramas of Ibsen' (4). But although Lawrence placed Measure for Measure among the problem plays, his essay in fact argued that the play was fully explicable in terms of historical criticism: 'The true interpretation of the whole play . . . depends upon constant realization that while it seems real . . . it nevertheless exhibits improbabilities and archaisms which must be judged in the light of early traditions and social usages' (p. 121).2 The third influential critical essay of the 1930s was by R. W. Chambers, 'The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure', originally given as the annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy. Chambers used a historical approach to reconstruct sixteenth-century attitudes and conventions, such as the monarch in disguise, the deserted bride in disguise, and betrothal contracts. But (like Wilson Knight), he also invoked Christian beliefs, describing Angelo as a repentant sinner, Isabella as noble and sincerely Christian, with the denouement reiterating the Sermon on the Mount. However, Chambers saw the Duke neither as a Christ-figure nor a stage-puppet, but as a governor seeking to do the right and just thing in a fallen world. These three critics helped shape much discussion of Measure for Measure up to recent years. G. Wilson Knight's Christian allegorizing influenced Francis Fergusson, for whom the play's title called to mind 'the mystery of human government which the drama explores in one way and the philosophy in another: that of the relation between Justice and Mercy, or Charity' (p. 105). In 1941 M. C. Bradbrook emphasized the Morality Play background to such an extent that she could speak of the 'marriage of Truth and Justice' (p. 386) at the end of the play. ~ In 1946 Roy W. Battenhouse took the allegorical approach to extremes in a doctrinaire reading, where the Duke becomes a personification of Grace, Angelo the fallen angel, Isabella by name 'devoted to God', and so on. Less reductively, in 1955 Nevil Coghill used Dante's medieval four-fold scheme for interpreting Measure for Measure 'in the tradition of the parables of Christ, that is, something fully human' (p. 18), while in 1972 Sarah C. Velz related the play's characterization and theme to the parable of the 13

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

sower (Mark 4:3-8).24 In 1957 Robert Ornstein alluded to the play's 'Morality' framework, and was echoed twenty-four years later by Mathew Winston, who saw the play as 'partly shaped by the dramatic conventions of the morality play' (p. 230), although not reaching the level of allegory or parable. Throughout the century some of the best criticism of this play derived from a historical approach, as best exemplified by Elizabeth Marie Pope's essay on its Renaissance background. Pope examined 'the annotated Bibles, the translations, the English commentaries, the sermons, and the tracts through which the teaching of the Church reached the individual without special training or interest in theology' (p. 66), bringing this material to bear on the major characters and issues. She rejected Battenhouse's theory that Shakespeare 'subconsciously thought of the Duke as 'the Incarnate Lord', since Shakespeare's audiences would have shared secular, but not religious attitudes. They 'would have taken it for granted that the Duke did indeed "stand for" God, but only as any good ruler "stood for" Him; and if he behaved "like power divine", it was because that was the way a good ruler was expected to conduct himself (p. 71). Pope found Isabella's behavior in placing her chastity before Claudio's life to be consonant with Renaissance doctrines also, for by such theological standards Isabella was 'not entitled to let Angelo and Claudio use her mercy as their bawd' (p. 78).26 The influence of Pope's essay and the historical methodology it exemplified can be seen in essays by John D. Cox and George L. Geckle, as in the book-length study by Darryl J. Gless, 'Measure for Measure', the Law, and the Convent (1979), which analyzed Renaissance views of scripture, theological law, civil law, honor, slander, and monastic devotion. Another influential aspect of Pope's work was her use of King James's political writings. The relationship of Measure for Measure, acted at James's court on 26 December 1604, to the attitudes and writings of the King has been of interest to scholars since the late eighteenth century, and has inspired one entire book by Josephine Waters Bennett, 'Measure for Measure' as Royal Entertainment (1966), and a complex chapter in a recent one by Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (1995). This group of scholars has tried to show the influence of James on the play's production, an 'occasionalist approach' which has not pleased some readers, notably Richard Levin.28 The discussion of James I as a possible model for the Duke saw the relation as being either a parody or an idealized image. Right through the twentieth century, general criticism of the Duke has always oscillated between negative and positive poles, as in the caustic comment of Marco Mincoff (1966) that 'the only acceptable excuse I know of for Vincentio is as an adumbration not of providence but of that very unprovidential figure James I' (p. 149). On the other side, Howard C. Cole (1965) approved of the Duke's 'exquisite juggling of wrath and reconciliation' (p. 426) at the end of the play, and Richard A. Levin (1982) presented him as 'a man who seeks to do good, but unknowingly succumbs to a series of temptations' (p. 258). More startlingly (and tediously), Harry Berger, Jr. (1997) spent over ninety dense pages proving that the play's 'donnee is that the Duke is a bad person' (p. 336). Donna B. Hamilton (1970) found the Duke 'a more complex character than many have admitted', learning 'the meaning of mercy and the kinds of demands which 14

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

mercy makes' in the course of the play (p. 175). Even more favourably, Cynthia Lewis (1983) judged that he achieves 'a compromise that approximates the ideal balance, presented in Li, between strict punishment and mercy' (p. 288), while N. W. Bawcutt (1984), after a sensitive analysis of the text, approved of the Duke, who, in contrast with Angelo, 'believes in a personal or reflexive view of the law' (p. 93). Many critics continue to worry over what kind of play Measure for Measure is, and whether it is structurally and thematically unified. There has been little consensus. Earlier writers, such as Mrs. Lennox and Swinburne (No. 37), felt that it was (or should have been) a tragedy, as did Edith Sitwell in 1948. However, most early twentieth-century critics considered it a comedy, a satiric comedy, a 'dark' or 'problem play'. In 1938 Montgomery Belgion noted that 'in the First Folio it is called a comedy pure and simple' (p. 19) and that it fulfills most of the usual generic expectations: Isabella is not physically violated, Claudio is saved, and Angelo escapes 'the consequences of his acts' (p. 25). The play, Belgion concluded, 'affirms no explicit faith', but tries to 'cause us to remember that we both hope and doubt that our sins will be forgiven us' (p. 28). Willard H. Durham made a similar point in 1941: although the play 'evokes little laughter of any sort', it 'is, by strict definition, a comedy' (p. 167). Elmer Edgar Stoll, however, insisted in 1944 that it 'is not a tragedy but a comedy, that is, a very Elizabethan one, a hybrid' (p. 249). Agreeing with W. W. Lawrence that many aspects of the play depended on Elizabethan dramatic conventions, Stoll emphasized its comic irony, since we know that the Duke is essentially in control. In 1957 John Russell Brown also judged it to be a comedy, albeit incomplete, because 'Shakespeare has not affirmed and celebrated love's wealth, truth and order in the ideal fulfilment of romantic comedies; he has rather presented imperfect responses' (p. 195). More recent critics for whom the play's comic vision is incomplete or undeveloped include Hal Gelb and Jean E. Howard. Others, such as Herbert Weil, Jr. and Lawrence W. Hyman, have disagreed, finding it both unified and aesthetically satisfying. To Roger Sale Measure for Measure is 'harsh and stern . . . mathematic in its calculations' (p. 60), and to A. D. Nuttall it is 'a jagged play', moving between the 'poles' of 'technical neatness' and 'metaphysical disorder' (p. 232), whereas for the iconoclastic Harold Bloom it 'surpasses the four High Tragedies as the masterpiece of nihilism' (p. 363) and is 'a comedy that destroys comedy' (p. 380).31 Uncomfortable with such an anomalous comic structure, some critics have classified the play as a satiric or ironic comedy. In 1943 Oscar James Campbell argued that Shakespeare, influenced by Jonson and Marston, wrote a play designed to expose knaves and fools, but that Isabella 'completely outgrew the role in which she was first cast' (p. 125). Murray Krieger elaborated on this approach in 1951, stating that the Duke and Lucio 'seem to have more consistently Jonsonian functions' (p. 783) than the other characters, but found the play to contain incongruent romantic elements. Agreeing with Campbell about the play's satiric tone, in 1956 David L. Stevenson judged it one of Shakespeare's greatest comic achievements, to be understood as an intellectual and not a romantic comedy, 'constructed' like a poem by John Donne, 'made up of a series of intricately interrelated moral ironies and reversals, held together by the twin themes of mercy and justice, and resolved by a final 2

15

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

balancing out of paradox' (p. 262). Northrop Frye treated comic structure in more general terms in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), ascribing ironic characteristics to the play, but in The Myth of Deliverance (1983) he placed it within a larger mythic pattern: 'Measure for Measure, then, is a dramatic diptych of which the first part is a tragic and ironic action apparently heading for unmitigated disaster, and the second part an elaborate comic intrigue which ends by avoiding all the disasters' (p. 24). More simply, W. M. T. Dodds had earlier viewed 'the situation of Angelo' as 'a diagram of tragedy' within a play that 'is a comedy' (p. 251).32 When the question of genre is left hanging between these opposed poles the play can be seen as inherently unable to achieve internal harmony, a view cogently expressed by Clifford Leech: 'In Measure for Measure we have a morality framework, much incidental satire, a deep probing into the springs of action, a passionate sympathy with the unfortunate and the hard-pressed. Only if we concentrate our attention on one of these aspects will the play leave us content' (p. 73). Critics who emphasize the conventional elements in Measure for Measure tend to view it as a comedy; those who stress the 'painful' aspects find it tragic, or at least 'dark'. The most common negative criticism of the play in the early part of the twentieth century saw it as expressing Shakespeare's personal mood of bitterness, pessimism, or grim humor, a biographical reading that has never been entirely discredited, as can be seen in the work of Mark Van Doren and Wylie Sypher. Another way of dealing with the play's structural and other 'flaws' was to revive the BoasLawrence category of the 'problem-play', as E. M. W. Tillyard did in 1949. Repudiating allegorical readings (the Duke-as-Providence approach), Tillyard focussed on the play's structure, arguing that 'the tone in the first half of the play is frankly, acutely human and quite hostile to the tone of allegory or symbol' (p. 129). But, he pointed out (following Boas), a structural break occurs at 3.1.151, which is stylistically evident because of the shift from poetry to prose. For Tillyard, only the comedy of Lucio, Pompey, Abhorson, and Barnardine could make 'the second half of the play possible to present on the stage with any success at all' (p. 131), as the play shifted from realism to improbability. From this point on Isabella becomes a plot-puppet (pp. 134-5).35 But to call Measure for Measure a 'problem-play' simply re-states a critical difficulty in other terms. Ernest Schanzer, devoting another book-length study to Shakespeare's Problem Plays (1963; see n. 28), inadvertently made the best case against the classification when he excluded All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet from the genre but included Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra alongside Measure for Measure. Schanzer was not able to define this supposed dramatic genre any more coherently than his predecessors. For him a 'problem play' presents a moral problem 'in such a manner that we are unsure of our moral bearings, so that uncertain and divided responses to it in the minds of the audience are possible or even probable' (p. 6). This formulation can then 'explain' individual characters. Schanzer argued that Claudio perplexes us (pp. 73—81), that Lucio is 'a rather complex and, in some ways, contradictory character' (p. 82). As for Isabella, 'the most controversial figure in the play' (p. 96), Schanzer found her 'complex' (p. 97), but claimed that her emphasis upon chastity 'takes as Pharisaical a view of the divine law as Angelo does of man16

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

made law' (p. 100), leading to a 'legalistic view of Divine Justice' (p. 106). However, Schanzer suggested, although 'strongly suggesting his own attitude towards her choice' (of chastity over Claudio's life) Shakespeare 'leaves it sufficiently unobtrusive to allow the audience to respond to it in an uncertain, divided, or varied manner' (p. 106). The term 'problem play' may itself be the problem, when so many candidates for the genre and so much critical debate have yielded few really new insights. The unifying theme in these studies, at least as far as Measure for Measure goes, is the seriousness of the moral issues explored and the unsatisfactoriness of the play's ending. By those criteria, today's post-Holocaust audiences might well label The Merchant of Venice a 'problem play', and feminist critics would likely find The Taming of the Shrew to be one, and so on. A more viable generic classification has been provided by the rehabilitation of tragicomedy in historical terms, as a Renaissance genre. Whereas Lawrence privileged problem plays over tragicomedies because the latter lacked the seriousness, realism, and analytical spirit of the former, a growing number of critics in the 1950s reconsidered tragicomedy as a genre. In Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' (1953), a major book-length study of the play, Mary Lascelles found that the notion of tragicomedy could explain the play's larger design, in which 'the concluding phase of the action is adjusted to meet our desire that those who are — at least by inclination and intention — good should neither suffer irreparable wrong nor be the cause of it to others' (p. 157). She added that willing and doing ill are, 'according to the logic of Shakespearian tragi-comedy, distinct', and that 'the doer of an ill act from which no harm results may share in the final amnesty' (p. 157). This is a fair comment on the play, perhaps, but it failed to see tragicomedy in historical terms. That step was made by Madeleine Doran in an exemplary historical study, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (1954). Doran set the play alongside a group of tragicomedies, including the second part of Dekker's The Honest Whore, Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, and Chapman's The Gentleman Usher, all plays that 'present a grave problem of adapting means to ends'. Doran complained that 'Measure for Measure is 'usually called a "problem" comedy and drawn into uneasy alliance with All's Well, which has no serious problem, and with Troilus and Cressida and Timon, which have problems, certainly, but are hardly comedies' (p. 366). She therefore grouped it together with plays that were 'similar to one another in having an action tending to tragedy but fortunately solved' (p. 366), a structural feature of tragicomedy as defined by Giambattista Guarini, the leading Renaissance theorist of the genre, and concisely expressed by John Fletcher in 1608: 'A tragi-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy' . .. (op. cit., p. 187). Doran saw the play's resolution as representing the genre's Januslike pull in opposed directions: '. . .Shakespeare has been at some pains to give it a formally satisfying ending, in the happily ironic reversal of the "measure for measure" theme'. As Doran put it: 'Early in the play, Angelo [rejects] Isabella's plea that he temper justice with mercy. . .. With their roles reversed at the end', she struggles with the same problem and 'solves it by according him mercy' (p. 368). 17

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

In Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures (1961) A. P. Rossiter also invoked tragicomedy, but in more general terms, claiming that 'Measure for Measure is tragi-comic in two distinguishable senses. In the first half it moves swiftly towards tragic calamity; . . . then the observer Duke turns Deus ex machina, and the puppetmaster makes all dance to a happy ending, with a lot of creaking' (p. 122). 'The other sense . . . depends on the parallel running of the same themes in two incongruous tones', that is, serious and comic (p. 124). In the introduction to his Arden edition (1965), J. W. Lever argued that the 'form' of the play, 'a close blend of tragic and comic elements', is 'so carefully patterned as to suggest a conscious experiment in the new medium of tragicomedy' (p. Ix). Like Doran, Lever summarized the influential discussion by Giambattista Guarini in The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601), which described tragicomedy as 'a close blend or fusion of seeming disparates; taking from tragedy "its great characters, but not its great action; . . . danger, not death"; and from comedy "... a well-tied knot, a happy reversal, and, above all, the comic order of things" ' (p. Ixi). In 1973 G. K. Hunter agreed with Doran and Lever, describing Measure for Measure as achieving 'Guarinian tragicomic effects within an English theatrical context' (p. 145). This generic context makes the behavior of the Duke at the denouement, as well as that of several other characters and elements in the play, comprehensible. One persisting problem in the play, Isabella's and Mariana's participation in the bed-trick, has given rise to a sub-category of historical criticism that might be called the 'betrothal-contract debate'. According to J. O. Halliwell (No. 24), Mariana was justified in yielding to Angelo because of her former betrothal to him, an argument revived and extended by W. W. Lawrence. Davis P. Harding argued in 1950 that 'a high percentage of the English people' would have made no 'moral distinction between a [sponsalia per verba] de praesenti contract and the marriage ceremony'(p. 148), even though no other virtuous Shakespearean characters, such as Romeo and Juliet and Ferdinand and Miranda, 'knowingly consummate their union' before the marriage ceremony (p. 150). Angelo arrests Claudio and Juliet for their deed, of which Isabella disapproves, and yet she willingly participates in the bed-trick substitution of Mariana, who is herself only betrothed to Angelo by a de praesenti contract. 'Here is the central problem of Measure for Measure', Harding stated, concluding that 'the inconsistency in Isabella exactly mirrors a national inconsistency' (p. 156). Ernest Schanzer later distinguished between contracts de praesenti and de futuro, and a number of scholars have vigorously debated the significance of betrothal contracts in the play. The main point seems to be that Shakespeare's audiences would have known that private betrothal contracts had legal, if not ecclesiastical sanction, so that they would have had no difficulty with Isabella obeying the disguised Duke's stratagem. Although several writers have compared the situations of Claudio and Juliet and Angelo and Mariana, the comparable case of Lucio and Kate Keepdown has been generally neglected. Considering all three parallel cases, Shakespeare's implication at the end of the play may be that marriage answers in one way or other society's need to control wanton human sexuality, albeit with an ironic effect for Angelo and Lucio. Or perhaps this concern over legalities is too solemn by half. A. D. Nuttall, after examining the 'disquiet' caused by the bed-tricks in Measure for Measure 18

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

and All's Well That Ends Well, 'exacerbated by the presence in the plays of psychological complexity', concluded that both 'plays are also fairy-tales; the endings are genuine eu["good"]catastrophes; the forgiveness is experienced as real forgiveness and 3 the concluding matrimony as joy' (p. 54). Concerns over the play's treatment of sexuality have, of course, been common since the mid-eighteenth century, but the earlier critical vocabulary was essentially moralistic. Modern psychoanalytic criticism of the play may be said to date from 1936, when Ellis-Fermor spoke of Isabella's concern over her chastity as an 'obsession' (p. 262), and P. R. Vessie wrote that Isabella had failed to progress 'much beyond a childlike level of self-love and self-interest' (p. 142). Vessie judged that 'her infantile, erotic impulses have found expression in a self-centered saintliness, and this manifestation is a fetish' (p. 143). This writer explained Angelo as a 'hypocrite' who 'had never before released his instincts' (p. 143), while the Duke 'shows too much pleasure in eavesdropping', having the prurience of a Peeping Tom (p. 144). In 1939 Hanns Sachs focussed on Angelo's cruelty, the 'outstanding trait in his character' (p. 67), diagnosing an internal conflict 'caused by the regression to the sadistic stage of 2 sensuality', which made him 'an obsessional neurotic' (p. 69)." Despite these early essays, there was little psychoanalytical criticism of the play until the 1970s. As usual in this school, elements of Shakespeare's plays are simply identified with one or more psychoanalytic concepts. In 1970 Stephen A. Reid, drawing on Freud and Stephen Marcuse, described Shakespeare's aim as that of 'persuading men that limited [sexual] satisfaction is the best', as if Measure for Measure were an exercise in sublimation. In 1976 Marilyn L. Williamson invoked Oedipal fantasies, the play demonstrating that the 'father-figure' is crucial to the characters' social and sexual development, and also showing 'the fundamental importance of patriarchal authority in maintaining a social structure in which sexuality is a lifegiving rather than a corrupting element' (p. 184). Meredith Skura made the careless statement in 1979 that Thomas Bowdler 'would have included the play in his Family Shakespeare if he hadn't had so much trouble cutting out the "indecencies'" (pp. 40— 41) — Bowdler (No. 12) did, in fact, include it. Skura asserted that Measure for Measure 'presents a world of radical ambiguity which challenges the very attempt to find meaning and order and undermines its own foundations as thoroughly as any deconstructing modern reader might' (p. 53); yet she also described the play in astonishingly simple terms as being 'about the problem of growing up' (p. 54). In revising her essay Skura again repeated that the play 'is really about growing up', but then added that 'the very action that curbs sexuality generates a cluster of latent sexual fantasies', although 'these . . . never literally take over the plot' (p. 265), and then concludes that this 'play about sex that is not about sex . . . is about sex after all' (p. 267). Also reverting to the reductive approach, as well as allegory, the feministpsychoanalytic critic Janet Adelman argued in 1989 that the Duke 'is in effect the distant heavenly father who returns to judge; like all mankind, Angelo is rescued from the consequences of his original sin only by the mercy of that father', and by the good offices of Mariana (pp. 166—7). According to Adelman, superimposing a hierarchy on to her allegory, the play 'remains dichotomized into a region of sexual soil, below family, and a region of purity, above it'. The Duke's proposal of 19

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

marriage to Isabella 'suggests Shakespeare's desire to end this dichotomy; our shock — and Isabella's silence — suggest his incapacity to do so' (p. 173). Other critics used other strands of psychoanalytical theory. In 1981 Bernard J. Paris approached the play in terms of Karen Horney's account of the 'strategies of defense' used by people to cope with life's difficulties and disappointments. From this perspective we see that the Duke has a 'basic conflict . . . between his perfectionistic and his self-effacing trends' (p. 271), and therefore 'wants Angelo to enforce the laws without harming his own relationship to the people' (p. 274). The so-called 'governing fantasy of the play is one in which self-effacing attitudes and values are vindicated and failure to live up to perfectionistic standards is excused' (p. 276). Where Stephen Reid, in 1970, had invoked psychoanalytic theory to see the play as recommending sexual abstinence, in 1994 Mark Taylor used the same theoretical background to argue that 'the play is implicitly critical of sexual abstinence', which 'represents some form of emotional incompleteness' (p. 169). In Taylor's tidy scheme, Angelo copes by means of aggression (p. 172), the Duke by means of compliance (pp. 173-5), and Isabella by means of detachment (pp. 181-2).41 In three complementary essays published in the 1980s Carolyn E. Brown focussed attention, sometimes to the point of absurdity, on the connections between eroticism, religious flagellation, and the dark desires of Angelo, Isabella, and the Duke. More reasonably, Harriett Hawkins invoked the history of psychology to underline 'the fact that sexual repression could result in ... sexual aberrations, was as obvious to Freud's Elizabethan predecessor, Robert Burton, as it was to Shakespeare' (p. 112), although she fails to identify these 'aberrations' in the play. Ralph Berry, in an essay on the play's language, united Freudian theory with the approach of William Empson to write revealingly on the play's sexual puns. It is easy to understand why Measure for Measure would interest feminist critics, such as David Sundelson, who in 1981 discovered at the heart of the play 'grave fears about the precariousness of male identity and . . . fears of the destructive power of women' (p. 83). In 1984 Marcia Riefer alleged that Isabella's experience of the play was one of'powerlessness' (p. 158), and ascribed to her a 'gradual loss of her personal voice during the course of the play', experiencing 'finally [at 5.1.490-94], a literal loss of voice' (p. 167). This is to ignore the conventions of the Elizabethan stage, in which boy actors seldom played a major role in the drama's denouement, but it proved a popular interpretation with other feminist critics. Amy Lechter-Siegel attempted to fuse Riefer's indictment of 'the forces of patriarchy' (p. 169) with a historical approach, asserting 'that the Duke/Friar represents not generalized patriarchal control, but rather historically specific Jamesian-style control as James I outlines his concept of absolute authority in the Basilikon Down' (p. 372). Barbara J. Baines, on the other hand, while also citing Riefer, argued in 1990 that Riefer's position 'simply does not square with the language and actions of the character' (p. 283). According to Baines, in 'a patriarchal society, men are privileged with authority, yet, somewhat paradoxically, that authority depends upon the chastity of women' (p. 286), so that after the Duke's proposal of marriage at the end of the play Isabella deliberately 'chooses silence as a form of resistance to the patriarchal authority and to the male discourse within which this authority operates' (p. 299).1 20

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

In 1995 Alberto Cacicedo blended feminism with New Historicism to assert that 'the defining concern of the play is ... the control of "the mother" in marriage in order to enable the control of men in the state' (p. 200). Cacidedo concluded that 'from the point of view of the women, the play is a grand skimmington geared to silence them and so justify the state authority that has affected such a change' (p. 205). Two years earlier Linda Macfarlane approached the play in explicitly ahistorical terms, presenting it as 'a revelation of gender relations . . . relevant to a twentiethcentury audience' (p. 77). Not suprisingly, Macfarlane's exasperated reading registered an impasse: on the one hand 'Isabella represents the female struggle to define and decide her own project for herself (p. 81); but on the other 'Her total defeat by Angelo, who represents one form of male power, is only prevented by her total dependence on that other powerful male, the Duke', whom she marries (pp. 81—2). Another New Historicist reading, and a convincing one, came from Lynda Boose in 1995, discussing a 1611 Cheshire court case of a woman who accused a preacher of sexual harassment, only to be herself accused of slander and harshly punished. Boose compared this miscarriage of justice both with the Angelo-Isabella relationship and with the Clarence Thomas /Anita Hill United States Senate hearings of 1991.m Related in some ways to New Historicism is Cultural Materialism, deriving from English neo-Marxist critics rather than Foucault. Both groups share a concern with power, but where Foucault saw individuals as passive subjects of repressive powersystems, Marx emphasized the power of men and women to shape their own history, albeit in conditions that they could not choose. Measure for Measure has obvious attractions for anyone concerned with power and corruption, but the criticism so far produced shows up the weaknesses of both schools. Jonathan Dollimore, a spokesperson for Cultural Materialism, discussing 'Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure', promised to 'offer a different reading of the play' (p. 73), invoking Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque and various authorities on sexual deviance. But he could only produce the lame insight that 'the prostitutes, the most exploited group in the society which the play represents, are absent from it', having 'no voice, no presence' (pp. 85—6). For the feminists, Isabella had no voice; for Dollimore, the Kate Keepdowns have been denied legitimate representation, a state of affairs far unlike, presumably, the present day when 'the demonising of deviant sexuality meets with cultural and political resistance'.m The New Historicist approach is typically represented by Leonard Tennenhouse, who brought Foucault's theories to bear on Shakespeare's play, also relating it to the contemporary subgenre of 'disguised ruler plays', such as Marston's The Malcontent (c. 1603) and The Fawn (c. 1604) - a connection made by W. W. Lawrence in 1931, apparently unknown to Tennenhouse. Arguing that such plays 'elaborate some collective fantasy about the origins and limits of power' (p. 140) and show 'the machinery of state . . . control' (p. 142), Tennenhouse asserted that Shakespeare's point is 'that only the true monarch is the best form of political power' (p. 143). Reverting to Foucault, Tennenhouse argued that political power includes the control of sexual desire through 'a set of substitutions which reverse the consequences of desire' (p. 150), so superimposing the New Historicist ideology of power on the action of Measure for Measure. Using the work of Tennenhouse as his starting point, 21

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Steven Mullaney also disclaimed any wish to reduce the play to a political allegory (p. 107), yet he equated the Duke with James I, implying that both rulers 'combined the powers of secular and ghostly patriarchy' (p. 104). In conclusion, Mullaney quoted Angelo's abject acknowledgement to the Duke: 'When I perceive your Grace, like pow'r divine, / Hath look'd upon my passes' (5.5.369-70), commenting: 'it is not a testament to the Christian allegory of the play but rather to the power that comes from dismantling, secularizing, and internalizing the structure of Christian anxiety, especially the psychological tyranny of pastoral inquiry, and for putting those structures into play on a new stage' (p. 111).46 Other recent approaches have been more grounded in historical actuality. Leah Marcus has discussed the play's setting in London and the paranoia over the fears of Catholicism regaining a hold in England, while Lynda Hayne has concentrated on the social issues and ramifications of betrothal contracts and marriage. As for power and its theatrical display, Craig A. Bernthal has provided a more convincing account of the contemporary treason trials of 1603 and its relation to Shakespeare's play than Mullaney did. Anthony B. Dawson, finally, in an essay published in 1988, made the transition from purely literary studies to performance criticism, the last approach to be surveyed here. Dawson deplored 'the increasingly hegemonic discourse of [American] new historicism' (p. 337), and discussed the play's last act from a theatrical point of view, invoking John Barton's famous 1970 production, in which Isabella turned away from the Duke when he proposed marriage, and Michael Bogdanov's infamous 1985 production with its 'self-subverting ending', in which 'the highly theatrical and public imposition of power . . . was done as if at a fascist rally' (p. 338). Dawson preferred the 'actual subversion' possible in theatrical production to the New Historicist formula, by which 'subversion' is always 'contained.'47 Dawson's theatrical approach to Measure for Measure coincided with a veritable explosion of productions on the stage in the latter part of the twentieth century. Aside from its recorded performance on 26 December 1604, and excluding the adaptations by Davenant and Gildon cited above, Measure for Measure is not known to have been performed again until 1720.m During the eighteenth century it was performed in London alone over one hundred and thirty times, but, as Brian Gibbons recently observed, it 'was played with decreasing frequency as the nineteenth century wore on. Its emphasis on sexuality, disease and poverty in low life, and intense, painful emotion, might well cause discomfort to increasingly urban middleclass audiences, sanctimonious about the family and marriage, anxious about class, sexually prudish or prurient, unused to thinking when at the theatre'.,m A. B. Walkley (No. 57) wrote in a review of a production in 1906 that he would rather read the play than see it on stage, because then he could 'dwell at leisure on the "sentiments" with their fine rhetorical moralising on the great commonplaces of life and death, mercy and justice, passion and chastity'. His 'sentiments' were shared by William Winter (No. 68), who in 1913 declared it 'better to be read than to be seen', a play 'unfit for the modern Theatre'. Although C. E. Montague (No. 64) gave a measured review of William Poel's production at Manchester in 1908, he too had grave misgivings, especially concerning 'Isabella's assent to the stratagem' of the bedtrick, while James Agate declared the play a failure in 1924 because of 'Shakespeare's 22

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

efforts to weave tragic issues to some stuff of comedy'.m When Agate reviewed Tyrone Guthrie's famous production at the Old Vic in 1933, starring Charles Laughton as Angelo and Flora Robson as Isabella, he expressed a common theatregoer's attitude: 'I hold that the interest definitely stops with the Duke's recommendation [i.e., the bed-trick] at the end of Act III, Scene I . . . ' (p. 31). The generally acknowledged twentieth-century watershed production was by Peter Brook at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1950, starring Harry Andrews as the Duke, John Gielgud as Angelo, and Barbara Jefford as Isabella. Before this the play had been done in Stratford only ten times between 1884 and 1947, but since Brook's version it has been produced ten times at Stratford, and has been taken up by many dozens of professional companies in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. Brook's production has been discussed in some depth by Richard David, Herbert S. Weil, Jr., and Jane Williamson, and aside from the fact that Brook cut lines to make both the Duke and Isabella less open to criticism, his major innovations were to emphasize what he termed in his book The Empty Space (London, 1968) the balance between the Holy and the Rough sides of the play. One of his boldest innovations was the long pause made by Isabella after the Duke's 'He dies for Claudio's death' (5.1.443), 'among the longest in theatre history', Jane Williamson noted, describing the ensuing moments: 'Then hesitantly, still silent, Isabella moved across the stage and knelt before the Duke. Her words came quiet and level, and as their full import of mercy reached Angelo, a sob broke from him. It was perfectly timed; and the whole perilous manoeuvre had been triumphantly brought off (p. 152). Williamson also showed that 'English productions of Measure for Measure in the mid-1950s placed increasing emphasis on the Duke' (p. 155) and in the 'early 1960s . . . began, increasingly, to present' him as 'the semiallegorical, God-like figure that some theatrical reviewers had been looking for in the mid-1950s and that literary critics had been discussing since the 1930s' (p. 159). Michael Elliot, in his Old Vic production (1963), acknowledged advice received from Nevill Coghill, while Tyrone Guthrie, in his 1966 production (Bristol Old Vic) described the play's central theme as 'Justice must be tempered by Mercy, Authority by Love'. For Guthrie the Duke was 'something more than a glorified portait of royalty. Rather he is a figure of Almighty God' (p. 161).51 As Ralph Berry has observed, Brook's approach 'was the received, one might say the Establishment, view of the play' (p. 242) until 1970, when John Barton produced the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In this production, according to Jane Williamson, 'none of the characters, including the good Duke and Isabella, emerged unflawed'. In the theatre program Anne Barton (a Cambridge professor and the director's wife) had written: 'Isabella's purity conceals an hysterical fear of sex which scarcely allows her to speak of her brother's fault, and leads directly to her unlovely attack upon him in prison'3" (p. 167). When the Duke (played by a bespectacled Sebastian Shaw) proposed to Isabella in the final scene, she 'simply leaped into Claudio's arms, ignoring Vincentio'. After his second attempt and 'a long pause of silence, he uttered a resigned, "So", put on his glasses, and departed with all the others, leaving a bewildered Isabella alone on stage looking out at the audience. The royal prince of the 1950s and the Godlike Duke of the 1960s had given way to a 23

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

genial humbler' (p. 169). Berry, who described this ending as 'perhaps the most original single feature of Barton's production, one that crystallizes the director's concept' (p. 242), noted that in the 1950s critics had simply taken it for granted that Isabella accepted the Duke's offer of marriage, 'faithfully reporting their recollection of the play as seen. Isabellas always, it seems, used to accept the Duke's proposal. Nowadays — beginning with Barton's production — they invariably draw back' (p. 243). Berry attributes the shift to a change in the public's attitude toward authority since the late 1960s and to 'the change in the position of women' (p. 243), so that directors in the 1970s could make Isabella 'tense and angrily resistant', or left 'in an agony of doubt', or even horrified by the Duke's proposal (p. 246). However, lest we think that a new and unchanging orthodoxy has taken over, in other recent productions Isabella has 'accepted [the Duke's] proposal with alacrity' (Stratford, 1978), or with approval (Stratford, 1983). In his 1979 BBC television production Desmond Davis made Isabella pause, but then accept the Duke's proposal, while in Nicholas Hytner's 1987 production at Stratford-upon-Avon, 'she stared at him — without actually rejecting him'. ~ An interesting variation occurred in Steven Pimlott's Stratford production (1994), when Isabella, humiliated in the final scene by the games she has been made to play by an improvising Duke, slapped him on the face and then kissed him. They both seemed confused, and the play ended in an atmosphere of ambiguity.54 In the most recent Stratford production (1998) by Michael Boyd, the Duke kissed Isabella, she thought things over for a moment, but then walked out with him hand-in-hand. It is, finally, as a dramatic creation that Measure for Measure stands or falls, and ideologically-driven critics should recall that the play was written to be performed before paying customers, not to be read as a treatise advocating certain religious, social, political or psychological positions or beliefs. Of course, productions of the play over time have reflected the ideological attitudes of directors, actors, and their reviewers, but these were attitudes neither of Shakespeare nor his public. In 1816 William Hazlitt (No.9) called Shakespeare 'the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies, and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, elevations, and depressions. The object of the pedantic moralist is to make the worst of everything; his was to make the best....' In the case of Measure for Measure, critics and scholars have perhaps placed too much emphasis upon the serious issues of the play, as embodied in the Duke, Angelo, and Isabella — the ethical and metaphysical relationships between justice, judgment, law, liberty, mercy, morality, self-discipline, and sensuality. So doing, they have downplayed the play's comic side. As Sir Walter Raleigh (No. 56) put it in 1907: 'This is indeed the everlasting difficulty of Shakespeare criticism, that the critics are so much more moral than Shakespeare himself, and so much less experienced. He makes his appeal to thought, and they respond to the appeal by a display of delicate taste'. Peter Brook, director of the twentieth century's most successful production of Measure for Measure, spoke of 'a roughness of texture and a conscious mingling of opposites' as being the 'essence' of Shakespeare's style: 'As long as scholars could not decide whether this play was a comedy or not, it never got played. In fact, this ambiguity makes it one of the most revealing of Shakespeare's works — and one that shows these two elements, Holy 24

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

and Rough, almost schematically, side by side. They are opposed and they co-exist'. 55 Further analysis of these juxtaposed elements may produce deeper insights into this ever-challenging work of art.

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8

9 LO

[1 12 13 14

The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden, ed. Edmond Malone, 3 vols (London, 1800), I, part II, pp. 233-4. In an interesting footnote to this passage, Malone commented on Dryden's 'witness the lameness of their plots; many of which, especially those which they writ first': 'This surely was said at random, and without authority, for the writer manifestly did not know which were Shakespeare's earliest productions. From his subsequent enumeration, he appears to have thought Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure, to have been among that author's early productions: but Pericles, at least in its present form, was probably produced in 1607 or 1608; The Winter's Tale there arc very good grounds for believing to have been produced in 1611, and to have been one of Shakespeare's latest works; and Measure for Measure, it is almost certain, was first represented in 1603, or 1604, when its author had passed through more than half of his theatrical career. That these two plays should have been considered by Dryden as mean performances, is truly wonderful. (I, part II, pp. 233—4) Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 142. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, III (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), p. 32. Charles Gildon, 'An Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England', in The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare. Volume the Seventh (1710), p.viii; reprinted in Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974—81), II, p. 220. Gildon, 'Remarks', pp. 292-3; reprinted in Vickers, II, pp. 239-40. John Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare (London, 1746), p. 72; reprinted in Vickers, III, p. 295. Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, Shakespear Illustrated: or the Novels and Histories, On which the Plays oj Shakespear Are Founded, Collected and Translated from the Original Authors. With Critical Remarks, 3 vols (London, 1753—54), I, p. 24; reprinted in Vickers, IV, p. 110. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Griffith, The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (London, 1775), p. 35. Samuel Johnson (ed.), The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added Notes by Sam. Johnson (London, 1765), I; reprinted in Vickers, V, p. 105. All quotations from Johnson are from vol. V of Vickers. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Trdition (New York, 1953), p. 213. See Thomas Middleton Raysor (ed.), Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, 2nd edn (London, 1962, Everyman's Library), I, pp. xviii-xxi. George L. Geckle, 'Coleridge on Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 (1967), 71-3. See Paradise Lost, 4.393-4: "So spake the fiend, and with necessitie, / The Tyrant's plea, excus'd his devilish deeds'. 25

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

23 24

25

26 27

28

See Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West (New York, 1958), pp. 58-66, but especially p. 63. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 'Introduction', Measure for Measure, ed. Sir Arthur QuillerCouch and J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1922), pp. xxiv, xxx. J. Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 115, 117. U. M. Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (London, 1936), pp. 260, 261, 262. G. Wilson Knight, 'Measure for Measure and the Gospels', The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930), pp. 73—96. Knight's essay influenced the following well-known critics: L. C. Knights, 'The Ambiguity of Measure for Measure', Scrutiny, 10 (1942), 222-33; and F. R. Leavis, 'The Greatness of Measure for Measure', Scrutiny, 10 (1942), 234—47; their essays were reprinted in The Importance of Scrutiny, ed. Eric Bentley (New York, 1948). Also see D. A. Traversi, 'Measure for Measure', Scrutiny, 11 (1942), 40—58. William Witherle Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931; 2nd edn, 1960), pp. 78-121. R. W. Chambers, 'The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure', Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, Proceedings of the British Academy, 23 (1937), 135— 92; revised and reprinted in Man's Unconquearable Mind (London, 1939), pp. 277—310. Francis Fergusson, 'Philosophy and Theatre in Measure for Measure', Kenyan Review, 14 (Winter 1952), 103—20; reprinted in Fergusson's The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York, 1957), pp. 126—43; Fergusson's influence is seen in Harold S. Wilson's 'Action and Symbol in Measure for Measure and the Tempest', Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (1953), 375-84; M. C. Bradbrook, 'Authority, Truth, and Justice in Measure for Measure', Review of English Studies, 17 (1941), 385-99. Roy W. Battenhouse, 'Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement', PMLA 61 (1946), 1029-59. Nevill Coghill, 'Comic Form in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), 14-27; and Sarah C. Velz, 'Man's Need and God's Plan in Measure for Measure and Mark IV, Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 37-44. Robert Ornstein, 'The Human Comedy: Measure for Measure', University of Kansas City Review, 24 (Autumn 1957), 15—22; reprinted in Ornstein's The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison, Wis., 1960), pp. 250-60; and Mathew Winston, '"Craft Against Vice": Morality Play Elements in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 229-48. Elizabeth Marie Pope, 'The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 2 (1949), 66-82. John D. Cox, 'The Medieval Background of Measure for Measure', Modern Philology, 81 (1983), 1—13; George L. Geckle, 'Shakespeare's Isabella,' Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 163—8; and Darryl J. Gless, 'Measure for Measure', the Law, and the Convent (Princeton, 1979). See Louis Albrecht, Neue Untersuchungen zu Shakespeares Mass fur Mass (Berlin, 1914; a Konigsberg dissertation), pp. 135-93; Norman Nathan, 'The Marriage of Duke Vincentio and Isabella', Shakespeare Quarterly, 1 (1956), 43-5; David L. Stevenson, 'The Role of James I in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure', ELH, 26 (1959), 188-208 (reprinted in revised form as an appendix in his The Achievement of Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' [Ithaca, N. Y., 1966]); Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of'Julius Caesar', 'Measure for Measure','Antony and Cleopatra' (London, 1963), pp. 120—6; Herbert Howarth, 'Shakespeare's Flattery in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 29-37; Josephine Waters Bennett, 'Measure for Measure' as Royal Entertainment (New York and London, 1966); Roy Battenhouse, 'Measure for Measure and King James', CLIO, 7 26

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

29

30 31

32

33

(1978), 193-215; Alvin Kernan, 'The King's Prerogative and the Law: Measure for Measure, Whitehall, December 26, 1604', Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (New Haven, 1995), pp. 50-70; Richard Levin, 'The King James Version of Measure for Measure', CLIO, 3 (1974), 129—63. See also Levin's exchange with Battenhouse in 'Another King James Version of Measure for Measure', CLIO, 7 (1978), 217-19, and Battenhouse's reply, 'On Shakespeare's Timely Timelessness', CLIO, 7 (1978), 220-22. See Marco Mincoff, 'Measure for Measure: A Question of Approach', Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 141—52; Howard C. Cole, 'The "Christian" Context of Measure for Measure', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 64 (1965), 425-51; Richard A. Levin, 'Duke Vincentio and Angelo: Would "A Feather Turn the Scale"?', Studies in English Literature, 22 (1982), 257-70; Harry Berger, Jr., 'What Does the Duke Know and When Does He Know It? Carrying the Torch in Measure for Measure', Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford, 1997), pp. 335—426; Donna B. Hamilton, 'The Duke in Measure for Measure: "I Find an Apt Remission in Myself ', Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 175-83; Cynthia Lewis, '"Dark Deeds Darkly Answered": Duke Vincentio and Judgment in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 271-89; N. W. Bawcutt, '"He Who the Sword of Heaven Will Bear": The Duke versus Angelo in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), 89-97. Edith Sitwell, A Notebook on William Shakespeare (London, 1948), pp. 122-9. See Montgomery Belgion, 'The Measure of Kafka', The Criterion, 18 (1938), 13-28; Willard H. Durham, 'What Art Thou, Angelo?', Studies in the Comic: Univ. of California Publications in English, 8 (1941), 155-74; Elmer Edgar Stoll, 'All's Well and Measure for Measure', From Shakespeare to Joyce: Authors and Critics; Literature and Life (New York, 1944), pp. 235-68; John Russell Brown, 'Love's Ordeal and the Judgements of All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida', Shakespeare and His Comedies (London, 1957), pp. 183-200; Hal Gelb, 'Duke Vincentio and the Illusion of Comedy or All's Not Well That Ends Well', Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 25-34; Jean E. Howard, 'Measure for Measure and the Restraints of Convention', Essays in Literature, 10 (1983), 149-58; Herbert Weil, Jr., 'Forms and Contexts in Measure for Measure', Critical Quarterly, 12 (1970), 55-72; Lawrence W. Hyman, 'The Unity of Measure for Measure', Modern Language Quarterly, 36 (1975), 3—20; Roger Sale, 'The Comic Mode of Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 19 (1968), 55—61; and A. D. Nuttall, 'Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?', Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 231—51; and Harold Bloom, 'Measure for Measure', Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York, 1998), pp. 358-80. See Oscar James Campbell, 'Measure for Measure', Shakespeare's Satire (New York, 1943), pp. 121—41 ; Murray Krieger, 'Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Comedy', PMLA, 66 (1951), 775—84; David L. Stevenson, 'Design and Structure in Measure for Measure: A New Appraisal', ELH, 23 (1956), 256—78 (reprinted in revised form as chapter 1 of Stevenson's The Achievement of Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' [Ithaca, N. Y., 1966]); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 177—8, and 'The Reversal of Action,' The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Toronto, 1983; rpt. with new intro., 1993), pp. 3-33; and W. M. T. Dodds, 'The Character of Angelo in Measure for Measure', Modern Language Review, 41 (1946), 246—55. Clifford Leech, 'The "Meaning" of Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 3 (1950), 66— 73; see also Hardin Craig (ed.), The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), pp. 833-4; and G. B. Harrison (ed.), Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York, 1952), pp. 1100-1. 27

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

34

35 36

37

38

39

40

See Mark Van Doren, 'Measure for Measure', Shakespeare (New York, 1939), pp. 217—24; and Wylie Sypher, 'Shakespeare as Casuist: Measure for Measure', Sewanee Review, 58 (1950), 262-80. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto, 1949; rpt. London, 1950, with different pagination). See also Peter Ure, Shakespeare: the Problem Plays, Writers and Their Work: No. 140 (London, 1961); William Toole, Shakespeare's Problem Plays: Studies in Form and Meaning (The Hague, 1966); and Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981). See also Michael Jamieson's useful survey of criticism: 'The Problem Plays, 1920—1970: A Retrospect', Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 1-10. See Mary Lascelles, Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' (London, 1953); Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, Wis., 1954); A. P. Rossiter, 'The Problem Plays', Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (London, 1961), pp. 108—28; J. W. Lever (ed.), 'Introduction', Measure for Measure, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1965), pp. Ix-lxiii; G. K. Hunter, 'Italian Tragicomedy on the English Stage', Renaissance Drama, NS 6 (1973), 123—48. See also George L. Geckle (ed.), Introduction, Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'Measure for Measure': A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1970), pp. 11-12; Arthur C. Kirsch, The Integrity of Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 89—105; and Gregory W. Lanier, 'Physic That's Bitter to Sweet End: The Tragicomic Structure of Measure for Measure', Essays in Literature, 14 (1987), 15—36, which focusses on the 'diptych structure' (via Frye) and 'binary oppositions.' Davis P. Harding, 'Elizabethan Betrothals and Measure for Measure', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 49 (1950), 139—58; Ernest Schanzer, 'The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 13 (1960), 81-9 (partially reprinted in The Problem Plays of Shakespeare, cited above); A. D. Nuttall, 'Measure for Measure: The BedTrick', Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 51—6. See also S. Nagarajan, 'Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals', Shakespeare Quarterly, 14 (1963), 115-19; J. Birje-Patil, 'Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 106-11; Margaret Loftus Ranald, ' "As Marriage Binds, and Blood Breaks": English Marriage and Shakespeare', Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1979), 68—81; Karl P. Wentersdorf, 'The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure: A Reconsideration', Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 12944; Margaret Scott, '"Our City Institutions": Some Further Reflections on the Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure', ELH, 49 (1982), 790-804; Harriet Hawkins, 'What Kind of Pre-contract had Angelo? A Note on Some Non-problems in Elizabethan Drama', College English, 36 (1974), 173-9; and A. D. Nuttall, 'Measure for Measure: The Bed-Trick', Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 51—6. P. R. Vessie, 'Psychiatry Catches up with Shakespeare', Medical Record, 144 (1936), 141-5; Hanns Sachs, 'The Measure in Measure for Measure', The American Imago, 1 (1939), 60-81; reprinted in The Creative Unconscious, ed. A. A. Roback (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), pp. 63—99; 2nd rev. edn, 1951, pp. 72—98; and in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. M. D. Faber (New York, 1970), pp. 481-97. See Stephen A. Reid, 'A Psychoanalytic Reading of Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure', Psychoanalytic Review, 57 (1970), 263—82; Marilyn L. Williamson, 'Oedipal Fantasies in Measure for Measure', Michigan Academician, 9 (1976), 173—84; Meredith Skura, 'New Interpretations for Interpretation of Measure for Measure', Boundary 2, 7 (1979), 3959; Meredith Skura, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven, 1981), pp. 243—70; Janet Adelman, 'Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well 28

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

That Ends Well and Measure for Measure', Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 151-74; revised version in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays; 'Hamlet' to 'The Tempest' (New York, 1992), pp. 76-102. 41 Bernard]. Paris, 'The Inner Conflicts of Measure for Measure: A Psychological Approach', The Centennial Review, 35 (1981), 266—76; and Mark Taylor, 'Farther Privileges: Conflict and Change in Measure for Measure', Philological Quarterly, 73 (1994), 169—93. 42 See Carolyn E. Brown, 'Erotic Religious Flagellation and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure', English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 139-65; Carolyn E. Brown, 'Measure for Measure: Isabella's Beating Fantasies', American Imago, 43 (1986), 67-80; Carolyn E. Brown, 'Measure for Measure: Duke Vincentio's "Crabbed Desires" ', Literature and Psychology, 35 (1989), 66-88; Harriett Hawkins, "The Devil's Party": Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 105-13; and Ralph Berry, 'Language and Structure in Measure for Measure', University of Toronto Quarterly, 46 (1976/7), 147-61. For Empson's own essay see 'Sense in Measure for Measure', The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951), pp. 270-88. 43 See David Sundelson, 'Misogyny and Rule in Measure for Measure', Women's Studies, 9 (1981), 83—91; Marcia Riefer, '"Instruments of Some Mightier Member": The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 157—69; Amy Lechter-Siegel, 'Isabella's Silence: The Consolidation of Power in Measure for Measure', Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from the 21st Annual Conference, ed. Mario DiCesare (Binghampton, New York, 1992), pp. 371—80; and Barbara J. Baines, 'Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure', Studies in English Literature, 30 (1990), 283— 301. For a caveat concerning feminist approaches to the play, see Kathleen McCluskie, 'The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure', Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Smfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 88-108. 44 See Alberto Cacicedo. ' "She is fast my wife": Sex, Marriage, and Ducal Authority in Measure for Measure,' Shakespeare Studies, 23 (1995), 187-209; Linda Macfarlane, 'Heads you win tails I lose', Critical Survey, 5 (1993), 77-82; and Lynda Boose, 'The Priest, the Slanderer, the Historian and the Feminist,' English Literary Renaissance, 25 (1995), 320-40. 45 Jonathan Dollimore, 'Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure', Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, New York, 1985), pp. 78-87. 46 See Leonard Tennenhouse, 'Representing Power: Measure for Measure in Its Time', Genre, 15 (1982), 139—56; Steven Mullaney, 'Apprehending Subjects, or the Reformation in the Suburbs', The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago, 1988; Ann Arbor, 1995), pp. 88-115. See also Stephen Greenblatt, 'Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne', Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 129-63. 47 See Leah S. Marcus, 'London', Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 160-211; Victoria Hayne, 'Performing Social Practice: The Example of Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 1-29; Craig A. Bernthal, 'Staging Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of Measure for Measure', Studies in English Literature, 32 (1992), 247—69; and Anthony B. Dawson, 'Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power', Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 328-41. 48 Sec Mark Eccles (ed.), Measure for Measure (New York, 1980), pp. 468-9. 49 Brian Gibbons (ed.), Measure for Measure (Cambridge, 1991), p. 56. 29

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

50 51

52

53

54 55

James Agate, Brief Chronicles: A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in Actual Performance (London, 1943), p. 29. See Richard David, 'Shakespeare's Comedies and the Modern Stage', Shakespeare Survey, 4 (1951), 129-38; Herbert S. Weil, Jr., 'The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook's Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 27—35; Jane Williamson, 'The Duke and Isabella on the Modern Stage', in The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price and Helen D. Willard (University Park, Penn., 1975), pp. 149-69. Professor Barton has not modified her position; in her introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edn (Boston, 1997), she has asserted: '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 (p. 580). See Ralph Berry, 'Measure for Measure on the Contemporary Stage', Humanities Association Review, 28 (1977), 241—7; S. Nagarajan, 'Measure for Measure on Stage and Screen', in Measure for Measure, ed. S. Nagarajan, 2nd rev. edn (New York, 1998), pp. 197, 199, 200. See George L. Geckle, Review of Measure for Measure, in Shakespeare Bulletin, 13 (Winter 1995), 12-14. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (1968; rpt., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972), pp. 98-9.

30

1 Joseph Ritson, correcting Shakespeare's editors 1783

From Remarks, Critical and Illustrative, on the Text and Notes of the Last Edition of Shakspere (London, 1783). Joseph Ritson (1752-1803) was born into a relatively poor family and educated at Stockton-on-Tees. Settling in London, he became a conveyancer, high bailiff of the Savoy, and in 1789 was called to the bar. Although he published tracts on matters of law, he is known today as an antiquarian and commentator on Shakespeare. His Remarks, Critical and Illustrative (1783) was a criticism of the 1778 Johnson and Steevens edition of Shakespeare, and this was followed by The Quip Modest (1788), criticizing Isaac Reed's 1785 revision of it. Ritson then attacked the third established Shakespeare edition in Cursory Criticisms on the Edition of Shakespeare Published by Edmond Malone (1792). His most extensive commentary on Measure for Measure in the three books is in Remarks, Critical and Illustrative, which has some penetrating notes on the play.

[On 1.2.84 s.d.] [Enter Clown.] As this is the first clown who makes his appearance in the plays of our author, Mr. Steevens thought it not amiss, from a passage in [Richard] Tarltons News out of Purgatory [1590], to point out one of the ancient dresses appropriated to the character. '—I saw one attired in russet, with a buttoned cap on his head, a great bag by his side and a strong bat in his hand; so artificially attired for a clowne, as I began to call Tarlton's wonted shape to remembrance.' This may, probably enough, have been the dress appropriated to such a character as the clown or fool in As you like it, All's Well that Ends Well, Twelfth Night, and King Lear, but the clown of this play is a different personage, the tapster to a bawdyhouse, and resembles the above character no more than Launce, Speed, Costard, or Launcelot Gobbo, the note and quotation, therefore, which might [have] had their use elsewhere, are here certainly misplaced. [On 1.2.145-7] Claud. — Upon a true contract, I got possession of Juliettas bed; You know the lady; &c. 31

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

This speech, as Mr. Steevens well observes, is too indelicate to be spoken concerning Juliet, before her face; for she appears to be brought in with the rest, though she has nothing to say. The clown points her out as they enter; and yet, from Claudio's telling Lucio that he knows the lady, &c. one would think, he says, she was not meant to have made her personal appearance upon the stage. That Julietta enters at the same time with Claudio; — that she is not present during his conversation with Lucio; — and that she is afterwards in the custody of the provost; — are evident and certain. The little seeming impropriety there is will be entirely removed by supposing, that, when Claudio stops to speak to Lucio, the provost's officers depart with Julietta. [On 1.3.19-21] Duke. We have strict statutes and most biting laws, Which for these nineteen years we have let sleep. It was fourteen The reason of who recollects before uttered mentions

years in all the editions prior to Theobald who made the alteration. which, he, in his note upon the place, says, will be obvious to him what the Duke has said in a foregoing scene. But the Duke had not a syllable about the matter; he must therefor mean Claudio, who the enrolled penalties Which have, like unscour'd armour, hung by the wall, So long, that nineteen zodiacks have gone round, And none of them been worn. [1.2.166—9]

Theobald says, the author could not so disagree with himself; and that it is necessary to make the two accounts correspond. But there is no reason to charge the author with inconsistency, neither is it necessary that the two speakers should agree in their calculation. If it were, the Duke's account should most certainly be preferred, as he was doubtless much better acquainted with the exact time of the disuse of those laws than Claudio can be reasonably supposed to have been. For, though he may not be too young a man to have a perfect recollection of the circumstance, (and it should rather appear he is) yet it must be observed that he is about to suffer by the revival of these very penalties, which, both his interest and inclination would naturally lead him to represent as much more obsolete than they actually were. The old reading should, in all events, be restored. [On 2.1.172] Elb. [Escal.] Which is the wiser here? Justice or iniquity? These, says Dr. Johnson, were, I suppose, two personages well known to the audience by their frequent appearance in the old moralities. The words, therefore, continues he, at that time produced a combination of ideas, which they have now lost. Justice or iniquity, i.e. the constable or the fool. Escalus calls the latter iniquity in allusion to the old Vice, a necessary character, it is said, in the ancient moralities or 32

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

dumb shews; and the Harlequin of the modern stage. Justice may have a similar allusion to his supposed antagonist, into whose hands, after a variety of elusions, he was always made to fall. [On 4.3.16] Clown. — Master Forthright the tiller. The old copy, says Dr. Johnson, reads Forthlight, but this he conjectured should be Forthright, alluding to the line in which the thrust is made. And, as he had it in his power to alter the text, — so the text was altered. Forthlight may, nevertheless, be the true reading; certainly, it should not have been so hastyly displaced. It, probably enough, contains an allusion to the fencers threat of making the light shine through his antagonist. [On 4.3.64-5] Duke. Unfit to live or die: oh, gravel heart! After him fellows; bring him to the block. The Duke is wonderfully consistent: not three lines below he calls the prisoner; A creature unprepar'd, unmeet for death [4.3.67]; and says, that to transport him in the mind he is Were damnable [4.3.68-9]. (16-24)

33

2 William Richardson, Isabella 'pious, . . . determined, and eloquent' 1789

From Essays on Shakespeare's Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, Imitation of Female Characters (London, 1789).

and on His

William Richardson (1743—1814) was educated at Glasgow University and went on to graduate M.A. He served several years as tutor to the sons of Lord Cathcart, and because of the nobleman's influence was appointed to the vacant chair of Humanity at Glasgow University in 1772, where he was a popular professor. He wrote several books on Shakespeare, including A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of some of Shakespeare's remarkable Characters (1774) and Essays on Shakespeare's Dramatic Characters of Richard the Third, King Lear, and Timon of Athens (2 vols, 1783—85). His remarks on Isabella come from the section 'On Shakespeare's Imitation of Female Characters', pp. 57—85 of these Essays.

Isabella is represented equally [Richardson has just discussed Miranda] blameless, amiable, and affectionate: she is particularly distinguished by intellectual ability. Her understanding and good sense are conspicuous: her arguments are well-applied, and her pleading persuasive. Yet her abilities do not offend by appearing too masculine: they are mitigated and finely blended with female softness. If she venture to argue, it is to save the life of a brother. Even then, it is with such reluctance, hesitation, and diffidence, as need to be urged and encouraged. Luc. To him again, intreat him, Kneel down before him, &c. Isab. O it is excellent To have a giant's strength: but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.

Luc. That's well said. [Quotes 2.2.43-5, 107-9] The transitions in Isabella's pleadings are natural and affecting. Her introduction is timid and irresolute. Lucio tells her, If you should need a pin, You could not with more lame a tongue desire it.

To him, I say. [2.2.45-7] 34

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Thus prompted, she makes an effort; she speaks from her immediate feelings: she has not acquired boldness enough to enter the lists of argument; and addresses him merely as a suppliant: [Quotes 2.2.60—3]. Animated by her exertion, she becomes more assured, and ventures to refute objections. As she is a nun, and consequently acquainted with religious knowledge, the argument she employs is suited to her profession. Is. Why, all the souls that are, were forfeit once, And he that might the vantage best have took, Found out the remedy. [2.2.73-5] At length, no longer abashed and irresolute, but fully collected, she reasons, so to say, on the merits of the cause. Good, good, my lord, bethink you Who is it that hath died for this offence? There's many have committed it. [2.2.87—9] Nor is her argument unbecoming in the mouth even of a nun. Her subsequent conduct vindicates her own character from aspersion. Besides, she had with great delicacy and propriety, at the beginning of her pleading, expressed herself in such a manner, as to obviate any charge. There is a vice that I do so much abhor, And most desire should meet the blow of justice, For which I would not plead but that I must. [2.2.29—31] Emboldened by truth, and the feeling of good intention, she passes, at the end of her debate, from the merits of the cause, to a spirited appeal even to the consciousness of her judge. Go to your bosom, Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know Like to your brother's fault. 1 [2.2.136-8] Isabella is not only sensible and persuasive, but sagacious, and capable of becoming address. In communicating to her brother the unworthy designs of Angelo, she seems aware of his weakness; she is not rash nor incautious, but gives her intimation by degrees, and with studied dexterity. It is not inconsistent with her gentleness, modesty, and reserve, that, endowed as she is with understanding, and strongly impressed with a sense of duty, she should form resolutions respecting her own conduct without reluctance, and adhere to them without wavering. Though tenderly attached to her brother, she spurns, without hesitation, the alternative proposed by Angelo, and never balances in her choice. Neither is it incongruous, but a fine tint in the character, that she feels indignation, and expresses it strongly. But it is not indignation against an adversary; it is not on account of injury; it is a disinterested emotion: it is against a brother who does not respect himself; who expresses pusillanimous sentiments; and would have her act in an unworthy manner. — Such is the amiable, pious, sensible, resolute, determined, and eloquent Isabella. She pleads powerfully for her brother, and no less powerfully for her poetical father. (66—70) 35

3 Edmond Malone, topical allusions in Measure for Measure 1790 From The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; Collated Verbatim with the most Authentick Copies, and Revised (10 vols in 11, London, 1790). Volumes I and II. Edmond Malone (1741-1812) was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, studied at the Inner Temple in London in 1763, and was called to the Irish bar in 1767. Financially unsuccessful as a lawyer, but having inherited a modest estate, Malone moved to London in 1777 to become a man of letters. He was a friend of Dr. Johnson, and after Johnson's death in 1784 helped Boswell revise his The Life of Samuel Johnson (published 1791). Malone is best known for his work on Shakespeare, beginning with An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakespeare Were Written (first published in the Johnson-Steevens edition, 1778), followed by his two-volume Supplement to that edition (1780). Most of the latter part of his life was spent working on his edition of Plays and Poems (first published in 11 volumes in 1790, and later revised and published posthumously with the help of James Boswell the younger in 21 volumes in 1821), but he also published an edition (3 vols in 4) of The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dry den (London, 1800).

[From An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written]

24. MEASURE FOR MEASURE, 1603. This play was not registered at Stationers' hall, nor printed, till 1623. But from two passages in it, which seem intended as a courtly apology for the stately and ungracious demeanour of King James I. on his entry into England, it appears probable that it was written not long after his accession to the throne: I'll privily away. I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes. Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause, and aves vehement; Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it. [1.1.67-72] 36

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Again,

So The general, subject to a well-wish'd king, Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence. King James was so much offended by the untaught, and, we may add, undeserved, gratulations of his subjects, on his entry into England, that he issued a proclamation, forbidding the people to resort to him. — 'Afterwards,' says the historian of his reign, 'in his publick appearances, especially in his sports, the accesses of the people made him so impatient, that he often dispersed them with frowns, that we may not say with curses.'" It is observable throughout our authour's plays, that he does not scruple to introduce English signs, habits, customs, names, &c. though the scene of his drama lies in a foreign country; and that he has frequent allusions to the circumstances of the day, though the events which form the subject of his piece are supposed to have happened a thousand years before. Thus, in Coriolanus, Hob and Dick are plebeians; and the Romans toss their caps in the air, with the same expression of festivity which our poet's contemporaries displayed in Stratford or London. In Twelfth Night we hear of the bed of Ware, and the bells of Saint Bennet; and in The Taming of the Shrew the Pegasus, a sign of a publick house in Cheapside in the time of Queen Elizabeth, is hung up in a town in Italy. In Hamlet the Prince of Denmark and Guildenstern hold a long conversation concerning the children of the Chapel and St. Pauls'. The opening of the present play, viewed in this light, furnishes an additional argument in support of the date which I have assigned to it. When King James came to the throne of England, March 24, 1602—3, he found the kingdom engaged in a war with Spain, which had lasted near twenty years. 'Heaven grant us his peace!' says a gentleman to Lucio, Act I. sc. ii., ' and afterwards the bawd laments, that 'what with the war, what with the sweat, she was custom-shrunk' [paraphrase of 1.2.82—4]. Supposing these two passages to relate to our authour's own time, they almost decisively prove Measure for Measure to have been written in 1603; when the war was not yet ended, as the latter words seem to imply, and when there was some prospect of peace, as the former seem to intimate. Our British Solomon very soon after his accession to the throne manifested his pacifick disposition, though the peace with Spain was not proclaimed till the 19th of August, 1604. By the sweat, considering who the speaker is, it is probable that the disorder most fatal to those of her profession was intended. However, the plague was sometimes so called; and perhaps the dreadful pestilence of 1603 was meant; which carried off in the month of July in that year 857 persons, and in the whole year 30,578 persons; that is, one fifth part of the people in the metropolis; the total number of the inhabitants of London being at that time about one hundred and fifty thousand. If such was the allusion, it likewise confirms the date attributed to this play. Some part of this last argument in confirmation of the date which I had assigned some years ago to the comedy before us, I owe to Mr. Capell....m (I, 344—6) 37

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

[From the Commentary Notes to Measure for Measure] [1] [On 1.3.19-21: 'We have strict statutes, and most biting laws / (The needful bits and curbs to head-strong weeds,) / Which for this fourteen years we have let slip....'] The old copy reads - head-strong weeds, and, - let slip. Both the emendations ['steeds' and 'sleep'] were made by Mr. Theobald.m' The latter may derive support (as he has observed) from a subsequent line in this play: The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept. [2.2.90] So, also, from a passage in Hamlet: How stand I then, That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep. [4.4.56-9] If slip be the true reading, (which, however, I do not believe,) the sense may be, — which for these fourteen years we have suffered to pass unnoticed, unobserved; for so the same phrase is used in Twelfth Night: Let him let this matter slip, and I'll give him my horse, grey Capulet. [3.4.286-7]. Mr. Theobald altered fourteen to nineteen, to make the Duke's account correspond with a speech of Claudio's in a former scene, but without necessity; for our author is often incorrect in the computation of time. (II, 18—19) [2] [On 4.2.43: 'Every true man's apparel fits your thief] A true man, in the language of our author's time, meant an honest man, and was generally opposed to a thief. Our jurymen are to this day called 'good men and true.' The following words - 'If it be too little, &c.' are given in the old copy to the Clown: the train of the argument shews decisively that they belong to Abhorson. The present arrangement, which is clearly right, was suggested by Mr. Theobald. . .. There is still a further equivoque. The true man's apparel, which way soever it be taken, fitting the thief, the speaker considers him as a fitter of apparel, i.e. a tailor. . . . (II, 90) [3] [On 5.1.411: 'Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.'] Shakspeare might have remembered these lines in A Warning for faire Women, a tragedy, 1599 (but apparently written some years before): The trial now remains, as shall conclude Measure for Measure, and lost blood for blood. (II, 124)

38

4 George Steevens, identifying the main source, explaining the text 1793

From The Plays of William Shakespeare (15 vols, London, 1793). Volume IV. George Steevens (1736—1800), educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge (which he left without a degree in 1756), was an important Shakespeare scholar of the latter half of the eighteenth century, erudite and contentious, particularly in his relationship with Edmond Malone (see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols, London, 1974—81, esp. vol. VI passim). He spent most of his adult life at his home in Hampstead Heath or in London, where he browsed in bookstores or did research at the British Museum. He assisted Samuel Johnson on Johnson's 1765 edition of Shakespeare's plays, was a member of Johnson's circle, and numbered among his closest friends Isaac Reed (1742-1807). He is noted as a co-editor of Shakespeare's plays together with Samuel Johnson (1773 and 1778), Johnson and Isaac Reed (1785), and Reed (1793).

[From the Headnote to Measure for Measure. Quotes Johnson: 'There is perhaps not one of Shakespeare's plays more darkened than this by the peculiarities of its author, and the unskilfulness of its editors, by distortions of phrase, or negligence of transcription' (The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, I, 263; reprinted in CHS, V, 103).] Dr. Johnson's remark is so just respecting the corruptions of this play, that I shall not attempt much reformation in its metre, which is too often rough, redundant, and irregular. Additions and omissions (however trifling) cannot be made without constant notice of them; and such notices, in the present instance, would so frequently occur, as to become equally tiresome to the commentator and the reader. Shakespeare took the fable of this play from the Promos and Cassandra of George Whetstone, published in 1578 A hint, like a seed, is more or less prolific, according to the qualities of the soil on which it is thrown. This story, which in the hands of Whetstone produced little more than barren insipidity, under the culture of Shakespeare became fertile of entertainment. The curious reader will find that the old play of Promos and Cassandra exhibits an almost complete embryo of Measure for Measure; yet the hints on which it is formed are so slight, that it is nearly as impossible to detect them, as it is to point out in the acorn the future ramifications of the oak. 39

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

[From the explanatory notes to Measure for Measure] [1] [On 2.3.40-2: 'O injurious love, / That respites me a life whose very comfort / Is still a dying horror!'] I know not what circumstance in this play can authorise a supposition [by Samuel Johnson] that Juliet was respited on account of her pregnancy; as her life was in no danger from the law, the severity of which was exerted only on the seducer. I suppose she means that a parent's love for the child she bears, is injurious, because it makes her careful of her life in her present shameful condition. Mr. Toiler1^ explains the passage thus: 'O, love, that is injurious in expediting Claudio's death, and that respites me a life, which is a burthen to me worse than death!' (IV, 250) [2] [On 3.1.93-6: 'The prenzie Angelo? / O, 'tis the cunning livery of hell, / The damned'st body to invest and cover / In prenzie guards!'] Princely is the judicious correction of the second folio. Princely guards mean no more than the badges of royalty, (laced or bordered robes,) which Angelo is supposed to assume during the absence of the Duke. The stupidity of the first editors is sometimes not more injurious to Shakespeare, than the ingenuity of those who succeeded them. In the old play of Cambyses I meet with the same expression. Sisamnes is left by Cambyses to distribute justice while he is absent; and in a soliloquy says: Now may I wear the brodered garde, And lye in downe-bed soft. Again, the queen of Cambyses says: I do forsake these broder'd gardes, And all the facions new. (IV, 283) [3] [On 5.1.528—9: 'Thanks, good friend Escalus, for thy much goodness, / There's more behind that is more gratulate.'] i.e. to be more rejoiced in; meaning, I suppose, that there is another world, where he will find yet greater reason to rejoice in consequence of his upright ministry. Escalus is represented as an ancient nobleman, who, in conjunction with Angelo, had reached the highest office of the state. He therefore could not be sufficiently rewarded here; but is necessarily referred to a future and more exalted recompense. [Steevens here quotes John Monck Mason,m' who disagreed:] 'I cannot approve of Steevens's explanation of this passage, which is very far-fetched indeed. The Duke gives Escalus thanks for his much goodness, but tells him that he had some other reward in store for him, more acceptable than thanks; which agrees with what he said before, in the beginning of this act: [Quotes 5.1.5-8]'. Mr. M. Mason's explanation may be right; but he forgets that the speech [5.1.5—8] he brings in support of it, was delivered before the denouement of the scene, and was, at that moment, as much addressed to Angelo as to Escalus; and for Angelo the 40

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Duke had certainly no reward or honours, in store. — Besides, I cannot but regard the word — requital [5.1.8: 'forerunning more requital'] as an interpolation, because it destroys the measure, without improvement of the sense. 'Fore-running more,' therefore, would only signify — preceding further thanks. (IV, 386—7) [From the Endnote to Measure for Measure] [Steevens reprints the Argument to Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, 1578, and concludes:] Whetstone, however, has not afforded a very correct analysis of his play, which contains a mixture of comick scenes, between a Bawd, a Pimp, Felons, &c. together with some serious situations which are not described. (IV, 389)

41

5 Francis Douce, on the play's sources 1807

From Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners: With Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakspeare; on the Collection of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum; and on the English Morris Dance (2 vols, London, 1807). Francis Douce (1757—1834) was born in London and after schooling at Richmond and later a French academy entered Gray's Inn at age twenty-two, but practiced law for only a short time. His real interest was in antiquarian research, and he worked for some years at the British Museum as keeper of manuscripts; while there he published Illustrations of Shakspeare. Inheriting considerable money in 1823 from the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, he spent the rest of his life collecting books and manuscripts, among other things, and publishing on literary and antiquarian subjects. He left the bulk of his collection to the Bodleian Library.

[On 3.1.120-27] It is difficult to decide whether Shakespeare is here alluding to the pains of hell or purgatory. May not the whole be a mere poetical rhapsody originating in the recollection of what he had read in books of Catholic divinity? for it is very certain that some of these were extremely familiar to him. Among them he might have seen a compilation on the pains of hell, entitled Examples howe mortall synne maketh the synners inobedyentes to have many paynes and dolours within the fyre of hell; black letter, no date, 12mo, and chiefly extracted from that once popular work, the Sermones discipuli, ' which contains at the end a promptuary of examples for the use of preachers. From this little volume it may be worth while to select the following passage, as according in some degree with the matter of Claudio's speech: — 'he tolde that he sawe in hell a torment of an yzye ponde where the soules the whiche therin were tormented cryed so horryble that they were herde unto heven,' sign B.iij. 'And the sayde beest was upon a ponde full of strong yse, the which beest devoured the soules within his wombe in suche maner that they became as unto nothynge by the tormentes that they suffred. Afterwarde he put them out of his wombe within the yse of the sayde ponde,' sign. G. iij. 'The caytyve was in syke wyse, for she myght not helpe herself, the whiche herde terryble cryes and howlynges of soules,' sign. H. And again, 'And the devyll was bounde by every joynture of all his membres with great 42

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

chaynes of yron and copre brennyng. And of great torment and vehement woodnes whereof he was full he turned hym from the one syde unto the other, and stretched out his handes in the multytude of the sayde soules, and toke them, and strayned them in lykewyse as men may do a clustre of grapes in theyr handes for to make the wyne come forth. And in such maner he strayned them that he eyther brake theyre heedes, or theyr fete, or handes, or some other membres. Afterward he syghed and blewe and dysperpeled the sayde soules into many of the tormentes of the fyre of hell.' sign. H. iij. The following lines from the sixth book of Phaer's Virgil might have furnished some materials on the occasion: . . . some hie in ayer doth hang in pinnes Some fleeting ben in floods, and deepe in gulfes themselves they tier Till sinnes away be washt, or densed deer with purgin fire. ' In the old legend of Saint Patrick's purgatory mention is made of a lake of ice and snow, into which persons were plunged up to their necks; and in the Shepherd's calendar, * chap, xviii. there is a description of hell as 'the rewarde of them that kepen the X comaundements of the Devyll,' in which these lines occur: — a great froste in a water rounes And after a bytter wynde comes Whiche gothe through the soules with yre; Fendes with pokes pulle theyr flesshe ysondre, They fyght and curse, and eche on other wonder. Chaucer, in his Assemblie offoules, has given an abridgement of Cicero's dream of Scipio; and speaking of souls in hell, he says: And breakers of the lawe, sothe to saine And likerous folke, after that they been dede Shall whirle about the world alway in paine Till many a world be passed. It was not until the seventh century that the doctrine of purgatory was confirmed, when 'they held that the departed souls expiated their sins by baths, ice, hanging in the air, &c.' says a curious writer on this subject. See Douglas's Vitis degeneris, 1668, 12mo, p. 77.[5] With respect to the much contested and obscure expression of bathing the delighted spirit in fiery floods, Milton appears to have felt less difficulty in its construction than we do at present; for he certainly remembered it when he made Comus say, one sip of this Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight Beyond the bliss of dreams.[6] (I, 132-5] [From 'On the Story and Construction of Measure for Measure'] Three sources whence the plot of this play might have been extracted, have already been mentioned, viz. Whetstone's Heptameron, 1582, 4to; his Promos and Cassandra, 43

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

1578, 4to; and novel 5. decad. 8. in Cinthio Giraldi. It is probable that the general outline of the story is founded on fact, as it is related, with some variety of circumstance, by several writers, and appears to have been very popular.... Towards the conclusion of this play Dr. Johnson has observed, that 'every reader feels some indignation when he finds Angelo spared. m This remark is rigorously just, and calculated to satisfy those moralists who would have preferred the catastrophe in some of the preceding stories. But in the construction of a play theatrical effect was to be attended to; on which ground alone the poet may be defended. The other charge against him in Dr. Johnson's note is doubtless unfounded, and even laboriously strained. Shakespeare has been likewise hastily censured by a female writer ^ of great ingenuity, for almost every supposed deviation from the plot of Cinthio's novel, and even for adhering to it in sparing Angelo. It might however be contended, that, if our author really used this novel, he has, with some exceptions, exerted a considerable degree of skill and contrivance in his alterations; and that he has consequently furnished a rich and diversified repast for his readers, instead of serving up the simple story in the shape of such a tragedy as might have suited a Greek audience, but certainly would not have pleased an English one in his time. In the novel, the sister, when she solicits mercy for her brother's murderer and her own seducer, (in the play Angelo is neither but in intention,) justly urges that excess of justice becomes cruelty. He therefore who would refuse mercy to Angelo for an intentional offence, has no right to censure him for severity to Claudio who had committed a real one. In the novel, the sister is actually seduced, and her brother murdered; and yet she pleads for the offender. In the play, though Isabella believes her brother to be dead, she reconciles herself to the sad event, inasmuch as she knows that he suffered by course of law, as well as by the cruelty of Angelo, from whose iniquity she herself has happily escaped. She is stimulated to solicit this man's life, from the suggestion and situation of her friend the innocent Mariana, who would have felt more distress from the death of Angelo, than the other parties discontent from his acquittal. The female critic has likewise observed that 'Measure for measure ought not to be the title, since justice is not the virtue it inculcates' [Lennox I, 37]. But surely, if Angelo had died, it would have been outmeasuring measure; as it is, the administration of justice is duly balanced, and both he and Claudio are equally punished in imagination. The Duke, too, who knew all the circumstances, deserves credit for some ingenuity in his arrangements to protect the innocent, and, if not rigidly to punish the guilty, at least to save a sinner. Nor will any one contend that Angelo has escaped punishment: the agonizing state of uncertainty in which he long remained after the mock sentence, the bitter reproof of his colleague, and the still severer language of the Duke, will, it is to be hoped, conduce to satisfy every feeling and humane spectator of this fine play, that the poet has done enough to content even the rigorous moralist, and to exemplify, in his own divine words, that 'earthly power doth then seem likest heaven's, when mercy seasons justice' [The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.196-7]. (I, 152-60))

44

i

Henry James Pye, a faulty play 1807

From Comments on the Commentators on Shakespear. With Preliminary Observations on His Genius and Writings; and on the Labors of Those Who Have Endeavoured to Elucidate Them (London, 1807). Henry James Pye (1745-1813) was born in London, being educated at home until he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1762, taking his M.A. in 1766. He fancied himself a poet, was appointed poet laureate (because of political connections with Prime Minister William Pitt) in 1790, and remained so until his death in 1813, when he was succeeded by Robert Southey. He was an object of mockery because of the bad quality of his verse, George Steevens (No. 4), for example, making fun of Pye's imagery in an ode that Pye dedicated to King George III. He also wrote plays, and his interest in theatre may explain his lone work on Shakespeare.

Though there are several striking passages in Measure for Measure, there are more faults in it, as a whole, than in any of the plays that are undoubtedly written by Shakespeare. How much stronger would the interest be if the friar was not known to be the duke till he suddenly broke forth, which should have been while Angelo was treating the remonstrance of Isabella (which might be made to Escalus) with insult, and just as he was saying, 'Away to prison with her' [5.1.121].'1' The death of Angelo should be respited by the unexpected appearance of Claudio, and not by the preposterous interference of Isabella, which, notwithstanding the candour of Ritson, and the brutal pleasantry of Johnson, is a gross violation of consistency of character, only to be equalled by the offer of Valentine of his mistress to Protheus, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. Such faults as these, and not the interval of time between the third and fourth act of The Winter's Tale, and the making Bohemia a maritime country, are mortal sins against the probability of the drama. There is a great impropriety (not to mention the gross indecency of their language) in the impurity of such a character as Lucio; and the lenity with which Pompey and the bawd are treated, at a time when the interest of the drama turns on fornication being punished with death. There seems also justice in the remark of Johnson, that it is strange Isabella should not express either gratitude, joy, or wonder, at the sight of her brother; but perhaps they were supplied by the action.[2] Shakespeare was a player as well as a poet, and probably was more anxious for stage effect than the perfection of his 45

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

drama as a composition. The players have often been censured for this, but let it be remembered, that there has been no dramatic writer of eminence, from ^Eschylus to Sheridan, who has not been connected with the theatre; and that, though many a bad play has become popular merely from theatric effect, without theatric effect there cannot be a good play. (33—4)

46

7 Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald, character and characterization 1808

From Measure for Measure; A Comedy, in Five Acts; As Performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. ... With Remarks by Mrs. Inchbald (London, 1808).

Elizabeth Inchbald (1753—1821) was born at Stanningfield in Suffolk of Roman Catholic parents, and sought her fortune on the stage at an early age. Rebuffed by various theatre managers at first — for although very attractive, she had a speech impediment — she married the actor and portrait painter Joseph Inchbald in 1772 and not long after began a relatively successful stage career, which included the role of Mariana in Measure for Measure. She and her husband became friends with Mrs. Sarah Siddons [nee Kemble, 1755-1831] and her brother John Philip Kemble [1757-1823], who after Joseph's death in 1779 considered marrying the widow. She also wrote and translated plays, many of them produced at Covent Garden, and novels (including the romance A Simple Story, 4 vols, 1791, for which she is best known), and edited The British Theatre (1806—9), twenty-five volumes with 'Remarks'.

Shakespeare displays such genius in the characters, poetry, and incident of his dramas, that it is to be regretted he ever found materials for a plot, excepting those of history, from any other source than his own invention. Had the plots of old tales been exhausted in his time, as in the present, the world might have had Shakspeare's foundation as well as superstructure, and the whole edifice had been additionally magnificent. Measure for Measure, like his other plays, is taken from an old story — Cinthio's novels, or a play of Whetstone's, has furnished the subject. The illustrious Bard had certainly taste to despise many of those books from whence he borrowed his fable, and yet would not apply to his own prolifick mind. This adoption of other men's plans, led him to adopt their incoherencies. He found he improved what they had done, and content with improvement, stopped short of perfection. Had Shakespeare been the inventor of the fable of the present play, he would assuredly have avoided the incredible occurrences here inserted. Allowing that the Duke's disguise, as a friar, could possibly conceal him from the knowledge of his intimate friends, and that Angelo should be so blind a lover as not to distinguish, in closest conference, her he loved from her he hated, (for these are stage inconsistencies, permitted for stage accommodation) there still remains a most disgraceful improb47

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

ability, in representing the deputy Angelo a monster, instead of a man. The few lines he speaks in a soliloquy [4.4.20—34], offer a plea too weak for his enormity in giving orders for the death of Claudio, after the supposed ransom paid by his sister. This plea is besides reduced in part from all show of reason by a sentence that precedes it in the very same speech. — In that sentence, Angelo says — 'He rests satisfied Isabella will not reveal her dishonour' ['But that her tender shame / Will not proclaim against her maiden loss, / How might she tongue me!' (4.4.23—5)] — yet he has ordered the brother's execution lest she should disclose this dishonour to him, and that he should proclaim it to all the world by taking his revenge. But as this declaration of the deputy's is not made till after the brother is supposed to be dead, an auditor, - unacquainted with the story, and expecting but natural events, — when the order comes for the execution of Claudio, makes this conclusion — Angelo has detected the imposition^ (not unlikely) Isabella has meant for him, and now pursues vengeance. Here had been an argument for his cruelty, and it would have been of blacker die, with a plausible motive. In fine, were Angelo less wicked, he would be hated more; — but wickedness without views, is but a pitiable insanity. ... But, with all the science of acting, Measure for Measure is a heavy performance. The grave scenes, except where some brilliant poetry is interspersed are tedious and dull. — That Dr. Johnson, in his criticism on this play, should write in praise of the comick characters, seems surprising! To a delicate critic of the present day, and one thoroughly acquainted with his moral character, it must surely appear as if Johnson's pure mind had been somewhat sullied by having merely read them. (3-5)

48

8 A. W. von Schlegel, 'the triumph of mercy over strict justice' 1815

From A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, by Augustus William Schlegel: Translated from the Original German by John Black. In Two Volumes (2 vols, London, 1815); rev. (in one volume) by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London, 1846). August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767—1845), born in Hannover of Lutheran parents, was one of the most significant writers of German Early Romanticism. He wrote poetry and literary criticism, translated Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Dante, and lectured on aesthetics, as well as classical and romantic literature. The 'Schlegel-Tieck' (Ludwig Tieck, his daughter Dorothea, and her husband, Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin, also contributed) translation of Shakespeare's plays into German blank verse is still considered a major version. Schlegel's Uber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur: Vorlesungen (2 vols, Heidelberg, 1809—11) was translated into French and Italian, as well as by John Black into English, and had an international influence on writers of the Romantic period, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Schlegel discusses All's Well That Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice as a group of plays that resemble each other in dealing with serious issues affecting the well-being of people and that impress us in the moral sense. Perhaps we have in Schlegel the original hint for the term 'problem play' as later developed by F. S. Boas and others. The text reprinted below is that of Morrison (1846), based on the last German edition. Page numbers to both the 1815 and 1846 English editions are provided.

[From Lecture XXIV: 'Criticisms on Shakespeare's Comedies'] In Measure for Measure Shakespeare was compelled, by the nature of the subject, to make his poetry more familiar with criminal justice than is usual with him. All kinds of proceedings connected with the subject, all sorts of active or passive persons, pass in review before us: the hypocritical Lord Deputy, the compassionate Provost, and the hard-hearted Hangman; a young man of quality who is to suffer for the seduction of his mistress before marriage, loose wretches brought in by the police, nay, even a hardened criminal, whom the preparations for his execution cannot awake out of his callousness. But yet, notwithstanding this agitating truthfulness, how tender and mild 49

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

is the pervading tone of the picture! The piece takes improperly its name from the punishment; the true significance of the whole is the triumph of mercy over strict justice; no man being himself so free from errors as to be entitled to deal it out to his equals. The most beautiful embellishment of the composition is the character of Isabella, who, on the point of taking the veil, is yet prevailed upon by sisterly affection to tread again the perplexing ways of the world, while, amid the general corruption, the heavenly purity of her mind is not even stained with one unholy thought: in the humble robes of the novice she is a very angel of light. When the cold and stern Angelo, heretofore of unblemished reputation, whom the Duke has commissioned, during his pretended absence, to restrain, by a rigid administration of the laws, the excesses of dissolute immorality, is even himself tempted by the virgin charms of Isabella, supplicating for the pardon of her brother Claudio, condemned to death for a youthful indiscretion; when at first, in timid and obscure language, he insinuates, but at last impudently avouches his readiness to grant Claudio's life to the sacrifice of her honour; when Isabella repulses his offer with a noble scorn; in her account of the interview to her brother, when the latter at first applauds her conduct, but at length, overcome by the fear of death, strives to persuade her to consent to dishonour; - in these masterly scenes, Shakespeare has sounded the depths of the human heart. The interest here reposes altogether on the represented action; curiosity contributes nothing to our delight, for the Duke, in the disguise of a Monk, is always present to watch over his dangerous representative, and to avert every evil which could possibly be apprehended; we look to him with confidence for a happy result. The Duke acts the part of the Monk naturally, even to deception; he unites in his person the wisdom of the priest and the prince. Only in his wisdom he is too fond of roundabout ways; his vanity is flattered with acting invisibly like an earthly providence; he takes more pleasure in overhearing his subjects than governing them in the customary way of princes. As he ultimately extends a free pardon to all the guilty, we do not see how his original purpose, in committing the execution of the laws to other hands, of restoring their strictness, has in any wise been accomplished. The poet might have had this irony in view, that of the numberless slanders of the Duke, told him by the petulant Lucio, in ignorance of the person whom he is addressing, that at least which regarded his singularities and whims was not wholly without foundation. It is deserving of remark that Shakespeare, amidst the rancour of religious parties, takes a delight in painting the condition of a monk, and always represents his influence as beneficial. We find in him none of the black and knavish monks, which an enthusiasm for Protestantism, rather than poetical inspiration, has suggested to some of our modern poets. Shakespeare merely gives his monks an inclination to busy themselves in the affairs of others, after renouncing the world for themselves; with respect, however, to pious frauds, he does not represent them as very conscientious. Such are the parts acted by the monk in Romeo and Juliet, and another in Much Ado about Nothing, and even by the Duke, whom, contrary to the well-known proverb, the cowl seems really to make a monk. (Black, II, 166—9; Morrison, 387—8)

50

9 William Hazlitt, Measure for Measure in performance 1816

From 'Measure for Measure', The Examiner (10 February 1816); reprinted in Hazlitt's A View of the English Stage; or, a Series of Dramatic Criticisms (London, 1818). William Hazlitt (1778-1830), best known as an essayist, was born at Maidstone and trained for the ministry, but gave that up for the study of philosophy and literature; he subsequently took up painting, and then turned to writing. He was a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, wrote for the Times, and did many reviews for The Examiner, owned by John and Leigh Hunt. Hazlitt's wellknown works, besides A View of the English Stage, include Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1821), and TableTalk; or Original Essays on Men and Manners (1821-22), among others. This review, first printed in The Examiner on 11 February 1816, was of a performance at Covent Garden on 8 February 1816. The cast, as listed in William Oxberry's New English Drama acting edition (London, 1822), included Charles Mayne Young as the Duke, Daniel Terry as Angelo, Eliza O'Neill as Isabella, and Charles Kemble as Claudio. Hazlitt begins his review by quoting the whole of Schlegel's comments (No. 8) on Measure for Measure.

This is, we confess, a very poor criticism on a very fine play; but we are not in the humour (even if we could) to write a better. A very obvious beauty, which has escaped the critic, is the admirable description of life, as poetical as it is metaphysical, beginning, 'If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing,' &c.[3.1.7—41], to the truth and justice of which Claudio assents, contrasted almost immediately afterwards with his fine description of death as the worst of ills: [Quotes 3.1.118—31]. Neither has he done justice to the character of Master Barnardine, one of the finest (and that's saying a bold word) in all Shakespeare. He calls him a hardened criminal. He is no such thing. He is what he is by nature, not by circumstance, 'careless, reckless, and fearless of past, present, and to come' [4.2.143—4]. He is Caliban transported to the forests of Bohemia, or the prisons of Vienna. He has, however, a sense of the natural fitness of things: 'He has been drinking hard all night, and he will not be hanged that day' [paraphrase of 4.3.53, 55-6], and Shakespeare has let him off at last. Emery does not play it well, for Master Barnardine is not the representative of a 51

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Yorkshireman, but of an universal class in nature. We cannot say that the Clown Ponipey suffered in the hands of Mr. Listen; on the contrary, he played it inimitably well. His manner of saying 'a dish of some three-pence' [2.1.92-3] was worth any thing. In the scene of his examination before the Justice, he delayed, and dallied, and dangled in his answers, in the true spirit of the genius of his author. We do not understand why the philosophical critic [Schlegel], whom we have quoted above, should be so severe on those pleasant persons Lucio, Pompey, and Master Froth, as to call them 'wretches.' They seem all mighty comfortable in their occupations, and determined to pursue them, 'as the flesh and fortune should serve' [2.1.253-4]. Shakespeare was the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies, and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, elevations, and depressions. The object of the pedantic moralist is to make the worst of everything; his was to make the best, according to his own principle, 'There is some soul of goodness in things evil' [Henry V, 4.1.4]. Even Master Barnardine is not left to the mercy of what others think of him, but when he comes in, he speaks for himself. We would recommend it to the Society for the Suppression of Vice to read Shakespeare. Mr. Young played the Duke tolerably well. As to the cant introduced into Schlegel's account of the Duke's assumed character of a Monk, we scout it altogether. He takes advantage of the good-nature of the poet to impose on the credulity of mankind. Chaucer spoke of the Monks historically, Shakespeare poetically. It was not in the nature of Shakespeare to insult over 'the enemies of the human race' just after their fall. We however object to them entirely in this age of the revival of Inquisitions and Protestant massacres. We have not that stretch of philosophical comprehension which, in German metaphysics, unites popery and free-thinking together, loyalty and regicide, and which binds up the Bible and Spinoza in the same volume!— Mr. Jones did not make a bad Lucio. Miss O'Neill's Isabella, though full of merit, disappointed us; as indeed she has frequently done of late. Her 'Oh fie, fie' [2.2.171], was the most spirited thing in her performance. She did not seize with much force the spirit of her author, but she seemed in complete possession of a certain conventicle twang. She whined and sang out her part in that querulous tone that has become unpleasant to us by ceaseless repetition. She at present plays all her parts in the Magdalen style. We half begin to suspect that she represents the bodies, not the souls of women, and that her forte is in tears, sighs, sobs, shrieks, and hysterics. She does not play either Juliet or Isabella finely. She must stick to the common-place characters of Otway, Moore, and Miss Hannah More, ^ or she will ruin herself. As Sir Joshua Reynolds^ concluded his last lecture with the name of Michael Angelo, as Vetus[3' wished the name of the Marquis Wellesley to conclude his last letter, so we [ will conclude this article with a devout apostrophe to the name of Mrs. Siddonsm ^ (234-40)

52

10 Nathan Drake, Isabella, a 'lovely example of female excellence' 1817

From Shakspeare and His Times: Including the Biography of the Poet; Criticisms on His Genius and Writings; A New Chronology of His Plays; A Disquisition on the Object of His Sonnets; and a History of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements, Superstitions, Poetry, and Elegant Literature of His Age (2 vols, London, 1817). Volume II. Nathan Drake (1766—1836) was born in Yorkshire to an artist, Nathan Drake, who died when the boy was only twelve years old. After little early formal schooling, Nathan the younger was apprenticed to a general practioner in York and later graduated M.D. from Edinburgh in 1789. He combined medicine with his love of literature and became an honorary associate of the Royal Society of Literature. His many publications include Literary Hours (1 vol., 1798; 3 vols, 1820) and Memorials of Shakespeare, or Sketches of his Character and Genius by Various Writers (1828), as well as his major work, Shakspeare and His Times, which was reprinted in both French and German translations.

. . . Of Measure for Measure, independent of the comic characters which afford a rich fund of entertainment, the great charm springs from the lovely example of female excellence in the person of Isabella. Piety, spotless purity, tenderness combined with firmness, and an eloquence the most persuasive, unite to render her singularly interesting and attractive. To save the life of her brother, she hastens to quit the peaceful seclusion of her convent, and moves, amid the votaries of corruption and hypocrisy, amid the sensual, the vulgar, and the profligate, as a being of higher order, as a ministering spirit from the throne of grace. Her first interview with Angelo, and the immediately subsequent one with Claudio, exhibit, along with the most engaging feminine diffidence and modesty, an extraordinary display of intellectual energy, of dexterous argument, and of indignant contempt. Her pleadings before the lord deputy are directed with a strong appeal both to his understanding and his heart, while her sagacity and address in the communication of the result of her appointment with him to her brother, of whose weakness and irresolution she is justly apprehensive, are, if possible, still more skilfully marked, and add another to the multitude of instances which have established for Shakespeare an unrivalled intimacy with the finest feelings of our nature. The page of poetry, indeed, has not two nobler passages to produce, than those 53

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

which paint the suspicions of Isabella as to the fortitude of her brother, her encouragement of his nascent resolution, and the fears which he subsequently entertains of the consequences of dissolution: — Isab. O, I do fear thee, Claudio; and I quake, Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain, And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honour. Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. Claud.Why give you me this shame? Think you I can a resolution fetch From flowery tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms, Isab. There spake my brother; there my father's grave Did utter forth a voice! [3.1.73-86] On learning the terms which would effect his liberation, his astonishment and indignation are extreme, and he exclaims with vehemence to his sister, - 'Thou shalt not do't' [3.1.102]; but no sooner does this burst of moral anger subside, than the natural love of existence returns, and he endeavours to impress Isabella, under the wish of exciting her to the sacrifice demanded for his preservation, with the horrible possibilities which may follow the extinction of this state of being, an enumeration which makes the blood run chill: — Claud. O Isabel! Isab. What says my brother? Claud. Death is a fearful thing. Isab. And shamed life a hateful. Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling! — 'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life, That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise 54

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

To what we fear of death. Isab. Alas! alas! [3.1.114-32] 'It is difficult to decide,' remarks Mr. Douce, 'whether Shakspeare is here alluding to the pains of hell or purgatory. May not the whole be a mere poetical rhapsody, originating in the recollection of what he had read in books of Catholic divinity? for it is very certain, that some of these were extremely familiar to him.' Of our author's predilection for the imposing exterior, and fanciful, but often sublime, reveries of the Roman Catholic religion, we have already taken some notice; and, in reference to the very interesting part which the Duke assumes in this play, under the disguise of a monk, it is the observation of the learned and eloquent Schlegel, 'that Shakespeare, amidst the rancour of religious parties, takes a delight in painting the condition of a monk, and always represents his influence as beneficial' . . . [quotes whole passage]." (II, 454—6)

55

11 William Hazlitt, 'a general system of cross-purposes' 1817

From Characters of Shakespear's Plays (London, 1817). See headnote to No. 9 above.

This is a play as full of genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it. 'The height of moral argument' which the author has maintained in the intervals of passion, or blended with the more powerful impulses of nature, is hardly surpassed in any of his plays. But there is in general a want of passion; the affections are at a stand; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions. The only passion which influences the story is that of Angelo; and yet he seems to have a much greater passion for hypocrisy than for his mistress. Neither are we greatly enamoured of Isabella's rigid chastity, though she could not act otherwise than she did. We do not feel the same confidence in the virtue that is 'sublimely good' at another's expense, as if it had been put to some less disinterested trial. As to the Duke, who makes a very imposing and mysterious stage-character, he is more absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state; more tenacious of his own character than attentive to the feelings and apprehensions of others. Claudio is the only person who feels naturally; and yet he is placed in circumstances of distress which almost preclude the wish for his deliverance. Mariana is also in love with Angelo, whom we hate. In this respect, there may be said to be a general system of cross-purposes between the feelings of the different characters and the sympathy of the reader or the audience. This principle of repugnance seems to have reached its height in the character of Master Barnardine, who not only sets at defiance the opinions of others, but has even thrown off all self-regard, - 'one that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, and to come' [4.2.142-4]. He is a fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other characters of the play. Barnardine is Caliban transported from Prospero's wizard island to the forests of Bohemia or the prisons of Vienna. He is the creature of bad habits as Caliban is of gross instincts. He has, however, a strong notion of the natural fitness of things, according to his own sensations - 'He has been drinking hard all night, and he will not be hanged that day' [4.3.43-4] - and Shakespeare has let him off at last. We do not understand why the philosophical German critic, Schlegel, should be so severe on those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey, and Master 56

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Froth, as to call them 'wretches.' They appear all mighty comfortable in their occupations, and determined to pursue them, 'as the flesh and fortune should serve' [2.2.253—4]. A very good exposure of the want of self-knowledge and contempt for others, which is so common in the world, is put into the mouth of Abhorson, the jailer, when the Provost proposes to associate Pompey with him in his office — 'A bawd, sir? Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery' [4.2.28—9]. And the same answer would serve in nine instances out of ten to the same kind of remark, 'Go to, sir, you weigh equally; a feather will turn the scale' [4.2.30—1]. Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers, for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations. The object of the pedantic moralist is to find out the bad in everything: his was to shew that 'there is some soul of goodness in things evil' [Henry I7, 4.1.4]. Even Master Barnardine is not left to the mercy of what others think of him; but when he comes in, speaks for himself, and pleads his own cause, as well as if counsel had been assigned him. In one sense, Shakespeare was no moralist at all: in another, he was the greatest of all moralists. He was a moralist in the same sense in which nature is one. He taught what he had learnt from her. He shewed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest fellow-feeling for it. One of the most dramatic passages in the present play is the interview between Claudio and his sister, when she comes to inform him of the conditions on which Angelo will spare his life. Claudio. Let me know the point. Isabella. O, I do fear thee, Claudio: and I quake, Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honour... . [Quotes 3.1.72-135] What adds to the dramatic beauty of this scene and the effect of Claudio's passionate attachment to life is, that it immediately follows the Duke's lecture to him, in the character of the Friar, recommending an absolute indifference to it. —Reason thus with life, — If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing, That none but fools would keep.... [Quotes 3.1.6-41] (320-6)

57

12 Thomas Bowdler, the Family Shakespeare 1818

From The Family Shakspeare, in Ten Volumes; in Which Nothing Is Added to the Original Text; but Those Words and Expressions Are Omitted Which Cannot with Propriety Be Read Aloud in a Family (London, 1818). Volume II. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) studied medicine at St. Andrews University and then Edinburgh, from whence he graduated M.D. in 1776. He was elected to the Royal Society and granted a license by the College of Physicians in 1781, but spent most of his time doing charitable work. He became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1784 and a member of the 'Blue Stocking Circle' of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800), to whom he dedicated his Family Shakespeare. Not only did he expurgate Shakespeare but he also completed a bowdlerized version of Edward Gibbons's five-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) shortly before his death. Bowdler's comments and work on Measure for Measure are ingenuous. In the ten-volume first edition of The Family Shakspeare (1818), as he admitted in his Preface to this play, he used John Philip Kemble's acting version (printed 1803) because he felt his 'own inability to render this play sufficiently correct for family-reading' (II, 3). Stung by criticism, he inserted an endnote in the general Preface to the second edition (1820), stating that he has now 'had recourse to his own pen, endeavouring to render that comedy as little objectionable as it can be rendered, without destroying its great beauties, which are closely interwoven with its numerous defects' (I, xii). In the general Preface to his third edition (8 vols, London, 1823), Bowdler recorded that he had 'taken great pains to discover and correct any defects which might formerly have escaped my notice', and that 'I may venture to assure the parents and guardians of youth, that they may read the Family Shakspeare aloud in the mixed society of young persons of both sexes, sans peur et sans reproche' (I, viii). Essentially, Bowdler cut out as much as possible of the sexual innuendo in Measure for Measure, particularly lines involving Pompey, e.g., all of 2.1 after line 40, and, of course, the whole of Lucio's part. The Preface from Volume I of the third edition is reprinted below.

This comedy contains scenes which are truly worthy of the first of dramatic poets. Isabella pleading with Angelo on behalf of mercy to her brother, and afterwards insisting that his life must not be purchased by the sacrifice of her chastity, is an 58

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

object of such interest as to make the reader desirous of overlooking the many great defects which are to be found in other parts of this play. The story is little suited to a comedy. The wickedness of Angelo is so atrocious that I recollect only one instance of a similar kind being recorded in history ; and that is considered by many persons as of doubtful authority. His crimes, indeed, are not completed, but he supposes them to be so; and his guilt is as great as it would have been if the person of Isabella had been violated, and the head of Ragozine had been Claudio's. This monster of iniquity appears before the Duke, defending his cause with unblushing boldness; and after the detection of his crimes he can scarcely be said to receive any punishment. A hope is even expressed that he will prove a good husband, but for no good reason — namely, because he has been a little bad [5.1.441]. Angelo abandoned his contracted wife for the most despicable of all reasons, the loss of her fortune. He added to his guilt not only insensibility to her affliction, but the detestable aggravation of injuring her reputation by an unfounded slander; ascribing his desertion of Mariana to levity in her conduct, of which she never was guilty. He afterwards betrayed the trust reposed in him by the Duke. He threatened Isabella that if she would not surrender her virtue, he would not merely put her brother to death, but make 'His death draw out to lingering sufferance' [2.4.166—7]. And finally, when he thought his object accomplished, he ordered Claudio to be murdered in violation of his most solemn engagement. These are the crimes, which, in the language of Mariana, are expressed by the words a little bad; and with a perfect knowledge of Angelo's having committed them, she 'Craves no other, nor no better man' [5.1.426]. Claudio's life having been preserved by the Provost, it would not, perhaps, have been lawful to have put Angelo to death; but the Duke might with great propriety, have addressed him in the words of Bolingbroke to Exton. Go, wander through the shades of night, And never show thy head by day nor light. [Richard II, 5.6.43—4] Other parts of the play are not without faults. The best characters act too much upon a system of duplicity and falsehood; and the Duke, in the fifth act, trifles cruelly with the feelings of Isabella, allowing her to suppose her brother to be dead much longer than the story of the play required. Lucio is inconsistent as well as profligate. He appears in the first act as the friend of Claudio, and in the fifth he assists the cause of Angelo, whom he supposes to be his murderer. Lastly, the indecent expressions with which many of the scenes abound are so interwoven with the story that it is extremely difficult to separate the one from the other. If my Readers should think (and I confess myself to be of that opinion) that Measure for Measure, as I have now corrected it, is not yet an unobjectionable play, I would request them to peruse it attentively in its original form; and I am fully persuaded that there is no person who will then express surprise at its not being entirely freed from defects which are inseparably connected with the story. (I, 32931)

59

13 P. P., character and morality in Measure for Measure 1822

From Measure for Measure, A Comedy; by IV. Shakspeare. With Prefatory Remarks. The Only Edition Existing Which is Faithfully Marked with the Stage Business, and Stage Directions, As It Is Performed at the Theatres Royal. By W. Oxberry, Comedian (London, 1822). William Oxberry (1784-1824), born in Moorfields, the son of an auctioneer, was well-educated and became well-known as an actor. His roles included Shylock, Slender, Richard III, and Macbeth, as well as many other non-Shakespearian ones. He wrote several books, but is best known today as the editor of The New English Drama (London, 1818—24), which collected 113 plays in 22 volumes. Measure for Measure is in volume 16 (London, 1823). Although Oxberry wrote the prefatory remarks for several plays, those for Measure for Measure are signed P. P., perhaps George Daniel, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym of P—P—, Poet Laureate (see headnote to No. 15).

[From the prefatory 'Remarks'] . . . Were the fanciful arrangement of an author's productions, according to their several degrees of excellence, adopted with regard to Shakespeare's, this play would scarcely, we think, be deemed worthy of a more exalted situation than amongst those of the second or third class. Though the plot has few extravagancies or irregularities, it is not developed with remarkable felicity; nor is the curiosity of the spectator very strongly aroused during its progress. The comparatively slight interest which he takes in the business of the scene, must, however, in a great measure be attributed to the little anxiety he feels for the principal personages. The Duke, who seems to have been intended for a pattern of wisdom and justice, is deemed a mighty tedious moralizer in the theatre, and excites but little respect by his saws and maxims. We are all of us too apt to slight the useful for the agreeable; to bestow our regard upon those who amuse, rather than upon those who instruct us; and, consequently, neither the probity of his character nor the benevolence of his intentions serves to compensate in the opinion of an audience for the sermonizing which his presence compels them to undergo. His conversation, nevertheless, abounds with axioms of profound wisdom and exquisite beauty. We may almost assert of this piece, what has been said of Shakespeare's writings collectively, that a complete system of moral and political 60

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

economy might be collected from it: but, elevated sentiments and poetical diction addressed to a theatrical assembly, are truly pearls cast before swine. They listen to them with impatience; and sigh for the excitement of an animated plot and bustling incidents. If the Duke's character commands our approbation, yet fails to excite our regard, that of Isabella is still more liable to such an objection. She has our respect, 'tis true, our reverence, — nay, almost our adoration; but, the homage we pay her is extorted from us as a duty, rather than spontaneously offered as a free gift. Our reason prompts us to bestow unqualified applause upon her rectitude, yet our heart refuses to join cordially in the tribute. We sympathise but coldly with her sorrows; for, with us erring mortals she has little in common. She is a being of a better world, scarcely partaking of the frailties of this. Had her tenderness for her brother operated so strongly as to have overcome her virtue, though she would have sunk considerably in our opinion as a saint, she would have risen greatly in our esteem as a woman. That heroism which is founded upon a conquest over the natural affections, will seldom command the love of mankind.... Had Isabella, to do a great good, done a little wrong, she would unquestionably have partaken of our sympathy far more largely than she does at present. Her character, however, is finely imagined and strongly drawn; 'chaste as the icicle that hangs on Dian's temple' [Coriolanus, 5.2.65— 8]; pious, eloquent, and resolute: her sentiments are noble, and her pleading on behalf of her brother most pathetic and convincing. Her worst fault (and fault enough it is,) Is, that she is intolerably shrewish. [The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.88-9] Witness for this, the style in which she rates Claudio in the prison, and her expressed determination to tear out Angelo's eyes upon discovering his treachery; though the players have judiciously omitted the latter passage, and considerably softened down the intemperance of the former. The character of Angelo has been censured as an unnatural conception — a monster that the world ne'er saw; but for this objection there appears to be no solid foundation. Critics are not arbitrarily to limit the degrees of baseness which our nature is capable of arriving at, nor to question the possibility of such horrible impurity because their own imaginations have never harboured the idea of similar pollution. Shakespeare, whose acquaintance with human nature was profound and universal, whose men and women are beings drawn from an attentive observation of life, and not the mere offspring of a luxuriant fancy, did not often err upon the side of extravagance; and if, in the present instance, any proof is needed of the possibility of what he describes, it may be sufficient to remark that a similar transaction has actually occurred in our own country. — The story of Kirk, here alluded to, is so well known, that 'tis unnecessary to detail it. - that of Rhynsault is equally familiar.^ The horror of the fiction, indeed, was surpassed by that of the reality; for, Angelo had at least the tyrant's plea — necessity [Paradise Lost, 4.393—4] — to offer in his defence; — he doomed Claudio to death, lest he should avenge the injury done to his sister; but, in the instances above mentioned, not even this palliation existed: the barbarity was not less wanton than execrable. As a satire upon hypocrisy, Angelo's 61

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

character may be ranked amongst Shakespeare's most felicitous conceptions. In the works of no other author can there be found so admirable an exposure of those fairseeming hypocrites, who thank God they are not as other men are. The drawing is so minute, so spirited, and so complete that it seems as if nothing could have been added or omitted without diminishing its excellence. And, how delightfully is his heartless rigour contrasted with the mild benevolence of his associate, Escalus! Surely, not without reason was our author styled 'the gentle Shakespeare!'^ The kindly feelings of his nature are continually rendered apparent by his captivating pictures of humanity in its most pleasing aspects; by those amiable personations which make us in love with our species, and generate in our minds feelings of philanthropy towards all mankind. Some parts of this play strongly exemplify the correctness of Johnson's remark, that, 'in Tragedy, Shakespeare often writes, with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but, in his comic scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour could improve. ' The serious scenes, we must allow, are occasionally open to the above censure — the comic portions are invariably excellent. Elbow is a second Dogberry, scarcely, if at all, inferior to his prototype; while Pompey is in every respect 'Pompey the Great' [2.1.219]. How inimitably does he 'bestow his tediousness' [Much Ado about Nothing, 3.5.21—2 ] upon the Deputies, in that delectable scene in the second act! 'Twould make one laugh out a night in Russia, when nights are longest there' [2.1.134-5]. Froth and Mrs. Overdone are worthy of their companions; and Lucio is a pleasant specimen of those 'waterflies,' who, in spite of their frivolity, are sound at the core, and not quite destitute of feeling or honourable principle. The scenes in which he slanders the Duke to his face are highly amusing; and few situations are so effective, or so productive of mirth, as that in the last act where he pulls the cowl from the supposed Friar. The comic characters, indeed, without an exception, are worthy of Shakespeare's best productions; even that of Barnardine, carelessly as it is sketched, strikingly displays the profundity of his skill. The catastrophe is somewhat tediously brought about; but the triumph of virtue over hypocrisy is always so gratifying that it serves to make the spectator forget the heaviness of the transactions by which it has been produced. The play is now seldom acted, and has never been very attractive. It is brought forward occasionally, to afford some favourite actor and actress an opportunity of displaying their declamatory powers, as the Duke and Isabella; but no talent has yet been able to render it popular. It is performed with few variations from the original, beyond some necessary curtailments and the transposition of one or two scenes: though it is curious to remark how, in the closing lines of the acting-copy, the players have thought proper to swell the Duke's hint of his attachment to Isabella into a formal declaration of his passion. They were willing to compensate for the absence of love-scenes in the body of the play by introducing a little courtship at the close. Perhaps the coldness with which the piece is treated may in a great measure be placed to the account of this deficiency of love-business, (hi—vi)

62

14 Augustine Skottowe, the play's major source 1824 From The Life of Shakspeare; Enquiries into the Originality of His Dramatic Plots and Characters; and Essays on the Ancient Theatres and Theatrical Usages. By Augustine Skottowe (2 vols, London, 1824). Augustine Skottowe (1785—1851) worked for the Navy Pay Office until it was merged with the Paymaster General's Office, a total of forty-three years in all. Although he wrote one other book, a memoir published in 1828 of his friend Charles Mills, historian, he is known today for his sole work on Shakespeare. See P. F. Skottowe, The Leaf and the Tree. The Story of an English Family (London, 1963). The Life of Shakspeare was shortened and revised by Adolph Wagner and included in the Schlegel and Tieck translation of Shakespeare's plays (Vienna, 1825-27).

[Skottowe summarizes the plot of G. B. Giraldi Cinthio's Decada VIII, Novella V from the Hecatommithi (1565).] From this novel, which is Cinthio's, Shakespeare has been erroneously supposed to have derived his plot of Measure for Measure. But the story had been dramatised as early as 1578, in a play in two parts, entitled the Historye of Promos and Cassandra, by George Whetstone. Instead of condemning the youth for the crime of violation, Whetstone makes his offence the guilty indulgence of his passion with a female to whom he was affianced. Instead of suffering execution for his crime, Whetstone saves the culprit by producing the head of another person instead of that which had been severed from the youth. Both these deviations from Cinthio are found in Shakespeare; and a further comparison of his play with that of Whetstone will lead to the conclusion, that Promos and Cassandra furnished the materials for the construction of Measure for Measure. Promos thus replies to the solicitations of the suppliant virgin: — Leave thy bootless suit: by law he hath been tried; Law found his fault, law judged him death. Which is quite paralleled by Shakspeare: Be thou content, fair maid; It is the law, not I, condemns your brother. [2.2.79-80] 63

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Both the governors attribute their fall in the hour of temptation to the same singular cause, — the charms of modesty and virtue, and their superiority over the meretricious lures of vice: — I do protest her modest words hath wrought in me amaze. Though she be fair, she is not deckt with garish shews for gaze; Her beauty lures, her looks cut off fond suits with chaste disdain. Thus in Measure for Measure: —

Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman's lightness ? [2.2.167—9]

O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint, With saints doth bait thy hook! Most dangerous Is that temptation, that doth goad us on To sin in loving virtue: never could the strumpet, With all her double vigour, art and nature, Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid Subdues me quite. — Ever, till now, When men were fond, I smiled, and wonder'd how. [ 2.2.179—86.] With great ingenuity the sister, in both plays, turns the unlawful solicitations of the magistrate into an extenuation of her brother's crime; and, as an argument in favour of his pardon, urges, — If that you love (as so you say) the force of love you know; Which felt, in conscience you should my brother favour show. Angela. — Plainly conceive, I love you. Isabel. — My brother did love Juliet; and you tell me, That he shall die for it. [2.4.141-3] And Angelo himself, in endeavouring to curb by reason the evil suggestions of his passions, and reflecting on the guilt of his heart, pursues the same train of thought: — O let her brother live: Thieves for their robbery have authority, When judges steal themselves. [2.2.174—6] It is equally remarkable that both the sisters affect to believe they are solicited to sin by the judge for the purpose of making trial of their virtue: — 'Renowned lord, you use this speech (I hope) your thrall to try;' which is a little amplified by Isabella: — I know your virtue hath a licence in't, Which seems a little fouler than it is, To pluck on others. [2.4.145-7] 64

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

The communication to the condemned brother of the detestable alternative by which his life might be saved, is in each play strikingly similar: — If thou dost live, I must my honour lose. Thy ransom is, to Promos' fleshly will That I do yield.

O! would my life would satisfy his ire! Cassandra then would cancel soon thy band. Thus Isabella: — If I would yield him my virginity, Thou might'st be freed.

O! were it but my life, I'd throw it down for your deliverance As frankly as a pin. [3.1.97-8, 103-5] When Isabella first tells Claudio of Angelo's proposal, he answers, with honest indignation, 'Thou shalt not do't;' [3.1.102] and in his willingness to meet his fate, nobly exclaims, — If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in my arms. [3.1.82—4] But the fear of death, nevertheless, ultimately proves fatal to his virtue; and the play of Whetstone supplied Shakespeare with the sophistical arguments by which Claudio endeavours to persuade his sister, that a compliance with Angelo's wishes could not be very dangerous to her soul: — Nay, Cassandra; if thou thyself submit 1 o save my lire Justice will say thou dost no crime commit, For in forc'd faults is no intent of ill. The argument in Measure for Measure is pushed beyond the original: — Sweet sister, let me live! What sin you do to save a brother's life, Nature dispenses with the deed so far, That it becomes a virtue. [3.1.132-5] Shakespeare was so well satisfied with this sophistry, that he placed it also in the mouth of Angelo; who confidently uses it in urging his dishonourable suit, insisting, that 65

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Our compell'd sins Stand more for number than account; and insidiously demanding, — Might there not be a charity in sin To save this brother's life ? [2.4.57-8, 63-4] It appears sufficiently extraordinary that the wretched Cassandra of Whetstone should plead with earnestness for the life of the actual violator of her person, and the supposed murderer of her brother; but what will be thought of her thus addressing the lustful and sanguinary Promos, — Yet ere we part, sweet husband, let us kiss — O! at his lips why faileth not my breath? and of her declaration Unto the king with me yet once more go, See if his grace my husband's life will save, If not, with his death shall my corps ingrave? Shakespeare avoids this inconsistency by the expedient of introducing Mariana, a lady to whom Angelo had been affianced. Mariana modestly undertakes to avail herself of silence and darkness, and she counterfeits Isabella in a private meeting with Angelo. Her acceptance of him as a husband, after these circumstances, is not very extraordinary; and, moreover, the injuries of Angelo against Mariana are by no means of so deep a dye as those of Promos against Cassandra. But Angelo is a man equally as depraved as Promos, and Mariana is fully acquainted with his villany; circumstances not very consistent with her expression of perfect satisfaction with her bargain: — O my dear lord! I crave no other, nor no better man. [5.1.425—6] The Cassandra of Whetstone is a wretched creature, whose abjectness Shakespeare has cast on Mariana, and thus enabled himself to present his Isabella in spotless and austere chastity; not exciting our love, - for her self-involved virtue needs no human sympathy, - but commanding our reverence for her purity and sacredness. Occasionally, the influence of the old play may be traced in her sentiments; but her pathetic earnestness, powerful argument, and impassioned eloquence throw Whetstone's heroine to an immeasurable depth of inferiority. The leading features in the characters of Promos and Angelo are the same; though the progress of their guilt is marked by differing as well as accordant circumstances. Apparently men of strict integrity and unimpeachable virtue, in the hour of temptation, unhappily, they fall; but they fall not without a struggle, nor without remorse: they combat with the guilty suggestions of their passions, and seek refuge from the allurements of beauty in the offices of religion. Promos, the more readily to prevail with Cassandra, enters into a positive engagement to marry her, as well as to spare 66

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

the life of her brother. Angelo is not guilty of this vulgar artifice; but his villany assumes a blacker character from the unmanly threats by which he seeks to enforce compliance with his wishes. In a moment of inconsiderate anger, Isabella threatens to expose the villany of Angelo, and endeavours, by that means, to extort the pardon of her brother. The reply is sufficiently obvious; but Shakespeare is not without the authority of the old play for the expressions which he assigns to Angelo: No force for that my might commandeth right: Her privy maim her open cries will stay; Or if not so, my frowning will her fright: And thus shall rule conceal my filthy deed. Angelo places unbounded confidence in the argument, and urges it with considerable force; — Who will believe thee, Isabel? My unsoil'd name, the austereness of my life, My vouch against you, and my place i' the state, Will so your accusation overweigh, That you shall stifle in your own report, And smell of calumny. [2.4.154-9] Again: — For my authority bears ofr a credent bulk, That no particular scandal once can touch, But it confounds the breather. [4.4.26-8] Angelo lays great stress on the death of Claudio as the means of preventing the detection of his crime; and that he may be perfectly satisfied on so important a point, he directs the head to be brought to him after the execution. Promos commands the gaoler to deliver the head to Cassandra. In the management of the Duke, in the early scenes of the play, Shakespeare has deserted Whetstone to follow his own conceptions. The King, in Promos and Cassandra, has no immediate superintendence over the actions of his deputy, for he resides at a distance, and learns the delinquency of Promos from the injured female who appeals to him. This is credible and natural, which is more than can be said of the conduct of the Duke. He resigns his government into the hands of deputies under the pretence of making a journey into Poland, whither he does not go; but remains concealed in Vienna overlooking the conduct of Angelo, and prying for intelligence in the disguise of a friar. When the sovereign in the original makes his entrance into the city, due solemnity and state are observed on the occasion: the delegated authorities are assembled to receive him, and to resign their power into his hands; and proclamation is made throughout the streets for all those who think themselves aggrieved to apply to him for redress. Shakespeare has not omitted any of these circumstances; the public reception of the Duke he exhibits on the stage, whilst Angelo mentions the other particu67

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

lars; - 'And why meet him at the gates, and re-deliver our authorities there?' [4.4.56]. Shakespeare has also copied the sovereign's salutation of the guilty magistrate both in substance and form: But see where Promos and the Mayor wait To welcome me with great solemnity. With cheerful show I shadow will the hate I bear to him for his insolency."

Promos, the good report of your good government I hear: Thus in Measure for Measure: Give me your hand, And let the subject see, to make them know That outward courtesies would fain proclaim Favours that keep within.

We have made enquiry of you; and we hear Such goodness of your justice, &c.

O, your desert speaks loud. [5.1.13-16, 5-6, 9] The crimes of the iniquitous governors detected, they, in both plays, make confession. My guilty heart commands my tongue, O King, to tell a truth, I do confess this tale is true, and I deserve thy wrath. 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. [5.1.371-4] Promos and Angelo are both pardoned by the intercession of the females they have injured; they are both compelled to marry them, and both are similarly exhorted to repay by affection the unmerited kindness of their deliverers. Be loving to good Cassandra thy wife. Look you love your wife: — [5.1.497] and again Love her, Angelo; I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue. [5.1.526—7] 68

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Had it been only in view to prove that Promos and Cassandra, and not the novel of Cinthio, formed the groundwork of Measure for Measure, many of the preceding extracts might have been spared; but the attaining of an insight into Shakespeare's process in the construction of his play has been the object, and for that reason we are still led to the notice of one or two other concurring particulars. In both plays, low officers take into custody the inmates of a brothel, and carry them before the deputy; and a woman of bad character bewails the enforcement of the laws against the vices of her trade. Whetstone's Rosko and Shakespeare's Clown are gentlemen of the same calling, and equally worthy members of their profession; Rosko, however, is a keen, active, witty rogue, but the Clown is full of low cunning disguised under an affected simplicity. The stupid constable, Elbow, bears a greater resemblance to Dogberry, in Much Ado About Nothing, than to any personage in Whetstone's play. Barnardine indeed is the only character entirely original, and considering the small space he occupies in the play, it is astonishing with what distinctness his peculiarities are marked. Some sportive fancy of Shakespeare caused his appearance, for a character more unnecessary for the advancing of a plot was never placed in a list of dramatis personae. (II, 54-68)

69

15 George Daniel, a play about mercy 1826

From Measure for Measure. A Comedy, in Five Acts. By William Shakspeare. Printed from the Acting Copy, with Remarks, Biographical and Critical [by George Daniel]. ... As now Performed at the Theatres-Royal London (c. 1826; in Volume VII of Cumberland''s British Theatre [London, 1823—31]). George Daniel (1789-1864), educated at a boarding school at Paddington Green, was a businessman most of his life. He was also a book collector (he owned the first four Folios of Shakespeare's works) and a lover of literature. He published poetry from the age of sixteen, including several satires under the pseudonym of P—P—, Poet Laureate, as well as a three-volume novel, an opera, musical farces, and miscellaneous prose pieces. He was a neighbour of Charles Lamb and also friendly with John Philip Kemble (1757-1823) and other actors. He is best known today as the editor of Cumberland's British Theatre series (39 vols), to which he contributed a preface for each play (close to three hundred). He had not only solid critical sense but also a knowledge of theatrical and performance tradition.

. . . Dr. Johnson has observed, that 'every reader feels some indignation Angelo spared;' and Mrs. Lenox has censured the propriety of the title Measure, 'since justice is not the virtue it inculcates.'^ Angelo is guilty in strict justice, deserved to die; - but the poet had a higher moral in propitiation of justice, from whose stern tribunal he appeals to the mercy: —

when he finds of Measure for in intent; and, view than the divine seat of

For Angelo, His act did not o'ertake his bad intent; And must be bury'd but as intent, That perish'd by the way; thoughts are no subjects; Intents, but merely thoughts. [5.1.450-4] Yet, though Angelo is dismissed with life, he does not escape punishment. The mental agony he endures under the mock sentence — the deep shame and humiliation that overwhelm him in the severe reproofs of Escalus and the Duke - may be said almost to expiate his crimes. He is made to feel the horrors of guilt without suffering its extremest penalty, and to taste the bitterness of death by hourly anticipation. In 70

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

being left to repentance we may esteem his punishment too light, and part with him in indignation; whereas, had his life paid the forfeit of his guilt, he might have excited pity; and thus, by outmeasuring Measure, have weakened the moral effect of this fine play. In no other drama of Shakespeare's, with the exception of Hamlet, are there more profound reflections on human life, than in Measure for Measure. What a melancholy, though true picture is the following: — Reason thus with life: — If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences That do this habitation, where thou keep'st Hourly afflict, - &c. &c. [3.1.6-11] And, if we can for a moment forget Portia's divine speech on mercy, where shall we find that attribute of Heaven more eloquently enforced than in the scene where Isabella pleads for her brother's life? Alas! Alas! Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; And he that might the vantage best have took, Found out the remedy: How would you be, If He, who is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? Oh! think on that And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made. [2.2.72—9] It were as vain to seek for a parallel to this sublime image among the lights of the Church; as in the page of the moralist for a passage of equal truth and beauty to the following: — Oh, it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant, - &c. &c. [2.2.107-9] Yet, as his imagination was boundless, so was his humanity, which embraced every object in creation's ample range; from man, proud man, to the poor beetle that we tread upon — offering a lesson of humility to the one, while asking compassion for the other! Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. [3.1.76-80] For its power of thrilling the soul with supernatural terror, Claudio's reflections on death may vie with anything that the imagination of poet ever conceived. 71

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

The comic part of this drama, though tinctured in a more than ordinary degree with the freedom of the age, is exceedingly humorous. Lucio, the fantastic, bears a certain resemblance to Mercutio; and Elbow, the constable, in his whimsical misapplication of terms, brings to our remembrance his worthy compeer, Master Dogberry. This is the first play of Shakespeare's in which a Clown makes his appearance. The present one is of the lowest description — a tapster to a bawd; yet he hardly yields to any of his brethren in wit, though in quality savours too much of the grossness of his calling. The radical fault of Measure for Measure is the indelicacy of its plot. The crime of Angelo, the pleading of Isabella for his life, and the terms upon which it is proposed to be granted, though managed with consummate skill, are caviare to our juster notions of propriety and good taste. On the stage, therefore, where the ignorant and unreflecting are promiscuously addressed, the representation of this drama may be of questionable utility; but to the enlightened mind it will prove a source of instruction and delight. The gayer scenes will charm with their humour, and the curious picture they exhibit of ancient manners; and the grave will offer food for reflection, by teaching us how to appreciate life, and how to employ it. It is but repeating a remark of the ingenious Schlegel, that Shakespeare has not fallen into the vulgar error of painting his monks in knavish colours, to show his zeal for the new religion, the progress of which was marked by greater sacrilege and as much enormity as the old. ' His love of truth, and reverence for the guardians and depositories of ancient learning, forbade him to repeat the common cant about ignorant and slothful monks; while his enlarged humanity could walk by the light of his own faith, without proscribing that of his ancestors. The monks introduced in Romeo and Juliet, in Much Ado about Nothing, and in Measure for Measure, are employed in kind and beneficent offices. It was not necessary, because they had renounced the world for themselves, that they should retire to sullen and useless seclusion, and thereby, as regards doing good, renounce it for others. Besides, we have reason to believe that Shakespeare regarded with no favourable eye the growing puritanism of the age. In the picture he has drawn of Angelo, we recognise a perfect likeness of sanctimonious hypocrisy: — Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone. [1.3.50-3] . . . The part of the Duke is not calculated to call forth any very powerful energies of the actor. It is calm, dignified, and reflective; and was finely sustained by the late Mr. Kemble.^ It was in this character that Mr. Joseph Paterson, an actor long attached to the Norwich company, of great versatility of talent, and in private life much respected, made his final exit from the stage of life. In October, 1758, he was performing the Duke, which he played in a masterly style; Mr. Moody was the Claudio; and, in the third act, where (as the Friar) he was preparing Claudio for execution the next morning, at these words, — 72

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep. A breath thou art — [3.1.5—8] Here he paused, and, dropping into Mr. Moody's arms, instantly expired! Mrs. Siddons, in Isabella, was great indeed.a Among her many triumphs of genius, the following noble burst stands pre-eminent: — There spake my brother — there my father's grave Did utter forth a voicel [3.1.85-6] . . . . (5-7)

73

16 Anna Brownell Jameson, Isabella compared to Portia 1832

From Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (2 vols, London, 1832). Anna Brownell Jameson (1794—1860) was born in Dublin, but grew up in England and married an English barrister, Robert Jameson, unhappily. Active as a writer, her The Diary of an Ennuyee (1826), originally titled A Lady's Diary and based on her own experiences, was a popular success, as was Characteristics of Women, several times reissued. Her many friendships with famous people included Ottilie von Goethe and Lady Byron. This excerpt from Characteristics of Women comes from the one-volume 'New Edition' (London, 1879), which has several additions to the 1832 printing.

The character of Isabella, considered as a poetical delineation, is less mixed than that of Portia; and the dissimilarity between the two appears, at first view, so complete, that we can scarce believe that the same elements enter into the composition of each. Yet so it is: they are portrayed as equally wise, gracious, virtuous, fair and young; we perceive in both the same exalted principle and firmness of character, the same depth of reflection and persuasive eloquence, the same self-denying generosity and capability of strong affections; and we must wonder at that marvelous power by which qualities and endowments, essentially and closely allied, are so combined and modified as to produce a result altogether different. 'O Nature! O Shakspeare! which of ye drew from the other?' Isabella is distinguished from Portia, and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is 'severe in youthful beauty' [cf. the Duke's 'He who the sword of heaven will bear / Should be as holy as severe' (3.2.161-2)], and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in such a man as Angelo — O cunning enemy! that to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook. [2.2.179-80] This impression of her character is conveyed from the very first, when Lucio, the libertine jester, whose coarse audacious wit checks at every feather, thus expresses his respect for her: 74

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

. . . I hold you as a thing enskyed and sainted, By your renouncement, an immortal spirit, And to be talked with in sincerity, As with a saint. [Quotes 1.4.31-7] A strong distinction between Isabella and Portia is produced by the circumstances in which they are respectively placed. Portia is a high-born heiress, 'lord of a fair mansion, master of her servants, queen o'er herself [The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.167— 9]; easy and decided, as one born to command, and used to it. Isabella has also the innate dignity which renders her 'queen o'er herself,' but she has lived far from the world and its pomps and pleasures; she is one of a consecrated sisterhood — a novice of St. Clare; the power to command obedience and to confer happiness are to her unknown. Portia is a splendid creature, radiant with confidence, hope, and joy. She is like the orange-tree, hung at once with golden fruit and luxuriant flowers, which has expanded into bloom and fragrance beneath favouring skies, and has been nursed into beauty by the sunshine and the dews of heaven. Isabella is like a stately and graceful cedar, towering on some Alpine cliff, unbowed and unscathed amid the storm. She gives us the impression of one who has passed under the ennobling discipline of suffering and self-denial: a melancholy charm tempers the natural vigour of her mind: her spirit seems to stand upon an eminence, and look down upon the world as if already enskyed and sainted; and yet, when brought into contact with that world which she inwardly despises, she shrinks back with all the timidity natural to her cloistral education. This union of natural grace and grandeur with the habits and sentiments of a recluse, — of austerity of life with gentleness of manner, — of inflexible moral principle with humility and even bashfulness of deportment, is delineated with the most beautiful and wonderful consistency. Thus, when her brother sends to her, to entreat her mediation, her first feeling is fear, and a distrust of her own powers: Alas! what poor ability 's in me To do him good? Lucio. Essay the power you have Isabella. My power, alas! I doubt. [1.4.75—7] In the first scene with Angelo she seems divided between her love for her brother and her sense of his fault; between her self-respect and her maidenly bashfulness. She begins with a kind of hesitation, 'at war 'twixt will and will not' [2.2.33]: and when Angelo quotes the law, and insists on the justice of his sentence and the responsibility of his station, her native sense of moral rectitude and severe principles takes the lead, and she shrinks back. O just, but severe law! I had a brother then — Heaven keep your honor! ! (Retiring.} [2.2.41-2] Excited and encouraged by Lucio, and supported by her own natural spirit, she returns to the charge, - she gains energy and self-possession as she proceeds, grows 75

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

more earnest and passionate from the difficulty she encounters, and displays the eloquence and power of reasoning for which we had been already prepared by Claudio's first allusion to her: In her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect, Such as moves men; besides, she hath prosperous art, When she will play with reason, and discourse, And well she can persuade. [1.2.182—6] It is a curious coincidence, that Isabella, exhorting Angelo to mercy, avails herself of precisely the same arguments and insists on the self-same topics which Portia addresses to Shylock in her celebrated speech; but how beautifully and how truly is the distinction marked! how like, and yet how unlike! Portia's eulogy on mercy is a piece of heavenly rhetoric; it falls on the ear with a solemn measured harmony; it is the voice of a descended angel addressing an inferior nature: if not premeditated, it is at least part of a preconcerted scheme; while Isabella's pleadings are poured from the abundance of her heart in broken sentences, and with the artless vehemence of one who feels that life and death hinge upon her appeal. This will be best understood by placing the corresponding passages in immediate comparison with each other: . . . [Quotes from The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.184-94 and 198-202, and Measure for Measure, 2.2.58-63 and 72-9] The beautiful things which Isabella is made to utter have, like the sayings of Portia, become proverbial: but in spirit and character they are as distinct as are the two women. In all that Portia says we confess the power of a rich poetical imagination, blended with a quick practical spirit of observation, familiar with the surfaces of things; while there is a profound yet simple morality, a depth of religious feeling, a touch of melancholy, in Isabella's sentiments, and something earnest and authoritative in the manner and expression, as though they had grown up in her mind from long and deep meditation in the silence and solitude of her convent cell: O it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant. [2.2.107-9] Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet.... [Quotes 2.2.110-22] . . . [Also quotes 2.2.127-8, 130-31, 134-41, 2.4.76-7, 3.1.77-80, 5.1.52-7] Her fine powers of reasoning, and that natural uprightness and purity which no sophistry can warp, and no allurement betray, are farther displayed in the second scene with Angelo. . . . [Quotes 2.4.98-120] Towards the conclusion of the play we have another instance of that rigid sense of justice which is a prominent part of Isabella's character, and almost silences her earnest intercession for her brother, when his fault is placed between her plea and her conscience. The Duke condemns the villain Angelo to death, and his wife Mariana 76

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

entreats Isabella to plead for him. . . [Quotes 5.1.430-2: 'Sweet Isabel, take my part. ...']. Isabella remains silent and Mariana reiterates her prayer . . . [Quotes 5.1.437-8, 442]. Isabella, thus urged, breaks silence and appeals to the Duke, not with supplication, or persuasion, but with grave argument, and a kind of dignified humility and conscious power, which are finely characteristic of the individual woman . . . [Quotes 5.1.443—54: 'Most bounteous sir....']. In this instance, as in the one before mentioned, Isabella's conscientiousness is overcome by the only sentiment which ought to temper justice into mercy, the power of affection and sympathy. Isabella's confession of the general frailty of her sex has a peculiar softness, beauty, and propriety. She admits the imputation with all the sympathy of woman for woman; yet with all the dignity of one who felt her own superiority to the weakness she acknowledges. .. . Nay, call us ten times frail; For we are soft as our complexions are, And credulous to false prints. [Quotes 2.4.124—30] Nor should we fail to remark the deeper interest which is thrown round Isabella by one part of her character, which is betrayed rather than exhibited in the process of the action; and for which we are not at first prepared, though it is so perfectly natural. It is the strong undercurrent of passion and enthusiasm flowing beneath this calm and saintly self-possession; it is the capacity for high feeling and generous and strong indignation veiled beneath the sweet austere composure of the religious recluse, which, by the very force of contrast, powerfully impress the imagination. As we see in real life that where, from some external or habitual cause, a strong controul is exercised over naturally quick feelings and an impetuous temper, they display themselves with a proportionate vehemence when that restraint is removed; so the very violence with which her passions burst forth, when opposed or under the influence of strong excitement, is admirably characteristic. Thus in her exclamation, when she first allows herself to perceive Angelo's vile design — Ha! little honour to be much believ'd And most pernicious purpose! — seeming! — seeming! I will proclaim thee, Angelo: look for it! . . . [Quotes 2.4.149-54] And again, where she finds that the 'outward sainted deputy' [3.1.88] has deceived her — 'O, I will to him, and pluck out his eyes!' . . . [Quotes 4.3.119, 121—2] She places at first a strong and high-souled confidence in her brother's fortitude and magnanimity, judging him by her own lofty spirit: I'll to my brother, Though he hath fallen by prompture of the blood, Yet hath he in him such a mind of honour. . . . [Quotes 2.4.177—83] But when her trust in his honour is deceived by his momentary weakness, her scorn has a bitterness and her indignation a force of expression almost fearful; and both are carried to an extreme, which is perfectly in character: 77

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Is't not a kind of incest to take life From thine own sister's shame? . . . [Quotes 3.1.136—46] The whole of this scene with Claudio is inexpressibly grand in the poetry and the sentiment; and the entire play abounds in those passages and phrases which must have become trite from familiar and constant use and abuse, if their wisdom and unequalled beauty did not invest them with an immortal freshness and vigour, and a perpetual charm....a Of all the characters, Isabella alone has our sympathy. But though she triumphs in the conclusion, her triumph is not produced in a pleasing manner. There are too many disguises and tricks, too many 'by-paths and indirect crooked ways' [2 Henry IV, 4.5.184], to conduct us to the natural and foreseen catastrophe, which the Duke's presence throughout renders inevitable. This Duke seems to have a predilection for bringing about justice by a most unjustifiable succession of falsehoods and counterplots. He really deserves Lucio's satirical designation, who somewhere styles him 'The Fantastical Duke of Dark Corners' [4.3.156—7]. But Isabella is ever consistent in her pure and upright simplicity, and in the midst of this simulation, expresses a characteristic disapprobation of the part she is made to play: To speak so indirectly I am loath: I would say the truth. [4.5.1-2] She yields to the supposed Friar with a kind of forced docility, because her situation as a religious novice, and his station, habit, and authority, as her spiritual director, demand this sacrifice. In the end we are made to feel that her transition from the convent to the throne has but placed this noble creature in her natural sphere; for though Isabella, as Duchess of Vienna, could not more command our highest reverence than Isabel the novice of Saint Clare, yet a wider range of usefulness and benevolence, of trial and action, was better suited to the large capacity, the ardent affections, the energetic intellect and firm principle of such a woman as Isabella than the walls of a cloister. The philosophical Duke observes in the very first scene: Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues. . . . [Quotes 1.1.35-40] This profound and beautiful sentiment is illustrated in the character and destiny of Isabella. She says, of herself, that 'she has spirit to act whatever her heart approves' [3.1.205-7]; and what her heart approves we know. In the convent (which may stand here poetically for any narrow and obscure situation in which such a woman might be placed) Isabella would not have been unhappy, but happiness would have been the result of an effort, or of the concentration of her great mental powers to some particular purpose . . . [Mrs. Jameson compares Isabella with St. Theresa (1515-82)]. Such women as Desdemona and Ophelia would have passed their lives in the 78

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

seclusion of a nunnery without wishing, like Isabella, for stricter bonds, or planning, like St. Theresa, the reformation of their order, simply because any restraint would have been efficient, as far as they were concerned. Isabella, 'dedicate to nothing temporal' [2.2.154—5], might have found resignation through self-government, or have become a religious enthusiast while 'place and greatness' [4.1.59] would have appeared [to] her strong and upright mind only a more extended field of action, a trust and a trial. The mere trappings of power and state, the gemmed coronal, the ermined robe, she would have regarded as the outward emblems of her earthly profession; and would have worn them with as much simplicity as her novice's hood and scapular; still, under whatever guise she might tread this thorny world, the same 'angel of light'. |2] (64-78)

79

17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a 'hateful' and 'painful' play 1835, 1836

From Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Two Volumes (London, 1835), vol. I; and The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (4 vols, London, 1836-39), vol. II, 1836. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), one of the the poets and philosophers of the Romantic period, is best known for his collaboration with William Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) and for Christabel; Kubla Kahn, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep (1816); and Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols (1817). Celebrated in his own time for his conversation as well as his writings, his Shakespearian criticism, which had a great influence in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has survived mainly because of the efforts of his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798-1843), who assembled and edited both Specimens of the Table Talk and The Literary Remains. See also The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, Bollingen Series LXXV (Princeton, 1990), 14:1, p. 73, and 14:2, p. 62.

[From Specimens of the Table Talk, 24 June 1827] Measure for Measure is the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakespeare's plays. It is a hateful work, although Shakespearian throughout. Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape. Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable. (I, 71-2) [From The Literary Remains] This play, which is Shakespeare's throughout, is to me the most painful — say rather, the only painful - part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the [miseteon],^ — the one being disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice - (for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of;) but it is likewise degrading to the character of woman. Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakespeare in his errors only, have presented a still worse, because more a

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

loathsome and contradictory, instance of the same kind in the Night-Walker, in the marriage of Alathe to Algripe.[2] Of the counterbalancing beauties of Measure for Measure, I need say nothing; for I have already remarked that the play is Shakespeare's throughout.

81

18 Henry Hallam, a struggle between drama and philosophy 1839

From Introduction to the Literature of Europe, in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (4 vols, London, 1837-39). Volume III (1839). Henry Hallam (1777-1859) was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1799. He practiced law for several years, and when his father died, leaving him a considerable inheritance, he obtained a sinecure as a commissioner of stamps, devoting himself to scholarly pursuits. He became a well-respected historian — known for A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) and The Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II (1827). The death of his eldest son, Arthur Henry, in 1833 immortalized in Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. (1833-50) - had a devastating effect on him, but he still managed to finish his mageristerial fourvolume Introduction. My selection comes from Part III, Chapter VI ('History of Dramatic Literature from 1600 to 1650').

Measure for Measure, commonly referred to the end of 1603, is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth, the play in which Shakespeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power of his own mind; the depths and intricacies of being which he has searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him; his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could grasp in the clearest expression; and thus he loses something of dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. The Duke is designed as the representative of this philosophical character. He is stern and melancholy by temperament, averse to the exterior shows of power, and secretly conscious of some unfitness for its practical duties. The subject is not very happily chosen, but artfully improved by Shakespeare. In most of the numerous stories of a similar nature, which before or since his time have been related, the sacrifice of chastity is really made, and made in vain. There is however something too coarse and disgusting in such a story; and it would have deprived him of a splendid exhibition of character. The virtue of Isabella, inflexible and independent of circumstance, has something very grand and elevated; yet one is disposed to ask whether, if Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that her reproaches against her miserable brother when he clings to life like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh. There is 82

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

great skill in the invention of Mariana, and without this the story could not have had any thing like a satisfactory termination; yet it is never explained how the Duke has become acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and confidence in Angelo. His intention, as hinted towards the end, to marry Isabella, is a little too common-place; it is one of Shakespeare's hasty half-thoughts. The language of this comedy is very obscure, and the text seems to have been printed with great inaccuracy. I do not value the comic parts highly; Lucio's impudent profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than of natural ill disposition, is well represented; but Elbow is a very inferior repetition of Dogberry. In dramatic effect Measure for Measure ranks high; the two scenes between Isabella and Angelo, that between her and Claudio, those where the Duke appears in disguise, and the catastrophe in the fifth act are admirably written and very interesting; except so far as the spectator's knowledge of the two stratagems which have deceived Angelo may prevent him from participating in the indignation at Isabella's imaginary wrong which her lamentations would excite. Several of the circumstances and characters are borrowed from the old play of Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra; but very little of the sentiments or language. What is good in Measure for Measure is Shakespeare's own. (Ill, 564—5)

83

19 Charles Knight, an introduction to the play 1840

From The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere (8 vols, London, 1838-43). Volume II: ... (1840). 2nd edn, revised (8 vols, London, 1867). Volume II. Charles Knight (1791-1873), born in Windsor, was the son of a bookseller and started to work for his father in 1805. Avid for learning and the dissemination of knowledge, he became a published author by the age of twenty-two, then a journalist, and next an editor and publisher. His passion for Shakespeare began to be fulfilled when he published the first part of his Pictorial Shakspere in 1838 (there were fifty-five parts in all); it was later issued in eight volumes. For each play Knight provides an 'Introductory Notice', 'Illustrations' and 'Historical Illustrations' after each act, and an interpretive concluding 'Supplementary Notice'. His Studies of Shakspere: Forming a Companion Volume to Every Edition of the Text (London, 1849) contains copious selections from the often-reprinted edition. The material below is from Volume II of the 2nd, revised edition.

[From the 'Introductory Notice' to Measure for Measure: 'State of the Text and Chronology'] This comedy was first printed in the folio collection of 1623, and there has been no previous claim to the right of printing it made by any entry in the registers of the Stationers' Company. We are very much inclined to think, from the state of the original text, that the editors of the first folio possessed no copy but that from which they printed. Some of the sentences throughout the play are so involved that they have very little the appearance of being taken from a copy which had been used by the actors; and in two cases a word is found in the text (prenzie) which could never have been given upon the stage, and appears to have been inserted by the printer in despair of deciphering the author's manuscript. On the other hand, the metrical arrangement, which has been called 'rough, redundant, and irregular, ^ was strictly copied, we have no doubt, from the author's original; for a printer does not mistake the beginnings and ends of blank-verse lines, although little attention might be paid to such matters in a prompter's book. The peculiar structure of the versification in this comedy was, we are satisfied, the result of the author's system; and, from the integrity with which it has been preserved in the first edition, we believe that the original manuscript passed directly through the hands of the printer, who made the

a

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

best of it without any reference to other copies. The original edition is divided into acts and scenes. It also gives the enumeration of characters as we have printed them, such a list of 'the names of the actors,' as we have before observed, being rarely presented in the early copies. We cannot trace that any allusion to Measure for Measure is to be found in the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries. There is, indeed, a passage in a poem published in 1607 which conveys the same idea as a passage in Measure for Measure: — And like as when some sudden extasy Seizeth the nature of a sickly man; When he's discern'd to swoon, straight by and bye Folk to his help confusedly have ran, And seeking with their art to fetch him back, So many throng, that he the air doth lack. ('Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis,' by William Barksted.) The following is the parallel passage in the comedy: — So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons; Come all to help him, and so stop the air By which he should revive. [2.4.24—6] Malone [No. 3] says of this coincidence, 'That Measure for Measure was written before 1607 may be fairly concluded from the following passage in a poem published in that year, which we have a good ground to believe was copied from a similar thought in this play, as the author, at the end of his piece, professes a personal regard for Shakespeare, and highly praises his Venus and Adonis.'2 This reasoning is to us not at all conclusive; for Shakespeare would not have hesitated to compress the six lines of Barksted into his own dramatic three; or the image might have been derived from some common source. Such coincidences prove nothing in themselves. In the other arguments of Malone as to the date of this play, which he assigns to 1603, we have an utter absence of all proof. . . . Conjectures such as these are too often laborious trifling. But, for once, they are pretty nearly borne out by incontrovertible testimony. The perseverance of Mr. Peter Cunningham has been rewarded by discovering in the Audit Office certain passages in the original Office Books of the Masters and Yeomen of the Revels, which fix the date of the representation at Court of some of Shakespeare's plays. The Office Book shows that Measure for Measure was presented at Court by the King's Players in 1604; and 'The Accompte of the Office of the Reuelles of this whole yeres Charge in Anfno] 1604: untell the last of Octobar 1605,' is preceded by the following very curious list of plays acted during that period: - ... [list includes 'On St. Stiuens Night in the Hall A Play called Mesur for Mesur,' author's name being given as 'Shaxberd']. Nothing can be a stronger evidence of the surpassing popularity of Shakespeare than this list. This account was published in 1842 by 'the Shakespeare Society,' in a volume edited by Mr. Peter Cunningham, and which is highly creditable to his industry and knowledge. ' (II, 261—3) 85

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

[From 'Introductory Notice' to Measure for Measure: 'Supposed Source of the Plot'] The Promos and Cassandra of George Whetstone, printed in 1578, but not acted, was, there can be no doubt, the foundation upon which Shakespeare built his Measure for Measure. Whetstone tells us in a subsequent work that he constructed his play upon a novel of Giraldi Cinthio, of which he gives us a translation; observing, 'this history, for rareness thereof, is livelily set out in a comedy by the reporter of the work, but yet never presented upon stage'4 . . . [provides Whetstone's 'argument of the whole history']. The performance of Whetstone, as might be expected in a drama of that date, is feeble and monotonous, not informed with any real dramatic power, drawling or bombastic in its tragic parts, extravagant in its comic. . . . It is scarcely necessary to offer to our readers any parallel examples of the modes in which Whetstone and Shakespeare have treated the same incidents . . . [quotes some passages from Whetstone that provided a source for Shakespeare's 2.2]. (II, 263-4) [From 'Supplementary Notice' to Measure for Measure] 'Look, the unfolding star calls up the shepherd' [4.2.203]. In the midst of the most business-like and familiar directions occur these eight words of the highest poetry. By a touch almost magical Shakespeare takes us in an instant out of that dark prison, where we have been surrounded with crime and suffering, to make us see the morning star bright over the hills, and hear the tinkle of the sheep-bell in the folds, and picture the shepherd bidding the flock go forth to pasture, before the sun has lighted up the dewy lawns. In the same way, throughout this very extraordinary drama, in which the whole world is represented as one great prison-house, full of passion, and ignorance, and sorrow, we have glimpses every now and then of something beyond, where there shall be no alternations of mildness and severity, but a condition of equal justice, serene as the valley under 'the unfolding star,' and about to rejoice in the dayspring. The little passage which we have quoted is amongst the numberless poetical gems which are scattered up and down this comedy with a profusion such as only belongs to one poet. It has been said of Shakespeare, 'He is the text for the moralist and the philosopher. His bright wit is cut out "into little stars;" his solid masses of knowledge are meted out in morsels and proverbs; and, thus distributed, there is scarcely a corner which he does not illuminate, or a cottage which he does not enrich.' This is by no means his highest praise, and his 'Beauties' give a very imperfect idea of his attributes; but certainly no other man ever wrote single sentences that to such an extent have now become mixed up with the habits of thought of millions of human beings. This play appears to us especially glittering with these 'little stars.' We cannot open a scene in which we do not encounter some passage that has set us thinking at some moment of our lives. Of such distinct passages, which the memory never parts from, the following will be recognised by all as familiar friends: — 86

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do; Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd But to fine issues. [1.1.32—6] Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, (Servile to all the skiey influences,) That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st, Hourly afflict. [3.1.6-11] Merciful heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak, Than the soft myrtle: But man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority; Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, His glassy essence, — like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep. [2.2.114-22] The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when the giant dies. [3.1.77-80] We select these, contrary to our usual practice of not separating the parts from the whole, for the purpose of pointing out that there is something deeper in them than the power of expressing a moral observation strikingly and poetically. They are imbued with the writer's philosophy. They form a part of the system upon which the play is written. But, opposed to passages like these, there are many single sentences scattered through this drama which, so far from dwelling on with pleasure, we hurry past — which we like not to look upon again — which appear to be mere grossnesses. They are, nevertheless, an integral portion of the drama — they also form part of the system upon which the play is written. What is true of single passages is true of single scenes. Those between Isabella and Angelo, and Isabella and Claudio, are unsurpassed in the Shakespearian drama, for force, and beauty, and the delicate management of a difficult subject. But there are other scenes which appear simply revolting, such as those in which the Clown is conspicuous; and even Barnardine, one of the most extraordinary of Shakespeare's creations, will produce little beyond disgust in the casual reader. But these have, nevertheless, not crept into this drama by accident - certainly not from the desire 'to make the unskilful laugh' [Hamlet, 3.2.25] Perhaps the effect of their introduction, coupled with the general subject of the dramatic action, is to render the entire comedy not pleasurable. Coleridge [No. 17] says, 'This play, which is Shakespeare's throughout, is to me the most painful — say, 87

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

rather, the only painful — part of his genuine works.' This is a strong opinion; and, upon the whole, a just one. But it requires explanation. The general outline of the story upon which Measure for Measure is founded is presented to us in such different forms, and with reference to such distinct times and persons, that, whether historically true or not, we can have no doubt of its universal interest. It is told of an officer of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy; of Oliver le Diable, the wicked favourite of Louis XL; of Colonel Kirke, in our own country , of a captain of the Duke of Ferrara. In all these cases an unhappy woman sacrifices her own honour for the promised safety of one she loves; and in all, with the exception of Colonel Kirke, the abuser of authority is punished with death. Whatever interest may attach to the narrative of such an event, it is manifest that the dramatic conduct of such a story is full of difficulty, especially in a scrupulous age. But the public opinion, which, in this particular, would operate upon a dramatist in our own day, would not affect a writer for the stage in the times of Elizabeth and James; and, in point of fact, plots far more offensive became the subject of very popular dramas long after the times of Shakespeare. It appears to us that, adopting such a subject in its general bearings, he has managed it with uncommon adroitness by his deviations from the accustomed story. By introducing a contrivance by which the heroine is not sacrificed, he preserves our respect for her, which would be involuntarily lost if she fell, even though against her own will; and by this management he is also enabled to spare the great offender without an unbearable violation of our sense of justice. But there was a higher aim in this even than the endeavour to produce a great dramatic effect. It may be convenient if we first regard this comedy as a work of art, constructed with reference to the production of such dramatic effect. Without referring, then, to the peculiar character of the Duke, and his secret objects in delegating 'mercy and mortality' [1.1.44] to Angelo, we have to look only at the sudden and severe sentence which the fault of Claudio has called down upon him, and at the circumstances which arise out of the intervention of Isabella to procure a remission of his punishment. This is the simple view of the matter which we find in the novel of Cinthio, in Whetstone's play of Promos and Cassandra, and in the pseudo-historical stories which deal with the same popular legend. It is in this point of view that we may consider the character of Isabella, acting upon one single and direct principle, without reference to the machinery of which she afterwards forms a part for carrying out the complicated management of the Duke. She is a being separated from all the evil influence - criminal, or ignorant, or weak - by which she is surrounded. In the eyes of the habitual profligate with whom she comes in contact she is 'a thing enskied and sainted' [1.4.34]. In the eyes of the tempter her purity is her most fearful charm. To her a more strict restraint than is laid upon the votaries of St. Clare would be a benefit and not an evil. To the subjection of all rebellious thoughts in herself, to the cultivation of the spiritual part of her nature, is she dedicated. She weeps for her brother; but she shrinks from the thought of going out of her own peculiar region to become his advocate: - 'Alas! What / Ability's in me to do him good?' [1.4.75-6]. When she has taken her resolution, she is still doubtful of herself: — 'I'll see what I can do' [1.4.84]. Few and timid are her words to Lucio; shrinking and half ashamed 88

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

is her first supplication to Angelo. She is as severe in her abstract view of guilt as the stern deputy himself: — There is a vice that most I do abhor, And most desire should meet the blow of justice. [2.2.29—30] At the first repulse she is abashed and would retire. She is the cloistress, to whom it appears that to plead for guilt has the semblance of excusing it; but she gradually warms into sympathy and earnestness. She recollects that mercy, as well as justice, is amongst the divine attributes. She first ventures upon the enunciation of a general truth: No ceremony that to great ones 'longs, Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword, The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe, Become them with one half so good a grace As mercy does. [2.2.59-63] But this general truth leads her to the declaration of the higher truth which she has most studied: — Alas! alas! Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. . . . [Quotes 2.2.72-9] From this moment she is self-possessed; and she stands before the organ of power pouring forth an impassioned eloquence with all the authority of a heavenly messenger. Then she is bold, even to the point of attacking the self-consciousness of the individual judge: — Go to your bosom; Knock there; and ask your heart, what it doth know That's like my brother's fault. . .. [Quotes 2.2.136-41] And at last, when she believes he will relent, she offers him no thanks, she supplicates him with no tears; but she promises him the reward of true prayers, That shall be up at heaven, and enter there, Ere sunrise. [2.2.151—3] The foundation of Isabella's character is religion. In the second scene with Angelo the same spirit breathes in every line. Her humility — Let me be ignorant, and in nothing good, But graciously to know I am no better; - [2.4.76-7] her purity, which cannot understand the oblique purposes of the corrupt deputy; — her martyr-like determination when the hateful alternative is proposed to her — 89

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Were I under the terms of death, The impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies, And strip myself to death, as to a bed That longing had been sick for, ere I'd yield; — [2.4.100—3] her simplicity, that believes for a moment that virtue has only to denounce wickedness to procure its fall; — her confidence in her brother's 'mind of honour:' [2.4.179] — all these are the results of the same mental discipline. Most fearfully is her endurance tried, when she has to tell Claudio upon what terms his life may be spared. The unhappy man has calmly listened to the philosophical homily of the Duke, in which he finds what is really somewhat difficult to find in such general exhortations to patience and fortitude — To sue to live, I find I seek to die; And seeking death find life. [3.1.42-3] He is to be sorely tempted; and his sister knows that he wants the one sustaining power which can resist temptation: — O, I do fear thee, Claudio. . . . [Quotes 3.1.73-6] Is her burst of passion, when her fears become true, and he utters the sophistry — What sin you do to save a brother's life, Nature dispenses with the deed so far, That it becomes a virtue, — [3.1.133—5] is that terrible indignation, 'take my defiance' [3.1.142], unnatural or unjust in a mind so constituted and so educated? The alternative was not for innocence to welcome death, but for purity to be reconciled to pollution. A lady, whose work Dr. Johnson has recommended as elegantly illustrating Shakespeare's departures from the novel of Cinthio, has been pleased to call Isabella 'a vixen' and 'a prude'.^ It is satisfactory that, if the last age had its Lennox, who understood as little of her own sex as she did of Shakespeare, the present has its Jameson. It was truly said by the editors of the first folio, addressing their readers, 'if then you do not like, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.' Mrs. Lennox set out upon the principle of depreciating Shakespeare, and she therefore utters absurdities such as these. Mrs. Jameson [No. 16] begins by reverencing him, and she therefore habitually gives us criticism as true and beautiful as that which we now extract: [Quotes p. 77, Ch. 16-27, above] The leading idea, then, of the character of Isabella, is that of one who abides the direst temptation which can be presented to a youthful, innocent, unsuspecting, and affectionate woman - the temptation of saving the life of one most dear, by submitting to a shame which the sophistry of self-love might represent as scarcely criminal. It is manifest that all other writers who have treated the subject have conceived that the temptation could not be resisted. Shakespeare alone has confidence enough in female virtue to make Isabella never for a moment even doubt of her proper course. But he has based this virtue, most unquestionably, upon the very highest principle on which any virtue can be built. The character of Angelo is the antagonist to that of 90

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Isabella. In a city of licentiousness he is 'A man of stricture and firm abstinence' [1.3.12]. He is Precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows. [1.3.50-2] He is one who

Doth rebate and blunt his natural edge With profits of the mind, study and fast. [1.4.60-1] But he wanted the one sustaining principle by which Isabella was upheld. Ulrici [No. 22] has sketched his character vigorously and truly: - [Quotes p. 100 below] After Shakespeare had conceived the character of Isabella, and in that conception had made it certain that her virtue must pass unscathed through the fire, he had to contrive a series of incidents by which the catastrophe should proceed onward through all the stages of Angelo's guilt of intention, and terminate in his final exposure. Mr. Hallam [No. 18] says, 'There is great skill in the invention of Mariana, and without this the story could not have anything like a satisfactory termination.' But there is great skill also in the management of the incident in the Duke's hands, as well as in the invention; and this is produced by the wonderful propriety with which the character of the Duke is drawn. He is described by Hazlitt [No. 11] as a very imposing and mysterious stage character, absorbed in his own plots and gravity. This is said depreciatingly. But it is precisely this sort of character that Shakespeare meant to put in action. Chalmers has a random hit, which comes, we think, something near the truth. 'The commentators seem not to have remarked that the character of the Duke is a very accurate delineation of that of King James. a' James was a pedant, and the Duke is a philosopher; but there is the same desire in each to get behind the curtain and pull the strings which move the puppets. We are not sure that Angelo's flattery did not save him, as much as Isabella's intercession: — 0 my dread lord, 1 should be guiltier than my guiltiness, To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your grace, like power divine, Hath look'd upon my passes. [5.1.366—70] As a ruler of men the Duke is weak, and he knows his own weakness: Fri. It rested in your grace To unloose this tied-up justice when you pleas'd: And it in you more dreadful would have seem'd Than in lord Angelo. Duke. I do fear, too dreadful: Sith 't was my fault to give the people scope, 91

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

'T would be my tyranny to strike and gall them For what I bid them do. [1.3.31-7] And yet he does really strike and gall them through another; but he saves himself the labour and the slander. And here, then, as it appears to us, we have a key to the purpose of the poet in the introduction of what constitutes the most unpleasant portion of this play, - the exhibition of a very gross general profligacy. There is an atmosphere of impurity hanging like a dense fog over the city of the poet. The philosophical ruler, the saintly votaress, and the sanctimonious deputy, appear to belong to another region to that in which they move. The grossness is not merely described or inferred; — but we see those who minister to the corruptions, and we are brought in contact with the corrupted. This, possibly, was not necessary for the higher dramatic effects of the comedy; but it was necessary for those lessons of political philosophy which we think Shakespeare here meant to inculcate, and which he appears to us on many occasions to have kept in view of his later plays. Mr. Hallam [No. 18] has most truly said of Measure for Measure that 'the depths and intricacies of being, which he (Shakespeare) has searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him' (p. 82). In this play he manifests, as we apprehend, his philosophical view of a corrupt state of manners fostered by weak government: but the subject is scarcely dramatic, and it struggles with his own proper powers. Here we have an exhibition of crimes of passion, and crimes of ignorance. There stands the Duke, the representative of a benevolent and tolerant executive power which does not meddle with the people, — which subjects them to no harsh restrictions, — which surrounds them with no biting penalties; but which utterly fails in carrying out the essential principle of government when it disregards prevention, and sees no middle course between neglect and punishment. A new system is to be substituted; the laissez faire is to be succeeded by the 'axe upon the block, very ready' [4.3.36-8] and then come all the commonplaces by which a reign of terror is to be defended: — We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape, till custom make it Their perch, and not their terror. [2.1.1—4]

The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept; Those many had not dar'd to do that evil, If the first that did the edict infringe Had answer'd for his deed; now, 't is awake. [2.2.90—3] The philosophical poet sweeps these saws away with an indignation which is the more emphatic as coming from the mouth of the only truly moral character of the whole drama: — Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet 92

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder. [2.110—3] But he does more — he exhibits to us the every-day working of the hot fit succeeding the cold of legislative and executive power. It works always with injustice. The Duke of the comedy is behind the scenes, and sees how it works. The weak governor resumes his authority, and with it he must resume his principles, and he therefore pardons all. The mouth-repenting deputy, and the callous ruffian, they each escape. We forget; he does not pardon all; the prating coxcomb, who has spoken slander of his own person, is alone punished. Was this accident in the poet? Great crimes may be looked over by weak governments, but the pettiest libeller of power is inevitably punished. The catastrophe of this comedy necessarily leaves upon the mind an unsatisfactory impression. Had Angelo been adequately punished it would have been more unsatisfactory. When the Duke took the management of the affair into his own hands, and averted the consequences of Angelo's evil intentions by a series of deceptions, he threw away the power of punishing those evil intentions. We agree with Coleridge [No. 17] that the pardon and marriage of Angelo 'baffle the strong indignant claims of justice;' but we cannot see how it could be otherwise. The poet, as it appears to us, exhibits to the end the inadequacy of human laws to enforce public morals upon a system of punishment. But he has not forgotten to exhibit to us incidentally the most beautiful lessons of tolerance; not using Measure for Measure in the sense of the jus talionis, but in a higher spirit — that spirit which moves Isabella to supplicate for mercy towards him who had most wronged her: — Most bounteous sir, Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd, As if my brother liv'd: I partly think, A due sincerity govern'd his deeds, Till he did look on me; since it is so, Let him not die. [5.1.443-7] (II, 315-21)

93

20 J. Payne Collier, on the play's date and sources 1842

From The Works of William Shakespeare. The Text Formed from an Entirely New Collation of the Old Editions: With the Various Readings, Notes, a Life of the Poet, and a History of the Early English Stage (8 vols, London, 1842-44). Volume II. John Payne Collier (1789—1883) was born in London, the son of an editor and journalist, John Dyer Collier. His mother, Jane Collier (nee Payne), was friendly with Charles Lamb (1775-1834) and William Hazlitt (1778-1830). Collier became a reporter for the London Times at the age of twenty and worked for that newspaper until 1821. Later he worked for the London Morning Chronicle as a law and parliamentary reporter (he was a student at the Middle Temple and was admitted to the bar in 1829), as well as a critic. His real passion, however, was for English literature, and he became known as a scholar and editor, but one with a tainted reputation because of various forgeries he created in original documents he had access to as literary advisor to the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Devonshire. He was director of the Shakespeare Society and author of dozens of scholarly publications, including the three-volume History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage (1831), The Memoirs of Edward Alleyn (1841), The Alleyn Papers (1843), The Diary of Philip Henslowe (1845), the eightvolume edition of Shakespeare cited above, the two-volume Shakespeare's Library (1844), The Dramatic Works of John Hey wood (1850—51), and the fivevolume The Works of Edmund Spenser (1862). Unfortunately, no one to this day is certain of the extent of Collier's fraud, so his statements must always be verified from independent sources. See Dewey Ganzell, Fortune and Men's Eyes: The Career of John Payne Collier (Oxford, 1982).

[From 'Introduction' to Measure for Measure] In the 'History of English Dramatic Poetry,' III. 68, it is remarked, that 'although it seems clear that Shakespeare kept Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra in his eye while writing Measure for Measure, it is probable that he also made use of some other dramatic composition or novel, in which the same story was treated.' I was led to form this opinion from the constant habit of dramatists of that period to employ the productions of their predecessors, and from the extreme likelihood, that when our old play-writers were hunting in all directions for stories which they could convert 94

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

to their purpose, they would not have passed over the novel by Giraldi Cinthio, which had not only been translated, but actually converted into a drama nearly a quarter of a century before the death of Elizabeth. Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, a play in two parts, was printed in 1578, though, as far as we know, never acted, and he subsequently introduced a translation of the novel (which he admitted to be its origin), in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 4to, 1582. No plays, however, excepting Promos and Cassandra, and Measure for Measure, founded on the same incidents, have reached our day, and Whetstone's is the only existing ancient version of the Italian novel.[11 The title of Cinthio's novel, the fifth of the eighth Decad of his Hecatommithi, gives a sufficient account of the progress of the story as he relates it, and will show its connexion with Shakespeare's play: — [Quotation in Italian follows.] — Whetstone adopts these incidents pretty exactly in his Promos and Cassandra; but Shakespeare varies from them chiefly by the introduction of Mariana, and by the final union between the Duke and Isabella. Whetstone lays his scene at Julio in Hungary, whither Corvinus, the King, makes a progress to ascertain the truth of certain charges against Promos: Shakespeare lays his scene in Vienna, and represents the Duke as retiring from public view, and placing his power in the hands of two deputies. Shakespeare was not indebted to Whetstone for a single thought, nor for a casual expression, excepting as far as similarity of situation may be said to have necessarily occasioned corresponding states of feeling, and employment of language. In Whetstone's Heptameron, the name of the lady who narrates the story of Promos and Cassandra is Isabella, and hence possibly Shakespeare might have adopted it. As to the date when Measure for Measure was written, we have no positive information, but we now know that it was acted at Court on St. Stephen's night, (26 Dec.) 1604. This fact is stated in Edmund Tylney's account of the expenses of the revels from the end of Oct. 1604, till the same date in 1605, preserved in the Audit Office: the original memorandum of the master of the revels runs literatim as follows: — 'By his Ma tls Plaiers. On St. Stivens night in the Hall, a Play caled Mesur for Mesur.' In the column of the account headed 'The Poets which mayd the Plaies,' we find the name of 'Shaxberd' entered, which was the mode in which the ignorant scribe, who prepared the account, spelt the name of our great dramatist. ^ Malone [No. 3] conjectured from certain allusions (such as to 'the war' with Spain, 'the sweat,' meaning the plague, &c.), that Measure for Measure was written in 1603; and if we suppose it to have been selected for performance at Court on 26th Dec. 1604, on account of its popularity at the theatre after its production, his supposition will receive some confirmation. . . . We may, therefore, arrive pretty safely at the conclusion, that Measure for Measure was written either at the close of 1603, or in the beginning of 1604.... Of Measure for Measure, Coleridge observes in his Literary Remains, ii. 122: [Quotes No. 17 above]. In the course of Lectures on Shakespeare delivered in the year 1818, Coleridge pointed especially to the artifice of Isabella, and her seeming consent to the suit of Angelo, as the circumstances which tended to lower the character of the female sex. He then called Measure for Measure only the 'least agreeable' of Shakespeare's dramas. ' (II, 3—5) 95

21 Joseph Hunter, striking passages in a play that gives little pleasure 1845

From New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare. Supplementary to All the Editions. By Joseph Hunter, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and an Assistant Keeper of the Public Records (2 vols, London, 1845). Joseph Hunter (1783-1861) was an antiquary (and a fellow and vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries), a Presbyterian minister for twenty-four years in Bath, and a keeper of the public records in London. Among his thirty-two published works are Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date, &c., of Shakespeare's 'Tempest' (London, 1839) and New Illustrations, a work devoted to the textual and critical problems of Shakespeare's works. His attitude towards Measure for Measure resembles that of Coleridge (No. 17).

Few of Shakespeare's plays give so little pleasure as this. The fault is, in a great measure, in the plot, which is improbable and disgusting. But the play wants character. The principal persons are unindividualized men and women, and it may be doubted whether they always exhibit the feeling which really belongs to the strange situations in which they are placed. The Friars are but the Friars of Romeo and Juliet revived; and the Clowns who are forced upon the stage not brought into action by the necessities of the story, the least entertaining of their species. Yet the last Act is finely constructed; and, in the character of Mariana at the moated grange, we see what a few strokes of a master's pen may accomplish. Yet this slight portion of the play is better known since attention was called to it by Mr. Tennyson's poem, ^ which may well deserve to find a place at the end of any edition of this play, just as Collins's Dirge'2^ is found at the end of Cymbeline. The story has no doubt been often told, and applied to one unpopular person after another. To the writers named in the notes, by whom it has been told, may be added Goulart^3' of whom there is an English translation by Edward Grimston, aJ entitled, Admirable and Memorable Histories of our Time, published in 1607. It is useless to inquire whether this were the first edition, as it was not to this work that Shakespeare was indebted, but to the Promos and Cassandra, a play printed in 1578, of which the author was George Whetstone, one of the many poets of the Elizabethan age who were connected with the naval and military enterprise of the time. a There are several striking passages in this play which live in men's memories, 96

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

though the recollection of them is not stimulated by the recitation at the theatres. With remarks upon two of these I dismiss this play. Isabella. Darest thou die? The sense of Death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. [3.1.76-80] It is the singular fate of these words to be for ever quoted as containing a sentiment which is really the very opposite to that which they were meant to convey. It is no plea for the lower orders of animals, on the ground that they suffer as much in death as does man himself, and that, therefore, care should be taken not to injure them: but the speaker endeavours to remove from the mind of her unfortunate brother the natural dread of death, and of the pain which accompanies it, by representing that death is no more to man than to the poor beetle which is crushed beneath the foot, and in a moment all sense and feeling are annihilated. The amiable author of a treatise entitled Zoophilos, a alluding to this passage, says he cannot recollect that humanity to brutes is 'expressly inculcated as a virtue earlier than the time of our own Shakespeare.' The natural history of the passage, taken in either sense, is incorrect. Claudius. Ay, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot: This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the DELIGHTED SPIRIT To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice, &c. [3.1.117—22] Few expressions have exercised more the ingenuity of commentators than 'the delighted spirit' of this passage. Some maintain that the passage is corrupt. Hanmer ' suggests dilated; Thirlby, ' delinquent; and Johnson, ^ benighted: all equally objectionable. Those who adhere to the text as it has come down to us, explain it as conveying the idea of the spirit accustomed to delights. I beg to offer a slightly different explanation. The poet evidently intends to shew how first the body, and next the spirit, are disposed of when the separation has taken place. The body he designates by an expression of singular appropriateness and beauty, 'this sensible warm motion;' where 'motion' is used in its sense of an ingeniously constructed machine, an automaton, a wooden puppet moved by strings, a very common meaning of the word. Such an ingeniously constructed work is the human frame, with the additional circumstances that it is 'warm' and 'sensible.' This 'motion,' so curiously and wonderfully made, becomes no more than a 'kneaded clod;' all its fine organization is broken to pieces and perishes. — He then turns to the soul which inhabited this body, and, full of the beautiful conception he had formed of it, speaks of'the spirit' as 'delighted' in having had such an habitation provided for it, loth to be torn away, and shrinking from the thought of the uncertain destiny which awaits it. Some critics have thought that, in the remainder of the passage, ( Shakespeare had certain passages in Dante in his mind. a ' 97

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

That the word 'motion' was used in the sense here attributed to it scarcely requires justification. The following line from [Ben] Jonson's Bartholomew Fair [1614] may be sufficient: The motion says you lie: he is called Dionysius. Act. V. Sc. 5. (I, 221-4)

98

22 Hermann Ulrici, an expression of New Testament morality 1846

From Shakspeare's Dramatic Art: And His Relation to Calderon and Goethe. Translated from the German of Dr. Hermann Ulrici [by A. J. W. Morrison], second (English) edition (London, 1846); Shakspeare's Dramatic Art. History and Character of Shakspeare's Plays. By Dr. Hermann Ulrici. Translated from the Third Edition of the German, with Additions and Corrections by the Author, By L. Dora Schmitz (2 vols, London, 1876). Hermann Ulrici (1806—84) was born in the Kingdom of Prussia and died in Halle. He was both a professor of philosophy and literary critic, and his Uber Shakspeares Dramatische Kunst und sein Verhaltnis zu Calderon und Goethe (Halle, 1839) shows the influence of the idealist Romanticism of August Wilhelm von Schlegel (No. 8 above). Translated by Morrison in 1846, Ulrici had a significant influence on nineteenth-century English Shakespearian criticism. The translation by Schmitz, which I reprint, represents Ulrici's final revised version. In his Preface (dated March, 1876) Ulrici says that 'I have directed my attention ... to the determination of the form, the construction of every drama as one independent whole' and looked for the organic unity, the 'idea' in each play (I, viii).

[From Book V, Chapter VIII: 'Measure for Measure. Cymbeline'; in an introductory paragraph Ulrici discusses the seriousness of the subject matter of Measure for Measure and notes its 'resemblance with those pieces which Shakespeare's earlier [sic] contemporaries - especially Beaumont and Fletcher - introduced upon the stage under the title of "tragicomedies." ' He concludes: 'It is much the same . . . with Cymbeline; I have therefore classed both dramas together, and have inserted them here as an appendage to the comedies and a point of transition to the historical dramas' (II, 154).] This piece was probably written at least seven years after The Merchant of Venice, and the two dramas also differ very much both in tone and colouring.^ And yet to judge from its ideal subject-matter, it shows the closest affinity to The Merchant of Venice; at least, the basis upon which the whole is erected is the same, even though the structure itself bears a different character. A Duke of Vienna forms the resolution to exchange, for a time, his purple mantle for a monk's cowl, and, under the pretext of a distant and pressing journey, to leave his sceptre in the hands of another, in order meanwhile, in a state of incognito, to 99

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

examine into the state of his dominions, and more especially into the mode and the effect of his representative's government. This plan may appear a capricious idea, and yet when examined more closely it has a well-founded motive both in the character and the position of the Duke. He is a man of warm affections for his fellow-creatures, and of high morality. Accordingly, he has hitherto exercised his power with clemency and indulgence; he fears with too much indulgence, for he has observed that vice and crime are alarmingly on the increase among his subjects. His wish was to ascertain whether his fears were well-founded, and also to correct his own mistakes, without appearing inconsistent or exposing himself to the reproach of punishing that, for which he was himself to blame; lastly he also wished to test the man whom he had chosen as his representative, and who had given him reason to doubt his moral character. Perhaps the Duke's object in trusting the supreme power to the earnest, zealous and sternly-virtuous Angelo, and in placing the gentle Escalus by his side in a subordinate position, may have been a longing for a short break in the everlasting monotony of state business, and a wish to obtain an opportunity for more closely observing his own surroundings, and those of his people and country. As was to be expected, Angelo exercises his deputed power with great rigour and apparent conscientiousness. At the very outset he revives an old and dormant law which threatens to punish all sexual sins with death, and causes an indeed extremely light-minded, but by no means vicious young nobleman, Claudio, to be thrown into prison, in order that, in accordance with the law, the sentence of death may be carried out upon him. The attempted deliverance, and final rescue of the young man by his sister with the Duke's assistance, forms the centre of the not very involved intrigue. And Angelo — who makes such profession of strict moral integrity, who boasts of his virtue, who insists upon order and discipline, and inexorably persecutes sin and frailty in others, and doubtless has the good-will to be what he seems — he it is who falls from his arrogated height (and in a much worse manner) into the very crime which — even contrary to his promised word — he intended to punish with the utmost severity of the law. Having once yielded to human weakness, he becomes a worthless hypocrite and deceiver. For it is this pride of virtue which thinks, above all things, of its own reputation and fame among men, this moral arrogance, which is always satisfied with itself, this self-inflated assurance that most readily falls a victim to temptation; and it sinks the deeper the more it endeavours to save external appearances. That the hypocrite is finally unmasked by the counter-intrigue of the Duke (which is favoured by accident), but pardoned for the sake of the faithful Mariana, whom Angelo had forsaken; that Claudio is saved, and his truly virtuous sister rewarded for her magnanimity; that the frivolous chatterbox Lucio is put to open shame, and the pimping clown Pompey gets a severe rebuke — these turns of the action bring the piece as close to the domain of comedy, as it is removed from it by the tone and colour of the representation. From these indications alone it will readily be seen where the internal centre of the artistic organism is to be found. Strict virtue and pure morality are certainly — as every one knows — the basis and end of human existence. But they are this only when accompanied by love, that inner and close communion of spirit which embraces all men, and which is one and the same thing as the idea of humanity 100

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

which has so often been misunderstood. Outward, strictly moral virtue, which in all cases thinks only of the observances of the law, of the final consequence and effect, which is something apart from love, which confounds morality with outward righteousness, and accounts this righteousness a merit, this pharisaic virtue is in truth no virtue, is nothing but a glittering soap-bubble, that bursts with the first breath of temptation. It is not virtuousness in this sense, not the outward lawful comissions and omissions, but that purity of heart, that integrity of the moral spirit which despises sin, but pities and tries to save the sinner; in short, love is the soul of all moral relations, and combines strictness with clemency and forbearance. This is the true foundation of human life, for it is only in and through the exercise of love that human virtue is possible, and, in fact, a virtue at all; we here have the same truth that is maintained in The Merchant of Venice, in face of justice. And if it be true that it is through love alone that man has the power of being virtuous and acting virtuously, and that he stands firm only in the fear of, at any moment, being liable to fall himself, then he is bound to show his fallen and penitent brother mercy instead of justice, and forgiveness instead of punishment. Shakespeare expresses this sentiment in the beautiful words (of Isabella): Alas, alas! Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once. . .. [Quotes 2.2.72-9] and again in the eloquent lamentation of the same Isabella, a passage of sublime pathos: Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet.... [Quotes 2.2.110-23] When the deeply significant poem so fully explains its own character, it would be presumption to add another word on the subject. All that remains for me to do, is to point out the manner in which the meaning of the whole is reflected in the various parts, in the characters, situations and relations. I have already intimated this as regards the principal moments of the action, which turn upon the conduct of Angelo (whose utter worthlessness required to be exposed, and which could be done only by the deception played upon him by Isabella and Mariana with the Duke's assistance), upon Claudio's danger and deliverance, and upon the doings of the Duke and Isabella, the representatives of true virtue. The chief characters are the Duke, Angelo and Isabella. The first two are so clearly and sharply delineated, the fundamental features of their natures, the motives of their actions so distinctly brought forward, that they do not stand in need of any further explanation. It is equally clear that they represent the two poles of the contrast, the reconciliation of which is the subject in question: the Duke is clemency and forbearance, forgiveness and mercy; Angelo the severity of the law, the rigour and the pride of virtue and self-righteousness. More difficult is the understanding of Isabella's character, for although it is developed with great care, both as regards delineation and colouring, it has nevertheless been interpreted and judged in very different ways. In my opinion she stands by the side of 101

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the Duke, in so far as the latter, so to say, represents the negative, and Isabella the positive contrast to Angelo. In her, likewise, the strictness and decision of virtuous will and action forms the centre of her nature; she too recognises the necessity of the law being firmly and strongly maintained against that vice which she most abhors, and would not plead for, but that she must (2.2). This is why she finds the rules of the nunnery, which she has entered as a novice, too lax (1.4), and wishes that there were more strict restraints upon the sisterhood. But this strictness, in her, does not rest upon the endeavour to be considered virtuous, but to be virtuous; with her it proceeds from her inmost nature, from the spotless purity of her mind, from her love of what is good, from her aversion to evil. This is why she at first shows an apparent coldness, shyness and respectful fear of Angelo, the universally-recognized hero of virtue; she has not the courage to unfold the eloquence of her sisterly affection before him, she allows herself to be intimidated by his stern, repulsive answer. But this is the reason also of her anger, her contempt and her threat when she perceives that his virtue is devoid of inner soundness, that it is not his real nature, but only a mask. This is the reason of the harshness and indignation with which she answers her brother's entreaty to agree to Angelo's shameful proposal, and why she holds up to him its dishonourable meanness, and lowness. For Isabella is above all things strict towards herself, that is to say, chaste by nature, and whereas Angelo only imagines himself strong enough to resist every temptation, she actually possesses this strength, because she not only has the will to be virtuous, not only shrinks from the sinful deed, but her soul revolts at the mere thought of allowing herself to be entrapped by sin. Whether or not this strictness, this purity, this unapproachableness, is the result of an inherent coldness of blood, enough, there it is, and it forms the essence of her spiritual nature, and confers peculiar greatness and dignity upon her character. This is why she is unable, in the outburst of deep feeling, to apply the usual means of female eloquence, and to beg for pity and mercy amid sighs and tears by displaying her sisterly affection. In place of this she possesses a clear, penetrating intellect, a finely-cultivated mind, which (as the above-mentioned passage shows) distinctly perceives that in every individual case, the sin and the sinner must be well distinguished, and that in human judgment, strictness must be combined with clemency, justice with mercy, because, as regards good as well as evil, it does not simply depend upon the deed, but above all upon the character and the disposition of the doer. This she impresses upon the representative of the law with all acuteness of thought and warmth of feeling; in this sense, her endeavour is to save her brother, and not merely to save him but at the same time to improve and raise him. Isabella, accordingly, is not amiable in the usual feminine sense of the word, but she is venerable, worthy of being a princess. For this reason she not only receives an offer of marriage from the Duke, but it is this very greatness and dignity of character, together with her great and equally unusual beauty that captivates Angelo's proud heart, which had hitherto been proof against feminine grace and amiability, and proves the cause of the downfall of his hypocritical virtue. It is self-evident, accordingly, what a close relation appears to subsist between Isabella's character and the meaning and spirit of the whole drama. The Duke has placed the aged, clement and thoughtful Escalus as a counterpoise to 102

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

the strict, energetic and zealous Angelo, in order that the wheel may not roll too quickly down the steep incline. He is introduced to show that a character like Angelo cannot be guided and converted by remonstrances and warnings, but that such natures can be corrected only by life, that is, by experiences that affect them deeply. This improvement the Duke hopes to see effected in Angelo; on this account, and still more so out of regard for Mariana, he pardons him. Mariana, it is true, is a mere secondary personage, introduced in the first place in order to throw a clearer light upon Angelo's character, and to solve the complication of the action in accordance with the rules of art; but she, at the same time, throws some light on the character of Isabella, with whom she is contrasted as a devoted woman, living only for her love, and animated only by the endeavour to save the man she loves; therefore, she at the same time represents the other pole of the great contrast — the one-sidedness of blind, inconsiderate love opposed to the demands of morality. In like manner Claudio and Juliet appear but in the background; they are the successful pictures of that human frailty which sins from having too much liberty, which is led to contrition and repentance through suffering and misery, and hence, deserve to obtain mercy and forgiveness. Thus they form a contrast to Angelo's false righteousness and Isabella's true virtue, and stand on the ground of common reality from which great and noble minds have, now and again, to remove the weeds so as to furnish the new crop with air and light. In Lucio, Froth, Pompey, Mistress Overdone and Barnardine, we have human vices, failings and crimes in their various stages. Lucio, without being actually a bad character, without being intentionally wicked — as is proved by his sympathy for Isabella and Claudio — has become both vicious and voluptuous through frivolity; young Master Froth is mere froth, without solidity enough for deep crime, but also much too light for virtue; Mistress Overdone, the bawd, loves sin from long habit and because she gains a livelihood by it. The murderer Barnardine is the personification of the coarse, sensual nature of man which becomes inhuman, because humanity has withdrawn her training and guiding hand; in him we see the sin of the individual which has its root within itself, but is at the same time fostered by the sinfulness of the whole race. Lastly, Pompey assists vice out of mere folly; he does not know, nor does he trouble himself much about his wishes and actions, because he looks upon life as a mere tap-room where a man can be merry at will, but only for money. His immorality consists less in inclination and deeds, than in the want of proper knowledge, in his perverted view of life and in his love of money. He has the conviction that no man is ever free from faults and vices, and, accordingly, goes through life thoughtlessly and carelessly; hence, in reality, it is his folly alone that is his fault, and he can therefore the more readily be tolerated. Although he plays the part of the clown, it is easy to see that it is not his vocation to bring his part prominently forward. Ordinary folly was too light to bear the whole weight of the view of life depicted here; and a meditative, tragic fool — like King Lear's friend - was out of place with the fundamental plan of the piece. Shakespeare, therefore, employs the clown here merely as a secondary personage, in order to throw light upon the meaning of the whole from a special point of view; he has no more right or significance than the other characters who are classed in the same category with himself. But if it be asked, In what does this right consist? why are we 103

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

presented with this complete catalogue of sinners and criminals? I think the answer is self-evident from the above explanation: we are to have an insight into the true nature of human virtue and morality, and therefore must necessarily also look into the depths of man's immorality and viciousness. This is the object of the drama. But in addition to this, the sinners with their various transgressions are intended to show us that all are far more deserving of mercy and forgiveness than Angelo, the arrogantly virtuous, haughty hypocrite. Let us but listen to the significant words of the Duke, in regard to Barnardine (5.1): There was a friar told me of this man: — Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul, That apprehends no further than this world, And squar'st thy life according. Thou'rt condemned; But, for those earthly faults, I quit them all; And pray thee take this mercy to provide For better times to come: - Friar, advise him, I leave him to your hand. [5.1.479-86] We cannot doubt but that the poet introduced these characters for the excellent reason of allowing their evil viciousness to give a reflex of the greater amount of evil in Angelo's nature. The reason that Measure for Measure enjoys so little approbation — in spite of its wealth of profound thoughts and its life-like, sharply delineated and well-developed characters (which are as important as they are original), and in spite also of its perfectly Shakespearian language and composition - does not, I think, lie so much in the subject-matter of the action, which is certainly repulsive and offensive to our more delicate, perhaps only the effeminate state of our feelings, as in the peculiar colouring of the piece. I mean to say it is a fault in the drama, that the pharisaism and the various vices which are contrasted with it are exhibited in colours too glaring and in outlines too sharp, hence in an almost revolting manner; that, in the struggle with the enemy which it attacks, the drama becomes offensive, sharp, and bitter; that it tries to arouse our disgust, and to engage our whole soul against this enemy, and thus, as it were, invites us to give our assistance in combatting it, to engage in real action in ordinary life, in place of raising us above the latter into the ideal spheres of art. Perhaps this was Shakespeare's object; he may have written the piece or remodelled it subsequently, with the express intention of arousing a spirit of sound, true morality in the nation in opposition to the Puritanical proceedings. But even though he had the most urgent occasion for so doing, from an artistic point of view, this tendency was a fault. The sharpness, the bitterness, the rousing of our feelings and the moral seriousness — which is pressed so much into the foreground and degenerates into prosaic moralising — are so many offences against the nature of poetry, and weaken the effect that art alone ought to produce. A few words, in conclusion, about the title of the drama. It does not, as might seem, convey the meaning of like for like, as in the old ius talionis, a limb for a limb, a life for a life; that is its significance only in an ironical sense. Its true purport has to be inferred from the leading thought of the whole, as explained above. It is intended 104

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

to signify that man can judge only of crime, only of the violation of justice in the narrower sense, but that, on the other hand, no man should judge another in regard to moral actions, inasmuch as no one is without sin and each is liable to commit the sin he condemns. As, therefore, each desires and hopes for mercy, so he ought to grant mercy; that to which he himself lays claim he ought to bestow upon others; the measure by which he himself hopes to be measured, he ought to apply to others. This is the measure for measure, the like for like of true justice. Besides this, Measure for Measure shows more distinctly than any other how deeply Shakespeare could penetrate into a traditional subject and imbue it with dramatic animation. . . . [Discusses Shakespeare's sources, Whetstone and Cinthio]. The main point, however, is that the deeply significant fundamental idea of the whole is entirely his own. (II, 154—65)

105

23 Gulian C. Verplanck, 'this remarkable drama' 1847

From Shakespeare's Plays: With His Life. Illustrated with many hundred Wood-cuts, Executed by H. W. Hewet, after Designs by Kenny Meadows, Harvey, and Others. Edited by Gulian C. Verplanck, LL.D. With Critical Introductions, Notes, Etc., Original and Selected. In Three Volumes (3 vols, New York, 1847). Volume II— Comedies. Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (1786—1870), whose family (Dutch and Flemish) had come to New Amsterdam in the early part of the seventeenth century, was born in New York City and educated at Columbia College, from which he graduated at the astonishing age of fourteen. He was admitted to the bar in New York at the age of twenty-one and went on to become a prominent politician, serving in the New York State Assembly and then as a four-term congressman from New York (the passage of a new copyright law in 1831 was the result of Verplanck's work). Although he wrote several books — including An Essay on the Doctrine of Contracts (1825) and Discourses and Addresses on Subjects of American History, Arts, and Literature (1833) — while politically active, once his political career ended in 1842, he devoted himself to scholarly pursuits. The most important of these was The Illustrated Shakespeare, which, although indebted to the earlier editions of Charles Knight and particularly John Payne Collier, offers some interesting critical commentary, particularly on the historical analogues to the character of Angelo.

[From 'Introductory Remarks' to Measure for Measure. After discussing the dating of the play and concluding that John Payne Collier's [No. 20] assignment of it to 16034 is correct, Verplanck begins his own assessment.] This places this remarkable drama at the commencement of that portion of the author's life, from 1602 to 1609, which was memorable for the production of Othello, with all its bitter passion; the additions to the original Hamlet, with their melancholy wisdom; probably of Timon, with his indignant and hearty scorn, and rebukes of the baseness of civilized society; and above all of Lear, with its dark pictures of unmixed, unmitigated guilt, and its terrible and prophet-like denunciations. Like all these, and perhaps more than any of them, it bears the stamp of that period of the author's life, first noted by Hallam, to which the reader's attention has 106

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

been already called, in the Introductory Remarks on As You Like It — when some sad influence weighed upon the Poet's spirit, and prompted him constantly to appear as 'the stern censurer of man.' I see no reason to doubt that this did not arise merely from a change of taste, or an experiment in dramatic art, but was, in some manner, connected with events or circumstances personal to the author, and affecting his temper, disposition, and moral associations of thought. There is no part of the author's own practical philosophy more true than that 'a man's mind is parcel of his fortunes' [Antony and Cleopatra, 3.11.31—2]. He does not, indeed, like Milton, or Rousseau, or Byron, delight to make himself the prominent figure in all his intellectual creations; yet these are not the less evidently coloured by the varying moods predominant, from time to time, during the changes of life. Few men could have more enjoyed life, or have more intensely relished the beautiful or pleasurable, or more reveled in the ludicrous and the fantastical, than the author of that gay and bright procession of poetic comedies, from Love's Labour's Lost to As You Like It and the Twelfth Night. How striking is the contrast, in this respect, between these, and especially between the last - and to my taste the most delightful of all, and the Measure for Measure, austere in its ethical poetry, and sarcastic in its humorous delineations! - or between this last and the Merchant of Venice, where the same topics are often enforced, the same train of thought and even of imagery introduced! They are the same, yet how different — like the same landscape seen in the sparkling sunshine, after a vernal rain, and again under a lowering wintry sky! The cause must remain in darkness, but, to my mind, it appears manifest that the effect was not the result merely of altering taste or ripening judgment. Samson Agonistes does not more strongly testify to some great and overwhelming physical revolution prostrating and fettering the intellectual giant, in body and mind, than this play and the nearly contemporary writings of its author do to some similar moral cause, or some external calamity of life acting upon the moral faculties, and producing new combinations and results in Shakespeare's moral anatomy of the human heart. It may have been some deep wound of his affections — some repeated evidence of man's ingratitude and heartlessness — possibly some mere personal calamity, — bringing home to the brilliant and successful man of genius the moving sense of the world's worthlessness, and opening to his sight the mysterious evil of his own nature. Whatever, then, may have been the immediate and external causes of this signal intellectual phenomenon in our literary history, it is undeniable that this drama of Measure for Measure specially marks the period of this great climacteric of Shakespeare's genius, resembling those climacterics of the body which, according to the old notions of philosophy or superstition, come in their regular periods over man, working a strange alteration on the functions of his body, as different planets succeed with new influences to rule his mind and his destiny. Although under its strong influence, the Poet was now about to enter upon a nobler course of labour, and to teach the world deeper and truer lessons in the learning of 'human dealings' [Othello, 3.3.260]; yet we cannot but rejoice that this solemn change of all the Poet's lighter fancies into something still more 'rich and strange' [The Tempest, 1.2.402], came not until after the quick and brilliant succession of his matchless poetic comedies had perpetuated the memory of his years of buoyant spirits, hope, joy, and untiring 107

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

fancy. For although we often find in his later works a calm and serene spirit of enjoyment, such as we have before alluded to in the pastoral beauties of Perdita's conversation, and the mountain scenes of Cymbeline — though his comic sketches in his later dramas prove that his perception of whimsical or absurd character was as acute and active as ever, and his power of graphic delineation as vivid — yet even then there seems to be an absence of that personal abandonment of the author's own spirit to the beauty or the humour of the scene, to which he had before accustomed us. He appears more as the great philosophical artist, depicting the very truth and nature of his scenes, and not, as was his former wont, as himself one of his own joyous throng, mixing in the plot against the bachelor liberty of Benedick — enjoying the frolics in Eastcheap as much as Falstaff or the Prince — or joining his own voice in the boisterous glee of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. But Measure for Measure breathes a sterner spirit than belongs to the productions of either the earlier or the later periods. Dr. Johnson has said that its 'comic scenes are natural and pleasing.'^ Their fidelity to nature cannot, indeed, be denied. But if they please, they do so from their faithfulness of portraiture; not like the scenes of Bottom, or Falstaff, and their companions, from their exuberance of mirthful sport, or their rich originality of invention and wit. They, as well as the loftier scenes of the piece, are but too fanciful pictures of the degrading and hardening influence of licentious passion, from the lighter profligacy of Lucio, the dissipated gentleman, to the grosser and contented degradation of the Clown; and if these are all painted with the truth of Hogarth, or Crabbe, they are depicted with no air of sport or mirth, but rather with that of bitter scorn. The author seems to smile like his own Cassius, 'as if he mocked himself {Julius Caesar, 1.2.106]. Thus Elbow, in his self-satisfied conceit and pedantic ignorance, would appear, as some of the critics regard him, simply as an inferior version of Dogberry. But he is not a Dogberry in whose absurdities the author himself luxuriates, but one whose peculiarities are delineated with a contemptuous sneer. Lucio, again, is a character unfortunately too common in civilized, and especially in city life — a gentleman in manners and education, and of good natural ability, made frivolous in mind and debased in sentiment and disposition by licentious and idle habits - thus substantially not a very different character from some of the lighter personages of the prior dramas; but he differs mainly from them because exhibited under a very different light, and regarded in a different temper. The others are represented in his scenes as they appeared to the transient acquaintance, or the companions of their pleasures. But the poet looks deeper into the heart and life of Lucio, and portrays this man of pleasure in the same mood which governs the higher and more tragic scenes of this drama — a mood sometimes contemptuous, sometimes sad, often indignant, but never such as had been his former wont, either merely playful or imaginative. Thus it seems to me that, if his comic scenes excite mirth from their truth, it is a mirth in which the author did not participate; and their sarcastic humour assimilates itself in feeling to that of the stern and grave interest of the plot, and the strong passion of its poetic scenes. Characters, in themselves light and amusing, are branded with contempt from the degradation of licentious habits; while the same passion, in a form of less grossness, but of deeper guilt, prostrates before it high reputation, talent, and wisdom. The intellectual and amiable Claudio, 108

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

willing to purchase 'the weariest and most loathed worldly life' [3.1.128], at any cost of shame and sin, is strangely contrasted with the drunken Barnardine, 'careless, reckless, and fearless of what is past, present, or to come' [4.2.143—4]. Indeed, the higher characters are mainly discriminated from the lower ones, in this moral delineation, in that conscience is dull or dead in the latter, while it appears in all its terrors in Angelo and Claudio, and in all the majesty of purity in Isabella. There is little formality of moral instruction, but the secret workings of guilt and fear are laid open with the rapidity, suddenness, and brevity of unuttered and half-formed thoughts. That men of lax moral opinions should shrink with disgust as some of his critics have done, from this too true a delineation of so common a vice, is not to be wondered at. It was less to be expected that Coleridge [No. 17] should have formed the judgment he expressed on this drama, though there are not a few readers who will assent to it. He observes, in his Literary Remains: — 'This play, which is Shakespeare's throughout, is to me the most painful, say rather the only painful part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the miseteon ['a thing that has to be hated'] — the one being disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong, indignant claim of justice, (for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of,) but it is likewise degrading to the character of woman.' We also learn from Mr. Collier [No. 20] that, in the course of Lectures on Shakespeare, delivered in 1818, (which were delivered from imperfect notes, and never written out,) Coleridge pointed especially to the artifice of Isabella, and her seeming consent to the suit of Angelo, as the circumstances which tended to lower the character of the female sex. He then called Measure for Measure only the 'least agreeable' of ShakeJ [21 speare ' s dramas. This criticism, however little laudatory, is still substantially an acknowledgment of the severe unity of feeling and purpose which pervades the piece, and the impressive power with which it enforces revolting and humbling truths. These are the more conspicuous, because the dark painting of moral degradation, of guilt, remorse, and the dread of death, is not relieved, as is the Poet's use elsewhere, by passages of descriptive beauty, or fancy, or tenderness. The only strong contrast which supplies their place is that of the severe beauty of Isabella's character, and the majestic wisdom and deep sentiment of her fervid eloquence. That in this sense the drama is not agreeable, and that it is even painful, is very true; yet the degree of pain thus given is precisely that by which the intellect is most excited, and which is thus the source of the deep and absorbing interest excited by all gloomy yet true pictures of life, in its sadder shapes of crime and woe. Though the subject and the thoughts be in themselves repulsive, yet when, as here, we feel that the author is breathing through them the strong emotions of his own soul, the attention is fixed, and the sympathy enchained. This is the secret of Dante's power, and of that of the nobler portion of Byron's poetry. That Measure for Measure possesses much of this power, is proved by the fact that, in spite of the objections of critics of every degree, it has always taken a strong hold of the general mind. No one of the high female characters of tragedy has been found more effective in representation than Isabella; while there is perhaps no composition, of the same length, in the language, which has left more of its expres109

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

sive phrases, its moral aphorisms, its brief sentences crowded with meaning, fixed in the general memory, and embodied by daily use in every form of popular eloquence, argument, and literature. The language and the rhythm have also peculiar boldness and austerity, congruous to the intellectual character and the sentiment of the drama, and as much marked in their difference from the author's preceding works. The diction is, more than in any of his plays, and very much more than in any preceding one, abrupt, condensed, elliptical, bold in new combinations and figurative meanings, and, consequently, often obscure from the rapidity with which figurative allusions are crowded on one another. The style throughout is, therefore, at once reflective and vehement, brief, harsh, austere, and (if the phrase may be allowed) angular, and rugged. Some tendency to this compressed and suggestive style appears in the enlargements to Romeo and Juliet, which had increased upon the Poet as his mind became more teeming with thought, and his mastery of language more familiar and consequently bold. Yet in this play he suddenly rushes to the very extreme of this manner, and carries it much further than he was afterwards accustomed to do. It is the theory of Ulrici, that Shakespeare's diction became more and more compressed and obscure, and his views of life and mankind more and more gloomy, as he advanced in years. But the date of this play, and the comparison of its style with his works, avows rather that these characteristics were the result of some quick and sudden change in habits of thought and composition; that from this time to that when Lear was written, they were carried to their greatest height, and were afterwards softened and subdued. In Measure for Measure he labours from fullness of thought, like one under strong excitement, striving to pour forth his emotions in a language just acquired, and not yet familiar. Shakespeare had also been, for some years, gradually innovating upon the accurate and careful melody to which he had originally modified his versification, both in rhyme and heroic blank verse, and had made it more and more pliable to the freedom of dramatic dialogue. Thus was at length perfected (as I have had occasion to observe in the Remarks on Macbeth] an unrivaled vehicle of dramatic poetry, flexible to every mood of fancy, sentiment, or passion, and unequaled for its purposes in the literature of any age or nation. In this play the experiment of bold and careless deviation from the regular rhythm, cadence, and measure, is, like the freedom of diction, carried to excess. This, too, I think, corresponds to, and was suggested by, the Poet's mood of mind, and reflects the austerity of thought which would have found little agreement with a more artificial sweetness of regular melody. In this respect, too, this extreme of rugged versification predominated only during the same season of his darker and sterner power, and though he never returned to the elaborate accuracy of his youth, yet he afterwards delighted most in a grave and majestic harmony, such as Milton imitated and rivaled. There being no other edition to compare with that in the folios, which has many certain and considerable typographical errors, the text of Measure for Measure is peculiarly doubtful, in many places, as to the precise sense or words, though we can never be at a loss for the general meaning. The bold novelties of expression, and suddenness of transition, must often leave the reader in doubt whether the obscurity he finds arises from style, or from some uncorrected misprint or omission. 110

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

SOURCE OF THE PLOT The story, like that of Othello, comes originally from a novel of Cinthio, the Italian novelist and tragic author. He was a prolific relater of dark and bloody stories, which have yet such an air of reality as to give the impression that he drew his materials, like [Sir Walter] Scott, from domestic traditions, or legal records. Shakespeare had also the same plot in Whetstone's tragedy of Promos and Cassandra (1578,) founded on Cinthio's novel. But he owed very little to either predecessor but the outline of the story, and some slight hints, or casual expressions. It is evident that, in such a case, a previous tragedy on the same subject instead of lessening Shakespeare's claims to originality, greatly increases them, as it imposed on him the new difficulty of avoiding many obvious images and ideas, which must arise to every writer handling the same incidents. Nor was Whetstone an author of so low a rank that he might be safely neglected in this respect, and his materials used without justice or plagiarism. On the contrary, he was, though inflated and extravagant in style, and deficient in the power of interesting and exciting his readers, a writer of learning and talent. He followed Cinthio very closely, in making the sister (the 'woful Cassandra' of his play, the Epitia of Cinthio, the Isabella of Shakespeare) yield to the Governor's desires and her brother's pusillanimous sophistry — a degradation which Shakespeare has avoided by the introduction of Mariana, and the very venial artifice of Isabella, which Coleridge censures, but which is certainly, if a blemish at all, a very slight one compared with the intrinsic repulsiveness of making the heroine the wife of the guilty Governor, and the supplicant for his life. The inferior characters of Whetstone are the same only in their habits and occupations — the painting of their character is Shakespeare's own as much as that of the nobler personages, and the high moral wisdom that flows in their dialogue. Isabella, as a character, is entirely his own creation... . The probability of the plot has been objected to, but certainly without any reason; for it singularly happens that we have historical evidence of the occurrence of three or four similar crimes, in different ages and countries. One of these is the wellknown story of Col. Kirke,' 3 ' in the reign of James II [ 1685-88], half a century after Shakespeare's death; another occurred in Holland, a century before his birth, under Charles the Bold, and has lately been related from the old chroniclers, with all their antique simplicity, by [Amable Guillaume Prosper Brugiere, Baron de] Barante [1782-1866], in his delightful Histoire des Dues de Eourgogne [1824-28]. Another of these Angelo-like abuses of power is said to have taken place under one of the old Dukes of Ferrara, and this may have been the actual foundation of Cinthio's tale. Shakespeare, whether he was acquainted with the original or not, (as his use of the book in Othello indicates that he was,) had the story before him, as Whetstone, a few years after the publication of his play, translated and published it himself- retaining, however, the names, and interweaving the thoughts of his own drama. It is contained in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, (1532,) and has been lately reprinted in [John Payne] Collier's Shakespeare's Library [1844]. He has also accompanied his own tragedy with an analytical argument, which will enable the reader to compare Shakespeare's management of the plot with that of his predecessor. . . . [Quotes Whetstone's 'Argument'] 111

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

The more authentic history of the Angelo of the Netherlands is recorded by several of the old Dutch and Flemish chroniclers of the reign of Charles le Temeraire, the last of the more than royal dukes who reigned in different rights over the several states of Flanders, Holland, and Burgundy. (See Barante's Histoire des Dues de la Maison de Valois.}. The Angelo was here a very brave and renowned knight, who was Governor of Flushing; and it was the wife of a state criminal, confined on a charge of sedition, who is tempted to yield up her honour on condition of receiving from the governor an order to the gaoler to deliver her husband up to her. In the meanwhile, a prior order had been sent; the husband was secretly beheaded; and the wife received on presenting her order, a chest containing the bloody corpse. Upon the Duke's visiting his principality of Zealand, she appealed to him for justice. The governor confessed his guilt, and threw himself with confidence upon the duke's mercy, relying on his former services and favour. The duke commanded him to marry the widow, and endow her formally with all his wealth. She at first shrunk with horror from the alliance, but at last consented to the ceremony, on the prayers of her family, who thought their honour involved in it. When this was done, the governor returned to the duke, and informed him that the injured person was now satisfied. 'So am not I,' replied this far more rigid ruler than Shakespeare's kindhearted, philosophical duke. He sent the guilty man to the same prison where his victim had died. A confessor was sent with him; and after the last rites of religion, without further delay, the governor was beheaded. His new wife and her friends had hurried to the prison, and arrived there only to receive the bloody trunk in the same manner that she had received the remains of her first husband. Overcome with horror, she fainted, and never recovered. Had Shakespeare adopted this version of the story, it would have afforded him a canvas for many a scene of terrific, perhaps of too horrible truth. But this would have demanded the omission or entire degradation of Isabella's character — one as differing from every other of the many admirable portraits he has left us of female excellence, that its loss would have been dearly purchased, even by scenes of terror or pathos vying with those of the last acts of Lear or Othello. (II, 4—7)

112

24 J. O. Halliwell, the betrothal contracts and their significance 1850

From The Complete Works of Shakspere, Revised from the Original Editions with Historical and Analytical Introductions to each Play, Also Notes Explanatory and Critical, and a Life of the Poet: By J. O. Halliwell, Esq., F.R.S., F.S.A., Member of the Council of the Shakspere Society, etc., etc.; and Other Eminent Commentators (3 vols, New York, 1850). Vol. I. James Orchard Halliwell, afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps (1820—89), was educated at Cambridge. Always interested in books, in 1839 he became a Fellow both of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Society. At the age of eighteen he had already published a book (An Account of the Life and Inventions of Samuel Morland) and in the same year began corresponding with Joseph Hunter (No. 21). He worked extensively in the British Library and in the two-year period of 1840—41 published twenty-three works, including An Introduction to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and 'On the Character of Sir John Falstaff. His Life of William Shakespeare (1848) contained much original scholarship derived from study of the records in Stratford-upon-Avon, as did New Boke about Shakespeare and Stratford-On-Avon (1850). From 1853 to 1865 he published a sixteen-volume folio edition of Shakespeare's works. According to DNB, he 'disclaimed all responsibility for an edition of Shakespeare's works, "Tallis's Library Edition" (London, 1850—53), with his name as editor on the title-page, which embodied some notes contributed by him to an American edition in 1850'. I quote from the American edition below, because in it Halliwell was the first editor or critic to explain the significance of betrothal contracts in Measure for Measure.

[From introductory notes on Measure for Measure. Halliwell first discusses the sources (Cinthio and Whetstone), and then the date (acted at court in 1604), mentions Charles Gildon's adaptation in 1700, and discusses the likelihood that Shakespeare alludes to James I at 1.1.67-72 and 2.4.26-30.] Mr. [H. N.j Hudson, in his very interesting and valuable Lectures on Shakspere (1848), a work which exhibits how carefully and philosophically the plays of the great dramatist are studied in America, observes that 'Measure for Measure is among the least attractive, yet most instructive, of Shakespeare's plays.'^ Coleridge [No. 17] terms it 'the only painful part of his genuine works.' Hazlitt [No.11] observes 'an original sin 113

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

in the nature of the subject, which prevents our taking a cordial interest in it.' And nearly every critic has his say against this remarkable comedy. Taking a view of the subject somewhat opposed to the opinion of Coleridge, it is necessary to state the grounds on which I venture to differ from so eminent a psychological critic; and I think it will be found, at the very commencement of this argument, a serious error has been committed by nearly all who have treated on the play, in estimating the extent of the crime for which Claudio was condemned. Ulrici says he had 'seduced his mistress before marriage.'^ This is, however, erroneous. In Shakespeare's time, the ceremony of betrothment was usually supposed to confer the power of matrimonial union. Claudio obtained possession of Julietta on 'a true contract' [1.2.145] and provided marriage was celebrated within a reasonable time afterwards, no criminality could be alleged after the contract had been formally made. So, likewise, the Duke tells Mariana it was no sin to meet Angelo, for he was her 'husband on a pre-contract' [4.1.71]. The story would be more properly analyzed by representing Claudio's error as venial, and Angelo's strictness so much the more severe, thus involving a greater antithesis in his fall. The only painful scene in the play is the subject of the argument between Angelo and Isabella; but Shakespeare is not to be blamed for the direction it takes. On the contrary, he has infinitely purified a barbarous tale which the taste of the age authorized as a subject of dramatic representation. The scenes between the lower characters would have been readily tolerated by a female audience in the time of the first James, and although they must now be passed over, we can hardly censure the poet for not foreseeing the extreme delicacy of a later age. The offences chiefly consist of a few gross words, which no one but literary antiquaries will comprehend, and are purposely left without explanation. Bearing in mind that the improprieties of language above alluded to are faults of the age, not of the poet's judgment, and that a similar apology may be advanced for the choice of subject, the moral conveyed by Measure for Measure is of a deeply religious character. It exhibits in an outline of wonderful power, how ineffective are the strongest resolutions of men against the insidious temptation of beauty, when they are not firmly strengthened and guarded by religion. The prayers of Angelo came from his lips, not from his heart, and he fell. Isabella, on the contrary, is preserved by virtue grounded on religious faith. Her character is presented as nearly approaching perfection as is consistent with possible reality; and we rejoice that such a being should be snatched from the gloomy cloister to exercise her mild influence in a more useful station. The minor characters complete the picture of one of the chief phases of human life, the conflict of incontinence and chastity. (I, 136-7)

114

h5 h.n.hudson

dispraise for Angelo, praise for Isabella, ambivalence about the Duke 1851

From The Works of Shakespeare: The Text Carefully Restored According to the First Editions; with Introductions, Notes Original and Selected, and a Life of the Poet; by the Rev. H. N. Hudson, A. M. In Eleven Volumes. (11 vols, Boston and Cambridge, 1851-56). Volume II, 1851. Henry Norman Hudson (1814—86) was born in Vermont and graduated from Middlebury College in 1846 (from whence the editor of this volume graduated 115 years later). After a four-year stint as a schoolteacher in Kentucky and Alabama, he moved to Boston, where he lectured on Shakespeare and finished his first book, Lectures on Shakespeare (2 vols, New York, 1848). Although brought up as a Congregationalist, he was ordained as an Episcopalian priest in 1849, married in 1852, and to earn a living began editing the Churchman. During this time he edited his eleven-volume edition of The Works of Shakespeare. After the Civil War he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, lectured on Shakespeare at Boston University, and worked intensively on Shakespeare, publishing Shakespeare, His Life, Art, and Characters (2 vols, Boston, 1872), the 'Harvard Edition' of the Works (20 vols, Boston, 1880-81), and the 'International Edition' (a twelve-volume revised edition of The Works of Shakespeare (New York, 1881 — 87). This last edition (vol. II, 1881) reprints without variation (including the page numbers) the introduction of the 1851 edition of Measure for Measure.

[From the 'Introduction' to Measure for Measure. After discussing the work of earlier scholars and editors concerning the play's date and sources, Hudson then places it within a dark period of Shakespeare's life. He gets to his own analysis via disagreement with Coleridge.] Whether from the nature of the subject, or the mode of treating it, or both, Measure for Measure is generally regarded as one of the least attractive, though most instructive, of Shakespeare's plays. Coleridge, in those precious fragments of his critical lectures, which now form our best text-book of English criticism, says, - 'This play, which is Shakespeare's throughout, is to me the most painful — say rather, the only painful — part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on

115

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the miseteon, — the one being disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claims of justice, (for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of;) but it is likewise degrading to woman.'^ This language, though there is much in other critics to bear it out, seems not a little stronger than the subject will fairly justify; and when, in his Table Talk, he says that 'Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable,' we can by no means go along with him. It would seem indeed as if undue censure had often passed, not so much on the play itself, as upon some of the persons,^ from trying them by a moral standard which cannot be fairly applied to them, as they are not supposed to have any means of knowing it; or from not duly weighing all the circumstances, feelings, and motives under which they are represented as acting. Thus Ulrici speaks of Claudio as being guilty of seduction^ : which is surely wide of the mark; it being clear enough, that by the standard of morality then and there approved, he was, as he considered himself, virtually married, though not admissible to all the rights of the married life; in accordance with what the Duke says to Mariana, that there would be no crime in her meeting with Angelo, because he was her 'husband on a precontract' [4.1.71]. And who does not know that, in ancient times, the ceremony of betrothement conferred the marriage tie, but not the nuptials, so that the union of the parties was thenceforth firm in the eyes of the law itself? Mr. Hallam, in like sort, speaking of Isabella, says, - 'One is disposed to ask, whether, if Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that her reproaches against her miserable brother, when he clings to life like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh.'^ In reply to the first part of which, we would venture to ask this accomplished critic whether she would not have suffered a still greater depreciation in his esteem, if she had yielded to Angelo's proposal. As to the second part, though we do indeed feel that Claudio were rather to be pitied than blamed, whatever course he had taken in so terrible an alternative, yet the conduct of his sister strikes us as every way creditable to her. Her reproaches were indeed too harsh, if they appeared to spring from any want of love; but as it is, their very harshness does her honour, as it shows the natural workings of a tender and deep affection, in an agony of disappointment at being counselled, by one for whom she would die, to an act which she shrinks from with noble horror, and justly regards as worse than death. We have here the keen anguish of conflicting feelings venting itself in a severity which, though certainly undeserved, only serves to disclose the more impressively the treasured riches of her character. And the same judicious writer, after stating that, without the part of Mariana, 'the story could not have had anything like a satisfactory termination,' goes on, — 'Yet it is never explained how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret, and, being acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and confidence in Angelo.' But surely we are given to understand in the outset that the Duke has not preserved the esteem and confidence in question. In his first scene with friar Thomas, among his reasons for the action he has on foot, he makes special mention of this one: 116

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be: [1.3.50—4] thus inferring that his main purpose, in assuming the disguise of a monk, is to unmask the deputy, and demonstrate to others what himself has long known. And the Duke throws out other hints of a belief or suspicion that Lord Angelo is angling for emolument or popular breath, and baiting his hook with great apparent strictness and sanctity of life; thus putting on sheep's clothing to the end that he may play the wolf with safety and success. Nor was there much cause for explaining how the Duke came by the secret concerning Mariana; it being enough that he knows it, that the knowledge thereof justifies his distrust, and that when the time comes he uses it for a good purpose; the latter part of the work thus throwing light on what has gone before, and the former preparing the mind for what is to follow. Nor is it unreasonable to presume that one of the Duke's motives for the stratagem was, that he was better able to understand the deputy's character than persuade others of it: for a man of his wisdom, even if he had no available facts in the case, could hardly be ignorant that an austerity so theatrical as Angelo must needs be not so much a virtue as an art; and that one so forward to air his graces and make his light shine could scarce intend thereby any other glory than his own. Yet Angelo is not so properly a hypocrite as a self-deceiver. For it is very considerable that he wishes to be, and sincerely thinks that he is what he affects and appears to be; as is plain from his consternation at the wickedness which opportunity awakens into conscious action within him. For a most searching and pregnant exposition of this type of character the reader may be referred to Bishop Butler's Sermon before the House of Lords on the 30th of January ; where that great and good man, whose every sentence is an acorn of wisdom, speaks of a class of men who 'try appearances upon themselves as well as upon the world, and with at least as much success; and choose to manage so as to make their own minds easy with their faults, which can scarce be done without management, rather than to mend them.'' ' Thus Angelo for self-ends imitates sanctity, and gets taken in by his own imitation. His original fault lay in forgetting or ignoring his own frailty. As a natural consequence, his 'darling sin is pride that apes humility, ^ and his pride of virtue, his conceit of purity, 'my gravity wherein (let no man hear me) I take pride' [2.4.9—10], while it keeps him from certain vices, is itself a far greater vice than any it keeps him from; insomuch that Isabella's presence may almost be said to elevate him into lust. And perhaps the array of low and loathsome vices, which the Poet has clustered about him in the persons of Lucio, the Clown, and Mrs. Over-done, was necessary to make us feel how unspeakably worse than any or all of these is Angelo's pride of virtue. It can hardly be needful to add, that in Angelo this 'mystery of iniquity'^7' is depicted with a truth and sternness of pencil, that could scarce have been achieved but in an age fruitful in living examples of it. The placing of Isabella, 'a thing enskied and sainted' [1.4.34] and who truly 15 all 117

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

that Angelo seems, side by side with such a breathing shining mass of pitch, is one of those dramatic audacities wherein none perhaps but a Shakespeare could safely indulge. Of her character the most prolific hint that is given is what she says to the Duke, when he is urging her to fasten her ear on his advisings touching the part of Mariana: 'I have spirit to do any thing that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit' [3.1.205—7]. That is, she cares not what face the action may wear to the world, nor how much reproach it may bring upon her from others, if it will only leave her the society, which she has never parted from, of a clean breast and an unsoiled conscience. In strict keeping with this, her character appears to us among the finest, in some respects the very finest in Shakespeare's matchless cabinet of female excellence. Called from the cloister, where she is on the point of taking the veil of earthly renouncement, to plead for her brother's life, she comes forth a saintly anchoress, clad in the sweet austere composures of womanhood, to throw the light of her virgin soul upon the dark, loathsome scenes and characters around her. With great strength of intellect and depth of feeling she unites an equal power of imagination, the whole being pervaded, quickened, and guided by a still, intense religious enthusiasm. And because her virtue is securely rooted and grounded in religion, therefore she never once thinks of it as her own, but only as a gift from the God whom she loves, and who is her only hope for the keeping of what she has. Which suggests the fundamental point of contrast between her and Angelo, whose virtue, if such it may be called, is nothing, nay, worse than nothing, because it is one of his own making, and has no basis but pride, which is itself but a bubble. Accordingly, there is a vestal beauty about her, to which we know of nothing equal, save in the lives of some of the whitest saints. The power and pathos with which she pleads for her brother are well known. At first she is timid, distrustful of her powers, shrinking with modest awe of the law's appointed organ; and she seems drawn unawares into the heights of moral argument and the most sweetly-breathing strains of gospel wisdom. Much of what she says has become domesticated wherever the English language is spoken, and would long since have grown old, if it were possible by any means to crush the freshness of immortal youth out of it. The Duke has been rather hardly dealt with by critics. The Poet — than whom it would not be easy to find a better judge of what belongs to wisdom and goodness seems to have meant him for a wise and good man; yet he has represented him as having rather more skill and pleasure in strategical arts and roundabout ways than is altogether compatible with such a character. Some of his alleged reasons for the action he is going about reflect no honour on him; but it is observable that the result does not approve them to have been his real ones: his conduct at the end offers better motives than his speech offered at the beginning; which naturally suggests that there may have been more of purpose than of truth in his statement of them. A liberal, sagacious, and merciful prince, but with more of whim and caprice than suits the dignity of his place, humanity speaks richly from his lips; yet in his action the philosopher and divine is better shown than the statesman; and he seems to take a very questionable delight in moving about as an unseen providence, by secret counsels leading the wicked designs of others to safe and wholesome issues. Schlegel thinks 'he has more pleasure in overhearing his subjects than in governing them in the usual 118

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

way of princes;' and sets him down as an exception to the old proverb, — 'A cowl does not make a monk:' and perhaps his princely virtues are somewhat obscured by the disguise which so completely transforms him into a monk. Whether he acts upon the wicked principle with which that fraternity is so often reproached, or not, it is pretty certain that some of his means can be justified by nothing but the end: so that if he be not himself wrong in what he does, he has no shield from the charge but the settled custom of the order whose functions he undertakes. Schlegel justly remarks, that 'Shakespeare, amidst the rancour of religious parties, delights in painting monks, and always represents their influence as beneficial; there being in his plays none of the black and knavish specimens, which an enthusiasm for Protestantism, rather than poetical inspiration, has put some modern poets upon delineating. He merely gives his monks an inclination to be busy in the affairs of others, after renouncing the world for themselves; though in respect of pious frauds he does not make them very scrupulous.'' ' As to the Duke's pardon of Angelo, though Justice seems to cry out against the act, yet in the premises it were still more unjust in him to do otherwise; the deception he has practised upon Angelo in the substituting of Mariana having plainly bound him to the course he takes. For the same power whereby he effects this could easily have prevented Angelo's crime; and to punish the offence after thus withholding the means of prevention were obviously wrong; not to mention how his proceedings here involve an innocent person, so that he ought to spare Angelo for her sake, if not for his own. Nor does it strike us as very prudent to set bounds to the grace of repentance, or to say what amount of sin must render a man incapable of it. All which may in some measure explain the Duke's severity to the smaller crime of Lucio after his clemency to the greater one of Angelo. Lucio is one of those mixed characters, such as are often generated amidst the refinements of city life, in whom low and disgusting vices, and a frivolity still more offensive, are blended with engaging manners and some manly sentiments. ' Thus he appears a gentleman and a blackguard by turns, and, what is more, does really unite something of these seemingly incompatible qualities. With a true eye and a just sympathy for virtue in others, yet, so far as we can see, he cares not a jot to have it in himself. And while his wanton, waggish levity seems too much for any generous feeling to consist with, still he shows a strong and hearty friendship for Claudio; as if on purpose to teach us how 'the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together' [All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.71-2]. Dr. Johnson rather oddly remarks, that 'the comic scenes are natural and pleasing'; not indeed but that the remark is true enough, but that it seems rather out of character. And if these scenes please, it is not so much from any fund of mirthful exhilaration, or any genial gushes of wit and humour, as from the reckless, unsympathizing freedom, not unmingled with touches of scorn, with which the deformities of mankind are shown up. The contrast between the right-thoughted, well-meaning Claudio, a generous spirit walled in with overmuch infirmity, and Barnardine, a frightful petrifaciton of humanity, 'careless, reckless, and fearless of what is past, present, or to come' [4.2.143-4], is in the Poet's boldest manner. Nevertheless, the general current of things is far from musical, and the issues greatly disappoint the reader's feelings. The drowsy Justice, which we expect and 119

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

wish to see awakened, and set in living harmony with Mercy, apparently relapses at last into a deeper sleep than ever. Our loyalty to Womanhood is not a little wounded by the humiliations to which poor Mariana stoops, at the ghostly counsels of her spiritual guide, that she may twine her life with that of the cursed hypocrite who has wronged her sex so deeply. That, amid the general impunity of so much crime, the mere telling of some ridiculous lies to the Duke about himself should draw down a disproportionate severity upon Lucio, the lively, unprincipled jester and wag, who might well be let pass as a privileged character, makes the whole look more as if done in mockery of justice than in honour of mercy. Except indeed, the noble unfolding of Isabella, scarce any thing turns out as we would have it; nor are we much pleased at seeing her diverted from the quiet tasks and holy contemplations which she is so able and worthy to enjoy. It will not be amiss to add, that the title of this play is apt to give a wrong impression of its scope and purpose. Measure for Measure is in itself equivocal; but the subject-matter here fixes it to be taken in the sense, not of the old Jewish proverb, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,' but of the divine precept, 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. 10 Thus the title falls in with that noble line by Coleridge, 'What nature makes us mourn, she bids us heal, 11 or with a similar passage in the Merchant of Venice, 'We do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy' [4.1.200—2]. (II, 12-17)

120

26 Walter Bagehot, Angelo a natural hypocrite 1853

From Literary Studies by the Late Walter Bagehot. M.A. and Fellow of University College, London. With a Prefatory Memoir. Edited by Richard Holt Hutton. (2 vols, London, 1879). Vol. I. Walter Bagehot (1826—77) was educated in Bristol and at University College, London, where he studied mathematics, intellectual and moral philosophy, and political economy, receiving his B.A. in 1846 and his M.A. in 1848. He read law and was called to the bar in 1852, but never practiced law, instead going into business, where he became an authority on banking and finance, publishing many books and essays on the subject. He edited The Economist, founded by his father-in-law, James Wilson in 1843, from 1860 until his death. His interest in literature is reflected in his contributions to The National Review, which he edited with R. H. Hutton, and his Literary Studies (1879), edited by Hutton and published posthumously.

[From 'Shakespeare - The Man' (1853). The essay, pages 126-72, is a general discussion of the qualities of Shakespeare as man and poet, his knowledge of women, the extent of his learning, and whether he was religious.] There are two things — good-tempered sense and ill-tempered sense. In our remarks on the character of Falstaff, we hope we have made it very clear that Shakespeare had the former; we think it nearly certain that he possessed the latter also. An instance of this might be taken from that contempt for the perspicacity of the bourgeoisie which we have just been mentioning. It is within the limits of what may be called malevolent sense, to take extreme and habitual pleasure in remarking the foolish opinions, the narrow notions, and the fallacious deductions which seem to cling to the pompous and prosperous man of business. Ask him his opinion of the currency question and he puts 'bills' and 'bullion' together in a sentence, and he does not seem to care what he puts between them. But a more proper instance of (what has an odd sound), the malevolence of Shakespeare is to be found in the play of Measure for Measure. We agree with Hazlitt [No. 11], that this play seems to be written, perhaps more than any other, con amore, and with a relish; and this seems to be the reason why, notwithstanding the unpleasant nature of its plot, and the absence of any very attractive character, it is yet one of the plays which take hold of the 121

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

mind most easily and most powerfully. Now the entire character of Angelo, which is the expressive feature of the piece, is nothing but a successful embodiment of the pleasure, the malevolent pleasure, which a warm-blooded and expansive man [i.e., Shakespeare] takes in watching the rare, the dangerous and inanimate excesses of the constrained and cold-blooded. One seems to see Shakespeare, with his bright eyes and his large lips and buoyant face, watching with a pleasant excitement the excesses of his thin-lipped and calculating creation, as though they were the excesses of a real person. It is the complete picture of a natural hypocrite, who does not consciously disguise strong impulses, but whose very passions seem of their own accord to have disguised themselves and retreated into the recesses of the character, yet only to recur even more dangerously when their proper period is expired, when the will is cheated into security by their absence, and the world (and, it may be, the 'judicious person' himself) is impressed with a sure reliance in his chilling and remarkable rectitude. (I, 161-2)

122

27 Richard Grant White, sympathy for Angelo, criticism of Isabella 1854

From Shakespeare's Scholar: Being Historical and Critical Studies of His Text, Characters, and Commentators, With an Examination of Mr. Collier's Folio of 1632. By Richard Grant White, A.M. (New York, 1854). Richard Grant White (1821-1885) was born in New York to a well-off merchant, raised in Brooklyn, and matriculated at the University of the City of New York in 1837, from which he graduated in 1839. He studied music and medicine, but became a lawyer, although he never practiced law. White's chief interest lay in writing, and he earned a living as a music critic, a literary critic, and a political commentator. His many books include National Hymns (New York, 1862), Words and Their Uses, Past and Present (New York, 1870), and England Without and Within (Boston, 1881), as well as the works by which he is best known today, Shakespeare's Scholar, his edition of The Works of William Shakespeare (12 vols, Boston, 1857-66), and Studies in Shakespeare (Boston and New York, 1886).

[White's chapter on Measure for Measure comprises pp. 111—72, a general commentary followed by extensive notes on the cruxes in each scene] Mr. Hunter thus opens his comments upon Measure for Measure: Few of Shakespeare's plays give so little pleasure as this. The fault is, in a great measure, the plot, which is improbable and disgusting. But the play wants character. The principal persons are unindividualized men and women, and it may be doubted whether they always exhibit the feeling which really belongs to the strange situations in which they are placed. 1 In this opinion he is sustained by Coleridge, and by Mr. Knight. It is prudent, as well as pleasant, to agree with such critics; but sometimes both policy and preference must needs be set aside; and I cannot err in supposing that there are many who, though lacking with me the sanction of such opinion, find, with me, in their enjoyment of the transcendent poetry, the subtle and far-reaching thought, and the nicely discriminated characters of this play, an ample compensation for the consciousness that they have opposed their judgments, even to that of Coleridge. As to the plot, it should be remarked, that though the incidents upon which it 123

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

turns are such as cannot in these days be made the topics of conversation in general society, or the subjects of dramatic representation before a polite audience, there is nothing in them to make the play repulsive in the closet. Interdicted, as the story must now be considered in the social circle, there is nothing in it to contaminate the individual. Its themes are excluded from the drawing-room, as we avoid there a discussion of the internal economy of the Lying-in Hospital, or anatomical disquisitions upon the viscera; though moral taint would not sooner follow upon the just consideration of the one than from the professional examination of the others.... [Discusses changing attitudes toward 'moral purity' and compares Measure for Measure to Hamlet.] ... But in neither play is there contamination; and in the latter, the principal personage, she for whom the play was written, and around whom the others group themselves, is an embodiment of the iciest, the most repelling continence. Nothing repulsive is brought before the reader's eye. The relations of Claudio and Juliet, while they awaken our pity for their sufferings, warn us against their error. And poor deserted and repudiated Mariana, counting through five years the lonely days and nights in that moated grange! do not her wrongs and her truehearted devotion plead 'trumpet-tongued' [Macbeth, 1.7.19] against the guilt of her betrothed husband? As to his dramatic relations with Isabella, what influence do they exert, save upon the side of virtue? Which comes most bravely out of those interviews, the designing villain, or the intended victim? What he says to her, is said by scores of scoundrels such as he in scores of other plays, including some of Shakespeare's; but what she says to him, and to her brother, about his base designs, finds no such utterance from other lips. I do not envy those who find this plot disgusting. They seem to me to be 'more nice than wise.' The principal characters, instead of being 'unindividualized men and women,' are distinctly drawn embodiments of types, clearly if not strongly marked. There are rulers, upright in intention, and not wanting in wisdom, but who lack administrative force, and who, half conscious of their failing, seek on some pretence to effect that by the hands of others which their own weak wills have failed to consummate. They are thoughtful when they should be active; and are employed in analyzing the causes or tracing the consequences of crime, when their energies should be bent on its prevention or its punishment. Such a ruler is the Duke. His inertness has allowed 'strict statutes and most biting laws' [1.3.19], which he confesses are 'needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds' [1.3. 20],to sleep for fourteen years; and his assumption of the monk's cowl is not his first masquerade; for Lucio, who knows nothing of his present disguise, calls him 'the old fantastical duke of dark corners' [4.3.156-7]. Shakespeare seems to have had an ever present consciousness of the essential opposition between the faculties which lead men to reflect and those which impel them to act. . . . [Refers to 4.4 of Hamlet] In Angelo, Shakespeare has drawn a faithful portrait of the man whose pride is in is eminent respectability - the man who finds it easy to lead a reputable life, and whose whole life is in his good repute. He is a selfish precisian. He is content to be pure when he has no great temptation to be otherwise; but he would seem pure at every hazard. There are men of no remarkable abilities or acquirements who attain position and influence and the deference due to wisdom, solely by the discreetness of 124

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

their lives, the grave courtliness of their bearing, their composed and collected manner, and the polished preciseness of their speech, which approaches pomposity, but still stops short of it. Such a man Shakespeare has shown us in Angelo, and in him alone. Polonius — Shakespeare's acute and high-bred courtier, not the jack-adandy of the stage, — is an approximation to this type; but he has too much affectation of subtle thought in his conversation. The man whom Angelo represents is always spoken of as 'eminent for his clear common sense and practical views of life,' and would never talk as Polonius does about Hamlet and Ophelia to the King and Queen in the second Scene of the second Act of the tragedy. That Angelo is punctilious, his first speech in the play, as he enters in obedience to the request of the Duke, plainly shows. He says, Always obedient to your grace's will, I come to know your pleasure. [1.1.25—6] It needs the manner of a Chesterfield to give those lines their proper utterance, — to make them deferential without servility, and formal without affectation. The Duke's reply shows how eminently respectable his deputy was considered by all Vienna; how he was looked to by the public, as a man whose character and conduct fitted him for dignified position, and how reputable were all his antecedents. [Quotes 1.1.26-31] Claudio says of him, that he for a name Now puts the drowsy and neglected act Freshly on me: — 'tis surely for a name: — [1.2.169—71] The Duke tells Friar Thomas that his deputy 'stands at a guard with envy' [1.2.51]; and he himself, in the solitude of his own chamber, confesses to himself that he takes pride in his own gravity; yet even in that secret place he shrinks from the confession, and says, 'let no man hear me' [2.4.11]. But Angelo is not all hypocrite at first. His gravity, his preciseness, and his respectability, are not mere shams. He is naturally sober, formal, and austere; and having never encountered exactly the sort of temptation which alone could betray him into impropriety, he has been exceedingly proper all his life. His selfish and hard-hearted repudiation of poor Mariana, which afterwards appears, would not impeach his respectability then more than it would now. Generosity is one thing; respectability quite another. They are not twins, nor is the latter born of the former. Observe that Angelo is naturally too grave to find any amusement in the conversation between the Clown, Froth, and Elbow, in the first Scene of the second Act. Elbow brings in, as he says, 'two notorious benefactors' [2.1.50]. The humor of the blunder does not exist for Angelo, who, not to be turned from his literal preciseness, solemnly asks, Benefactors! Well, what benefactors are they? Are they not malefactors? [2.1.49-51] He puts a curt question or two, and, leaving the affair in the hands of Escalus, soon goes out, hoping that his colleague 'will find cause to whip them all' [2.1.137]. There 125

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

is no affectation about this: he really finds no pleasure in studying the characteristics of such scum; and thinks whipping the best use to which they can be p u t . . . . But to return a moment to Angelo. The naturally formal and unbending character of his mind is shown in the manner of his answer, when the Provost (Act II. Sc. 2), seeking assurance for the act, asks if it be really his will that Claudio shall die on the morrow. He doe not reply simply 'yes;' but, Did I not tell thee yea? Hadst thou not order? Why dost thou ask again? [8-9] He cannot conceive of a scruple or doubt entertained by a subordinate, after he has received orders from his superior. Immediately afterward, giving directions about poor Juliet, then hourly looking for the birth of her child, he uses no term of pity, does not even call her by her name, but designates her by an epithet which is at once opprobrious, technical, and suited to lips 'of wisest censure' [Othello, 2.3.193] and coldly adds, with a scrupulous regard for propriety, and an equally scrupulous disregard of the appeals of sympathy for such an improper person, no matter what her extremity, 'Let her have needful, but not lavish means' [2.2.24]. This is before he has seen Isabella, and ere the cold surface of his soul has been ruffled by passion; for we learn afterward, from his own lips, that he has never yet been moved by woman's beauty: this virtuous maid Subdues me quite. Ever till now When men were fond, I smiled, and wondered how. [2.2.184-6] And he has prided himself, too, on this insensibility to female charms; for when Isabella first comes before him, and the Provost is about to retire, Angelo calls to him — 'Stay awhile' [2.2.26]. There is no need that his subordinate should remain; but Angelo wishes to show how unmoved he will be by the tears and the charms of this beautiful young woman. What Isabella says of him in the last scene, is more than half true: I partly think A due sincerity govern'd his deeds Till he did look on me, [5.1.445-7] for when he leaves her, after their first interview, and she says, 'Heaven keep your honour safe' [2.2.157], he replies, Amen, For I am that way going to temptation Where prayers cross. [157-9] What blindness and prejudice must it be which calls so truthful and carefully drawn a character 'unindividualized.' Had Shakespeare not left us Angelo, one strongly marked type would have been wanting in his panorama of mankind. The same may be said of one other character in the comedy; but that one will be considered elsewhere. (111-19) 126

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

SCENE 5. ["SCENA QUINTA" IN FOLIO; 1.4 IN MODERN EDITIONS] Isab. And have you nuns no farther privileges? Fran. Are not these large enough? Isab. Yes, truly: I speak not as desiring more; But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of St. Clare. [1.4.1—5] Shakespeare's women have been so much praised, and it is so safe and so easy to praise them, that it may be confidently assumed that they who have studied these wonderful creations most lovingly and closely, are they who are generally repelled by the promiscuous praise bestowed upon them; for it is but too often the vague and unmeaning panegyric of the thoughtless and undiscriminating, who seek to acquire a reputation for taste by compliance with custom. Those who truly know Shakespeare's women, who regard them with instinctive devotion and intelligent admiration, turn away with disappointment or distaste from this adulation, to the loving contemplation of its object; and shut their ears to the always inadequate and often belittling praise of the women, to bend their mind's eye upon the women themselves, who never disappoint, and never leave the cravings of man's heart unsatisfied, when he who called them into being meant that they should fill it. It is, indeed, one of the marvels of Shakespeare's genius, that, living in the age in which he lived, born and bred as he was, having such examples before him as the women of the dramas written by his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, and writing for a stage upon which women never appeared, he created the most real-seeming, the most captivating and truly feminine women in the whole range of imaginative composition. . . . [Discusses Perdita, Hermione, Cleopatra, and Charmian.] Among the charms with which Shakespeare has endowed his women of the higher types, a subduing tenderness of heart and an innate purity of soul are eminent. The lovely, lovable, and loving creatures seem to be devoted and self-sacrificing from an impulse of their natures, to stifle which would be to end their hopes of happiness. They are chaste, not because they are passionless, or because they have deliberately weighed the propriety of the two courses of conduct and decided for the better; but because, being passionful, they are also single-minded and true-hearted, and revolt instinctively from the thought of wanton desecration of their spotless natures. Such are Miranda, Julia, Portia, Rosalind, Viola, Perdita, Juliet, Desdemona, and, above all, Imogen; but such is not Isabella; and it is in her that this play furnishes for us its second strongly marked type of character, which, without her, would have been unrepresented on Shakespeare's stage. The poet has given us one marvellously faithful, and yet ideal portrait of the woman sometimes, and, heaven be thanked, but rarely, seen, who is compounded solely of intellect and a sense of propriety. This woman makes piety her employment, and chastity her profession. She is deliberately sanctified, and energetically virtuous. 127

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

She is not content with yielding to the influences and practising the precepts of religion, she must openly mortify herself before it. She is not satisfied with living chastely in thought and deed, as maid or matron, she must continually fortify herself in a purity which, having reasoned herself into, she fears that she might be reasoned out of, and lay deliberate plans to preserve a continence which, in most cases, she need apprehend no temptation to relax. She is strong-minded, and often enough strong-bodied; and would have stood till doomsday beside the ruined tower, and listened amid the lingering light to the lay which won Coleridge's Genevieve, ' and have gone away unthrilled by impulses of soul and sense, and undisturbed by pity. She is a pietist in her religion, a pedant in her talk, a prude in her notions, and a prig in her conduct. This is the sort of woman which alone could furnish a proper companion portrait to Angelo; and Shakespeare has given her to us in Isabella, — one of the most truthful and carefully finished of his female characters; and yet to the thoughtful observation of a manly man, one of the most repulsive. The Supplementary Essay to this play in Mr. Knight's Edition of the Works of Shakespeare states that Mrs. Lennox calls Isabella 'a vixen', and 'a prude', but that Mrs. Jameson defends and eulogizes the character. > I have yet to read thoroughly the writings of any of Shakespeare's female commentators; but what little I know of Mrs. Lennox leads me to dread rather than seek her as an ally; while I fear that Mrs. Jameson might lead me to admire, unconvinced, and approve against my better judgment. Therefore I have postponed reading the views of either of these ladies upon the character of Isabella until after I have recorded my own. Our first view of Isabella shows her to us on a volunteer foray against impropriety. A novice, about to enter a convent, she has just heard the rules of the order from one of her future sisters. One would think that the rules of any convent would have seemed strict enough to a young woman in the flush of youth; and that in this one, where, as we learn in this Scene, a nun could not speak to a man 'but in the presence of the prioress' [1.4.11], or if she spoke, must be concealed, Isabella could be proper to her heart's content. But no; she only hears the laws which are to shut her out from intercourse with men and with the world, to express her wish for 'a more strict restraint upon the sisterhood' [1.4.4-5]. Her porcupine purity is neither the negative virtue resulting from ignorance and sometimes miscalled innocence, nor the instinct of a chaste consciousness, nor the unconscious fruit of religious influence. She has solemnly made up her mind to be chaste: she has determined to be tres forte sur la sagesse. 5^ that is to be her speciality: she has announced it; and the whole town knows it. It is amusing to see the evidence of this in the answer of the Provost to Angelo, when the latter first hears of her, on the second occasion on which she is spoken of in the play. Angelo, hearing her announced as 'the sister of the man condemned' [2.2.18], asks if Claudio has a sister. The Provost replies, 'Ay, my good lord' [2.2.20]; and adds, — not that she is beautiful, not that she is gentle or stately, not that she is beloved, not that she is benevolent, not even that she is virtuous; but that she is 'very virtuous.' Angelo. Provost.

Hath he a sister? Ay, my good lord; a very virtuous maid. Act II. Sc. 2. [19-20] 128

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

And to put beyond all question the deliberate thoroughness with which Isabella has given her mind to this matter, - after her first formal introduction of her business, she herself tells us the position which she has taken upon the subject. Isab. There is a vice, that most I do 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. Act. II. Sc. 2. [29-33] It is a vice that she most abhors, that she most desires should meet the blow of justice. She has thought over the category of vices, and has determined that this is to be her particular horror. Would Viola have done that? would Portia? would Imogen? Pure hearted, gentle creatures, — no. They would have revolted from the unmaidenly syllogisms which must have preceded such a conclusion, as they would have shrunk from infamy; and yet they were no prudes; and when there was necessity, called things by their right names. We seek in vain for any evidence that Isabella's formidable chastity and ascetic religion were the fruits of, or even accompanied by, any grace of soul or tenderness of heart. She has a dreadfully rectangular nature, is an accomplished and not very scrupulous dialectician, and thinks it proper to be benevolent only when she has the law on her side. She is utterly without impulse, — that charming trait of woman, which if it expose her to some perils, protects her from more and greater, and which prompts and gives efficiency as well as beauty alike to all her gentle deeds of homely kindness and her nobler acts of self-devotion. Isabella, on the contrary, does everything 'by the card.' She goes to Angelo to intercede for her brother, — she could not have done less, — and begins by making the immodest and utterly needless, and therefore unkind and injurious confession, that her brother has been guilty of the vice which she most desires should meet the blow of justice. She briefly and coldly states her case; and after receiving only a quasi denial of her proposition, she instantly retires; not neglecting the opportunity, however, to eulogize the law which in the morrow will leave her brotherless. [Quotes 2.2.34—51: 'I have a brother is condemn'd to die. .. .'] A sister might have neglected to volunteer a panegyric of that particular statute at that particular time, and yet have been none the less pure-minded. No wonder that Lucio tells her, If you should need a pin, You could not with more tame a tongue desire it. [2.2.45—6] but it is very questionable whether Isabella was womanish enough to need a pin; she probably used buttons, — or would have done so had she lived now-a-days. It may be uncharitable, perhaps, to accuse her of having an eye to the reversion of the points with which Claudio tied his doublet and hose; but her indifference to his death looks very like it. But, urged on by Lucio, she remains, and commences — to plead with Angelo? to touch his heart by womanly graces? to turn against his manhood all the nameless, 129

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

irresistible power of female prayers and tears? No: she stops to reason with him, to have a little bout at dialectics, — the subject being the pardon of her brother. She tells the deputy that he might pardon him, And neither heaven nor man grieve at the mercy. [2.2.49—50] And when he says, that, what he will not, that he cannot do, she replies, But you might do't and do the world no wrong, If so your heart were touch'd with that remorse As mine is to him. [2.2.53-5][6] Could she be more deliberate, if she were proving that the angles of a right-angled triangle are equal to two right angles? And thus she goes on, disputing with Angelo as to how he would feel if he were Claudio; giving him her ideas about authority, justice, and the unjust influence which social position exerts upon our judgment of man's conduct: she almost gets into a discussion of 'fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute'. 7' She does it well, exceedingly well; and with a self-possession, clearness of perception, and command of language, which under the circumstances are equally astonishing, unfeminine, and unlovely. But not a prayer, not an entreaty, not an utterance of woeful apprehension, until she hears that Claudio is to be beheaded on the next day; and then she utters an ejaculation, not of grief, but of apprehension for the safety of his soul: — very proper, and highly becoming in one about to become a professional religieuse; but had her woman's and her sister's feelings - such as she had — been uppermost, she would have appeared the better, and have been none the worse. But as to her sorrow, it is remarkable that she does not shed a tear, or once use those woman's weapons, until she hears from the Duke of the death of Claudio; and then she weeps, rather, it would seem, from spite than grief. The Duke tells her that Claudio's 'head is off and sent to Angelo' [4.3.116]. Is she crushed by the unexpected blow? Does she grieve? Is her spirit subdued by her bereavement, and the fate of her brother? No: her first thought is of a vixen's vengeance upon the adversary who has overreached her. She exclaims, 'O, I will to him and pluck out his eyes!' [4.3.119]. After this, as we learn from the remarks of the Duke and Lucio, she weeps. But it is note-worthy that her tears are not spoken of in very complimentary terms even by the Duke. He does not call them 'holy drops,' or any thing of the kind, but 'fretting waters' [4.3.146]; and the only consolation which he deems at all likely to be efficacious with this very holy and 'very virtuous' maid are promises of revenge, and gratified ambition. If you can, pace your wisdom In that good path that I would wish it go; And you shall have your bosom on this wretch, Grace of the duke, revenges to your heart, And general honor. [4.3.132—6] A second interview with Angelo (Act. II. Sc. 4) is almost a repetition of the first. He tells her that her brother cannot live; and her brief, calm, acquiescent reply is, 130

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Even so, — Heaven keep your honor. Retiring. [2.4.34] Angelo, to obtain the opportunity for his base proposal, is obliged to provoke her into an attempt to change his determination; and then she goes at it like the senior wrangler of some future female college. To quote the characteristic parts of this scene would be to give the whole of it. There are one or two very decided expressions of feeling, in reply to the attack made upon that particular virtue which she has made her hobby; but not one tender word to show that she is moved to sorrow or compassion for her brother, or that she has woman's heart beneath her marble bosom. Her exceeding adroitness in special pleading becomes positively amusing when she turns the tables upon Angelo, who asks her, Might there not be a charity in sin, To save this brother's life? [2.4.63-4] Not disconcerted for an instant, she replies, Please you to do't, I'll take it as a peril to my soul, It is no sin at all, but charity. [2.4.64-6] O women, who long to let the light of your intellect shine before men, see how repulsive this creature is to men, in spite of her beauty and her intellect, as she stands victoriously quibbling with a judge, while she cannot plead for or excuse her erring brother!. . . . To return to our Scene. — It is more chilling than a North West Passage to hear this beautiful woman, whose brother's life hangs on her tongue, admitting with arid curtness the positions which her adversary takes as the basis of his argument. [Quotes 2.4.81—8: 'But mark me. ...']. Our sympathy is with her cause, but not with her; and when, thinking that she has Angelo on the hip, she who could not entreat, assumes the bully, and thus threatens him: [Quotes 2.4.149-54: 'Ha? little honor to be much believ'd. ...']. Then, with all our pity for Claudio and our detestation of Angelo, we cannot but feel a sort of satisfaction that the latter is not so entirely in the clutches of this beautiful she Rhadamanthus, ^ and that the pardon of Claudio is not obtained exactly in that way. Claudio himself appreciates exactly the strong points of his sister's character; for, in the first sentence of the play which apprises us of her existence, he tells Lucio, She hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade. Act I. Sc. 2. [184-6] And it is quite remarkable that the 'prone and speechless dialect, such as moves men' [1.2.183-4], of which he speaks, is not in her, but, be it noticed, 'in her youth' [1.2.182]. Angelo, too, bears evidence to the fact that she is a very intellectual woman, in fact quite 'an intelligence.' She does not touch him by her devotion, or 131

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

her winning ways, or the pathos of her appeals for her brother's life; but admiring at once her person and a sharp specimen of the argumentem ad hominem with which she favors him, and quibbling after the fashion of Shakespeare's day, he says, aside, She speaks, and 'tis Such sense, that my sense breeds with it. Act II. Sc. 2. [141-2] Isabella's frigidity with Angelo is unredeemed by any tenderness to her brother. It does not melt even in the furnace of his affliction. Her first announcement of his fate is cold and merciless enough. Lord Angelo, having affairs to heaven, Intends you for his swift ambassador, Where you shall be an everlasting leiger: Therefor your best appointment make with speed; To-morrow you set on. Act III. Sc. 1. [56-60] But when, after some discussion, in which she utters several fine things about what Claudio ought to do, and what she would do under other circumstances, she again directs him to prepare for execution, — with an impassability absolutely frightful, this sheriff in petticoats says to her brother, 'Be ready, Claudio, for your death tomorrow' [3.1.106]. Sheriff! There wasn't a headsman in Austria who could have done it with a more professional and businesslike air. Claudio, stunned by this cold-blooded barbarity, and left without consolation in his extremity, becomes cowardly, and shrinks from death even at the expense of his sister's chastity. That she remains firm, would be to her honor, were not the spirit in which she does it so pitiless, so utterly uncompassionate, the feeling which she expresses so inhuman, not to say so unwomanly, and the language which she uses so obdurate and so savage. Hear the gentle votaress of St. Clare, the 'very virtuous maid!' — [Quotes 3.1.135—46: 'O you beast!. ...']. Is this the spirit of Christ's religion? is it this to be 'a very virtuous maid?' Do genuine propriety of life, and innate purity of soul necessitate such treatment of a brother, weak, erring, cowardly, and selfishly sinful though he be? What a terrible and yet what a truthful satire is written in this character of Isabella! But she caps the climax of her indifference and her deference to routine duty when the Duke, entering at this moment, in his holy character and habit, asks her, as she is about retiring precipitately, to wait, - promising that it shall be for her benefit. Does she catch at a chance of comfort for poor Claudio? Hear her prompt reply: 'I have no superfluous leisure: my stay must be stolen out of other affairs; but I will attend you a while' [3.1.157-9]. She has no leisure. She is a woman of business; and her stay must be stolen out of other affairs. She has wasted as much time upon her brother as she has to spare — nevertheless, she has done or offered to do nothing to prepare him for his death, and now she is impatient to be off to her duties at the convent, and leave him to his fate. Unless her apologist, Mrs. Jameson, is even a better special pleader than she is

132

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

herself, her case seems hopeless; for she is here judged out of her own mouth, and those of her brother and her admirer. . . . As if to show by contrast the unloveliness of Isabella's character, Shakespeare has given us in Mariana one of his most lovable and womanly of his feminine creations. We see little of her: indeed, she does not appear until the fourth Act; in the first scene of which she says very little, in the last scene but eight words, and in the fifth Act not a great deal. But the few touches of the master's hand make a charming picture. Every word she utters shows that she is exactly Isabella's opposite. Turn to the fifth Act and hear her plead, — plead for the man whose life is justly forfeit for taking, as she thinks, the life of another, in a course of crime which involved a sin against her love. Timid and shrinking before, she does not now wait to be encouraged in her suit. She is instant and importunate. She does not reason or quibble with the Duke; she begs, she implores, she kneels. She even drags down that beautiful graven image, Isabella, upon her knees, by her impetuous prayers: [Quotes 5.1.430— 2, 'O my good lord!. ...' and 5.1.436—42, 'Isabel, / Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me....']. No dialectics, no right-angled triangles here. This is a woman, pleading like a woman. And does not her very prayer for Angelo make his crime seem more detestable as well as her more lovable? How the fullness of her heart wells up from her lips! These few words of self-devotion and of impulse throw a halo around her, whose tender glow makes the glittering light of Isabella's intellect seem as false and as chilly as that reflected from an icicle. .. . [Here White compares Isabella unfavourably with Mariana and Imogen.] Such is Shakespeare's marvellously truthful portraiture of a type which, sad to say, does exist among womankind. — Women whose existence is bound up in a love of propriety, a pride of intellect, and an ostentatious submission to the dictates of an austere religion. Perhaps they should be pitied rather than condemned; but it would tax any power, short of omnipotence, to make them loved. Coleridge says, in a brief paragraph of his Table Talk, devoted to this play: 'Isabella herself contrives to be 9 unamiable. The remark is severe; for it needlessly attributes a bad motive. Isabella needed no contrivance to such an end: her unamiability, like the reading and writing spoken of by Dogberry, 'comes by nature.' Isabella is a woman with too much brain or too little heart. A woman cannot have too fine an intellect, or one too large, if only her affections be finer and larger; but the moment that she shows an excess of the first, she becomes unfeminine, repulsive, monstrous. Shakespeare has given us an ideal of every type of man and womankind, and he could not pass by this. Its unloveliness was not to deter him from his task; though the effect of that is somewhat modified by the personal beauty of his subject; which, too, was necessary to the dramatic movement of the play. But he does not always set up his greatest creations as models for our imitation. He drew an lago and an Angelo among men; among women, why should he withhold his hand from a Lady Macbeth and an Isabella? Coleridge, in the little paragraph just mentioned, complains that, 'our feelings of justice are grossly wounded at Angelo's escape.' No, no! Indeed, no! It is for Mariana's sake that Angelo is pardoned. What is the injustice of his pardon to the justice of giving her her husband? Her suffering, her long and lonely sorrows, are the condition 133

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

of the happy termination of the play; and shall she not have her reward? Yes, truly. Tears like hers would wash away the blood on the stern statute books of Draco J10^ Hallam finds fault with the Duke's hinted intention of marrying Isabella; and calls it 'one of Shakespeare's hasty half thoughts'. l' One of Shakespeare's hasty half thoughts! Pray, how many such has he left us? With all deference to the Historian of the Literature of Europe, this was exactly the best disposition which could have been made of Isabella. The Duke, a well-meaning, undecided, feeble-minded, contemplative man, needed somebody to act for him and govern him; she, after having listened solemnly to his arguments, probably found him guilty — not of love, that would have been unpardonable — but of preference for a female, under extenuating circumstances, and - married him. He needed a 'gray mare, 12' and Shakespeare, with his unerring perception of the eternal fitness of things, gave him Isabella. (133-50)

134

28 William Watkiss Lloyd, an uncongenial play 1856

From The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. The Text Carefully Revised with Notes by Samuel Weller Singer F.S.A. The Life of the Poet and Critical Essays on the Plays by William Watkiss Lloyd M.R.S.L., etc. etc. [2nd edition] (10 vols, London, 1856). Volume I. William Watkiss Lloyd (1813—93) attended the Newcastle-under-Lyme grammar school in Staffordshire, where he showed great promise. However, he never had the opportunity to go to university and became a self-taught classical and Shakespearian scholar. His many publications include several books on Greek architecture and art, as well as essays on Shakespeare written for the second edition of Samuel Weller Singer's The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. These were reprinted as Essays on the Life and Plays of Shakespeare, by William Watkiss Lloyd; Contributed to the Edition of the Poet by S. W. Singer, 1856 (London, 1858). The essay on Measure for Measure is marked by a certain perversity because of Lloyd's insistence that it must either be an early play or - an inadmissible alternative — that Shakespeare suffered 'a falling off in poetic energy and inspiration'. I provide page numbers from Volume I of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (1856) and signature letters from Essays on the Life and Plays of Shakespeare (1858), which is a word-for-word reprint and also more accessible than the edition.

[From 'Critical Essay on Measure for Measure', pp. 439—49. After a detailed discussion of the date of the play and its relation to All's Well That Ends Well, Much Ado about Nothing, and the Henry IV plays, Lloyd, who expresses no affection for Measure for Measure, ignores the consensus of scholarly evidence to the contrary and concludes that it must be an early play.] There is good proof that the second part of Henry IV was written in 1598, and I should be very sorry to think that Measure for Measure, which contains nothing that the author of Henry IV had not already surpassed, and much that, it must be said, is scarcely worthy of him, was produced by him many years later. I would rather conjecture, as a means of getting over the chief difficulty of the more agreeable view, that 'our James,' among the plays that 'did so take' him, chose to take Measure for Measure under his special patronage, from admiration for the 'fantastical Duke of 135

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

dark corners' [4.3.157] - a true description in one sense - and that Shakespeare, in a later revision, indulged the British Solomon by heightening the resemblance he had chosen, with whatever judgment, to own to, into a positive and assigned portrait. This, however, is half way between conjecture and jest. The city of Vienna is the scene of the play — it is represented as a very sink of sensual defilement, corrupted and ravaged in every physical and moral quality, the consequence of the suspension, for fourteen years, of the activity of most severe statutes framed to check the national tendency to grossness and licence. The delineation of such a state, of course, presents us with images and persons disgusting and contemptible in every sense; and this is one great cause of the uncongenial effect of the entire play. The progress of public demoralization is rather exaggerated than relieved by the character of the reaction to which it has conduced. Dissoluteness in one quarter is compensated by austerity equally in excess in another, and the pride of unblushing and ostentatious vice is matched by equal parade of ostentatious virtue. The picture is a true one of the effect on morals, of laws or maxims too severe to be executed; and the action of the play exhibits the further disorder and complication resulting from the mere revival of unamended statutes, that had never become obsolete but for their need of amendment, and can scarcely have a better fate again. All the questions involved are brought to issue in the play, though it scarcely leaves assurance in conclusion that the instructive experience will have its full weight for the future. We are spectators of a receptacle of stagnant impurities in vehement ferment and working through stages of decomposition, but the hope of ultimate purification is scarcely set forth so cheeringly as to compensate for the disagreeableness of what we witness, and to interest our sympathies in the result. The Duke, by whose fault, as he admits, and fourteen years' remissness, the corruption had gained such head, determines at last to check it but averse, if not ashamed, to make the sudden change in person, under the pretext of absence deputes his authority to Angelo, with Escalus as associate and second. Escalus, without any particular elevation of character, approves his fitness as a judicious magistrate, — considerate in the exercise of his functions of 'the nature of our people, our city's institutions, and the terms of common justice' [1.1.9—11]; and, in his subordinate place, roots out the lower mischiefs and abuses with equal vigour and discretion. Notorious haunts are abolished, the doubtful warned and punished on confirmed proof; and the lax appointment of the constabulary, by which the egregious Elbow had life-long tenure of office, is corrected once and for all. But my lord Angelo flies at higher game; in a city of lax morals he has affected and enjoyed the reputation of being 'a man of stricture and firm abstinence' [1.3.12], taking 'pride in gravity' [2.4.9-10], Stands on a guard with envy, scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone. [1.3.51-3] 'Lord Angelo is precise' [1.3.50], and he figures the precisians of the day, of whom we hear so much among the puritanical magistrates at a little later date, — sworn persecutors, especially of the deadly sin of fornication, - but who doubtless flourished 136

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

already at the date when Shakespeare was writing this play. Beneath the mask of severity he hides not only weakness, but meanness; and the Duke, even when he installed him, was aware that he had not only broken his contract to marry Mariana when her dower was lost at sea, he had covered his own falseness by base imputation on her chastity. Claudio and Julietta are guilty of the now so severely denounced frailty, but in its most venial form assuredly, the mutual lapse of lovers contracted, and still faithful to each other, and Claudio is adjudged to die — Escalus in vain endeavouring to soften the stony Angelo. Isabella, a novice of the sisterhood of St. Clare, and sister of Claudio, is urged by his friends to try the effect of her intercession. Angelo, inflamed with lust at the sight of her, proposes to allow the ransom of her brother's life in recompense for her own submission. He effects his purpose, as he supposes, but is deceived through the management of the Duke, who, disguised as a friar, remains in the city to watch his proceedings, and causes Mariana to keep the assignation made for her by Isabella. The Duke saves the life of Claudio, whom Angelo would have sacrificed, notwithstanding his engagement, and, re-appearing in the last Act, exposes the hypocrisy of the deputy, forces him to marry Mariana, to whose entreaties he accords his life, pardons Claudio, and himself marries Isabella. What then has been done? The re-enactment of 'severe and biting laws' [1.3.19] has broken down by the frailty of the appointed administrator; and it would seem as if this had been from the first the anticipation of the Duke, who exposed Angelo (whose weakness he knew) to an overpowering temptation, from pique at the censure of his seeming severity on his own remissness. Certain precedents at the same time have been established, both of severity and moderation. Mrs. Overdone is suppressed, Lucio has a lesson for life, while Julietta and Mariana are treated tenderly, and the allowances to be made for human weakness when really allied to affection are sanctioned and must be continued. One of the circumstances that serve to convince me that Measure for Measure is an early play of Shakespeare, is that at the end he has conferred the beauty and affection of Mariana on one so stained with falseness and baseness as Angelo. It is a conclusion in accordance with that of All's Well that Ends Well — the mystifying prevarication of Diana corresponds with that to which Isabella condescends in blind submission to the friar — and of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but not of any of the plays known to be of late date. Mariana, it is true, appears but little, but her wrongs enlist our sympathies, and these are confirmed by the warmth and vivacity of her intercession for her unworthy husband — intercession very contrasted with the tone and spirit of that of Isabella for her brother. 'The thread of our life is of a mingled yarn' [All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.71]; who should know this better than vehement poetic natures like Shakespeare or Goethe; and Christian charity, to say nothing of self-examination, may well plead for the limits to be extended within which tempted and tottering virtue shall still be held capable of regaining self-command and self-respect. At what point the limit shall be fixed is one question in morals, perhaps, and another in poetry; and, in respect of the latter at least, the later works of Shakespeare sanction a severe rule, though still with human compassion. Isabella is one of the most important characters of the play in every respect; when 137

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

we first see her she is looking forward to the life of a nun, and only anxious lest the austerities of the conventual life should not be sufficiently severe. There is something in the trait that reminds us of Angelo, and she is indeed the representative of the second form which severity assumes in a city of licence. Prudishness is paired with hypocrisy, and the wild luxuriance of unbridled passion almost engages interest, if not esteem, beside the puritanical gravity - gravity acquired on the one hand by art in hiding passions that still rage within, and will assert themselves with opportunity; on the other hand by rigorous extirpation of the very germs of human sympathy, by the desperate resort in fear of indulgence, to absolute deadness of feeling, and coldness of all the affections of the heart. So it is that the unhappy Claudio, resigned to die only when death is inevitable, and so easily recovering his interest in life when a chance appears of purchasing it even upon most shameful terms, that we can give but little faith to his penitence, when, on again receiving assurance that the case is hopeless, he adds — Let me ask my sister pardon. I am so out of love with life that I will sue to be rid of it; - [3.1.171-2] is scarcely so far from our sympathies as his formal sister. Young she is, and beautiful, and her youth and beauty are rightly estimated by her brother Bid her assay to him, I have great hope in that; for in her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect, Such as moves men. [1.2.181—4] He adds, Beside, she hath a prosperous art When she will play with reason, and discourse, And well she can persuade. [1.2.184—6] Accordingly, in her first interview with the strict deputy, her words, eloquent and forcible, are still far more a discourse of reason than a passionate appeal; it is only by the assiduous goading of Lucio, 'Give 't not o'er so:' 'to him again, entreat him' [2.2.43]: 'You are too cold' [2.2.45], 'You are too cold' [2.2.56], repeated, that she rises to any effective warmth, and overcomes her apparent apprehension of seeming to sanction frailty in pleading for mercy to the frail. Lucio himself, who is evidently given up to debauchery, and who proves himself in the sequel not merely frivolous, but wantonly and mischievously slanderous, has nevertheless a warmer heart. No word of lamentation for the fate of her brother, or for the sorrows of Juliet, though her cousin adoptedly, escapes the 'enskyed and sainted' Isabella [1.4.34], in the first instance; and it is only the urgency of Lucio that makes her undertake the suit, in spite of her mistrust of 'her poor ability to do him good' [1.4.75-6], - her doubt of her power, Til see what I can do' [1.4.84]. 'But speedily' [1.4.84], adds Lucio, and he departs, fain to be content with the assurance Soon at night, I'll send him certain word of my success. [1.4.79-80] 138

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

In the interview with Claudio she again 'plays with reason and discourse' [1.2.185] to admiration, and, sorely tempted though he might be, Claudio assuredly is not to be justified, or even excused, for desiring to gain a disgraced life by the disgrace of his sister; but the heroism of Isabella in the matter, where no sacrifice on her part was in question, is a cheap virtue. Human weakness we feel might claim more tender rebuke from a sister, and it must be admitted that her tone is not that which would give Claudio the best chance of recovering self-command: Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd; 'Tis best that thou diest quickly. [3.1.149-50] 'Hard words and hanging' [2.1.237], are the portion her sisterly passion gives him, and there is like to be the end. But enter now the Friar Duke; and here he is in his element of dark management, and behind scene intermeddling. We never throughout this play get into the free open joyous atmosphere, so invigorating in other works of Shakespeare; the oppressive gloom of the prison, the foul breath of the brothel, are only exchanged for the chilly damp of conventual walls or the oppressive retirement of the monastery, where friars are curious as to the motives of ducal seclusion, and are ready to intimate a guess that a petticoat is concerned in the secret. No, holy father, throw away that thought; Believe not that the dribbling part of love Can pierce a complete bosom. [1.3.1—3] Yet how near the holy father was to being right, will appear in time. Isabella, cold and unimpressible when approached through her affections, is submissiveness itself under the guidance of a supposed ghostly father, and, without protest or scruple, lends herself to the accomplishment of an intrigue, that to be consistent with herself in the affair of her brother, she should, in the first instance at least, have repulsed and revolted from. Her management of the meeting of Angelo with the unknown Mariana made her distinctly accessory to a transgression several degrees worse than that of Claudio and Juliet, for which she can so little make allowance; but the warrant of the 'good father' [3.1.238] keeps down every hint of doubtfulness, and not a word escapes from her to show that the success of this scheme has chief interest, or any interest whatsoever, for her from its reference to her brother. The real temper of virtue after this fashion, is however not left open to misconception by any false canonization in the play. We easily recognize something more, for once, than mere accordance with the wish of another when Isabella, conjured by Mariana to add her intercession for her would-be seducer, whom, be it remembered, she still believes to have caused her brother's execution, pleads for him thus: Duke. He dies for Claudio's death. Isab. Most bounteous sir, (kneeling) Look, if it please you, on this man condemned, As if my brother lived. I partly think, A due sincerity governed his deeds, Till he did look on me. [5.1.443-7]

139

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

So it is, cela ejfraie — mais cela flatte toujours. ' The votaress of St. Clare adopts the theory of the pernicious deputy's conduct that keeps affected preciseness most in honour, and is at the same time most complimentary to her own personal charms. The thought every way has its consolations; but, after its utterance, it is quite without violence to our feelings that we regard her as renouncing her project of taking the veil, and descending to that secondary stage of virtue that finds its appropriate rewards in such prizes as a marriage with a duke. [Lloyd then discusses Shakespeare's use of his sources, Cinthio and Whetstone, and concludes by contrasting Cassandra's (Promos and Cassandra} concern for her honor vis-a-vis her brother's life with Isabella's attitude.].... Honor, fame, envious report, despite, slander, are words unknown to Isabella as considerations that affect her own determination; this is fixed by abhorrence of vice and shamefulness, and the religious sanction, Better it were a brother died at once, Than that a sister by redeeming him Should die for ever. [2.4.106-8] She is far less deterred by any fear of the consequences to her own reputation, by any shame to be incurred by herself, than by her vivid apprehension of the shamefulness of such weakness as her brother's — the disgrace, whether published or in private conscience, of a life so selfishly and basely preserved. She hates the vice as being vice, and she hates the vicious perhaps one degree worse; and if the vicious prove to be a brother she recoils only with the more loathing, and denounces the more contemptuously. It is obvious how much more naturally the virtue of the city of the story appears in the form of austere intolerance of vice than in that of timorous care of reputation; and it would not be impossible to trace, in every plausible detail, how all other alterations and additions were led up to by the requirements of contrast and heightening relief for the chief group; but the play, on the whole, is too thoroughly uncongenial to induce me to linger over it longer. Omitting other gleanings, I note that the jest about the mischance of Elbow's wife, is lineal from a disaster in the family of the 2 Gripax of Promos and Cassandra. A certain interest would attach to the collation of the state of the laws, the penal enactments and enforcement of them, suspended, irregular, or intermitting, that apply to offences of the nature that form the argument of Measure for Measure, about the time when it must have been written and represented. The philosophical and ethical, not to say poetical import of the work, may be studied independently of this information; — but the play itself is, as a composition, an incident in the life of Shakespeare, as the opinions it mainly addresses and influences were important facts in the condition of contemporary England, and realized themselves in most palpable historical incidents in the political history of the ensuing generation. (I, 441-9; RR5-SS3)

140

29 Charles Cowden Clarke, on Isabella, the epitome of goodness, and some minor characters 1863

From Shakespeare-Characters; Chiefly Those Subordinate (London, 1863). Charles Cowden Clarke (1787—1877) was born at Enfield, Middlesex, where his father was schoolmaster, and where the teenaged Charles taught John Keats when he was about six or seven. He later became friendly with Charles and Mary Lamb, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. After moving to London, he met his wife Mary Victoria Novello, through whose family he met the composer Mendelssohn, the actor-manager Macready, and Charles Dickens. Charles and Mary — who had already published her Complete Concordance to Shakespeare in 1845 - collaborated on the edition of Shakespeare's plays known as 'Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare' (London, 1864—68) and on such works as Recollections of Writers (London, 1878) and The Shakespeare Key (London, 1879). Charles's major unassisted work was his public lectures on Shakespeare and other writers, 1834—56, many of which were published, including Shakespeare-Characters. Although many critics have written on Isabella, Angelo, Claudio,and the Duke, Clarke is one of the few to discuss the minor characters of Measure for Measure in any detail.

[From Chapter XX] For the store of golden axioms on moral and social wisdom that it contains, no one of Shakespeare's dramas stands more grandly conspicuous than that of Measure for Measure. Moreover, it displays a wider range of character, morally contrasted, than almost any other. We have the brutal stupidity of Barnardine, the callous offspring of vicious ignorance, whom the prospect of a shameful death cannot rouse to sensibility; the cruel and practical indifference of Abhorson, the gaoler and hangman; the putrid infamy of the creatures haunting the suburban stews; the vile and coldblooded hypocrisy of virtue in Angelo — the more heart-sickening from that hypocrisy, as palpable disease is preferable to the scrofulous treachery of roseate health, when the worm of death is at the core; and ascending from that 'lowest deep' in morality to the benevolent-hearted Provost, the well-meaning and patriotic but certainly weak Duke, up to the angelic purity of the sainted Isabella, the heroine of 141

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the piece, and foremark of the whole community, and to whom the foremark of comment is consequently due. Isabella is a curious combination of staid self-possession and the most shrinking modesty. She has a fine and even powerful mind, but it is in conjunction with a retiring nature, rendered even bashful by habit and education. She is very young. The poet has distinctly marked this in several portions of the play, and she has been brought up for a nun. Most people seem to consider Isabella as a full-grown woman, with a confirmed manner, and a confident, nay, a self-satisfied disposition. To me she is much the reverse of all this. I find her to be, upon close and careful examination of the character as Shakespeare has drawn it, a girl of naturally fine understanding and admirable judgment, together with an unvain and most unselfish spirit. She is hardly aware of her own mental powers, for there has been hitherto little opportunity for their exercise. Her answers to Lucio, her brother's friend, when he comes to beg her intercession with Claudio's stern judge, are indicative of self-doubt and distrust of her own qualifications for the office of pleader. 'Alas! what poor ability's in ME to do him good?' [1.4.75—6]. And when Lucio urges her, with 'Assay the power you have' [1.4.76], she falteringly replies 'My power! Alas! I doubt' [1.4.77], as if but too fearful that she can do naught to meet this calamity. Her brother's first description of her fully bears out the view here taken of the character. He speaks of her modest, silent habit, together with her tender years, where he says In her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect, Such as moves men; [1.2.182—4] and her power of intellect is denoted in the words She hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade. [1.2.184—6] Isabella has been called 'cold.' But with what generous impulse she speaks, when, hearing of her brother's offence with Juliet, she exclaims, 'Oh, let him marry her!' [1.4.49] with the genuine trust of youth, believing that reparation is the best expiation. Note, also, the enthusiastic eagerness with which she is willing to augment austerities in her approaching convent life. She asks, 'Have you nuns no further privileges?' [1.4.1]. And upon her sister Francesca's answer, 'Are not these large enough?' [1.4.2] Isabella replies — Yes, truly: I speak not as desiring more; But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of St. Clare. [1.4.3—5] This is precisely the lavish zeal with which a very young person enters upon vowed duties. Her prodigal regardlessness of life, too, is perfectly characteristic of youth. Of her own, of her brother's, of Mariana's, she is, each in turn, equally prodigal when misfortune threatens. Of her own she eagerly speaks: 142

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Oh, were it but my life, I'd throw it down for your deliverance As frankly as a pin. [3.1.103-5] Is that the speech and act of a cold-blooded person? Of her brother's life she is no less profuse when staked against honour: — Better it were a brother died at once, Than that a sister, be redeeming him, Should die for ever; [2.4.106-8] and she is thus profuse because she feels sure that he, too, would be so, knowing the alternative; for she says, rather than this — Had he twenty heads to tender down On twenty bloody blocks, he'd yield them up. [2.4.180—1] And of Mariana's life she shows the same disregard when knowing that it is made miserable by Angelo's unkindness; for she exclaims, 'What a merit were it in death to take this poor maid from the world!' [3.1.231—2]. Such being precisely the way in which young ardent natures feel when first coming face to face with the stern griefs of life. Isabella's warmth of indignation, when she finds her brother less indifferent to death, compared with dishonour, than she had believed, might redeem her from the charge of 'coldness;' but even this has been turned against her, one critic going so far as ungenerously and unjustly, and unwarrantably as ungenerously, to sneer at a 'virtue' that is (he says) 'sublimely good at another's expense. ' Jenny Deans would, of course, be placed in the same category of this writer's contempt with Isabella. ^ From all that we are shown of her character, Isabella's 'virtue' is as noble and unselfish as it is unaffectedly sincere and pure. It has courage for all things but evil-doing in hope of advantage. She herself says, when urged by the Duke to undertake an attempt of a difficult nature — 'Let me hear you speak farther; / have spirit to do anything that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit' [3.1.205—7]. This is not the language of a cold-natured woman. She has been accused of lukewarmness in her pleading to Angelo; but read the whole of those two fine scenes carefully, and I insure the congruence — that the skill of the dramatist is absolute and consummate mastery, in the way whereby he has contrived to preserve the womanly warmth with womanly delicacy throughout. In the first of these two scenes, Shakespeare has managed to exhibit the impression of lukewarmness that has been alluded to, as produced upon the bystanders, Lucio and the Provost; both of them being present on this occasion. The coarse man of the world, Lucio, not having an idea of the motive that restrains her and holds her in a measure tongue-tied, urges her, almost reproachfully, saying (aside to her) — Give't not o'er so: to him again, entreat him; Kneel down before him, hang upon his gown: You are too cold; if you should need a pin, You could not with more tame a tongue desire it: To him, I say. [2.2.43-7] 143

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Does not the tone and manner of this expostulation also convey the idea of its being addressed to a very young, and not to an adult woman? But the fact is, Lucio, in his dissolute callousness and vice-hardened perceptions, has not a glimmering of the real cause of Isabella's apparent coldness; and many who have judged the character, and pronounced it 'cold,' deem to have equally missed the true source of Isabella's imputed 'tameness' here. I can only feel it to be consistent with the most generous ardour of nature, such as she gives evidence of possessing beneath her exterior calm and self-retention, that this modest young girl, this maiden recluse, should find extreme difficulty in speaking at all upon the subject she has to treat of; and, upon studying the scene itself, it will be perceived that Isabella's hesitiation only occurs when she has to touch upon the subject in question — her brother's fault. The virgin delicacy with which the poet has made her shrink from its absolute mention, and search for any form of words that shall convey the substance of her plea, without naming it, appears the very triumph of dramatic art, and perfectly serves to vindicate the character from the charge of unwomanly coldness, while exquisitely inferring its womanly modesty and reserve. On all other points Isabella's conduct is warmth and earnestness to the uttermost. With what fervour and force of solemn argument she pressed her appeal for mercy! When Angelo puts her off with Your brother is a forfeit of the law, And you but waste your words, [2.2.71—2] she rejoins — Alas! Alas! Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; And HE that might the 'vantage best have took, Found out the remedy. How would you be, If HE, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? O! think on that, And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made. [2.2.72—9] In the second of these two great scenes, (the pleading scenes,) - great in their wonderfully artistic conduct throughout, — Isabella is alone with Angelo; and the poet has depicted her difference of bearing with miraculous tact and delicacy. Upon her entrance, the very first words Angelo utters awaken the feminine instinct, the sensitive perception of his altered manner and ominous meaning. She at once shrinks from it, and seeks to ward it off, by endeavouring as long as possible to misunderstand and misbelieve it. She will not allow herself to own that it is there, and will not allow him to make it manifest through his indirect speech. The way in which she parries this dreaded meaning is so intensely true to modest womanhood that no one but Shakespeare (whom an enthusiastic friend once declared to be half a woman, so tender and delicate was his poet-nature, as well as noble and exalted,) no one but he could have penned the words uttered by Isabella during this scene. They are full of the innocent-artful turns and defences that women, possessing both moral and mental 144

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

susceptibility, resort to in circumstance of such critical difficulty as the one at issue between herself and Angelo. She evades his licentious inferences as long as possibly she can, by ingenious replies framed so as to preserve the ambiguity she would fain have him keep to; then, when forced upon her comprehension, she takes affecting refuge in appeal: — I have no tongue but one: gentle, my lord, Let me entreat you speak the former language. [2.4.139-40] And when his unrelenting purpose will not withhold its expression, she adopts the course (so perfectly womanly!) of imputing a better motive to him than she is conscious he is actuated by, in a last lingering hope of inducing him to retract, by arousing within him a sense of moral shame: — I know your virtue hath a licence in 't, Which seems a little fouler than it is, To pluck on others. [2.4.145-7] And lastly, when she finds nothing will avail to restrain him from open avowal of his foul wish, she bursts forth into indignant eloquent protest against his most pernicious purpose [2.4.150]. I have ventured the rather to enlarge upon my views of this pure-charactered being, Isabella, because I feel that she has received scant justice hitherto from critics of my own sex — critics, best as well as worst — and because I think it a reproach upon men that they should treat injuriously one of the most beautiful-souled among 3 Shakespeare's beautiful-souled women. Can anything be more finely contrasted in character, as moral contrasts, than the two portraits of Lucio and the Provost in this play? The one is a young gallant — a roisterer 'about town' — a thorough man of the immoral world; a socially-esteemed 'gentleman.' Among the list of persons, he is styled a 'fantastic,' but also one of the 'gentlemen.' He dresses well; he frequents what is termed 'good society,' say, genteel society. Virtuous ladies would not protest against his being admitted to the company they frequent. Well-bred gentlemen would not disdain to associate with him. He is known to be tainted with vices, but they are fashionable vices, in some (so called) gay courts; vices that have a tender, palliating nomenclature affixed to them, and which enables their perpetrator to obtain a passport into decent communities. He would be called (with a half-serious shake of the head) a 'gay deceiver,' a 'wild young fellow,' a wicked 'Lothario,' and so be endured, if not pardoned, for the sake of his station and easy effrontery; which, combined, suffice to make him be thought agreeable; and of a surety his legs would be tolerated under gentle mahogany. ' Yet this man is a liar, a backbiter, and a profligate. He basely neglects his illegitimate child, and with coward selfishness deserts its miserable mother. He maligns the absent Duke, and not only eats his words when he finds that they are likely to draw him into mischief but accuses another of their utterance. He is a slanderer and a moral poltroon; yet is he one of that class of gentry who, by dint of position, by birth, an impudent brazen assumption, and unimpeachable costume, passes current as a dashing young fellow; dissipated certainly, but of highly-respectable connexions; and who, by 145

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

and by, when he has 'sown his wild oats,' in other words, is battered and precociously 'used up,' and is all but mentally impotent, will subside into a respectable member of society, and possibly be a justice of quorum,^ and commit 'petty rogues' to prison-labour. Totally different from this man is the grave, sensible, and really respectable Provost. He is a person in an inferior grade; no higher appointment than that of head-gaoler of the prison. But he is mild, kind, gentle-hearted; full of charity and forbearance towards those original temptations to sin, and circumstances of sin, which form extenuation, though not vindication of sin. In the fault of the youthful Claudio he can perceive temperament, unrestrictive teaching, and a desire to amend; which should all plead against the fault receiving so stringent a punishment as is awarded to it. Even in the hardened Barnardine, the worthy Provost can discern that spark of retrievable matter which should be fostered into hope of reformation, rather than extinguished in impatient haste. He says, with the true spirit of divine hope — that hope which bids us not despair of even the apparently most destitute of lost souls: What if we do omit This reprobate, till he were well inclin'd. [4.3.73-4] The Provost in this play is, as it were, an impersonation of that more merciful spirit of justice which would rather deal correctively than penally with human error. That spirit which, taking into consideration how ill-taught and ill-advised the childhood of most criminals has been, is inclined to treat those criminals with more of leniency than severity. That spirit which, pitying the slender opportunities of knowing better and doing better that fall to the lot of the generality of pauperinfancy, leans towards the tolerant rather than the inexorable in judging their after misdeeds. That spirit which, aware of the inefficient means that have been taken to prevent vice, dreads too harshly to punish vice. That spirit which, conscious that the education of the destitute child is too often suffered to be but the training to become the self-providing thief, fears to inflict a penalty which should, in strict justice, fall on those who took pains originally to make him an honest man. But as the great withumanist of our own day - Douglas Jerrold^ - says, with his own fine and peculiar irony, 'To reform man is a tedious and uncertain labour; hanging is the sure work of a minute.' We are made to recognize throughout the delineation of the character of the Provost, (as contrasted with that of Lucio,) how far higher is moral elevation than social elevation. For the keeper of felons we have esteem and reverence; for the conventional gentleman - the gentleman about town, we come not short of contempt, and even loathing. There is only one redeeming touch in all Lucio's nasty character. It is, that with all his moral degradation he has yet sufficient perception of good left, to be sensible of the purity and holy whiteness of Isabella. He holds her in genuine veneration, and says to her: — I would not — though 'tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest, 146

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Tongue far from heart, - play with all virgins so: I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted; By your renouncement, an immortal spirit; And to be talk'd with in sincerity, As with a saint. [1.4.31-7] Shakespeare solaces his heavenly spirit with these single redeeming touches in his worst characters; for he knows that human nature, even in its more deplorable deviations from what it should be, and from what it naturally is, has its strange latent points of good, that still hover and linger there to claim affinity with that which might perchance have been cherished into virtue by benign and wholesome influences, instead of being smothered and perverted to evil by sinister ones. In the very blackest and vilest of the personages in this drama — the bad old woman, who gains a livelihood by trading in vice — the poet has developed just one solitary touch that rescues her from utter abhorrence and abandonment. She plays for the keep of the wretched offspring of Lucio, rather than suffer the child to starve, which its own parent would have done. — 'His child is a year and a quarter old, come Philip and Jacob; / have kept it myself; and see how he goes about to abuse me' [3.2.201—3]. Shakespeare always courageously shows how nature asserts her unquenchable power over even the most unhappily-corrupted hearts. In the power of displaying 'individuality' of character, we see the poet to no more advantage than in his several grades of official men; from the constable in ordinary up to the justice of the peace; all, whether prominent or subordinate, are finished portraits. Elbow, the constable in this play, and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, are brothers of the same class; both conceited and ignorant; both perverting and 'abusing the king's English' [ 2.1.88 — 'Do you hear how he misplaces?']; and both calling themselves 'the poor Duke's officers' [2.1.177]; a joke that Shakespeare evidently liked, from his repeating it. Elbow is intent upon clearing his wife before Angelo from a scandal of Pompey; a scene abounding in the most ludicrous phraseology and rich caricature of justice-room evidence and examination: — the opening of the second act. Connected with this same scene figures a prodigious specimen of being, in the person of'Master Froth;' styled in the dramatis persona, 'Froth, a foolish gentleman.' Master Froth is a sample of the 'order in creation, "idea-less." ' He is one of that class of human beings who, like a certain class of reptiles, appear to exist quite as well without brains as with brains. Some amiable naturalist — Buffon, 7 mayhap — tried the experiment upon a tortoise, of taking out its brains, in order to ascertain whether the animal could dispense with its cerebral accomplishment. The brain of a tortoise being no larger than a pea, he theorised that the difference between a pea and nothing could make no difference to the poor beast. The result (it is said) confirmed the hypothesis; the poor beast blundered on without, as before with its pea of brain. And thus blunder on some human tortoises - brainless - through life; to all intents and purposes of mere going on, as well as though they had their full pea-complishment of skull furniture. But they may go right, or they may go wrong, as the case may be. If they go right, it is from pure good hap; if they go wrong, it is from utter 147

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

futility and incapacity to keep out of harm's way. Master Froth strays from the right path from sheer vapidity; he frequents low dissolute haunts from no graver cause than idleness and vacuity of mind. He fools away his time, his money, and his health only because he is master of his leisure and of'fourscore pound a year' [2.1.123],with ne'er a pea-pulp in his cranium to guide him in their due disposal. He just manages to 'blunder on,' and that is all. He has not so much beneath his 'most weak pia mater' as will help him to a single spontaneous notion. He never originates a remark; never offers an opinion. He can only answer; only return syllable-rejoinders to what is demanded of him: 'No, indeed;' 'Ay, so I did;' 'All this is true' [1.2.105, 108, 113]. These form the 'higher-level' of his ability. The only time he ventures upon an ascent above this 'tableland' of mind, and ventures at a reason for what he says, he flounders and pitches headlong. Directly he attempts a 'because' he is ruined! The Clown, in the course of the examination before the Provost and Escalus, asks Froth whether he has not a fancy for sitting in a certain room in their tavern; and he avers that he has so, adding, 'because it's an open room, and good for winter' [2.1.131—2]. Simple reply is the only safe course for Froth. Let him once open his mouth for anything beyond this, and he proclaims himself a fool — an aboriginal fool. By the way, he is knowing in dates. Your fellows who know nothing else are apt to be recondite in dates. They are unerring on points of chronology. So when the Clown, in his zeal for accuracy, appeals to Master Froth for confirmation whether his father did not die at Hallowmas, Froth corrects him, with — 'All-hollondeve' [2.1.126]. But after this exertion, and his breaking down in his sole 'because,' he drops into silence until the Lord Escalus summons him to answer his cross-questioning, and to receive a piece of wholesome advice. Upon which, pea-brain Froth once more relapses into his yeas and nays and his 'Yes, an't please you, sirs' [2.1.196]; and is again tempted beyond his depth in reply to his lordship's counsel to keep clear of mischief and tavern-haunting, with 'I thank your worship. For mine own part, I never come into any room in a tap-house but I am drawn in' [2.1.208—10]. You see he can't utter six words without betraying what a hopeless gull he is. Well may that brazen fellow, Pompey, bid Escalus look in Froth's face as a guarantee for his harmlessness. He may look into the ' "blankness" of that dark;' he will find nothing there: it is responsible only for vacancy; it is fatuity made absolute: - [Quotes 2.1.147-59: Pompey and Escalus]. The postulate granted, the logic is fair, and the conclusion self-evident. But if there is no 'harm' in the poor simpleton, neither is there any good in him. He is too effete, too flabby, too mean, or to be worth anything. As Rochefoucauld truly says, 'A fool has not stuff enough in him to be good. ' There can be no virtue in Froth; and he is Froth no less by nature than by name. No spirit, no essence, no body in him; nothing, in short, but 'Froth.' Pompey, the Clown, is a copy from the life, so far as his original calling goes. One class of the domestic fool-jester in our poet's time was a hireling attendant at the taverns and places of profligate resort in the suburbs of great towns. Here the dramatist, for his purpose, had to introduce such a personage; and he has drawn him with all the bold strong colours required by the occasion. But he has given him humour, in a degree redeeming the coarseness; and wit, that points the moral while it helps to withdraw attention from the grosser details of the picture that he judged it needful to draw. 148

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

The philosophy of making the Clown meet in the gaol, imprisoned for debt, so many of the idle young men about town whom he had formerly encountered in haunts of dissipation, is sound doctrine, and sufficiently indicates the motive which induced the treating of so untoward a subject. There is one speech he makes — a sharp satire upon respectable iniquitous trades — which alone lifts him into importance among the dramatis persona: — "Twas never merry world since, of two usuries, the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed, by order of law, a furr'd gown to keep him warm; and furr'd with fox and lamb skins, too, to signify, that craft being richer than innocency, stands for the facing [3.2.5-10]. If there be one speech more familiar than another in our mouths, when talking of Shakespeare, it is that, take what subject we may for discussion, we shall find that he has been beforehand with us, and (which is more) that he has left little or nothing to be said after him. Who would suppose that he had anticipated the modern boasted discovery of the impolicy, not to say the folly, of sending young delinquents to the common gaol for the purpose of amendment by correction? Yet, in the slight sketch of the reckless and incorrigible Barnardine we have a practical treatise upon the immorality, as well as the futility, of visiting crime with the indiscriminate punishment of incarceration. In the case of the character just referred to, the Duke is made to inquire of the Provost 'What is that Barnardine, who is to be executed in the afternoon?' [4.2.128—9]. The Provost replies 'A Bohemian born, but here nursed up and bred; one that is a prisoner nine years old' [4.2.130—31]. With that apparently casual but premeditated little fact, the poet, like a great moral philosopher, deduces the after life of the man; and with surpassing vividness, in a short scene, has he given that result in the mature criminal, which must naturally ensue from such a course of correction visited upon a nine years' victim. Barnardine has become, as the Provost describes him, 'A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal' [4.2.142—5]. The young delinquent who learns the force of morality, the power of justice, the rights of mankind, the duties of himself to his neighbour and of his neighbour to him, from prison-walls, having no other instruction for his tender years than the hard truths to be gathered from their stony tutelage, runs no chance of becoming any other than the brutal, insensible Barnardine. For the multitudes of Barnardines, prison-taught and prison-punished in actual existence, who will be responsible at the last great account? Those who adjust matters so that no other teaching is provided for juvenile thieves than prisons, gaols, houses of correction, and penitentiaries; or the childish malefactors themselves, who know no better than that to pilfer, to cheat, and to lie are legitimate means of gaining a livelihood, until taught that they are perilous to soul and body by the state education of the 'Stone Jug,' and bread and water? Shakespeare, in the story of Barnardine, read us a profound lesson in penal legislation two hundred and sixty-three years ago. May it be turned to profit now!... And from this episode, turn we to that point in the conduct of the plot referring to the second interview of Isabella with Angelo, while he is expecting her and is meditating his wicked purpose, for a specimen of self-knowledge, conveyed in 149

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

language that, for boldness and originality, is exceedingly striking. It is in the poet's finest manner: - [Quotes Angelo's soliloquy at 2.4.1—17]. And then, as she is coming into his presence, how fine the reflection upon his own agitation: - [Quotes 2.4.19-30]. Scan this writer as we may; come to him as often as we may, the more reason do we find for admiration. Some fresh beauty, some latent sense, more subtle meaning, some pregnant import, still starts to light as we scrutinise the passages. An instance occurs to me upon the present occasion. Hitherto I have not noticed the artful way in which he has made Angelo, at the commencement of Isabella's first interview with him, answer her at length in replying to her timid and hesitating attempts at pleading for her brother. But as she progresses, and gathers confidence and power, he gradually becomes silent, and even allows the bystanders' expressions of interest in her suit to be heard; and then, in the intensity of his own absorption in her and her argument, he utters those few strong self-communing words — 'She speaks; and it is such sense, that my sense breeds with it' [2.2.141-2]. The grandest writing, however, perhaps in the play, appears in the arguments produced on both sides with reference to the awful question of death. The Duke (as the Friar) characteristically would induce Claudio to look upon it as a gain, by balancing the bearing the evils of life, in opposition to a riddance of their burden. But Claudio has every inducement to cling to life. He is in love with life; he has strong affections, strong passions, and is condemned to death for yielding to their sway. In his craving for life, he would retain it even by the loss of his sister's honour. Perfectly are these characteristics sustained in the three persons of Isabella, Claudio, and the Duke. The speech of the Friar-duke to Claudio is a lofty argument, but it is a subtle Jesuitical composition; for it has all the air of one who is reasoning as a conventional casuist with a man about to die, and whom it is his object to persuade to indifference. In short, it is a philosophical 'condemned sermon.' He says — 'So then, you hope for pardon from Lord Angelo?' [3.1.1]. Claudio answers — [Quotes 3.1.2—41, including the Duke's 'Be absolute for death' speech]. This is the tranquil exposition of one who is upon very good terms with the world; who has the trade-wind of fortune in the 'shoulder of his sail;' and who contemplates the storm and shipwreck of life as a contingency, not as the most certain event in this world. People do not talk in that calm manner of the 'grim fiend' when he is glaring at them over the shoulder. Two stronger and more characteristic speeches on the opposite sides of a question surely never were penned by the same man. There is the stoical philosophy of the Duke, simply contemplating the event of death; and in the other, the terror and dismay of Claudio, who is trembling on the brink of eternity, and is about to be thrust over the precipice. The one is the philosophy of resignation, where there is no demand for it in the teacher himself; and the other a display of the futility of the argument, where the demand for resignation is absolute; the revolt of nature against the hollow plausibility for a contented endurance. The one a cool, a frigid ratiocination; the other, an awful and terrible reality. More powerful lines than these can never have been uttered. They are like a prolonged shriek: — [Quotes 3.1.117—31, Claudio's plea to Isabella]. As regards that portion of the plot of Measure for Measure which turns upon the 150

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Duke retiring from his government, and leaving the stringent execution of his neglected laws to a deputy, while he, in his monkish disguise, watched from under his cowl the progress of events, no useful purpose can result from such masquerading, seeing that when the law is about to be enforced, he comes forth in the nick of time and pardons all the delinquents. However, it makes an agreeable stage-mystery; and not the less so, from the audience being all the while admitted to the secret. The story itself is a deeply-interesting one, and has been more than once paralleled in history. . . . In a brief summary of the right tendency of this play, let it be observed that the only man who is deservedly punished is the grossly loose character, Lucio; and he is compelled to marry one fully worthy of him. Angelo having a sense of goodness, and being moreover a repentant sinner, is united to the virtuous woman whom he had treated with unkindness. Moreover, the Clown is converted into an under-gaoler, and the suburbs of infamy are all broken up. [Concludes with a four-page peroration on the glories of Shakespeare.] (497—521)

151

30 Georg Gottfried Gervinus, a play expressing equity, not justice 1863

From Shakespeare Commentaries by Dr. G. G. Gervinus, Professor at Heidelberg. Translated under the Author's Superintendence by F. E. Bunnett (2 vols, London, 1863), Volume II; revised edition (London, 1875). Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805—71), born in Darmstadt, a German historian and critic, was self-taught in English, Spanish, and French. He studied at Giessen in 1825 and at Heidelberg, where he was offered a position as private lecturer in 1831. His best-known work in Germany was the Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (5 vols, 1835—42), which covered one thousand years of German poetic national literature. His appointment at Gottingen in 1835 was abruptly ended after two years when he and six others protested against the suspension of the Hanoverian constitution. Gervinus eventually attained a professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 1844. His historical writings and political theories led to his being tried for high treason in Baden in 1853, but the state dropped the case. Although he published several works of historiography during his lifetime, Gervinus is best known today in the Englishspeaking world as the author of Shakespeare Commentaries, originally published in Leipzig as Shakespeare (4 vols, 1849—50). The material reprinted below comes from the one-volume New Edition, Revised by the Translator (London, 1875; reprinted in 1877), which has many stylistic changes from the 1863 edn.

[From Measure for Measure (from the section entitled 'Third Period of Shakespeare's Dramatic Poetry', which includes the major tragedies and the romances)] The vein of deep thought, which so strikingly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare's latter period, beats in the fullest pulse in Measure for Measure, the drama most closely linked to the comedies last discussed [The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, and Twelfth Night]. It was performed in the year 1604; and probably not written much earlier. The basis of the piece is an Italian tale in Giraldi Cinthio's Hekatomithi (8. 5), translated in Whetstone's Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 1582. The cruel and painful purport of this tale is briefly this. The Emperor's deputy in Inspruck, Juriste by name, who is enjoined to be guilty of nothing contrary to justice during his prince's absence, passes sentence of death upon a youth on account of the crime which Claudio commits in Measure for Measure', by the 152

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

double promise of marriage and the release of her brother, he seduces the pleading sister (Epitia) into the same crime, for which he had sentenced her brother, and orders him then not withstanding to be put to death and the corpse to be sent to his sister's house. The Emperor sentences his deputy to marry Epitia and then to be beheaded. At her intercession his life is spared, and she retains him as her husband. The same Whetstone who translated this tale had before (1578) published a piece in ten acts upon this subject, entitled Promos and Cassandra, which was never performed. Even he felt the necessity of moderating the repulsive tenor of the narrative. As the play was a comedy, owing to its happy conclusion, he interspersed the serious action with burlesque interludes, which caricature the meaning and thus offer a counterbalance to the painful impression. The sinning brother, as in Shakespeare, is not put to death; the gaoler sets him free, and carries the sister the head of a dead man instead of that of her brother. For the rest the details are similar to those in the novel. Shakespeare, on his part, has in his Measure for Measure still more moderated and purified the story by carrying out still further Whetstone's track. In his play the head of the dead man is not brought to the sister, but, with a more natural and less cruel object, to the judge. The sister's fall is avoided by the introduction and substitution of Angelo's former affianced one, and thus a change is effected in that part of the story which is the most offensive, because the marriage with the murderer of her brother, or with him who at any rate ordered the sentence of death to be executed, is extraordinarily degrading to the woman. In spite of all these improvements, however, most readers at the present day feel that all that is offensive in the tenor of the piece is not yet wholly removed. We are not inclined to pardon the poet for having brought upon the stage the cruel subjects of the Italian novelists both here, in All's Well that Ends Well, and in Cymbeline, and for having required us to look with the more sensitive eye on the representation of that which in narration falls less forcibly on the blunter ear. Measure for Measure, indeed, is performed even to this day in moral England, and that without abridgment or alteration, thus proving that the representation itself softens much which appears repugnant to us in the piece. Notwithstanding, the play found little favour with most English critics, Hunter, Knight, and others; even an admirer like Coleridge called this play the most painful or rather the only painful work among Shakespeare's dramas. ^ He considered the comic and tragic parts alike bordering on the detestable, the one disgusting, the other terrible; he called the pardon and marriage of Angelo degrading to the female character and not in conformity with the demands of severe, indignant justice; for cruelty combined with lust and infamous baseness could not be forgiven, because we could not consider them heartily repented of. These objections would be indisputable were we convinced from the course of action and the nature of the actors, that a sincere repentance on the part of Angelo was inconceivable; and were we to admit that 'severe, indignant justice' is the only true justice - a justice in this instance well employed. To form a correct judgment on these passions it is necessary that we should as usual go back to the motives of action and discover their psychological connection. A novel taken from Shakespeare's play, furnished with all his characteristic touches and with his representation of circumstances, and placed by the side of the original 153

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

source or by the side of Whetstone's play, would evidence, in the simplest and most striking manner, the wonderful difference from others which renders our poet so unique and distinct. What a richness of reflection do we meet with in Shakespeare when we search into the elements of the facts before us! What a depth in the characters, compelling attention from us even before we see them entangled in such painful intricacies! What a boldness in bringing the very noblest characters into these same odious intricacies, just as if he aimed at multiplying the difficulties and contradictions of the plot! And, moreover, what a careful construction of circumstances, so that from the outset our apprehension is calmed as to the gloomy incidents, and we are allowed to anticipate an end not altogether disastrous! In the first place, in how masterly a manner is the ground prepared on which the poet has placed the scene of these habits, characters, and incidents! The scene is laid in Vienna. Moral corruption here 'boils and bubbles till it o'erruns' [5.1.318]; society is destroyed by it, and all decorum is lost.... [Here Gervinus summarizes the issues raised in 1.1—3, describing the Duke as one whose 'whole nature is that of a man of moderation, gentleness, and calmness, his whole endeavour that of a circumspect philosopher,' while Angelo 'has the most nervous ambition never for a moment to lose his irreproachable reputation.'] . . . The Duke had learned that this Angelo was affianced to one Mariana, the sister of Frederick, a noble and famous naval hero. Before the appointed nuptials the brother perished at sea with his vessel and with the dowry of his sister; and the bridegroom was cruel and hard-hearted enough to forsake her who could now advance him no further either with her property or kindred; nay, he even pretended discoveries of her dishonour in order to give a colour to his proceedings. In this trait, also, we at once recognize a proud aspiration after rank, property, and importance, and a proud display of a highly sensitive morality; the poet has wisely started with this, just as in Much Ado about Nothing he preluded Claudio's subsequent deception by an earlier one, in order more definitely to mark out the character. The Duke, in conferring upon Angelo the post of deputy, has before him the double aim of testing how he will be affected in this wider field of action, to what steps his severe morality will lead him, and what influence his new power will exercise upon his character. The Duke himself pleads a journey as a pretext, but, disguised in a friar's habit, he watches all events in the immediate neighbourhood. The manner in which we see the circumspect man watching every incident, and, as it were, playing the part of Providence, has the effect of rendering us prepared and calm as the events unfold before us; all that is painful and the severe in them thus becomes much mitigated. In the play itself we perceive the superior scene-shifter and observer, before whom the action seems to pass like a drama within a drama; in this way we are unconcerned for the evil issue of the evil actions. In the novel, and in Whetstone's piece, no trace of this arrangement is to be found, nor of the delicacy which dictated it . . . [Gervinus summarizes the events of 2.1.] Claudio was betrothed to a near friend of his excellent sister Isabella; by a secret union she became his wife. The outward form of marriage was postponed because Juliet's dower remained in the coffer of her friends, whose favour had to be gained for the marriage. Juliet is a being who appears honourable by the mere friendship of 154

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Isabella; we only catch a glimpse of her in her prison, composed and repentant in her innermost soul. Claudio himself is designated as a man true to his word, all the less therefore was their mutual error free from any bad intent. He erred because, with a lively and sanguine nature, very different to Angelo's, he surrenders himself to every momentary impression. The poet shows us the excitable, easily influenced nature of the man very distinctly in the scene in which he is at first filled with the Duke's representations of the evils of life and the consolations of death, but immediately afterwards he is overwhelmed by his own ideas of the horrors of death, compared to which even the weariest life seems to him a Paradise. We perceive the same nature subsequently, when, in the first feeling of honour, he utterly rejects the price at which Isabella is to purchase his life, and immediately afterwards, when he pictures to himself the terror of death, he would gladly see her pay the price. 'He offended as in a dream' [2.2.4], the Provost himself says compassionately of Claudio; 'all sects, all ages smack of this vice' [2.2.5], and he alone is to fall a sacrifice to a pitiless law. He is to die by that Angelo who has been guilty towards Mariana of a much worse moral crime from a perfectly similar motive. For which, indeed, was the more guilty, the anticipation of matrimonial right on the part of the faithful Claudio, or Angelo's breach of faith and dissolution of a firmly contracted alliance? Must not the similarity of the circumstance have reminded the severe judge of his own guilt? The remembrance of it is abundantly brought home to him by Escalus, by Isabella, and by the Provost. But he thinks only of the letter of offence and law, and in his invulnerableness he feels himself secure against all the remonstrances and appeals to his own bosom. He forebodes not how soon even this his pride of virtue was to be confounded. Claudio sends a request to his sister Isabella, since his appeal cannot reach the Duke, that she would petition Angelo for his life. He knows that her youth and beauty will move him, he knows that she possesses happy mental endowments, that she is able to persuade 'when she will play with reason and discourse' [1.2.185]. He also knows that she sees through men judiciously; at any rate she proves it afterwards in his own case. She knows him thoroughly when she has to deliver Angelo's request to him; she sees through his weakness and love of life before she utters it. When he gives her his assurance she believes him; his firmness at first fulfils the expectations of her belief, but his despondency justifies still more her former fear. This knowledge of human nature, this mind and beauty, and these rich endowments for the world and its use, Isabella is on the point of carrying into the cloister. She possesses, like the Duke, in well-balanced proportion that two-sided nature, the capacity to enjoy the world according to circumstances or to dispense with it. She has already begun her noviciate; the rule of the cloister is known to her; to her its restraint is too slight rather than too strict. The low-minded Lucio, to whom an Angelo and his virtue, the Duke and his rank, the monk and his office, are not too sacred to be profaned by his aspersions, finds in Isabella alone one who is capable of inspiring him with respect by the impression of her nature. He sees her already as 'a thing ensky'd' [1.4.34], sainted by her renouncement, an immortal spirit, 'to be talked with in sincerity, as with a saint' [1.4.36—7]. When she learns her brother's crime she is rigorous enough to raise no objection to the law and its execution; nor is she so over-heroic in her 155

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

virtue as not to feel the human emotion of desire to save her brother's life. She sees in his case a punishable crime, but she sees no crime in pardoning him; she goes even so far in the presence of the judge as to estimate Claudio's fault less than she thinks it. Strong as she is, she does not hesitate to take upon herself and her whole sex the show of weakness, a great contrast in this to Angelo, who falls with a show of strength and moral austerity. When her virtue is put to the test, she exhibits herself in truth as the hero she had formerly supposed Angelo to be; and, sympathisingly as she had before felt for Claudio, as soon as he wishes to purchase his life with her shame, regardless of her twice-repeated reminder of their honourable deceased father, she indignantly rejects him, for she now regards his sin not as 'accidental, but a trade' [3.1.148]. However much this severity and heroism may seem in its asceticism and sobriety similar to Angelo's pride of virtue and show of honour, yet even in this she is the opposite to Angelo, being so far from all false pretensions that, upon the friarduke's remonstrance that 'virtue is bold and goodness never fearful' [3.1.208], she hesitates not to take upon herself the appearance of crime for the sake of a truly virtuous object; and agrees to his adventurous plan, which by a pious fraud is to procure safety to her brother, and to restore her faithless lover to the rejected Mariana. Sympathy with her brother leads her not to disregard the sin, but only the appearance of sin; feeling and womanliness are developed in the very action which seems to demand a masculine renunciation of womanly delicacy. A similar instance is again subsequently to be remarked in her when she is petitioned by Mariana to implore for the life of Angelo, whom she yet regards as the murderer of her brother. It may seem to require the strength of masculine asceticism, when she even now calms herself upon her brother's death that he 'had but justice' [5.1.448]; but it certainly demanded the utmost womanly gentleness and pity, and the absence of every feeling of spite and revenge, when in the same breath she petitions for Angelo's life. The whole character of this woman is pervaded by a mixture of commiseration and strength of character, of personal purity and forbearance for the weakness of others, of tenderness and firmness, of womanly timidity, and even mistrust of self and resolute decision of action, of modesty and ability, of humility and the exhibition of mental and moral power. She stands in the midst of the universal depravity, elevated in stainless purity of soul far above all the basenesses of crime, a being whose thoughts were already wafted above the earth, and whose feelings were free from the emotions of all common passion. . . . [Gervinus discusses the meetings between Isabella and Angelo in 2.2 and 2.4.] . . . The vein of tyranny which had slumbered in this man of cold conventionality awakes as soon as he is excited and has once cast the mask aside; he torments her now even with the threat of aggravating her brother's death. When he now believes himself to have reached his aim and has committed the one misdeed, he is drawn still further along the downhill path of crime; and more and more apparent becomes the deep shadow cast by the light of this richly-gifted man and the evil disposition hitherto concealed within his soul. He weighs in his mind the embarrassments which must result from the release of Claudio, whose death, with inexorable severity, he had solemnly announced from the public judgment seat. His pardon, unexpected as it would be, would support an accusation from Isabella, were she to venture one. But 156

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

that which expressly determines him, contrary to his promise, to permit the sentence against him to be carried into execution is the fear that the riotous youth may seek revenge for 'so receiving a dishonoured life' [4.4.31], and that he will not be restrained by the considerations which are to be expected from the shame and prudence of Isabella. . .. [Gervinus discusses Angelo's inner anguish, and concludes:] For must not death to a criminal of this character have been a greater benefit than a life of shame? His life is, however, to be spared and he is to be raised from his fall. The poet, in this character, has designed a new variation of his favourite theme of show. The task in Angelo is a worthy sequel for the actor who represented the gross hypocrisy arising from the systematic selfishness of a villain like Richard, and the regardless contempt of all show, based as in Prince Henry on the absence of all selfishness. The actor is here required to represent a man who is too little for the great, bold, dangerous projects of an ambitious selfishness; too noble for the weak errors of a vain self-love, who wavers negatively between the two, who aspires after honour, who would be a master in his political vocation, a saint in his moral life, but who, in the hour of temptation, is found as false and tyrannical in the one as he is hypocritical and base in the other. The task demands that the actor should not allow the mental endowments and the germ of good in this character utterly to be lost sight of in the midst of his fall; that he should let the original nobility of this nature appear through all the immoderate errors, and thus leave open the sure prospect of a radical reformation and repentance. Or could it be true, as Coleridge was of opinion, that sincere repentance on the part of Angelo was impossible? Certainly, after this deed, there was no more show for this man. The eyes of the tester would no more leave him; he would deceive no one again. He has henceforth only the prospect of becoming a great criminal or of raising himself to lasting virtue and honour. Isabella — she who has most to complain against him — petitions for him, and seems to trust in the germ of good within him. Mariana — she who takes the greatest interest in him — will keep him with all his faults, and she pleads in his behalf that 'men are moulded out of faults, and become much more the better, for being a little bad' [5.1.439—41]. She speaks in the sense of the prince in Whetstone's play, who says at last to the pardoned judge: 'If thou art wise, thy fall can make thee rise; when the lost sheep was found, for joy a feast was prepared.' But the severe indignant justice which Coleridge desired was not executed upon Angelo. Not though he had so solemnly challenged the whole rigour of the law against himself and had uttered his own sentence! Not though he even deserved a severer doom than Claudio, against whom he had committed a judicial murder when his own greater crime was to go unpunished! Not though his misdeed was magnified by a new moral disgrace, by a broken promise and an official error, in ordering an execution at an unusual hour. Not though from him to whom much is given more ought to be required! Even the Duke's own feeling and sentence seemed unrelentingly to condemn him. If he once pronounced himself a tyrant for suddenly punishing that which he had before overlooked, how must he then have regarded Angelo, who punished with death a crime less severe than that which he had committed himself? And, moreover, this severe condemnation had solemnly fallen from the lips of the Duke: — 157

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

An Angelo for Claudio, death for death: Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure, Like doth greet like, and Measure still for Measure. [5.1.409-11] This equal retribution has ever been the poetical expression of a 'severe and indignant justice,' and its sentence seemed here to be inexorably pronounced. Yet, apart from poetry, Angelo's doom would not be in law altogether in conformity with justice. Angelo's double crime — the disgrace of Isabella and the death of Claudio - had indeed not been carried out. The severest law could have pronounced upon Angelo only the highest chastisement for attempt. Moreover the Duke is not in earnest as to his sentence of retaliation; it is only one of those exciting tests which he has delighted in inflicting upon Claudio and Isabella and now upon Angelo. He says indeed expressly that Angelo shall die on the very block 'where Claudio stooped to death' [5.1.415], while the latter, by means of himself and his contrivances, is still alive. And how could the Duke execute the sentence of death on Angelo, when he had himself expressly led him upon this ground of temptation and trial by reviving severe discipline, and by confiding to him so high and slippery a position? How ashamed must he have stood before his Isabella, whose sense of justice was so strong that she would not want to see him punished for his intentions and thoughts; who was so mild and good that, even when she believed Claudio dead, she took into account in Angelo's favour the temptation to which he was exposed by her mere appearance! If she was ready thus to take a crime upon herself on account of the opportunity she had involuntarily afforded, must not the Duke have seriously charged himself with the temptation which he had consciously and wilfully occasioned? And how should he execute this severe act of punishment; he who shuddered to consign to death the gipsy Barnardine — a brute, a Caliban, a heavy stubborn malefactor? he, in whose heart, not 'severe indignant justice,' but mercy and mildness lay? he who demanded of the prince who bears the sword of heaven that he should pay to others neither more nor less than he could justify after weighing his own offences and respecting human weaknesses? And this indeed is not only the spirit of the Duke, but that of our whole play, in which the Duke is, as it were, the chorus: - namely, that true justice is not jealous justice, but that circumspect equity alone, which suffers neither mercy nor the severe letter of the law to rule without exception, which awards punishment not measure for measure, but with measure. Neither the lax mildness which the Duke had allowed to prevail and which he himself condemns, nor the over-severe curb which Angelo applied, is to be esteemed as the right procedure; the sluggishness which gives license to sin, and the system of intimidation which destroys the sinner with the sin, meet with the same condemnation. This play, in its strikingly practical character, has become like a defence of the corrective system, the only system of punishment which a poet's moral intuition could pronounce to be suitable to the world. The Duke loves to employ intimidation in suspense, threats, and torments of imagination, but in actual cases of penalty he permits mercy to rule when possible, thus giving opportunity for moral reformation. Like Escalus, he pursues sinners by habit and trade rather than the casual fallen one, the bawd and the seducer rather than the seduced; thrice 158

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

they warn even the more punishable of their punishment; and the poetic punishment which meets this trade in Pompey is not the removal of the person, but the investing of his crime with dishonour and with the detestation which belongs to the hangman's office. The Duke despairs not even of the dull Barnardine. His first thought upon the picture sketched of him is that he wants advice; and although in his own opinion this murderer has justly incurred the penalty of death, he attempts at last even in him the effect of instruction. It is for this reason that so much stress is laid throughout the play upon the mercy which mediates between severe justice and crime, and it is for this that the poet turns so decidedly against the absolute execution of the law, and the literal meaning of its letter. Whilst he quotes in Claudio's lips the word of God (Rom. 9:15): 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,' he looks with bitterness on the human justice which assumes the infallible position of that Judge, who even in his arbitrary will must appear just to us. But between man and man the poet desires that every sentence should by all means as much as possible have regard to the motives of the erring, and should certainly (to continue the words of the apostle) rest somewhat on 'him that willeth and him that runneth. ~ ' Thus, in Germany also, poetry, at the period of its revival in Goethe's youth, afforded a similar practical opposition to the inhuman and merciless punishment of errors in which human inclinations concurred, the strength of which and their proportion to our education and power of resistance we have not bestowed upon ourselves. The German poems of the former century, which stirred up all the feelings of humanity against the practice of capital punishment for child-murder, may be closely compared with this piece, which stood in very similar relation to equally barbarous English laws. Thus for instance Chalmers drew attention to the revival of a statute in 1604, which decreed death to all persons who married whilst their former husbands or wives were yet alive. ' But whilst our play in the first place recommends moderation in the exercise of justice, it occupies at the same time a far more general ground and extends this doctrine to all human relations, exhibiting, as it were, the kernel of that opinion so often expressed by Shakespeare of a wise medium in all things. It calls us universally from all extremes, even from that of the good, because in every extreme there lies an overstraining which avenges itself by a contrary reaction. There was good in the Duke's mildness, but it turned to the detriment of the common weal, and scattered the seeds of crime. There was good in Angelo's severity, but it erred throughout by the exaggeration of its aims, and, as in the case of Elbow, the question might have been put also with respect to him: 'Which is the wiser here? Justice or Iniquity?' [2.1.172]. There was good in Angelo's serious political studies, but the suppression of the feelings which accompanied them avenged itself by bursting asunder the unnatural restraints. There was good in his exalted virtue, but when he prided himself in it, he 'fell by virtue' [2.1.38]. If it is indeed excellent to have a giant's strength, the warning is given not to use it like a giant. We are dissuaded from all unbridled action, because the reaction will be restraint: — As surfeit is the father of much fast, So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint. [1.2.126—8] 159

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

As this doctrine of the harmful excess of all and even of good things lies in the facts, so it is to be found also in the images and similes of this poem so rich in maxims. Thus the crowd around the sick man who wish to help, becomes an injury; the crowd around the beloved prince for the sake of applause, becomes a burden. In a similar manner this doctrine lies in the characters and in the contrast of their position with regard to each other. The single character of Angelo, with the unnaturally overstrained exaggeration of his nature, counterbalances alone a series of contrasts; his severity counterbalances the mildness of the Duke, his sobriety the levity of Claudio, his heartlessness the tender weakness of his faithful Mariana, and his anxious adherence to the appearance of good, Lucio's indifference to the basest reputation. Between these extremes stands Isabella alone, a type of a complete human nature, rendering it plain that all extreme is but imperfect and fragmentary; that moderation is not weakness and indolence; that far rather it forms in man the true moral centre of gravity, which holds him secure from all waverings and errors, and qualifies him for the highest power which can be required of man. (485—504)

160

31 Walter Pater, 'the central expression' of Shakespeare's 'moral judgments' 1874

From 'A Fragment on Measure for Measure', The Fortnightly Review, NS 16 (July—Dec. 1874), 652—8. Revised as 'Measure for Measure' in Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (London, 1889), pp. 176—91; second edition (London, 1890), pp.176—91; third edition (London, 1895); fourth edition (London, 1901). I quote from the second edition, which regularizes the spelling of 'Shakespeare'; the third and fourth editions differ from the second only in pagination. Walter Horatio Pater (1839—94) was educated at the King's School in Canterbury and Queen's College, Oxford, where he studied German, read French on his own, and studied Greek under the great classicist Benjamin Jowett. He graduated in 1864 and in the same year became a fellow of Brasenose College. He is best known today for his association with the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly with Swinburne (No. 37). His most famous publications are Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (2 vols, 1885). Appreciations is a collection of previously published essays on such authors as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Browne, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as three essays on Shakespeare, including one on Love's Labour's Lost, one on 'Shakespeare's English Kings', and the slightly revised essay on Measure for Measure, which I quote from below.

In Measure for Measure, as in some other of his plays, Shakespeare has remodelled an earlier and somewhat rough composition to 'finer issues,' suffering much to remain as it had come from the less skilful hand, and not raising the whole of his work to an equal degree of intensity. Hence perhaps some of that depth and weightiness which make this play so impressive, as with the true seal of experience, like a fragment of life itself, rough and disjointed indeed, but forced to yield in places its profounder meaning. In Measure for Measure, in contrast with the flawless execution of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has spent his art in just enough modification of the scheme of the older play to make it exponent of this purpose, adapting its terrible essential incidents, so that Coleridge found it the only painful work among Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for the reader of to-day more than the usual number of difficult expressions; but infusing a lavish colour and a profound significance into it, so that under his touch 161

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

certain select portions of it rise far above the level of all but his own best poetry, and working out of it a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgments. It remains a comedy, as indeed is congruous with the bland, half-humorous equity which informs the whole composition, sinking from the heights of sorrow and terror into the rough scheme of the earlier piece; yet it is hardly less full of what is really tragic in man's existence than if Claudio had indeed 'stooped to death' [5.1.415]. Even the humorous concluding scenes have traits of special grace, retaining in less emphatic passages a stray line or word of power, as it seems, so that we watch to the end for the traces where the nobler hand has glanced along, leaving its vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully, in the rising of the style. The interest of Measure for Measure, therefore, is partly that of an old story told over again. We measure with curiosity that variety of resources which has enabled Shakespeare to refashion the original material with a higher motive; adding to the intricacy of the piece, yet so modifying its structure as to give the whole almost the unity of a single scene; lending, by the light of a philosophy which dwells much on what is complex and subtle in our nature, a true human propriety to its strange and unexpected turns of feeling and character, to incidents so difficult as the fall of Angelo, and the subsequent reconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleads successfully for his life. It was from Whetstone, a contemporary English writer, that Shakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio's 'rare history' of Promos and Cassandra, one of that numerous class of Italian stories, like Boccaccio's Tancred of Salerno, ' in which the mere energy of southern passion has everything its own way, and which, though they may repel many a northern reader by a certain crudity in their colouring, seem to have been full of fascination for the Elizabethan age. This story, as it appears in Whetstone's endless comedy, is almost as rough as the roughest episode of actual criminal life. But the play seems never to have been acted, and some time after its publication Whetstone himself turned the thing into a tale, included in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, where it still figures as a genuine piece, with touches of undesigned poetry, a quaint field-flower here and there of diction or sentiment, the whole strung up to an effective brevity, and with the fragrance of that admirable age of literature all about it. Here, then, there is something of the original Italian colour: in this narrative Shakespeare may well have caught the first glimpse of a composition with nobler proportions; and some artless sketch from his own hand, perhaps, putting together his first impressions, insinuated itself between Whetstone's work and the play as we actually read it. Out of these insignificant sources Shakespeare's play rises, full of solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty, the new body of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry, escaping from the imperfect relics of the old story, yet not wholly transformed, and even as it stands but the preparation only, we might think, of a still more imposing design. For once we have in it a real example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described as suggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hints only, brings into distinct shape the reader's own half-developed imaginings. Often the quality is attributed to writing merely vague and unrealised, but in Measure for Measure, quite certainly, Shakespeare has directed the attention of sympathetic readers along certain channels of meditation beyond the immediate scope of his work. 162

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Measure for Measure, therefore, by the quality of these higher designs, woven by his strange magic on a texture of poorer quality, is hardly less indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare's reason, of his power of moral interpretation. It deals, not like Hamlet with the problems which beset one of exceptional temperament, but with mere human nature. It brings before us a group of persons, attractive, full of desire, vessels of the genial, seed-bearing powers of nature, a gaudy existence flowering out over the old court and city of Vienna, a spectacle of the fulness and pride of life which to some may seem to touch the verge of wantonness. Behind this group of people, behind their various action, Shakespeare inspires in us the sense of a strong tyranny of nature and circumstance. Then what shall there be on this side of it - on our side, the spectators' side, of this painted screen, with its puppets who are really glad or sorry all the time? what philosophy of life, what sort of equity? Stimulated to read more carefully by Shakespeare's own profounder touches, the reader will note the vivid reality, the subtle interchange of light and shade, the strongly contrasted characters of this group of persons, passing across the stage so quickly. The slightest of them is at least not ill-natured: the meanest of them can put forth a plea for existence — 'Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live!' [2.1.223] — they are never sure of themselves, even in the strong tower of a cold unimpressible nature: they are capable of many friendships and of a true dignity in danger, giving each other a sympathetic, if transitory, regret — one sorry that another 'should be foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack' [1.2.190—1]. Words which seem to exhaust man's deepest sentiment concerning death and life are put on the lips of a gilded, witless youth; and the saintly Isabella feels fire creep along her, kindling her tongue to eloquence at the suggestion of shame. In places the shadow deepens: death intrudes itself on the scene, as among other things 'a great disguiser' [4.2.174], blanching the features of youth and oiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its disgraceful associations. As in Orcagna's fresco at Pisa, ' it comes capriciously, giving many and long reprieves to Barnardine, -who has been waiting for it nine years in prison, taking another thence by fever, another by mistake of judgment, embracing others in the midst of their music and song. The little mirror of existence, which reflects to each for a moment the stage on which he plays, is broken at last by a capricious accident; while all alike, in their yearning for untasted enjoyment, are really discounting their days, grasping so hastily and accepting so inexactly the precious pieces. The Duke's quaint but excellent moralising at the beginning of the third act does but express, like the chorus of a Greek play, the spirit of the passing incidents. To him in Shakespeare's play, to a few here and there in the actual world, this strange practical paradox of our life, so unwise in its eager haste, reveals itself in all its clearness. The Duke disguised as a friar, with his curious moralising on life and death, and Isabella in her first mood of renunciation, a thing 'ensky'd and sainted' [1.4.34], come with the quiet of the cloister as a relief to this lust and pride of life: like some grey monastic picture hung on the wall of a gaudy room, their presence cools the heated air of the piece. For a moment we are within the placid conventual walls, whither they fancy at first that the Duke has come as a man crossed in love, with Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, calling each other by their homely, English names, or at the nunnery among the novices, with their little limited privileges, where 163

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

If you speak you must not show your face, Or if you show your face you must not speak. [1.4.12—13] Not less precious for this relief in the general structure of the piece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, a creature wholly of Shakespeare's invention, told, by way of interlude, in subdued prose. The moated grange, with its dejected mistress, its long, listless, discontented days, where we hear only the voice of a boy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of the loveliest songs of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare's school,3 is the pleasantest of many glimpses we get here of pleasant places — the fields without the town, Angelo's gardenhouse, the consecrated fountain. Indirectly it has suggested two of the most perfect compositions among the poetry of our own generation. Again it is a picture within a picture, but with fainter lines and a greyer atmosphere: we have here the same passions, the same wrongs, the same continuance of affection, the same crying out upon death, as in the nearer and larger piece, though softened, and reduced to the mood of a more dreamy scene. Of Angelo we may feel at first sight inclined to say only guarda e passed. ' or to ask whether he is indeed psychologically possible. In the old story, he figures as an embodiment of pure and unmodified evil, like 'Hyliogabalus of Rome or Denis of Sicyll. ' But the embodiment of pure evil is no proper subject of art, and Shakespeare, in the spirit of a philosophy which dwells much on the complications of outward circumstance with men's inclinations, turns into a subtle study in casuistry this incident of the austere judge fallen suddenly into utmost corruption by a momentary contact with supreme purity. But the main interest in Measure for Measure is not, as in Promos and Cassandra, in the relation of Isabella and Angelo, but rather in the relation of Claudio and Isabella. Greek tragedy in some of its noblest products has taken for its theme the love of a sister, a sentiment unimpassioned indeed, purifying by the very spectacle of its passionlessness, but capable of a fierce and almost animal strength if informed for a moment by pity and regret. At first Isabella comes upon the scene as a tranquillising influence in it. But Shakespeare, in the development of the action, brings quite different and unexpected qualities out of her. It is his characteristic poetry to expose this cold, chastened personality, respected even by the worldly Lucio as 'something ensky'd and sainted, and almost an immortal spirit' [1.4.34-5], to two sharp, shameful trials, and wring out of her a fiery, revealing eloquence. Thrown into the terrible dilemma of the piece, called upon to sacrifice that cloistral whiteness to sisterly affection, become in a moment the ground of strong, contending passions, she develops a new character and shows herself suddenly of kindred with those strangely conceived women, like Webster's Vittoria, ' who unite to a seductive sweetness something of a dangerous and tigerlike changefulness of feeling. The swift, vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white spirit, and, stripped in a moment of all convention, she stands before us clear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties of the piece. Cassandra, the original of Isabella in Whetstone's tale, with the purpose of the Roman Lucretia in her mind, yields gracefully enough to the conditions of her brother's safety; and to the lighter reader of Shakespeare there may seem something harshly conceived, or psychologically impossible even, in the suddenness of the 164

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

change wrought in her, as Claudio welcomes for a moment the chance of life through her compliance with Angelo's will, and he may have a sense here of flagging skill, as in words less finely handled than in the preceding scene. 8^ The play, though still not without traces of nobler handiwork, sinks down, as we know, at last into almost homely comedy, and it might be supposed that just here the grander manner deserted it. But the skill with which Isabella plays upon Claudio's well-recognised sense of honour, and endeavours by means of that to insure him beforehand from the acceptance of life on baser terms, indicates no coming laxity of hand just in this place. It was rather that there rose in Shakespeare's conception, as there may for the reader, as there certainly would in any good acting of the part, something of that terror, the seeking for which is one of the notes of romanticism in Shakespeare and his circle. The stream of ardent natural affection, poured as sudden hatred upon the youth condemned to die, adds an additional note of expression to the horror of the prison where so much of the scene takes place. It is not here only that Shakespeare has conceived of such extreme anger and pity as putting a sort of genius into simple women, so that their 'lips drop eloquence' and their intuitions interpret that which is often too hard or fine for manlier reason; and it is Isabella with her grand imaginative diction, and that poetry laid upon the 'prone and speechless dialect' [1.2.183] there is in mere youth itself, who gives utterance to the equity, the finer judgments of the piece on men and things. From behind this group with its subtle lights and shades, its poetry, its impressive contrasts, Shakespeare, as I said, conveys to us a strong sense of the tyranny of nature and circumstance over human action. The most powerful expressions of this side of experience might be found here. The bloodless, impassible temperament does but wait for its opportunity, for the almost accidental coherence of time with place, and place with wishing, to annul its long and patient discipline, and become in a moment the very opposite of that which under ordinary conditions it seemed to be, even to itself. The mere resolute self-assertion of the blood brings to others special temptations, temptations which, as defects or overgrowths, lie in the very qualities which make them otherwise imposing or attractive; the very advantage of men's gifts of intellect or sentiment being dependent on a balance in their use so delicate that men hardly maintain it always. Something also must be conceded to influences merely physical, to the complexion of the heavens, the skyey influences, ' shifting as the stars shift; as something also to the mere caprice of men exercised over each other in the dispensations of social or political order, to the chance which makes the life or death of Claudio dependent on Angelo's will. The many veins of thought which render the poetry of this play so weighty and impressive unite in the image of Claudio, a flowerlike young man, whom, prompted by a few hints from Shakespeare, the imagination easily clothes with all the bravery of youth, as he crosses the stage before us on his way to death, coming so hastily to the end of his pilgrimage. Set in the horrible blackness of the prison, with its various forms of unsightly death, this flower seems the braver. Fallen by 'prompture of the blood' [2.4.178], the victim of a suddenly revived law against the common fault of youth like his, he finds his life forfeited as if by the chance of a lottery. With that instinctive clinging to life, which breaks through the subtlest casuistries of monk or 165

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

sage apologising for an early death, he welcomes for a moment the chance of life through his sister's shame, though he revolts hardly less from the notion of perpetual imprisonment so repulsive to the buoyant energy of youth. Familiarised, by the words alike of friends and the indifferent, to the thought of death, he becomes gentle and subdued indeed, yet more perhaps through pride than real resignation, and would go down to darkness at last hard and unblinded. Called upon suddenly to encounter his fate, looking with keen and resolute profile straight before him, he gives utterance to some of the central truths of human feeling, the sincere, concentrated expression of the recoiling flesh. Thoughts as profound and poetical as Hamlet's arise in him; and but for the accidental arrest of sentence he would descend into the dust, a mere gilded, idle flower of youth indeed, but with what are perhaps the most eloquent of all Shakespeare's words upon his lips. As Shakespeare in Measure for Measure has refashioned, after a nobler pattern, materials already at hand, so that the relics of other men's poetry are incorporated into his perfect work, so traces of the old 'morality,' that early form of dramatic composition which had for its function the inculcating of some moral theme, survive in it also, and give it a peculiar ethical interest. This ethical interest, though it can escape no attentive reader, yet, in accordance with that artistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled, is not to be wholly separated from the special circumstances, necessities, embarrassments, of these particular dramatic persons. The old 'moralities' exemplified most often some rough-and-ready lesson. Here the very intricacy and subtlety of the moral world itself, the difficulty of seizing the true relations of so complex a material, the difficulty of just judgment, of judgment that shall not be unjust, are the lessons conveyed. Even in Whetstone's old story this peculiar vein of moralising comes to the surface: even there, we notice the tendency to dwell on mixed motives, the contending issues of action, the presence of virtues and vices alike in unexpected places, on 'the hard choice of two evils,' on the 'imprisoning' of men's 'real intents' [5.1.450-4]. Measure for Measure is full of expressions drawn from a profound experience of these casuistries, and that ethical interest becomes predominant in it: it is no longer Promos and Cassandra, but Measure for Measure, its new name expressly suggesting the subject of poetical justice. The action of the play, like the action of life itself for the keener observer, develops in us the conception of this poetical justice, and the yearning to realise it, the true justice of which Angelo knows nothing, because it lies for the most part beyond the limits of any acknowledged law. The idea of justice involves the idea of rights. But at bottom rights are equivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the recognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands, or our thoughts, is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love. 'Tis very pregnant: The jewel that we find we stoop and take it, Because we see it; but what we do not see We tread upon, and never think of it. [2.1.23-6] 166

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

It is for this finer justice, a justice based on a more delicate appreciation of the true conditions of men and things, a true respect of persons in our estimate of actions, that the people in Measure for Measure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of this play is full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare's poetry, so in its ethics it is an epitome of Shakespeare's moral judgments. They are the moral judgments of an observer, of one who sits as a spectator, and knows how the threads in the design before him hold together under the surface: they are the judgments of the humourist also, who follows with a half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, the various ways of human disposition, and sees less distance than ordinary men between what are called respectively great and little things. It is not always that poetry can be the exponent of morality; but it is this aspect of morals which it represents most naturally, for this true justice is dependent on just those finer appreciations which poetry cultivates in us the power of making, those peculiar valuations of action and its effect which poetry actually requires. (176—91)

167

32 Edward Dowden, a dark and bitter play 1875

From Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1875); 3rd edition revised (London, [c.1879]); 4th edition (London, 1879); reprinted many times. Edward Dowden (1843-1913) was born in a suburb of Cork, Ireland, to a welloff merchant and landowner. He was privately educated and then formally matriculated Trinity College, Dublin, at age sixteen. A precocious student, he studied philosophy and won academic prizes and at age twenty received his B.A. and four years later his M.A. In 1867 he was appointed to the Chair of Oratory and English at his alma mater and remained a professor there until he died. A prolific scholar and critic (and even poet) who wrote books on Southey (1879), Spenser (1882), Shelley (1886), and Browning (1904), as well as French literature, he is best known for his work on Shakespeare, including Shakspere (London, 1877), editions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, and numerous essays on the playwright, including 'Shakspeare's Portraiture of Women', Contemporary Review, 47 (1885), 517-35 (reprinted in Transcripts and Studies, [London, 1888]), which contains part of a paragraph on Isabella. However, his best known and most influential work is Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, which demonstrates a decidedly biographical and psychological approach to the playwright's work that was influenced by Gervinus (No. 30) and itself influenced many subsequent critics. The excerpts below are from the fourth edition.

[From 'Preface to the Third Edition'. Dowden discusses Julius Caesar and Hamlet, both 'tragedies of thought rather than of passion', their 'chief characters' failing 'through some weakness or deficiency rather than through crime'.] After Shakespeare had written these two tragedies, or while he was writing them, he continued to write comedy. But the genial spirit of comedy was deserting him. Twelfth Night resumes all the admirable humorous characteristics of the group of comedies which it completes. Then the change comes; All's Well that Ends Well is grave and earnest; Measure for Measure is dark and bitter. In the first edition of this work I did not venture to attempt an interpretation of Troilus and Cressida. I now believe this strange and difficult play was a last attempt to continue comedy made when Shakespeare had ceased to be able to smile genially, and when he must be either ironical, or else take a deep, passionate and tragical view of life, (vi) 168

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

[Discusses Troilus and Cressida and then presents a table in which he groups plays; among '8. Later Comedy', we find the following subgroup:] (c) Serious, dark, ironical. All's Well (? 1601-02). Measure for Measure (1603). Troilus and Cressida (? 1603; revised 1607?). ( x) . . . In the Later Comedies, again, it is quite remarkable how Shakespeare (generally in the portions of these plays which are due to his own invention) repeats, with variations, the incident of a trick or fraud practiced upon one who is a self-lover, and its consequences, grave or gay. Thus Falstaff is fatuous enough to believe that two English matrons are dying of love for him, and is made the victim of their merry tricks. Malvolio is made an ass of by the mischievous Maria taking advantage of his solemn self-esteem; Beatrice and Benedick are cunningly entrapped, through their good-natured vanity, into love for which they had been already predisposed; the boastful Parolles is deceived, flouted, and disgraced by his fellow-soldiers; and (Shakespeare's mood growing earnest, and his thoughts being set upon deep questions of character) Angelo, the self-deceiver, by the craft of the Duke, is discovered painfully to the eyes of others and to his own heart, (xi—xii) [From 'Chapter II. 'The Growth of Shakespeare's Mind and Art'] Of the group of comedies which belong to this period the two latest in date are probably Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well. When the former of these plays was written Shakespeare was evidently bidding farewell to mirth; its significance is grave and earnest; the humorous scenes would be altogether repulsive were it not that they are needed to present without disguise or extenuation the world of moral licence and corruption out of and above which rise the virginal strength and severity and beauty of Isabella. At the entrance to the dark and dangerous tragic world into which Shakespeare was now about to pass stand the figures of Isabella and of Helena, — one the embodiment of conscience, the other the embodiment of will. Isabella is the only one of Shakespere's women whose heart and eyes are fixed upon an impersonal ideal, to whom something abstract is more, in the ardour and energy of her youth, than any human personality. Out of this Vienna in which Corruption boils and bubbles Till it o'errun the stew, [5.1.318-19] emerges this pure zeal, this rectitude of will, this virgin sanctity. Isabella's saintliness is not of the passive, timorous, or merely meditative kind. It is an active pursuit of holiness through exercise and discipline. She knows nothing of a Manichean hatred of the body; the life runs strongly and gladly in her veins; simply her soul is set upon things belonging to the soul, and uses the body for its own purposes. And that the life of the soul may be invigorated she would bring every unruly thought into captivity, 'having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience.' 169

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Isab. And have you nuns no farther privileges? Fran. Are these not large enough? Isab. Yes, truly. I speak not as desiring more; But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood. [1.4.1-5] This severity of Isabella proceeds from no real turning away on her part from the joys and hopes of womanhood; her brother, her schoolfellow Julia, the memory of her father are precious to her; her severity is only a portion of the vital energy of her heart; living actively she must live purely; and to her the cloister is looked upon as the place where her energy can spend itself in stern efforts towards ideal objects. Bodily suffering is bodily suffering to Isabella, whose 'cheek-roses' [1.4.16] proclaim her physical health and vigour; but bodily suffering is swallowed up in the joy of quickened spiritual existence: — Were I under the terms of death The impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies, And strip myself to death, as to a bed That longing have been sick for ere I'd yield My body up to shame. [2.4.100-4] And as she has strength to accept pain and death for herself rather than dishonour, so she can resolutely accept pain and death for those who are dearest to her. When Claudio falters back dismayed from the immediate prospect of the grave, Isabella utters her piteous 'Alas, alas!' [3.1.132] to perceive the tenderness and timorousness of his spirit; but when he faintly invites her to yield herself to shame for his sake, she severs herself with indignation, not from her brother, not from Claudio, but from this disgrace of manhood in her brother's form — this treason against fidelity of the heart: O, you beast! O, faithless coward! O, dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? [3.1.135—7]

Take my defiance! Die; perish! [3.1.142-3] Isabella does not return to the sisterhood of Saint Clare. Putting aside from her the dress of religion, and the strict conventual rule, she accepts her place as Duchess of Vienna. In this there is no dropping away, through love of pleasure or through supineness, from her ideal; it is entirely meet and right. She has learned that in the world may be found a discipline more strict, more awful than the discipline of the convent; she has learned that the world has need of her; her life is still a consecrated life; the vital energy of her heart can exert and augment itself through glad and faithful wifehood, and through noble station more fully than in seclusion. To preside over this polluted and feculent Vienna is the office and charge of Isabella, 'a thing ensky'd and sainted' [1.4.34]: 170

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

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. [1.1.35-40] (82-5)

171

33 Denton J. Snider, mediation by the monastic life 1875

From 'Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure"', The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 9 (1875), 412—25; reprinted with slight revisions in System of Shakespeare's Dramas (2 vols, St. Louis, 1877), II, 7-24. Denton Jaques Snider (1841—1925) was born in Ohio, matriculated at Oberlin College, Ohio, and received his B.A. in 1862. After serving in the Union Army for a short time, he taught Greek and Latin in the College of the Christian Brothers, St. Louis, Missouri. He met William Torrey Harris and Henry C. Brokmeyer, members of the 'St. Louis Movement', studied Hegel, and became a founding member of the St. Louis Philosophical Society and a regular contributor to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (edited by Harris and published in St. Louis). Apart from some years travelling, he spent most of his life in St. Louis. Snider was a prolific writer and published books on Greece and Rome, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare (three works), and Goethe, as well as works of psychology, philosophy, autobiography, and poetry. The essay below is reprinted from System of Shakespeare's Dramas.

[From Volume II, 'Part. I — Legendary Drama. Comedy, or Mediated Drama — V. Group. — Monastic Life, Measure for Measure'. Denton has an elaborate Hegelian framework into which he organizes Shakespeare's plays: 'The Legendary Drama, in general, employs collisions in the Family, with the State in the background; the Historical Drama employs collisions in the State, with the Family in the background. That is, the one is essentially domestic, the other essentially political' (Introduction, I, 38). 'Legendary Drama' is divided into Tragedy and Comedy. 'In Comedy, which is also named the Special or Mediated Drama, the essential point is the Mediation; this, also, is of two kinds, real and ideal. When the collision is mediated by the instrumentalities of the real world, this species of Drama may be called real. On the contrary, it may be called ideal when the collision is mediated through the introduction of an ideal world. Both indicate reconciliation, though by different means' (Introduction, I, 41). Measure for Measure, the only play in its group, follows 'IV. Group — Pure Comedies' (including The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Love's Labor's Lost, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Denton explains that Measure for Measure forms 'a kind of transition out of the real comedies, which have gone before, into the more purely ideal comedies, which are to follow' (II, 6). These latter groups 172

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

include 'VI Group — Idyllic Life' (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline) and VII Group - Pure Ideal World' (A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest).] This play belongs to the class of special or mediated dramas, in accordance with the distinction made in the preceding essays. The collision has a tragic depth and earnestness; the fundamental tone of the whole work is serious and even dark, notwithstanding the comic nature of certain portions. The conflict, however, is mediated, and the persons are saved from a tragic fate by the intervention of the World of Mercy. This form of mediation is the main thing to be noticed, and constitutes the distinguishing characteristic of the play. Hereafter we shall see pastoral communities and ideal realms of various kinds introduced for the purpose of healing the disrupted elements of society. Now it is religion as an organized system which is brought in with its principles, and which seeks to determine the affairs and harmonize the conflicts of the State. Another peculiarity of the present drama is that the religious world is not transferred to a territory entirely removed from the political world, but both exist together in this country of Vienna. The ideal realm is, hence, the Church in one of its manifestations, namely, monastic life. The treatment will be, accordingly, quite distinct from that of the other mediated dramas which are to follow. There are three general movements of the entire action. The first is short, but must be considered as a part coordinate with the other two. It shows the disruption which is taking place in the whole social fabric of the country. The ruler, who is the embodiment of mercy, is unable to administer the law on account of excessive leniency towards crime; he leaves the State and betakes himself to the religious realm — enters a monastery. The woman, who is the representative of chastity, is preparing to abandon society and the Family; she also is eager to lead the religious life of the cloister. That is, Mercy and Chastity have taken flight from the secular world. The second movement portrays the conflict in this secular world between formal justice and incontinence; the religious sphere, as a distinct organized system, undertakes from without to mediate the difficulty, and fails. The third movement indicates the true solution — the diremption between the secular and religious elements is overcome, and both are united into a principle higher than either taken separately; mercy becomes a constituent of the State, and chastity a constituent of the Family; formal justice — or, rather, injustice — ceases, as well as the illicit relation of the sexes, in the two grand ethical institutions of man. The merciful monk returns and becomes the just ruler, while the chaste woman is made his wife. It is thus a double restoration from a double disruption. I. 1. In the first movement the first thread has its central figure in the person of the Duke. Mercy is his predominating trait, but mercy in its one-sided manifestation. Through the pardon of offences and their tacit permission, he has suffered the law to become of no validity, and indeed to fall into utter contempt. The result is universal crime and disregard of all authority. He is aware of the evils, but cannot bring himself to execute those enactments which he has permitted to be violated. He must, therefore, abandon the helm of government to others and flee. The office of ruler, who is to administer justice, is too severe for his merciful nature, and, moreover, he 173

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

has a preference for a retired, contemplative life. Accordingly, the very first scene of the play represents him as transferring his authority to his deputy. He recognizes his mistake to be excessive leniency; to restore respect for law and to secure society there is need of a sharp, decisive remedy. He, therefore, selects as his substitute a man of quite the opposite character, a man who will enforce the law rigidly to the letter. Angelo is taken, whose temperament is cold and inflexible, and whose knowledge of the statutes is most ample. But his chief characteristic is the strictest adherence to formal justice. He is, therefore, the person best fitted by nature to enforce the old enactments which have fallen into desuetude, and, in general, to restore the reign of law, which seemed to have taken its departure from society. Angelo, too, seems to be as rigid with himself as with others; he has reduced to submission the fierce appetites and passions of the body; he is ready to subsume himself under his own principles. Such are the grounds for his selection by the Duke. We may now expect the sway of justice in all its severity, for it is the world in which Angelo moves — is the fundamental consciousness from which spring all his convictions and actions. It would seem, however, that the Duke, notwithstanding his laudations of Angelo, has still a lingering suspicion of his deputy's weakness, or at least believes that mercy cannot be entirely banished from the administration of the law. One ugly fact in Angelo's history is known to him, as will hereafter appear, namely, the treatment of Mariana. Hence the Duke will not leave Vienna, though he gives out that he has gone forth to Poland; but he must remain in the country to watch an experiment whose success he does not regard as absolutely certain, if he be true to his sense of duty and to his benevolent character. He cannot deliver his people over entirely to formal justice, if he have any faith at all in his own principle of mercy. His stay is, therefore, necessitated by the situation. The Duke has also thrown up another bulwark against the extreme tendencies of Angelo's disposition. Escalus has been appointed to the second position in the State, with large authority, and he possesses also great influence on account of his character and his age. In this man the element of mercy again becomes the predominant trait. He will try to tame the legal ferocity of his associate, and in his own judicial capacity he will decide with moderation - indeed, with leniency. The Duke, to a certain extent, reappears in him — not as supreme now, but as subordinate; for it is the principle of both of them which has broken down the administration of the State, and, hence, must not again be made paramount. Such seems to be the reason of this double authority, and such the true relation between Angelo and Escalus. Mercy and justice thus form the contrast of their characters. But whither will the Duke go when he quits the State, with its laws and institutions? He can only follow the bent of his nature and enter the pure realm of mercy, if there be such in existence. He will find it in the organization of the Christian Church. When, therefore, he abandons secular life, he can betake himself only to a religious life. Accordingly, he enters a monastery — assumes the habit of a holy friar, whose life is devoted to works of benevolence and mercy. His special duty is now that of an adviser, confessor, mediator; he is to soothe the individual in affliction, and harmonize the struggles incident to weak humanity. He is not of the world, but 174

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

descends into it as a power from without — as a messenger from Heaven — in order to reconcile its difficulties and to banish its doubts. Religion means mediation, and the priest must mediate, not only between God and man, but also between man and man. Therefore the Duke, as friar, henceforth becomes the chief mediator of the play. But we must not fail to notice the other determinations which flow from his situation. He will have to be in disguise, for he remains in his own city; in his ordinary garb could not help being generally known to the citizens. He is thus compelled to act a species of falsehood from the start. Moreover, his influence is external — comes from a sphere beyond — for he no longer possesses any authority to realize his views and intentions. He is, hence, forced to resort to trickery and deception in order to accomplish his ends. Thus a moral taint is thrown upon his character and calling which no plea of good results can wholly remove. But his shrewd devices totally fail of their purpose. The lesson seems to be that this separation of the secular and religious worlds has a tendency to pervert both from their true nature, for both thus become immoral, though in different manners; they must be united and reconciled in the institutions of man. Let us now attempt to state, in abstract terms, the movement of which the Duke is the center. Mercy finds itself unable to stem the lawlessness of the time; it is too kindhearted, and rests too much in the emotions. It permits offenders to go free and violence to remain unpunished; it, therefore, saps the foundation of law and institutions, which must always rest upon the responsibility of man for his deed. The whole realized world of right seems to be crumbling to ruin; such is the result of mercy in its one-sidedness. It therefore takes its flight from the State, after resigning all authority into the hands of justice —justice in its extreme severity — which now in its turn undertakes to control society. The course of the play will show that justice, too, breaks down; it destroys what it ought to protect, and violates its own principle; it becomes, in fact, just the opposite of itself, namely, the direst wrong. Such is the outcome of justice in its one-sidedness. Mercy, therefore, must return to the world — but not in order to destroy, or even to displace, justice, for thus the old conflict would be renewed; but both must be reconciled and united in one principle. Each one, taken by itself, is inadequate and one-sided; only their unity is true justice or true mercy. 2. We are now ready to take up the second thread of the first movement. The Duke alone cannot completely represent dissatisfaction with the present condition of society; he must have his counterpart in the other sex, whose principle is chastity, and whose institution is the Family. Isabella is the embodiment of this element of female virtue; but we observe that she, too, is about to abandon the world for a religious life. The motives to this step on her part are not fully stated, but are sufficiently implied. The licentiousness of the time must make society distasteful to her pure nature; she will, therefore, leave it, and seek a life of perpetual chastity in the nunnery. But even there the rules are not strict enough for her, as she says when she is seeking admission. The intensity of her principle is thus made manifest. Religion is, hence, the ideal realm to which she flees in order to avoid the conflicts of life, and to preserve intact her deepest conviction. She will also perform important mediations hereafter in the play. 175

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

To express this thought abstractly, chastity sees itself assailed and disregarded in the world; it can find a solution of the difficulty only by an entire annihilation of the sexual relation - that is, mankind will be pure when it is destroyed. Chastity, therefore, betakes itself to a realm of its own, and leaves behind merely incontinence, which is also destructive of man. Both sides are thus negative, inadequate. The true solution of the problem is that chastity and the sexual relation must be reconciled and united in the Family, which then controls both elements, and becomes a religious institution in the truest sense. The Duke and Isabella, in their devotion to one virtue, or to one phase of a virtue, have abjured the domestic relation; the Poet, in order to bring about a positive solution, has to make the monk a husband and the nun a wife. Let us now sum up our results, and mark the necessary transition to the next movement. There has taken place a spiritual breach, which produces two worlds the religious and secular. The religious world has two principles — mercy and chastity — which principles have been taken away from the secular world. In the latter, therefore, remain abstract justice, on the one hand — for mercy has departed, and the illicit sexual relation on the other hand — for chastity has fled from society to the cloister. Such is the logical result of the flight of the Duke and Isabella to their monastic life. In the secular world, therefore, two principles are now found which can produce only the most bitter conflict — formal law undertakes to root out licentiousness. II. 1. The second movement exhibits this conflict, which is the main theme, and constitutes the greatest portion of the play. Its elements have already been indicated, and may be divided into three threads. The first thread comprises the religious element — the Duke and Isabella, and some other minor characters, who by their functions are the mediators of the conflicts which are about to arise. They will be considered in their relation to those upon whom they work. 2. The second thread is made up of the instruments of justice, from the deputy down to the pettiest officer. The characters in this class are contrasted on the principles of mercy and justice. The difference between Angelo and Escalus in this respect was before noted. In the humane Provost of the prison, mercy becomes again the predominant trait, while in the brutal executioner, Abhorson, justice shows its most revolting feature. The constable Elbow, in a low sphere, is a stickler for legality, like Angelo in a high sphere; both, too, are guilty of a violation of the law which they execute. The law must now be enforced in all its severity. The particular form of its violation which will be taken by the Poet can easily be inferred from the flight of Isabella, the representative of virgin purity. One of the primal institutions of man is the Family, whose true existence depends, not only upon the mutual fidelity of husband and wife, but also upon the chastity of man and woman. Hence legislation has always sought to erect barriers against the passions of the human race, in order to protect this institution. But in spite of every effort the evil has not been extirpated, and in all civilized societies there is a despised and outlawed class which has been called the negative Family. So it is, so it has been, and will probably continue to be; the fact alone is sufficient for our present purpose. The law against incontinence was the one that was first taken by Angelo, and of whose enforcement there was, of course, the greatest need. An old enactment which 176

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

had long lain dormant, and which prescribed death as the punishment for the offence, is suddenly raked from its obscurity and executed with rigor. Here was formal justice, undoubtedly. Angelo was technically correct — the law had never been repealed — yet his conduct under the circumstances was palpably unjust. But the character of the deputy is to adhere simply to this formal side, to the neglect of all others. 3. The third thread is now to be unfolded. The whole world of incontinence, in all its phases, must come up for portraiture, since it is the object against which the law directs its shaft. Angelo proposes to sweep it out of existence; hence it must appear, in order to be swept out of existence. Such is the reason for the introduction of this element; to be exhaustive, the theme had to be treated. But it has brought the play into great discredit. The question has been asked whether such a subject is suitable for artistic treatment. If Art excludes the Ugly and Repulsive - in general, the Negative — then there can be but one answer. But a critical canon of this sort would exclude from Art every great poem of modern times. Such a subject cannot upon any general principle be stricken from the list of artistic themes; the most that can be said is that the Poet was unnecessarily coarse and revolting in his portraiture. But, to anyone who takes delight in depth of thought and completeness of treatment, this drama must furnish a great and permanent satisfaction. (a.) The incontinent world, which the critic has also to consider, is divided into two very distinct groups of people, between whom the Poet makes the greatest difference — quite the difference between guilt and innocence. Yet both are liable to the law, and must suffer punishment. The first group is composed of the most degraded members of the negative Family above mentioned — those who have lost both chastity and fidelity to the individual, these two virtues being an object of purchase and sale. Here we remark that loathsome sore of modern society known as 'social evil.' As before stated, it assails the existence of the Family, since the latter depends upon the absolute and unreserved devotion of one man and one woman to each other. 'Social evil,' therefore, destroys the primitive natural basis of the Family. The Poet has laid much stress, and gone into great detail, upon this not very attractive element of his play. All its essential phases are portrayed — the persons, their talk, their consciousness. The woman is there, the 'unfortunate female;' also the besotted habitues', still again the more fashionable customers — soldiers, apparently — Lucio, and two other 'gentlemen.' Upon them the law falls with a heavy hand; they are dragged before court, and dismissed with an admonition by the good Escalus. For a second offence they are again brought in, and all sent to prison, which is now full of this class of people, so that the clown compares it with Mistress Overdone's own house. Lucio, one of these persons, seems to be not very consistently drawn in his various acts and relations. His connection with Isabella is surprising, since they cannot have much in common. He is, perhaps, the meanest character to be found in Shakespeare. The only purpose of his life is lust; he is utterly devoid of any ethical principle — hence is absolutely hollow. Decency, truth, fidelity, are meaningless to him except as they may subserve his passion. He jeers at and betrays the clown, his own tool; he vilifies the Duke; he informs on the woman who has taken care of his own illegiti177

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

mate offspring. Thus he is faithless, lying, slanderous, as well as lecherous. Shakespeare has elsewhere portrayed villainy in colossal proportions, yet with some powerful motive, but meanness he has concentrated in Lucio. The reader will be ready to excuse any further details upon this part of the drama, though the Poet evidently considered it of great importance. (b.) It is the second group, however, of this incontinent world which gives rise to the leading incidents of the play. Its persons differ from the persons of the first group in the fact that both parties — men and women — have fidelity, but have lost chastity — that is, they are true to one another, though they have violated the commandment. It is the class which are often said to love 'not wisely, but too well' (Othello, 5.2.344). Such are Claudio and Juliet. It will be noticed that these possess the essential basis of the Family, namely, fidelity to the individual; but their fault, equally with the former case, comes under a violation of law which inflicts the penalty of death upon the man. Claudio is willing to have the marital rite performed; his intention is to be true to his betrothed; but nothing can help him against the stern deputy. Such is the conflict; Claudio is, in spirit, the husband of Juliet, but has failed to comply with the form, which, however, he is ready to do at once. Shall he now suffer the same punishment as one who transgresses in full, one who is both unchaste and faithless? In order to rescue him from death, the mediations of the poem are introduced. Claudio's sister, Isabella, who is just about to become a nun, is hastily called upon to intercede with the deputy for the life of her brother. She at once strikes the heart of the subject; she pleads the cause of mercy against the rigor of the law; she alludes to the redemption of all mankind through the Saviour against the strict demands of justice. Her thought is similar to that of Portia, in Merchant of Venice, on a similar occasion.^' Finally, she bids him think whether he is not guilty of the same offence, and so condemns himself in his own sentence. In the second interview, the deputy says that he will save the life of her brother on condition she yields up her honor to him, to which proposition she gives an indignant refusal. Let us consider, for a moment, the logical bearing of these two scenes. Virgin innocence comes to plead for incontinence. Isabella feels the conflict within herself in making such a plea, but, on the other hand, the life of a brother is at stake. She tries to soften the offense in every way — she who has placed chastity the highest in her vow. This is what seduces the deputy, with all his severity of character. Virtue pleading for its own overthrow can alone touch his rigor. Accordingly, he replies in substance, with logical precision: If incontinence be so trivial an offence, yield to me. Thus Angelo falls — becomes the violator of his own deepest principle, namely, legality. The man who adheres to form alone must always exhibit the same weakness. If he had loved chastity as much as he did the law, he could never have fallen. Just the opposite is the case with Isabella. Though inconsistent in her request, she spurns his proposal; for her, chastity is the highest principle. Isabella, therefore, can no longer plead for her brother on such grounds, and Angelo can no longer assert his own innocence. Angelo has lost his integrity, but Isabella has not obtained her request; Claudio's safety must be brought about by some new means. But another conflict and more anguish await Isabella. She goes to her brother and tells him of her rejection of the base proposition of the deputy, expecting his admira178

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

tion and approval. Great is her disappointment. But how could she expect that her brother, who cared so little for chastity, would be willing to sacrifice his life for her purity? He asks her to submit, but she, true to her principle, again indignantly refuses, and breaks out into a curse upon her incontinent brother. Thus Isabella passes triumphantly through her double ordeal against deputy and brother. This plan has now failed to save Claudio; another mediator must be brought to his rescue. This is the Duke, disguised as a friar. He designs to overreach Angelo in his lustful proposal. A young lady, once betrothed to, but now abandoned by, the deputy, is substituted for Isabella. This is the essential turning-point of the drama, and it must be carefully noted. The disguised Duke, in order to save Claudio from death, brings about the very same offense for which Claudio was condemned. It is the demand of mercy to rescue the unfortunate man, for law has inflicted an unjust punishment — has become wrong. To get rid of the injustice of law, the offense is repeated; law thus condemns - indeed, logically destroys - itself, since it forces the very crime which it seeks to punish, in order to thwart its own injustice. Also, the highest officer of the law is made guilty of the same crime which he unrelentingly punishes. Thus the inherent contradiction of law is shown in the plainest manner. The injustice of the statute is amply motived by the Poet. It is, in the first place, an old enactment which has long lain unexecuted and unknown; in the second place, the punishment is wholly disproportionate to the offence. But the main point of its wrong is that Claudio is still true to the spirit of the law, whose whole object was the protection of the Family; for he was faithful to the one person, and ready to fulfil the ceremony. He is caught in the letter of the enactment, which no doubt he had violated. To avoid the monstrous injustice of the penalty, the law is trampled underfoot. But even by this last scheme Claudio is not rescued; Angelo violates his promise to release him. It is perfectly natural that the deputy should act thus. He has violated his own deepest principle — why should he now be restrained merely by his promise? In fact, it is just the strength of that principle of abstract justice within him which drives him to disregard his word and to give orders for Claudio's death. The deputy had previously broken loose from his principle; now his fall is accomplished in act. He can hardly be called a villain, though he is narrow, bigoted, and even cruel. His conduct springs directly from his conviction, which is adherence to the form rather than regard for the spirit of justice. He loves the law more than the essential object of the law; hence he falls into contradiction just at this point. His abandonment of his betrothed was from a formal ground — she did not live up to her contract in furnishing dower. Finally, he exhibits the same trait in the last words which he utters in the play, when he says, in substance, 'Execute me according to law.' He thus shows what is his ultimate principle, as well his own readiness to have it applied to himself. The result of the disruption between the secular and religious worlds is now manifest — the one has become criminal, the other helpless. Justice has turned out utterly contradictory of itself, and mercy has sought in vain to mediate the wrong. The nun, whose vow is eternal chastity, has been compelled to plead for incontinence, and even then has failed. The monk, who left society for religious works, has 179

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

been forced to resort to trickery and deception in order to accomplish his humane end; and he, too, has not succeeded. The purposes and principles of all are shattered and broken, and death is still hanging over Claudio. It is clear that external mediation cannot rescue him, nor, indeed, can it save society. There remains one alternative — the return of the Duke to power. III. This is the theme of the third movement, which is now to be considered. We shall therefore behold the restoration of mercy to the State, which cannot dispense with it. The abstract form of justice grinds the world to death. That form, however, is necessary to society; the purpose is not to underrate it; only, it is not absolute — it has limits. The question always is to ascertain these limits. Also, mercy without justice is equally impotent — means social disorder and violence. The play starts from an anarchy produced by undue leniency. The Duke must come back from his religious life; the result is true justice, of which mercy is a constituent. The Duke is now to judge the world before him in accordance with his two principles. The first class of offenders are left in prison to atone for their guilt; the Duke does not discharge them, for they are truly amenable to justice. Their punishment was mild in the first place, compared to the penalties of the law. The gentle Provost and the good Escalus receive his approbation for the happy blending of mercy and justice in their actions. Barnardine, the prisoner from youth and the victim of the forms of law, is brought in and pardoned. This character does not fit well into any particular thread of the play; still he is a striking illustration of its general theme. Each person gets his dues, yet none perish — not even Angelo, who repents of his deed, and must be forgiven; he has, too, a wife, whose claims cannot be forgotten. The Duke has learned to be just as well as merciful. Four pairs are brought up before us, representing various phases of marriage. Lowest of all is the union of Lucio, who is compelled to wed one of his kind as a punishment. Man and woman are in this case both unchaste and faithless, yet the child born to them necessitates the Family. The second pair is Claudio and Juliet, who love and are willing to comply with the inherent result of their conduct; they have been faithful to one another, but unchaste. The third pair, Angelo and Mariana, represent the same phase in general; the woman here has at least love and fidelity. In all these cases, the Duke makes marriage the solution of the difficulty, instead of destroying the offender. The object of the law could only have been the security of the Family; yet that object would certainly not be obtained by killing the husband. Thus the Duke by his decision reaches the great purpose of the law, and at the same time shows mercy in its true sense and limitation. But the fourth pair, the Duke and Isabella, have the indispensable condition of the true union; for they alone possess chastity before marriage. This element has been dwelt upon by the Poet, in other dramas, with great force and beauty. Isabella intended to take the vow of perpetual chastity; that is the best reason why she should enter the Family. It is Mistress Overdone and her class who ought to take such a vow. The Duke also has entered monastic life, but his virtue cannot be spared from a society in which there is none to throw away. He and Isabella are thus modelled after a similar pattern, and go through with quite the same experience. Both of them, independently of each other, fled from the prevailing corruption; they sought to annihilate the sexual relation 180

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

entirely, since it is productive of so much evil. But they discover their own chastity and fidelity, which form the true ethical basis of marriage; thus they belong together, and are united at the end of the play. Conventual life is inadequate, and passes away; the disruption between the secular and religious worlds is healed; their reconciliation and union are found in the institutions of man, in which religion becomes the most potent principle, but loses its forms, its organization, and even its name. The historical groundwork of this drama lies deep in the development of European nations. The same separation is witnessed; the various monastic orders — and, indeed, the church — have stood outside of the life of society, yet have tried to control it by manifold instrumentalities - very often in the manner of the Duke - by intrigue and cunning. A time of general violence like the Middle Ages may receive much benefit from such a system. But monasticism gives only a negative solution to the problem of sin; it makes the world holy by destroying it. Man is, hence, not likely to remain contented with the solution. The Reformation struck at celibacy and attempted to sanctify the Family, so that it became not merely a tolerated evil, but a positive religious institution. Luther the monk, like the Duke, took a wife. The Poet has presented both sides of the subject in their truest aspects; he manifests no bigoted or partisan prejudice in his treatment; there is portrayed the pure conflict between two principles, but it can be seen that he has given the solution of his own age and nation to the question of monasticism. (II, 7—24)

181

34 FJ. Furnivall, the place of Measure for Measure

in Shakespeare's canon 1877 From The Leopold Shakspere. The Poet's Works, in Chronological Order, From the Text of Professor Delius, With "Edward III." and "The Two Noble Kinsmen," and an Introduction by F.J. Furnivall, Illustrated (London, 1877). Frederick James Furnivall (1825—1910), the son of a wealthy physician, was educated at University College, London, and then Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1847 and M.A. in 1850. After studying at Lincoln's Inn, he was called to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1849, but had little interest in the law and became active in the Christian Socialist movement. Also interested in philology, he joined the Philological Society in 1847 and was its secretary from 1862 until his death in 1910. He adopted the society's ideas for spelling reform, and these are reflected in the words 'poisond', 'ruind', and 'linkt' below. More important was his work on a new dictionary, which led eventually to the creation of the New English Dictionary (now known as the Oxford English Dictionary] under the editorship of Dr. James Murray. Furnivall also founded the Early English Text Society in 1864, the Chaucer Society in 1868, the Ballad Society in 1868, the New Shakspere Society in 1873, the Wiclif Society and the Browning Society in 1881, and the Shelley Society in 1886. Highly respected as a scholar in Germany (he had contributed an introduction to the 1875 revised translation of Gervinus's (No. 30) Shakespeare Commentaries, he received an honorary Ph.D. from Berlin University in 1884. He also received an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford in 1901 and was one of the founding Fellows of the British Academy in 1902. His long introduction to The Leopold Shakspere divides Shakespeare's works into periods, Measure for Measure being in the 'Third Period (1601—8)' in a subgroup titled 'The Unfit-Nature or Under-Burden-failing Group', which also includes Julius Caesar and Hamlet.

Measure for Measure. - We turn from the Baltic shore to the inland city of Vienna, that city where Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam died, that city which is still notorious for the social evil which Shakespeare brings under our notice,where the loss of woman's honour is treated as a mere malheur, mishap, unlucky accident, and which is therefore the fit city for this play that follows Hamlet, where the cloud of the young prince's mother's lust hung like a pall over his life, and the incest of the 'beast 182

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

that wants discourse of reason' [Hamlet, 1.1.150] poisond his faith in women, and ruind his young love. On the stifling air of this drama, as contrasted with earlier ones, hear Mr. W. Watkiss Lloyd: — 'We never throughout this play get into the free, open, joyous atmosphere so invigorating in other works of Shakespeare: the oppressive gloom of the prison, the foul breath of the brothel, are only exchanged for the chilly damp of conventual walls, or the oppressive retirement of the monastery, where friars are curious as to the motives of ducal seclusion, and are ready to intimate that a petticoat is concerned in the secret.'1 ' Yet though we have this 'night's black curtain' over the play; though woman's and man's incontinence match, to some extent, the queen's and Claudius's in Hamlet; though Claudio in his weak fear of death, like Hamlet, fails to do his duty; yet here, beside, in intentional contrast to the lust and weak will of woman and man, rises, like the moon in its pure beauty, like the lightning flash in its white wrath, the noble figure of Isabella, 'a thing ensky'd and sainted, an immortal spirit' [1.4.34—5], Shakespeare's first wholly Christian woman, steadfast and true as Portia, Brutus's wife, pure as Lucrece's soul, merciful above Portia, Bassanio's bride, in that she prays for forgiveness for her foe, not her friend; with an unyielding will, a martyr's spirit above Helena's of All's Well, the highest type of woman that Shakespeare has yet drawn. In these points then I find that Measure for Measure is rightly made to follow Hamlet immediately, and not All's Well, though assuredly with the latter play it has much in common. Note, too, how Measure for Measure carries on the Hamlet reflections on Death and Life. Compare Hamlet, III. i., 'to die, to sleep,' &c.[59 ff.], with Claudio's 'aye, but to die [and go] we know not where' [3.1.116]; Hamlet's 'dread of something after death' [3.1.77], with Isabella's 'the sense of death is most in apprehension' [3.1.77]. Again, Hamlet's 'insolence of office,' &c.[3.1.72 ff.], with Isabella's 'every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder' [2.2.112—13]. Hamlet's 'Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny' [3.1.135—6] is like the Duke's 'back-wounding calumny the whitest virtue strikes' [3.2.186—7]. The like names Claudio and Claudius occur; and Claudius's pathetic speech, 'my words fly up, my thoughts remain below' [3.3.97], is like Angelo's 'Heaven hath my empty words: heaven in my mouth, and in my heart the strong and swelling evil of my conception' [2.4.2, 4, 6—7]. While Lucio's 'our doubts are traitors,' &c.[1.4.77 ff.], preach the moral of the play of Hamlet. Further, Hamlet's 'he took my father grossly full of bread' [3.3.80], and Hamlet's desire to take his uncle when he is drunk, asleep [3.3.89], are like Barnardine's excuse for not dying here [4.3.53—6]: he was, as the Duke says, 'a creature unprepared, unmeet for death' [4.3.67]. Polonius seeing method in Hamlet's apparent madness [2.2.206], and Hamlet's telling his mother he could re-word his sentence [3.4.143], are just the Duke's, Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense (Such a dependency of thing on thing) As e'er I heard in madness. [5.1.61—3] Of whom, too, but the forlorn Ophelia does the deserted Mariana remind us? Music pleased the woe of both of them. One always thinks of Tennyson's Mariana in the Moated Grange: — 183

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Is this the end, to be left alone, to live forgotten and die forlorn?^ With All's Well, too, the links are strong. The firm will and energy of Helena is like that of Isabella: her love, though she is deserted and detested, is won back by the same means as Mariana's; the substitution of Helena for Diana, as here of Mariana for Isabel. Again, the scene in court, the trial as it were before the Duke, and the exposure of Angelo, are like those of Bertram before the king in All's Well, just as Lucio's exposure is like Parolles's. The clown is a male Mrs. Quickly, though the scene with Escalus is like that of Dogberry and Verges before the Duke, and Gobbo and his son before Bassanio. Yet those who would put Measure for Measure next to All's Well, surely overlook the far deeper tone of the former play: its dealing with death and the future world, its weight of reflection, the analysis of Angelo's character, the working of conscience, the greater corruption dealt with, the higher saintliness shown in Isabella. Also, if we look at the name of the play, Measure for Measure, we shall see that Shakespeare's idea in it was, though with grim humour and ultimate relenting, to preach in Angelo and Lucio his Third-Period doctrine - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, vengeance for weakness, yielding to temptation, and sin, though here the vengeance is but the poetical justice of marriage to the women whom the sinners have sinned with or abandoned. Intending nun as Isabella is, we must nevertheless look on her as no hard recluse, but as 'Isabel, sweet Isabel' [5.1.436—7], with cheek-roses [1.4.16], gentle and fair. Yet she is 'a thing ensky'd and sainted, an immortal spirit;' [1.4.34—5], and this enables us to understand the conflict that must have gone on in her mind between her sisterly affection and her religious principles when pleading her brother's cause, and her acquiescence in Angelo's resolve that Claudio must die. Both times she needs Lucio's appeal before she'll again urge how much better mercy becomes the king and judge, than justice. Her unhappy words, 'Hark! how I'll bribe you' [2.2.145], seem to have first brought out the evil in Angelo. 'He tempts her through that which is uppermost in the noble woman, the passion for sacrifice. There is something splendid in the idea of perilling the soul itself for the sake of another' (E. H. Hickey).[5] Shakespeare's original, Whetstone, makes his heroine Cassandra give way to her brother's appeal: — My Andrugio, take comfort in distresse; Cassandra is wonne, thy rannsome greate to paye. But this was not Shakespeare's conception of Isabella. She believed that the son of her heroic father was noble like herself; and when she found that he was willing to sacrifice her honour for his life, 'her swift vindictive anger leapt like a white flame from her white spirit',6 and her indignant 'take my defiance, die, perish' [3.1.142-3], was her fit answer to her brother's base proposal. Yet she who would not stoop to wrong, dared for the sake of Mariana to bear the imputation of it. She had no care for the world's opinion, so that the deed appeared not foul in the truth of her spirit; and as in The Merry Wives and Much Ado, her quick woman's wit took a righteous delight in circumventing a knave. We have another passionate outburst from her when she hears the false news that her brother has been executed. And then she takes her side by the Duke who loves her, to fight with him God's fight against the evil in 184

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

that foul Vienna; a far better post, heading Heaven's army in her land than praying barren prayers in convent walls. She is the first of the three splendid women who illumine the dark Third Period: she, glorious for her purity and righteousness, Cordelia for her truth and filial love, Volumnia for her devotion to honour and her love of her native land. Perhaps we may add a fourth, Portia, Brutus's wife, for nobleness and wifely duty. But the highest of all is Isabella. For Angelo, we may contrast him with Isabella, as Bertram with Helena, or Proteus with Julia; he has to be emptied of his self-pride in seeming religion, as Bertram of his pride of birth; but in judging Angelo 'let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall' [1 Corinthians, 10:12]. His is a terrible analysis of character, a self-revelation to any man who has striven for purity, has fancied himself safe, and in the hour of trial has failed. Claudio is, as Mr. Pater says, one of the flower-like young University men that abound at Oxford. To him, self-indulgent, life-loving, death is the greatest terror; and he sees no great harm in his sister undergoing what his own sweetheart has borne. To Isabella's sense of honour and purity he could not attain; but in expression of apprehension he stands even above Hamlet. His words on after-death are among the most poetical in Shakespeare... . Seeing that the centre of Measure for Measure is the scene of Isabella with Claudio in the prison, where his unfit nature fails under the burden of coming death laid on him; seeing the many links between this play and Hamlet, and the more between that and Julius Caesar, we cannot be wrong in putting all three together as the first group of the Third Period, the 'unfit nature, or underburden-failing group,' &c. Then we pass to the second group of the two 'tempteryielding plays,' with which the first [Othello] is, by Angelo, &c., strongly linkt, too. (Ixxiv—Ixxv)

185

35 George Wilkes, Measure for Measure and Roman Catholicism 1877

From Shakespeare, From an American Point of View; Including an Inquiry as to His Religious Faith, and His Knowledge of Law: With the Baconian Theory Considered (London and New York, 1877). George Wilkes (1817-1885) was born in New York City, but little is known of his early life. He was a law clerk in the office of Enoch E. Camp and then a journalist and with Camp founded in 1845 the National Police Gazette, a periodical that exposed various elements of the criminal underground in the city and, consequently, provoked constant threats of violence. Wilkes led an active life, settling down in the 1850s when he purchased Porter's Spirit of the Times, later (1859-1866) named Wilkes's Spirit of the Times, a journal which covered sports, politics, and other contempory issues. His last publication was his book on Shakespeare, in which he argued that Francis Bacon could not have written Shakespeare's plays and also that Shakespeare was a Catholic. (Oddly enough, Wilkes himself, although a Protestant all his life, was converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but his friends, thinking the conversion to be a priestly plot, had him buried as a Baptist.) The excerpts below are taken from the revised and corrected third edition (New York, 1882), Part II, Chapter XIII, in which Wilkes discusses The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure.

The date of the production of this fine play is fixed by Mr. FJ. Furnivall,1 in his 'Trial Table of the Order of William Shakespeare's Plays,' at 1603, when our poet was forty years of age. It was performed, says Gervinus, in 1604, but not published until 1623. Dr. Johnson speaks of its merits with such indifference that it would almost seem as if he had never read it; while to other critics it is on a level, so far as the intellectual elevation of its language and imagery are concerned, with the very finest productions of Shakespeare's genius. To my judgement its moral management is faulty, and the great principle of retributive justice is sadly sacrificed to a weak fancy for forgiveness; but nothing can excel the exquisite delicacy, combined with the tremendous illustrative force, of the language allotted to Isabella, who is the main figure in the piece. The plot was familiar even before Shakespeare's time, but he undoubtedly adopted it from Whetstone's play of Promos and Cassandra, published in 1578, which had no success, and which was itself translated from an Italian novel by Geraldi Cinthio. The 186

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

main story is that of a pure sister pleading to a corrupt judge for a condemned brother's life, which sister is allowed to ransom his existence only by a surrender of her chastity to that functionary. The judge, succeeding in his aim, then orders the execution of the brother to take place, for fear he may seek revenge for 'so receiving a dishonored life' [4.4.31]. This is the original story; but Shakespeare changes it, so that Isabella, the sister, when her honour is at its crisis, sends a female representative, in the undistinguishing darkness of the night, to perform her expected part with Angelo, the judge, and thus herself escapes all taint. To justify her pure mind to the pursuance of this double course, however, Isabella acts under the direction of a holy friar, who provides as her nocturnal substitute a maiden under betrothal to Lord Angelo, the judge. The real duke is the disguised friar who counsels Isabella to this act, and who, when he finds that Angelo, his deputy, still orders the sentence of death to be carried out against Claudio, privately interposes his authority with the prison officials, and sends to Angelo the head of a man who had that day died in his cell as Claudio's head. The severed head deceives Angelo and Isabella both; whereupon the agonized and desperate girl bursts into threats of personal vengeance upon the villainous deputy, and is about starting off to execute them, when the friar appears, informs her that the real duke comes home on the morrow, and advises her to intercept him, along with her friend Mariana, on his public entrance to the city, and then to conspicuously lay their wrongs before him, in the very presence of Lord Angelo. This advice is followed by Isabella and Mariana, and as the Duke enters the city, surrounded by his nobles, the young ladies cast themselves before him, and, denouncing Angelo, demand justice upon him. Duke.

Relate your wrongs: In what? By whom? Be brief: Here is lord Angelo shall give you justice! Reveal yourself to him.... [Quotes 5.1.26-42]

The Duke affects to disbelieve Isabella, and orders her off to prison. Mariana is then required to tell her story. She thereupon recites her betrothal to Angelo, his abandonment of her because of the failure of her fortune, and finally the consummation of her betrothal by keeping Isabella's appointment with the deputy in the dark. Finally, unveiling, Mariana shows her face to Angelo, and claims to be his wife. The Duke hereupon demands of Angelo if he knows this woman. Ang.

My lord, I must confess, I know this woman; And, five years since, there was some speech of marriage Betwixt myself and her; which was broke off, Partly, for that her promised proportions Came short of composition; but, in chief, For that her reputation was disvalued

In levity: since which time of five years I never spake with her, saw her, nor heard from her, Upon my faith and honour.... [Quotes 5.1.216-40] 187

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

The Duke now goes out on some pretence, but really to resume his friar's habit. At the same time, from the other side of the stage, but still in the custody of officers, again comes Isabella. Angelo, on the exit of the Duke, had at once resumed all his former arrogance, and as soon as he sets eyes upon the returning friar, through whose art he has suffered so much trouble, he assumes a lofty tone, and orders him to be arrested. The Duke, thus hustled by the officers, is discovered under the friar's cowl. He at once resumes his regal dignity, and waives Angelo from the ducal seat. Duke,

Ang.

(to Angelo.) Sir, by your leave: Hast thou or word, or wit, or impudence, That yet can do thee office? If thou hast, Rely upon it till my tale be heard, And hold no longer out. O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your grace, like power divine, Hath look'd upon my passes; then, good prince, No longer session hold upon my shame, But let my trial be my own confession, Immediate sentence then, and sequent death, Is all the grace I beg.... [Quotes 5.1.362-425]

Mariana hereupon entreats Isabella to help her beg of the Duke the life of Angelo; but the Duke checks the movement by the following sublime rebuke: Duke. Against all sense do you importune her. Should she kneel down in mercy, of this fact, Her brother's ghost his paved bed would break, And take her hence in horror. [5.1.433—6] Mariana, nevertheless, perseveres, and Isabella again falls upon her knees before the Duke. Duke. Your suit's unprofitable: stand up, I say — I have bethought me of another fault: — Provost, how came it Claudio was beheaded At an unusual hour? [5.1.455-8] Claudio then appears, is pardoned, and handed over to Isabella, whereupon the allforgiving Duke thus addresses her, and winds up the situation with one general joy: Duke. And, for your lovely sake, Give me your hand, and say you will be mine, He is my brother too: But fitter time for that. By this, lord Angelo perceives he's safe; Methinks, I see a quickening in his eye: —

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Well, Angela, your evil quits you well: Look that you love your wife; her worth, worth yours. I find an apt remission in myself. [5.1.491-8] It is hardly possible for language to picture a more base, bloodthirsty, and unpitying miscreant than Angelo. To the last moment, even in the presence of the Duke, he maintains his villainy by misrepresenting Isabella, and by relentlessly defaming the character of Mariana. In fact, he does not cease to lie against them both; and when he is actually unmasked beyond all remedy, like Proteus, he suddenly confesses, and, as every reader must regret, is as readily forgiven. In this respect, the moral of the play is as deplorable as that of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and, through its utter defeat of the principle of retributive justice, could hardly have been the inspiration of such a stern lawyer as Lord Bacon. To Shakespeare, however, a big-natured, good-tempered man, with a prodigious and sympathetic genius, but scarcely any conscience, this pleasant rounding of the whole story was a natural inclination. By following this course, which, it may be remarked, was usual with our poet in the earlier part of his career (indeed, until he arrived at the period of his deepest tragedies), he obtained his reputation for an unruffled serenity of character. It may also be observed, that in preferring these happy terminations, Shakespeare evinces one form of the art of theatrical management by sending his audiences home pleased, thus unconsciously testifying to the tender and generous nature of the people. But something, at the same time, let me add, is due to the principle of justice; and there can be no doubt that Coleridge is right when he says 'that sincere repentance on the part of Angelo was impossible,' and therefore regrets that the unparalleled villain was not executed. ' But Gervinus finds excuse for the mercy of the Duke in the fact that, 'apart from poetry,' such a doom would not have been in strict conformity with either law or justice. Gervinus's position is, that Angelo's double crime — the intended disgrace of Isabella and the death of Claudio — had not been consummated, and that he had been consequently guilty only in intent.But this argument is specious and does not justify his pardon, for Angelo had executed Claudio as far as his bloody and merciless purpose could do so, and had been guilty with Mariana, [of] the very act for which, under the statutes of Vienna, Claudio had been condemned. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the penalty for this last particular offence could hardly have been offered by the Duke, who, in the habit of a friar, had advised it. Regarding the play as a whole, however, we may safely conclude that it does not inculcate either statesmanship or law; at any rate, not such statesmanship or logical exactitude as might be expected to make their development from the mind of Sir Francis Bacon. This is mainly the reason why I have quoted so largely from Measure for Measure... . [Wilkes now dismisses Lord Chief Justice John Campbell's citations from Measure for Measure in Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered (London and New York, 1859) as any solid evidence that Shakespeare was trained as a lawyer.] But the great figure in the play, the figure which stands in towering dignity and purity and beauty above all others, and above all other of Shakespeare's women, is Isabella, the nun, or rather, the young novitiate of the convent of St. Clare. It seems 189

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

to me that, if our poet had any method, beyond the mere usual waywardness of his plots, it was his object in this play to develop, through the characters of Isabella and the Duke, his views of the beautiful philosophy of the Catholic religion. In his portraiture of the villain Angelo, he, on the other hand, paints a perfect picture of Puritan hypocrisy. Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone. [1.3.50—3] And this oblique sarcasm against the Puritans is again repeated, says Dr. Farmer, ' in the Constable's account of Master Froth and the Clown: 'Precise villains they are, that I am sure of; and void of all profanation in the world that good Christians ought to have' [2.1.54-6]. The opening of Measure for Measure finds Isabella undergoing her religious probation in that tranquil half-way house upon the road to heaven, the convent of St. Clare. She is conversing sweetly with the nuns upon the sacred mysteries that are just unfolding to her virgin comprehension when she is suddenly interrupted by a rude clangor at the convent gate. This comes to summon her back to the stirring world in order that she may contemplate a gross offense and make solicitation of the newlyappointed deputy for her brother's life. She cannot choose but yield to the appeal; but, going out, never comes back, having learned 'that in the world may be found a discipline more strict, more awful than the discipline of the convent; having also learned that the world has need of her: that her life is still a consecrated life, and that the vital energy of her heart can exert and augment itself as Duchess of Vienna more fully than in conventual seclusion.' In speaking of Measure for Measure, Drake says that 'the great charm of the play springs from the lovely example of female excellence exhibited in the person of Isabella. Piety, spotless purity, tenderness combined with firmness, and an eloquence most persuasive, unite to render her singularly interesting and attractive. C'est un ange de lumiere sous I'humble habit d'une novice. To save the life of her brother she hastens to quit the peaceful seclusion of her convent, and moves amid the votaries of corruption and hypocrisy, amid the sensual, the vulgar, and the profligate, as a being of a higher order, as a ministering spirit from the throne of grace. ' Knight, in alluding to Isabella, says that 'the foundation of her character is religion. Out of that sacred source springs her humility; her purity, which can not understand oblique purposes and suggestions; her courage; her passionate indignation at the selfishness of her brother, who would have sacrificed her to attain his own safety. It is in the conception of such a character that we see the transcendant superiority of Shakespeare over other dramatists. The "thing enskied and sainted" [1.4.34] was not for any of his greatest contemporaries to conceive and delineate.'1 And yet, Shakespeare made this female masterpiece — this religious paragon, this beau ideal of his genius — a nun; and while escorting her with solemn dignity throughout her scenes, he commands silence and bent heads for every allusion to the Latin faith. In comment upon this fact, it may be remarked that, if a mere [-Q-]

190

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

playwright might venture upon such developments of Catholic saintliness in the midst of a Puritan age, Bacon could hardly have feared loss of favour with Elizabeth or James by openly claiming the authorship of the Shakespeare plays himself. (110-19)

191

36 J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, on the play's analogues and early performance 1880

From Memoranda on Shakespeare's Comedy of Measure for Measure by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps (London, 1880). James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820—89) was born as Halliwell [see the headnote to No. 24 above]. In 1872 he changed his name by royal letters patent to Halliwell-Phillipps after his wife, Henrietta Elizabeth Molyneaux, the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Phillipps (from whom both she and Halliwell were estranged) had a riding accident, became incapacitated, and he took over her financial affairs. After her death in 1879, he remarried, but kept the additional surname. Only twenty copies of the Memoranda on ... Measure for Measure, a small pamphlet of six pages of notes, were printed. I reprint from copy number one, the British Library copy, initialled J. O. H.-P.

'They report a historic of one who did yet worse. It was the Provost la Vouste, who plaied a wicked part with a certaine honest woman. She comming unto him to make sute for her husband, whom this Provost kept in prison, was required to graunt him one nights pleasure, and he would yield to whatsoever shee herselfe demanded. This woman, finding herselfe much perplexed, looking on the one side to her breach of faith plighted to her husband, and on the other side his life which she should save, shee was very desirous to acquaint her husband therewith; who, having dispenced there-withall, shee then yields unto the Provosts brutish desire, resting assured that he would certainly keepe promise with her concerning her husband. But in the morning this most vilde wretch, after he had caused her husband to be hanged, said thus unto her, — I did promise, indeede, to restore you your husband; I keepe him not, but I yield him unto you,' Goulart's Admirable and Memorable Histories, 4to. 1607. Reed, speaking of Heywood's Woman Kill'd with Kindness, acted in 1602, observes that 'the pleadings of Sir Charles with his sister to give up her person to Acton for the discharge of his debt and ransom of his liberty, and her reflections on the proposal, seem borrowed in some degree from the scenes between Claudio and Isabella in Measure for Measure;' but if there is any imitation at all, it was probably on the side of the great dramatist.... Both stanzas of the song, 'Take, oh take those lips away' [3.1.1—6], are given with the initials W. S. in a manuscript of the seventeenth century in the British Museum, MS. Harl. 6057, fol. 36, but it is not likely that there is here any good evidence of authorship. 192

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

'In the yere 1547 a citizen of Comun was cast into prison upon an accusation of murder, whom to deliver from the judgement of death his wife wrought all means possible. Therefore, comming to the captaine that held him prisoner, she sued to him for her husbands life, who, upon condition of her yeelding to his lust and payment of 200 ducats, promised safe deliverance for him. The poore woman, seeing that nothing could redeeme her husbands life but losse and shipwracke of her owne honestie, told her husband, who willed her to yeeld to the captains desire and not to pretermit so good an occasion; wherefore she consented; but after the pleasure past, the traiterous and wicked captaine put her husband to death notwithstanding,' Beard's Theatre of God's Judgements, 1612.... Measure for Measure was certainly in existence in December, 1604. ' In the old transcripts of the Audit Accounts made for Malone is the following, — '1604 and 1605. Ed. Tylney. On St. Stephens night, Mesure for Mesur by Shaxberd, performed by the K.'s players.' (5-10)

193

37 Algernon Charles Swinburne, a tragedy 1880

From A Study of Shakespeare (London, 1880). Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1900) was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford (although he did not graduate), where he was tutored by Benjamin Jowett. He was friendly with William Morris, George Meredith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones. A prolific writer of both verse, prose, and plays, Swinburne produced several works of literary criticism, including George Chapman: A Critical Essay (1874); 'The Three Stages of Shakespeare', in The Fortnightly Review, NS 17 (May 1875), 412-45, and NS 19 (January 1876), 24—45, essays which formed the basis of A Study of Shakespeare (1880); A Study ofBenJonson (1889); Shakespeare (wr. 1905; publ. Oxford, 1909); and The Age of Shakespeare (1908), all of which helped to maintain interest in the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. I reprint from the revised 3rd edition of A Study of Shakespeare (London, 1895).

[Swinburne discusses Shakespeare in terms of three stages of his style: 'I. First Period: Lyric and Fantastic, II. Second Period: Comic and Historic, III. Third Period: Tragic and Romantic.' Measure for Measure is discussed in the 'Third Period' as one of'three detached or misclassified plays', described by Swinburne as follows: 'An all but absolute brotherhood in thought and style and tone and feeling unites the quasitragedy of Troilus and Cressida with what in the lamentable default of as apt a phrase in English I must call by its proper designation in French the tragedie manquee of Measure for Measure. In the simply romantic fragment of the Shakespearian Pericles, where there was no call and no place for the poetry of speculation or philosophic intelligence, there is the same positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative and passionate style' (pp. 195—6).] The relative disfavour in which the play of Measure for Measure has doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simply explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully and plausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicial authority in France or in the world, that in the land of manycoloured cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too much a prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England. This comment is in 194

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

itself as surely just and true as it is incisive and direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question. The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the Puritan Angelo is exposed: it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished. In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage 'the strong, indignant claim of justice' is 'baffled.The expression is absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored or even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word directly and deliberately baffled' , buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck in the face. We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous and too long retarded retribution: we are tricked out of our dole, defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable and satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away. That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and that no sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show of coherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper and rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent throughout all its better parts to the absolute exclusion of any other would of itself most amply suffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch, every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity: but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaborate machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as 'the old fantastical duke of dark corners' [4.3.156-7] as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of creative poetry. I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on a musical point in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore give any biped who believes that ears 'should be long to measure Shakespeare' all timely warning to avert the length of his own. A very singular question, and one to me unaccountable except by a supposition which on charitable grounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment — namely, that such ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or ostensibly human, - has been raised with regard to the first immortal song of Mariana in the moated grange ['Take, O, take those lips away' and ff, 4.1.1—6]. This question is whether the second verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearian fragment may not haply have been written by the author of the first. The visible and audible evidence that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap into sight of all human eyes and conviction of all human ears. The metre of Shakespeare's verse, as written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of Fletcher's. It can only seem the same to those who hear by finger and not by ear^: a class now at all events but too evidently numerous enough to refute Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once apparently tautologous phrase of Pistol. (202—5) 195

38 George Bernard Shaw, Measure for Measure as dramatic literature 1886-1909

From Our Corner, August 1, 1886; The Saturday Review, February 26, 1898; Preface to Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. By Bernard Shaw. The First Volume, Containing the three Unpleasant Plays (2 vols, London, 1898); The Daily News (London), April 17, 1905; Poet Lore 20 (September-October, 1909). George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin to a Protestant grain merchant and a mother who wanted to be an opera singer. Her thwarted ambitions ensured that Shaw was well-educated in music, and for a time he earned his living as a music critic in London for The Star (1888—90) and The World (1890-94). Shaw's formal education was spotty, but he read deeply and widely from an early age, and his literary sophistication and wit can be seen in the dramatic criticism he wrote for The Saturday Review (1895-98). His own career as a playwright began in 1892 with a production of Widowers' Houses, and by the time of Arms and the Man (1894) and The Devil's Disciple (1897) Shaw was on his way to becoming the most famous and influential playwright of his time. A member of the socialistic Fabian Society, Shaw was an iconoclast — as is seen in the excerpts printed below — who used his plays and criticism to encourage cultural, social, and moral reform. Everything is reprinted from the originals. I have also provided page numbers for all of the selections from Edwin Wilson's invaluable collection Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare (New York, 1961).

[From a review of Love's Labours Lost in Our Corner, August 1, 1886] . . . Nothing, it seems to me, but a perverse hero-worship can see much to admire in the badinage of Biron and Rosaline. Benedick and Beatrice are better; and Orlando and Rosalind much better: still, they repeatedly annoy us by repartees of which the trivial ingenuity by no means compensates the silliness, coarseness, or malice. It is not until Shakespeare's great period began with the seventeenth century that, in Measure for Measure, we find this sort of thing shown in its proper light and put in its proper place in the person of Lucio, whose embryonic stages may be traced in Mercutio and Biron. . . . (120; Wilson, 119-20) 196

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

[From a review of Much Ado about Nothing in The Saturday Review, February 26, 1898] Much Ado is perhaps the most dangerous actor-manager trap in the whole Shakespearian repertory. It is not a safe play like The Merchant of Venice or As You Like It, nor a serious play like Hamlet. It success depends on the way it is handled in performance; and that, again, depends on the actor-manager being enough of a critic to discriminate ruthlessly between the pretension of the author and his achievement. The main pretension in Much Ado is that Benedick and Beatrice are exquisitely witty and amusing persons. They are, of course, nothing of the sort. Benedick's pleasantries might pass at a sing-song in a public-house parlor; but a gentleman rash enough to venture on them in even the very mildest ^52-a-year suburban imitation of polite society to-day would assuredly never be invited again. From his first joke, 'Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?' [1.1.106] to his last, 'There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn' [5.4.123—4], he is not a wit, but a blackguard. He is not Shakespeare's only failure in that genre. It took the Bard a long time to grow out of the provincial conceit that made him so fond of exhibiting his accomplishments as a master of gallant badinage. The very thought of Biron, Mercutio, Gratiano, and Benedick must, I hope, have covered him with shame in his later years. Even Hamlet's airy compliments to Ophelia before the court would make a cabman blush. But at least Shakespeare did not value himself on Hamlet's indecent jests as he evidently did on those of the four merry gentlemen of the earlier plays. When he at last got conviction of sin, and saw this sort of levity in its proper light, he made masterly amends by presenting the blackguard as a blackguard in the person of Lucio in Measure for Measure. Lucio, as a character study, is worth forty Benedicks and Birons. His obscenity is not only inoffensive, but irresistibly entertaining, because it is drawn with perfect skill, offered at its true value, and given its proper interest, without any complicity of the author in its lewdness. Lucio is much more of a gentleman than Benedick, because he keeps his coarse sallies for coarse people. Meeting one woman he says humbly, 'Gentle and fair: your brother kindly greets you. Not to be weary with you, he's in prison' [1.4.24—5]. Meeting another, he hails her sparkingly with 'How now? which of your hips has the more profound sciatica?' [1.2.58—9]. ' The one woman is a lay sister, the other a prostitute. Benedick or Mercutio would have cracked their low jokes on the lay sister, and been held up as gentlemen of rare wit and excellent discourse for it. Whenever they approach a woman or an old man, you shiver with apprehension as to what brutality they will come out with (291; Wilson, 141-2) [From the Preface to Volume 1 of Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (London, 1898] . . . Of Shakespeare's plays we have not even complete prompt copies: the folio gives us hardly anything but the bare lines. What would we not give for the copy of Hamlet used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original 'business' scrawled by the prompter's pencil? And if we had in addition the descriptive directions which the author gave on the stage: above all, the character sketches, however brief, by which 197

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

he tried to convey to the actor the sort of person he meant him to incarnate, what a light they would shed, not only on the play, but on the history of the sixteenth century! Well, we should have had all this and much more if Shakespeare, instead of merely writing out his lines, had prepared the plays for publication in competition with fiction as elaborate as that of Meredith. ^ It is for want of this elaboration that Shakespeare, unsurpassed as poet, storyteller, character draughtsman, humorist, and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his studies of character and society, though in such unpopular plays as All's Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, we find him ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him. . . . (xxi; Wilson, 259) [From a letter to The Daily News (London) of April 17, 1905, summarizing in twelve points Shaw's views on Shakespeare] 7. That Shakespeare tried to make the public accept real studies of life and character in — for instance — Measure for Measure and ^4/1*5 Well that Ends Well; and that the public would not have them, and remains of the same mind still, preferring a fantastic sugar doll like Rosalind to such serious and dignified studies of women as Isabella and Helena. (12; Wilson, 4) [From a note to Felix Grendon printed in Grendon's article 'Some Misconceptions Concerning Shaw', in Poet Lore, 20 (September-October, 1909): 376-86] . . . I read Measure for Measure through carefully some time ago with some intention of saying something positive myself; but its flashes of observation were so utterly uncoordinated and so stuck together with commonplaces and reach-me-downs that I felt that the whole thing would come to pieces in my hand if I touched it; so I thought it best to leave it as he left it, and let the stories and the characters hide the holes in the philosophic fabric. (382; Wilson, 129)

198

39 Henry Morley, a lesson from the Sermon on the Mount 1889

From Measure for Measure. By William Shakespeare. With The Historic of Promos and Cassandra. Cassell's National Library (London, 1889). Henry Morley (1822—94) was born in London, the son of an apothecary, and studied for a career in medicine. He matriculated at King's College, London, at the age of sixteen, graduated in 1843, and worked in medicine, unsuccessfully. He later attained an academic appointment at King's College in 1857 and in 1865 became a professor of English at University College, London, and later at Queen's College, London, in 1878. He worked on and edited numerous magazines, including Charles Dickens's Household Words and All the Year Round, and many books. He completed ten volumes of an eleven-volume history of literature titled English Writers, and wrote literally hundreds of introductions for 'Morley's Universal Library' (63 vols, 1883—88) and 'Cassell's National Library' (214 vols, 1886—90). Morley's remarks on Measure for Measure are historically important because he was the first critic to cite the actual biblical verse from Matthew 7.1—2 (see also Luke 6.37—8) that is clearly the major allusion in the title.

[From 'Introduction,' pages 5—11 ; after a discussion of the text, date, and sources, Morley begins his critical remarks.] Upon this unacted play of Promos and Cassandra Shakespeare founded his Measure for Measure, with some very significant changes in the story. . . . It will be observed that Whetstone, whose intention is entirely moral, sets the story among subordinate characters, who represent at large the licence and corruption of the times. Shakespeare saw the artistic use of this, and summed it all up in his characters of Mistress Overdone, her servant Pompey (another Rosko), ^ and the empty-headed trifler, Lucio, who represents in light but firm touches the fashionable form of 'simple Pleasure foraging for Death.''"' In other respects the recasting of the story is thoroughly Shakespearian. No gross stain is allowed upon the sister's character. She is elevated into one devoted to God's altar, about to take vows of celibacy, incapable of taking stain. Before she tells her brother in what way she has been asked to save him, there are touches of womanly dread on his behalf, lest he should be tempted to ask of her the sacrifice, and when 199

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the temptation grows upon him with the dread of death, the very soul of a true womanhood flashes out against him. Shakespeare invents the character which has moved Tennyson to sing of Mariana in the Moated Grange/ ' and shapes his tale to the last in the spirit of love, justice, and mercy. In Cinthio's novel the condemned brother is really executed in the prison. In Whetstone's version he is supposed to have been so executed, but a felon's head has been sent in place of his. In Shakespeare, not only is there no execution at all — the head sent being that of a pirate who had died of fever in the prison — but a hardened murderer who has been long in prison, whose brutalised nature is distinctly shown, has been proposed as one who can be executed, and he is spared because he is not fit to die. Again, it is Shakespeare's own device to keep his Duke upon the scene, going to and fro as a good genius, thus taking away from the tragic incidents every suggestion that there may be an unhappy end. With tragic movement, and with an executioner among the characters, the play is so continued that not only is nobody killed, (Lucio indeed reaps what he has sown) but nobody is permanently wronged. The whole atmosphere is, at the close, of pardon and of kindly consideration, that even reaches to the brutish Barnardine. And Angelo, who had been self-righteous, deeply repentant at the close, is taught his lesson, the sacred lesson of the play: — 'Judge not, that ye be not judged: for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again' [Matthew 7:1-2]. To these words of Christ, which are at the heart of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, there may be joined those words of St. Paul, which follow his contrast between works of the Flesh and fruits of the Spirit: — 'Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself [Galatians 6:1-3]. (8-11)

200

40 Arthur Syrnons, the 'painfulness' of Measure for Measure 1889

From The Works of William Shakespeare Edited by Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall. With Notes and Introductions to Each Play by F. A. Marshall and Other Shakespearian Scholars, and Numerous Illustrations by Gordon Browne (8 vols, New York, 1888—90). Measure for Measure. Notes and Introduction by Arthur Symons (Volume V, 1889). Arthur William Symons (1865-1945), born in Milford Haven, Wales, to a Wesleyan minister, was educated at the High Street Classical and Mechanical School in the West Country town of Bideford, but after three years there left in 1882 without a degree. He became a member of the Browning Society, founded by F. J. Furnivall (No. 34), with whom he established a correspondence, and published 'An Introduction to the Study of Browning' in 1886. Although he wanted to be known as a poet — he published Days and Nights in 1889 and dedicated it to Walter Pater (No. 31) and later London Nights in 1895 - he is best remembered today as the author of The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900), and as an advocate of the 'Art for Art's Sake' doctrine associated with Pater and Oscar Wilde. His Shakespearian introductions written for the Irving and Marshall edition were reprinted with some new essays in Studies in the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1919; London, 1920). The essay on Measure for Measure was slightly revised in this collection, which forms my copy text. Page numbers are provided from both the 1889 and 1919—20 versions (which are identical).

[From 'Critical Remarks' by Arthur Symons, following sections on 'Literary History' and 'Stage History' by F. A. Marshall] Measure for Measure is neither the last of the comedies nor the first of the tragedies. It is tragedy and comedy together, inextricably interfused, coexistent in a mutual contradiction; such a tangled web, indeed, as our life is, looked at by the actors in it, on the level of its action; with certain suggestions, open or concealed, of the higher view, the aspect of things from the point of view of a tolerant wisdom. The hidden activity of the Duke, working for ends of beneficent justice, in the midst of the ferment and corruption of the seething city; this figure of personified Providence, watchfully cognizant of act and motive, has been conceived by Shakespeare (not yet 201

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

come to his darkest mood, in which man is a mere straw in the wind of Destiny) to give a sense of security, centred within even such a maze as this. It is not from Isabella that we get any such sense. Her very courage and purity and intellectual light do but serve to deepen the darkness, when we conceive of her as one sacrifice the more. Just as Cordelia intensifies the pity and terror of King Lear, so would Isabella's helpless virtues add the keenest ingredient to the cup of bitterness, but for the Duke. He is a foretaste of Prospero, a Prospero working greater miracles without magic; and he guides us through the labyrinths of the play by a clue of which he has the secret. That Measure for Measure is a 'painful' play (as Coleridge called it)cannot be denied. There is something base and sordid in the villainy of its actors; a villainy which has nothing of the heroism of sin. In Angelo we have the sharpest lesson that Shakespeare ever read self-righteousness. In Claudio we see a 'gilded youth'^ with the gilding rubbed off; and there is not under heaven a more pitiful sight. From Claudio's refined wantonness we sink deeper and deeper, through Lucio, who is a Claudio by trade, and without even the pretence of gilding, to the very lowest depth of a city's foulness and brutality. The 'humours' of bawd and hangman and the customers of both are painted with as angry a hand as Hogarth's^; bitten in with the etcher's acid, as if into the very flesh. Even Elbow, 'a simple constable,' a Dogberry of the lower dregs, struts and maunders before us with a desperate imbecility, in place of the engaging silliness, where silliness seemed a hearty comic virtue, of the 'simple constable' of the earlier play. In the astonishing portrait of Barnardine we come to the simply animal man; a portrait which in its savage realism, brutal truth to nature, cynical insight into the workings of the contented beast in man, seems to anticipate some of the achievements of the modern Realistic novel. In the midst of this crowd of evil-doers walks the Duke, hooded body and soul in his friar's habit; Escalus, a solitary figure of broad and sturdy uprightness; Isabella, 'a thing enskied and sainted' [1.4.34], the largest-hearted and clearest-eyed heroine of Shakespeare; and apart, veiled from good and evil in a perpetual solitariness of sorrow, Mariana, in the moated grange. In the construction of this play Shakespeare seems to have put forth but a part of his strength, throwing his full power only into the great scenes, and leaving, with less than his customary care (in strong contrast to what we note in Twelfth Night) frayed ends and edges of action and of characterization. The conclusion, particularly, seems hurried, and the disposal of Angelo inadequate. I cannot but think that Shakespeare felt the difficulty, the impossibility, of reconciling the end which his story and the dramatic conventionalities required with the character of Angelo as shown in the course of the play, and that he slurred over the matter as best he could. With space before him he might have convinced us, being Shakespeare, of the sincerity of Angelo's repentance and the rightfulness of his remission; but as it is, crowded as all this conviction and penitence and forgiveness necessarily is into a few minutes of supplementary action, one can hardly think that Coleridge expressed that natural feeling too forcibly in declaring 'the strong indignant claim of justice' to be baffled by the pardon and marriage of Angelo. Of the scenes in which Angelo appears as the prominent actor (the incomparable second and fourth scenes of the second act, the 202

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

first the temptation of Angelo, the second Angelo's temptation of Isabella) nothing can be said but that Shakespeare may have equalled, but has scarcely exceeded them, in intensity and depth of natural truth. These, with the other scenes between Claudio and Isabella, make the play. It is part of the irony of things that the worst complication, the deepest tragedy, in all this tortuous action comes about by the innocent means of the stainless Isabella; who also, by her steadfast heroism, brings about the final peace. But for Isabella, Claudio would simply have died, perhaps meeting his fate, when it came, with a desperate flash of his father's courage; Angelo might have lived securely to his last hour, unconscious of his own weakness, of the fire that lurked in so impenetrable a flint. Shakespeare has sometimes been praised for the subtlety with which he has barbed the hook for Angelo, in making Isabella's very chastity and goodness the keenest of temptations. The notion is not peculiar to Shakespeare, but was hinted at, in his scrambling and uncertain way, by the writer of the old play on which Measure for Measure is founded. In truth, I do not see what other course was open to either in dealing with a situation which was not original in Shakespeare or in Whetstone. Angelo, let us remember, is not a hypocrite: he has no dishonourable intention in his mind; he conceives himself to be firmly grounded on a broad basis of rectitude, and in condemning Claudio he condemns a sin which he sincerely abhors. His treatment of the betrothed Mariana would probably be in his own eyes an act of frigid justice; it certainly shows a man not sensually-minded, but cold, calculating, likely to err, if he errs at all, rather on the side of the miserly virtues than of the generous sins. It is thus the nobility of Isabella that attracts him: her freedom from the tenderest signs of frailty, her unbiassed intellect, her regard for justice, her religious sanctity; and it is on his noblest side first, the side of him that can respond to these qualities, that he is tempted. I know of nothing more consummate than the way in which his mind is led on, step by step, towards the trap still hidden from him, the trap prepared by the merciless foresight of the chance that tries the professions and the thoughts of men. Once tainted, the corruption is over him like leprosy, and every virtue withers into the corresponding form of vice. In Claudio it is the same touchstone, Isabella's unconscious and misdirected Ithuriel-spear, ' that reveals the basest forms of evil. A great living painter has chosen the central moment of the play, the moment when Claudio, having heard the terms on which alone life can be purchased, murmurs, 'Death is a fearful thing' [3.1.115], and Isabella, not yet certain, yet already with the fear astir in her of her brother's weakness replies, 'And shamed life a hateful' [3.1.116]; it is this moment which Holman Hunt^ brings before us in a canvas that, like his scene from the Two Gentlemen of Verona, is not only a picture but an interpretation. Against the stained and discoloured wall of his dungeon, apple-blossoms and blue sky showing through the grated window behind his delicate dishevelled head, Claudio stands; a lute tied with red ribbons hangs beside him, a rose has fallen on the dark garments at his feet, one hand plays with his fetters (with how significant a gesture!), the other hand pinches, idly affectionate, the two intense hands that Isabella has laid upon his breast; he is thinking, where to debate means shame, balancing the arguments; and with pondering eyes, thrusting his tongue towards the corner of his just-parted lips with a movement of exquisite naturalness, he halts in indecision: all 203

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

his mean thoughts are there, in that gesture, in those eyes; and in the warm and gracious youth of his whole aspect, passionately superficial and in love with life, there is something of the pathos of things 'sweet, not lasting' [Hamlet, 1.3.8], a fragile, an unreasonable, an inevitable pathos. Isabella fronts him, an embodied conscience, all her soul in her eyes. Her eyes read him, plead with him, they are suppliant and judge; her intense fearfulness, the intolerable doubt of her brother's honour, the anguish of hope and fear, shine in them with a light as of tears frozen at the source. In a moment, with words on his lips whose far-reaching imagination is stung into him and from him by the sharpness of the impending death, he will have stooped below the reach of her contempt, uttering those words, 'Sweet sister, let me live!' [3.1.132]. After all, the final word of Shakespeare in this play is mercy; but it is a mercy which comes of the consciousness of our own need of it, and it is granted and accepted in humiliation. The lesson of mercy taught in The Merchant of Venice is based on the mutual blessing of its exercise, the graciousness of spirit to which it is sign and seal. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath; it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. [The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.185-7] Here, the claim which our fellow-man has on our commiseration is the sad claim of common guiltiness before an absolute bar of justice. How would you be If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? [2.2.75—7] And is not the 'painfulness,' which impresses us in this sombre play, due partly to this very moral, and not alone to the circumstances from which it disengages itself? For it is so 'painful' to think that we are no better than our neighbours. (1889, V, 170-2; 1919-20, 44-52)

204

41 Andrew Lang, a 'disconsolate and bitter' play 1891

From 'The Comedies of Shakespeare. With Illustrations by E. A. Abbey, and Comments by Andrew Lang. VI. Measure for Measure'. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 84 (1891), 62-77. Andrew Lang (1844—1912) was born in Selkirk, Scotland, to a sheriff-clerk. A precocious youth, he entered Edinburgh Academy at age ten and began a lifetime of extensive reading. He moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow University in 1863, then won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied at Balliol College under Benjamin Jowett. After graduation in 1868, he became a fellow at Merton College, then left the academic life in 1875 to become a journalist in London. He was an influential reviewer and published regularly in both British venues (The Daily News, Saturday Review, Spectator, and Cornhill Magazine) and American journals (Harper's and Nation). He wrote several articles for the ninth edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, edited the twelve-volume series The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Yellow Fairy Book, etc. (1889-1910), and produced several volumes of poetry and many scholarly books, including Letters on Literature (1889), Homer and the Epic (1893), Alfred Tennyson (1901), Magic and Religion (1901), Sir Walter Scott (1906), History of English Literature from 'Beowulf to Swinburne (1912), and Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown (1912).

Like so many of Shakespeare's plays, Measure for Measure is founded on an old story, and, to some extent, on an old play. It is always desirable to compare the piece, as Shakespeare finished it, with its basis as it existed in tradition or literature. Shakespeare takes, as it were, some rude old statue of metal, fuses it again in the fire of his genius, and recasts it in a mould that differs considerably from the original fashion. Yet the Shakespearian play is very often not without marks of its earlier condition; even Shakespeare cannot always make it wholly a new thing, and the stubborn nature of the legend, or some persistent vice of the old fashioning, or some flaw in the metal, cannot be completely burned away. The poet is ever labouring with a stubborn matter, and in Measure for Measure the stubbornness of the matter is so persistent that we might wish he had cast his favor on some other topic. The story of a magistrate who makes the surrender of a girl's honor the price of her brother's pardon, and who then treacherously slays the brother after all, is of unknown antiquity, and widely diffused. The immediate origin of the story, as 205

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Shakespeare knew it, is in the novels or brief tales of Giraldi Cinthio (published in 1565). A governor of Innspruck, Juriste, is the Angelo of the story, Epitia is the Isabella, Ludovico the Claudio. Epitia, unlike Isabella, is moved by her brother's entreaties, yields, and, after all, finds that her brother has been executed. The Emperor sentences Juriste to marry Epitia, and then to die. Epitia procures his pardon, and remains his wife — a repulsive conclusion. There is here no Mariana, and the treacherous intention of the judge is carried into effect. Cinthio dramatized his own romance as Epitia (published 1583). Five years earlier, George Whetstone had published his own unacted rhyming play, Promos and Cassandra, founded on Cinthio's novel. In 1582 Whetstone printed in prose the tale on which he had based his drama, The Rare Story of Promos and Cassandra, reported by Madam Isabella. He dates the events in the reign of Corvinus, King of Bohemia. Andrugio, the brother, is not really executed. He escaped to a hermitage, whence he came forth when he heard that Promos was to die for his treachery. Promos is pardoned, and marries Cassandra. The play of Whetstone is a very rude rhyming affair. The flat and dismal dulness of the whole piece — comic underplot, songs, and the rest — makes reading it a labor very distasteful. In this miserable legend Shakespeare had to alter much. He could not let his Isabella yield to Angelo; he could not suffer her to marry Angelo. He introduced the concealed Duke and the story of Mariana with the beautiful song. He altered the low comic plot, though he did not succeed in making this among the best of his humorous interludes. Not much was to be done with Whetstone's Lamia, Rapax, Gripax, and the rest of them. The matter is far from being conveniently comic. However, Shakespeare was placed in the way of some very dramatic situations. He could see what might be made of the encounters between the magistrate and the maiden; between her, again, and her brother, not to speak of the surprises caused by the substitution of another criminal's head for that of Angelo, and the revealed secret of Mariana. All that was flat and commonplace in Whetstone's hands was in Shakespeare's an opportunity for the display of character — a chance to show all the naked passions of the heart wrestling in open conflict, with Pleasure enticing men, and Death awaiting them. ^ The life of man moralizes itself, as it were unconsciously, when he combines the incidents of two or three old tales into a drama. He seldom probes the human heart more deeply; seldom displays the upper and the inner layers of consciousness and conscience so clearly as in Measure for Measure. It is not among his more kindly and beloved pieces — far from that; yet even here are pity and tenderness, a gentle sense of human infirmity, a mirthful and disdainful pity and compassion. Even about Shakespeare the humblest critic must be frank, and one is compelled to admit that Measure for Measure is not among his more fortunate plays. M. Coquelin, in his excellent study on Shakespeare and Moliere, in the Century Magazine, remarks that from 1601 his dramas were 'all masterpieces, all of them, and all disconsolate; it is the triumph of evil. ' Now, Measure for Measure is not, as an audience in the playhouse understood it, disconsolate; nor does evil triumph. Even the wretched Barnardine is reprieved: even the misdoers are not punished, except by being made to marry against their wills — Angelo to Mariana; Lucio to the lady whom he likes 206

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

less than pressing to death, hanging, and whipping. An Elizabethan audience would see more comedy than tragedy, more humor than cruelty, in this revenge. Still, it does not leave evil triumphant; and as Isabella is probably to be a Duchess, not a Nun, a Protestant public would think that virtue is rewarded indeed, while Claudio and Juliet escape with a fright. Nothing in this is 'disconsolate,' but disconsolate and bitter is the whole spirit of the piece. 'O, Heaven, the vanity of wretched fools!' [5.1.164] the Duke's exclamation, might be the motto of the work. It is almost in the dark modern manner of poems and dramas like Dr. Ibsen's, where too often there is no humorous, and no kindly or pure or sympathetic character. Isabella, indeed, is pure, but hers is an 'armed and iron maidenhood,' not wholly without a touch of bitterness. Lucio is humorous, and in the beginning, sympathetic. His ribaldry seems changed to chivalry by the very sight of Isabella: 'gentle and fair [1.4.24], he calls her: Hail, virgin, if you be — as those cheek-roses Proclaim you are no less. [1.4.16—17] When Isabella thinks he is mocking her, after his manner, he replies in a speech as pure as Imogen's, or the 'consecrated snow that lies on Dian's lap' [Timon of Athens, 4.3.485-6], could be: Lucio. It is true I would not — though 'tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest, Tongue far from heart — play with all virgins so; I hold you as a thing ensky'ed, and sainted; By your renouncement, an immortal spirit, And to be talk'd with in sincerity, As with a saint. [1.4.30-7] But Lucio relapses into a degrading kind of buffoonery in his confusions between the Duke and the Friar, who is the Duke in disguise. Doubtless this brings into relief the nobility of Isabella, which acts like a spell even on so dishonorably waggish a ribald. But we had begun to like Lucio, as a kind of Mercutio, with no worse fault than a laxity about love, and a galloping tongue. Shall it be argued that Shakespeare wants to demonstrate the degradation that follows loose morality? Indeed he is not commonly so severe; we are puzzled in the close by his Lucio, and, if we still remain his friends (as I confess I do, for the rest of the characters are unfriendly), we are 'disconsolate' enough at the conclusion of his rank and rambling adventures. It is not Shakespeare's wont to give us so much of the dark and the sour, so little of the light and the sweet, even in his tragedies. 'Man delights him not' [Hamlet, 2.2.309]; in this drama, however, we explain to ourselves this failure in his sunny humanity. Perhaps he simply found he had taken up an old 'canvas,' an old plot and play, which proved scarcely fit material for his genius. Certainly his language is, far beyond his wont, perplexed and tormented, while the turns of fortune and circumstance, which give movement and surprise, really spoil, to modern tastes, even the magical purity of Isabella. Can we admire her when she arranges the midnight meeting of the uncon207

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

scious Angelo and his forsaken betrothed, Mariana? Isabella had no choice, to be sure; it was for her brother's life that she dabbled in this intrigue, but she shows no dislike or disgust. 'The image of it gives me content already' [3.1.259], she exclaims, agreeing with the disguised Duke that 'the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof [3.1.257-8]. A modern playwright would infallibly have given Isabella some merry confidante, some light lady's-maid, who should have contrived this stratagem without her mistress's knowledge. But manners alter, not morals. It remains true that the passage is distasteful. The plot of Measure for Measure needs narrating here, and the plot, full of turns and astonishments, demands rapid inconsistencies of character, which are themselves full of bewilderment. The Duke Vincentio has long been reigning, though Lucio probably exaggerates when he calls him 'the old Duke of dark corners' [4.3.156—7]. Certain severe laws — for example, that which makes death the punishment of simple incontinence — have fallen obsolete. The Duke is a student of politics in a somewhat abstract fashion; like an austere Haroun-al-Raschid, he determines to disguise himself, to pretend a journey, and to see how things fare in his absence. He appoints Angelo as his regent, speaking of Angelo in conceited curious terms of praise not easily understood: Duke. Angelo, There is a kind of character in thy life.... [Quotes 1.1.26-47] It is to be supposed that the Duke understands, or gravely suspects, Angelo's real character — a selfish, unstable puritanism. Such a person is with difficulty unmasked; he is at once too wary, too selfish, and even too cold for it to be easy to reach the 'hard-panof his nature. The circumstances and opportunities of absolute power will make him show himself as he is, 'one whom all would have considered worthy of dominion had he not enjoyed it'; as Tacitus writes, dignus imperio, nisi imperasset. * 'It is never explained', Hallam says, 'how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret' (the refusal to marry the betrothed Mariana), 'and, being acquainted with it, how he preserved his esteem and confidence in Angelo.The story could scarcely have been kept secret; the Duke must have known it, and in the 'dark corners' of his mind must have suspected Angelo. 'A shy fellow was the Duke' [3.2.130-1]. He misdoubts Angelo, 'A man of stricture and firm abstinence' [1.3.12]. If, on the other hand, Angelo bore the trial well, then the Duke's laws would be enforced, while the Duke, being supposed absent, incurred no unpopularity. At all events, Hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be. [1.3.53—4] The Duke vanishes into his disguise of a friar, Angelo carries out the law, and Claudio is doomed to death. Even in his offence there is a kind of mercenary purpose very unattractive and unromantic. Claudio and Juliet were betrothed, but did not marry, while they secretly anticipated their marriage, that some money might not be lost: 208

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

She is fast my wife, Save that we do the denunciation lack Of outward order... . [Quotes 1.2.147-53] Juliet, apparently, lost her dower if she married without her friends' consent, which was withheld for the moment. So Claudio must die, and a crowd of vulgar and mercenary sinners are also molested. In their humors, those of Pompey, Froth, Elbow, and the rest, there is 'more dirt than wit.' Except in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, there is little low comedy in Shakespeare which amuses us less than the malapropisms of these gentry. One very human speech there is, that of Pompey, 'Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live' [2.1.233]. That is the humor of it.' ' Lucio goes to Isabella with the tidings of her brother's doom, advising her to try pleading with Angelo.... [Quotes 1.4.79-84]. Isabella, most abhorring the vice, makes but one appeal, and would withdraw without using any woman's wiles. Kneel down before him, hang upon his gown; You are too cold, [2.2.44-5] whispers the knowing Lucio, and then follows the famous scene of argument and entreaty. Even here how misplaced, according to our ideas of taste and pathos, is the conceit of Isabella: He's not prepared for death. Even for our kitchens We kill the fowl of season; shall we serve Heaven With less respect than we do minister To our gross selves? [2.2.84—7] As Isabella's prayers increase in beauty and nobility, as she offers the bribe of true prayers, That shall be up at heaven, and enter there Ere sunrise — prayers from deserved souls, From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate To nothing temporal — [2.2.151—5] the heart of Angelo becomes inflamed with evil passion. He moralizes on his own iniquity. He is the carrion lying by the violet, in the sun. . . . Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman's lightness? . . . What dost thou? or what art thou, Angelo? [2.2.165, 167-9, 172] Now first, it seems, does he begin to be conscious of a life's hypocrisy. Many a man has passed as a saint, Mr. Holmes says, because he has never worked down to the 'hard-pan' of his character.' ' 209

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, With saints doth bait they hook! [2.2.179-80] To himself Angelo has actually been a saint, of veins cold as snow-broth [1.4.58] — 'snaw-broo,' as we still call it in the North, when the spring floods come down. The spring flood of passion sweeps away the snow-broth of Angelo's veins; hitherto he has merely been untempted: Ever till now, When men were fond, I smiled and wonder'd how. [2.2.185—6] When Isabella returns, he proposes the infamous bargain: Might there not be a charity in sin, To save this brother's life? [2.4.63-4] Long after Shakespeare's time, Helen Walker, the original of Scott's Jeanie Deans, ' answered that question in her own way. She would not lie to save the life of a sister condemned like Claudio. Isabella, invincibly innocent, supposes Angelo to mean the sin he would commit in pardoning her brother. In vain Angelo pleads, Be that you are, That is, a woman; if you be more, you're none. [2.4.134-5] When at last she is forced to understand, she shows little of the passion with which she afterward most suddenly turns and rends Claudio, when he is for her surrender. 'I will proclaim thee, Angelo; look for't!' [2.4.151] she cries; and then he shows her how valueless and discredited her report will be. 'Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true' [2.4.170]. She speeds to her brother, without a shadow of doubt as to his approval of her conduct: Yet hath he in him such a mind of honor That, had he twenty heads to tender down On twenty bloody blocks, he'd yield them up, Before his sister should her body stoop To such abhorr'd pollution. [2.4.179-83] In Isabella there is a natural cold disdain of passion, and there is all the nun's regard for stainless purity, as a sacrifice meet for heaven and essential to salvation. Neither her soul nor her body will she give to a detested embrace, and to an eternity of punishment: Better it were a brother died at once, Than that a sister, by redeeming him, Should die forever. [2.4.106-8] Austere as is this virtue, we cannot deny that it is in a way self-regarding. It is not only her maiden pride, but her immortal soul that Isabella is chary of. The Third Act is a long disputation on Death. Death is viewed on this hand and 210

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

that, with human eyes, with those of philosophy, of religion, of devoted honor, reckless of life that bears a stain. Shakespeare seems to contradict that beautiful saying of Rochefoucauld's, 'Men cannot look steadily at death or the sun.'He does regard it steadily. In prison we find the Duke, disguised as a friar, lecturing on death to Claudio: Duke. Be absolute for death: either death or life, Shall thereby be the sweeter.... [Quotes 3.1.5-41] With force might Claudio have quoted to his ghostly counsellor what the ghost of Achilles in Hades said to the living Ulysses: 'Make not a light thing of my death to me.He has all youth's appetite for life, though he has half schooled himself to die bravely. If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms, [3.1.82—4] he says to Isabella, who is now by no means so assured of his resolution, and that he bears such a mind of honor. But his welcome of death as a bride comforts her again: There spake my brother! There my father's grave Did utter forth a voice! [3.1.85-6] She then tells him of Angelo's proposal, and at first he is firm enough: 'Thou shalt not do't' [3.1.102]. But how rapidly, by what swift and unperceived gradations, he slides into consent, and a fearful coward's vision of the universal end of all! A moment ago he was fortified by philosophy, and strong in honor. He was 'absolute for death.' Then, at the slightest glimmer of a dishonorable hope, at an instant's vision of possible life, this 'flower-like' young man — so Mr. Pater calls him' ' — is ready to sell his sister's shame, and to make the betrothed of Heaven the mistress of a villain. 'Death is a fearful thing' [3.1.115], he cries, and never listens to the answer, 'And shamed life a hateful' [3.1.116]. All that can be dreamed and feared of death, the chill, the nothingness; or, again, the eternal torment; or, worst of all, the horror of a semi-conscious, half-irrational, fevered continuance of vague existence, the uncomforted wanderings of the ghost, flash into Claudio's mind - a hell of dire alternatives. Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.... [Quotes 3.1.117-35] Yet not so sudden is the fall of Claudio as the revulsion to utter scorn and loathing of Isabella: O, you beast! O, faithless coward! O, dishonest wretch! [3.1.135-6] Is this a natural mood? Could a girl speak thus to a brother, degraded as he is? Romantic and terrible, as Mr. Pater thinks, ' this blaze of contempt may be; but is 211

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

it true to nature? One can more easily imagine Isabella turning and departing in silence, crushed by sorrow and shame; but this is her last word: 'Tis best that thou diest quickly. [3.1.150] The Duke enters, explaining that Angelo has but made trial of Isabella, that Claudio must die, and at once he is as ready for death as he had been eager for life: Let me ask my sister pardon. I am so out of love with life, that I will sue to be rid of it. [3.1.171-2] Claudio returns to his cell, and the Duke reveals to Isabella his notable plot, namely, that she shall pretend to yield, and that Mariana, the rejected bride of Angelo, shall take her place in a night meeting with him. Angelo had not only abandoned Mariana when her dowry was lost, but infamously 'pretended, in her, discoveries of dishonor' [3.1.227]. Isabella, we have seen, is content, and the Duke goes to seek 'this dejected Mariana' at 'the moated grange' [3.1.264-5]. There follows a string of comic scenes, in which Lucio maligns the Duke to his disguised face, and then we reach, in the Duke's company, the moated grange, and hear the page's beautiful song, 'Take, O, take those lips away!' [3.4.1]. Mariana, winning comfort as she may from a boy's sweet singing, is not the Mariana that our age knows best. When all but a boy himself, Lord Tennyson conquered this character from Shakespeare, and we think of her when All day within the dreamy house The door upon their hinges creak'd; The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd, Or from the crevice peered about. Old faces glimmered through the doors, Old footsteps trod the upper floors, Old voices called her from without. So the lines run in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, of 1830.[14] Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that the Laureate here gave us the betterknown and the better-liked Mariana, whom we more willingly remember than the dejected lady who sought Angelo in the garden 'circummured with brick,' 'upon the heavy middle of the night' [4.1.28, 34-5]. By a touch of delicacy Isabella is made to acquaint Mariana with the plot behind the scenes, and 'she'll take the enterprise upon her' [4.1.65]. None the less, though Angelo is deceived, he commands Claudio's execution. The Duke determines to sacrifice Barnardine — 'A Bohemian born; one that is a prisoner nine years old' [4.2.130-1] - instead, and Shakespeare renews, in Barnardine's case, his long criticism of death — the very burden of the strange comedy. Barnardine is Prov. A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come.... [Quotes 4.2.142-52] 212

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Barnardine is remote from the fearful and curious considerings of Claudio. How will he meet death? The Duke tries them all, as Cleopatra made experiments of many poisons on many men. Barnardine, in his rough way, is no more ready to die than Claudio. Enter Abhorson. Abhor. Sirrah, bring Barnardine hither. Pom. Master Barnardine! you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine.... [Quotes 4.3.21-62] Yet the Duke respites him, as so unmeet for death, and the head of a prisoner who had died of fever is palmed off as Claudio's on Angelo. Isabella, too, is told that her brother is dead. The Fifth Act winds up all with the Duke's return. Isabella pleads her cause with him, alleging that she yielded to Angelo, and was recompensed by her brother's death. Being disbelieved, she calls the friar — who was, of course, the Duke — as evidence in her behalf. Lucio cannot resist the opportunity of ape-like mischief: Had he been lay, my lord, For certain words he spake against your grace In your retirement, I had swing'd him soundly. [5.1.128—30] Mariana, veiled, now complicates the matter by her story. The Duke departs, and returning as the Friar, has a dispute with Lucio, who pulls off his hood. Tableau^. ' Angelo begs for 'immediate sentence then, and sequent death' [5.1.373], which, as in Lucio's case later, is commuted for marriage. But death is to follow for Angelo, till Mariana begs for his life in her own interest: 'I hope you will not mock me with a husband' [5.1.417]. She wins Isabella to aid her suit: I partly think A due sincerity govern'd his deeds, Till he did look on me; since it is so, Let him not die. [5.1.445-8] Then, of course, we have Claudio brought on 'muffled,' and the piece 'ends happily,' if people could be happy who had gone through such shame and terror. Measure for Measure is a fantastical play of dark corners, like the Duke himself. It wants relief, which it does not obtain either from a gorgeous pageantry of court life in Vienna or from real comedy and humor. We no longer find Pompey and Abhorson comic, Lucio loses our liking, and perhaps I have overstated the unsympathetic elements in the character of Isabella. Perhaps poor Juliet, with whom Claudio sinned — Juliet, who only crosses the stage on her meeting with the Duke — is the most winning person of the play. In Juliet penitence is indeed a grace. Duke. Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry? Juliet. I do, and bear the shame most patiently. [2.3.19-20] Certainly we can esteem Juliet more than the dishonorably pertinacious love of Mariana. Nor can we be quite out of sympathy with Pompey, and his 'Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live' [2.1.223] — an excuse for many callings. 213

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

With all its gloom, Measure for Measure is at least rich, and perhaps too rich, in dramatic situations. The changes and turns of character under the stress of different emotions are almost too frequent. Of all Shakespeare's plays, Mr. Pater says, in his interesting study, it contains most of his ethical judgments on sin, on mercy, on deathJ16^ No man nor woman in the piece has the right to cast the first stone at the others, and, except in the luckless case of Lucio, no stone is cast in the end. But the very pitifulness of Shakespeare is in this play allied to contempt. It is a child of his darker moods. Most things are pardonable in men, because in such a creature most things become insignificant. We are such stuff as nightmares are made of. Purity is hard and stern, Honor is a broken reed, even Love may be degraded by too persistent pardoning. Life is a comedy or tragedy of errors, and the veil of Death may hide a face more horrible than Life's. Truly Coleridge was right in deeming Measure for Measure a painful play. It is a comedy where Death holds the place of Love; there is no beautiful shape of Love in the whole of it, and the very mirth is miserable. (62— 77)

214

42 Barrett Wendell, a recapitulation of Shakespeare's earlier work 1894

From William Shakspere: A Study in Elizabethan Literature (New York, 1894). Barrett Wendell (1855—1921) was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1877, after cofounding the Harvard Lampoon. He studied law for some years, but failed the bar and took a position as an English professor at Harvard. He became a legendary teacher whose students included W. E. B. Du Bois and Van Wyck Brooks, and introduced what are now known as English composition and creative writing into the curriculum, as well as American literature. His many publications include Cotton Mather, The Puritan Priest (1891), English Composition: Eight Lectures Given at the Lowell Institute (1891), A Literary History of America (1900), The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature (1904), The Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante (1920), as well as his early book on Shakespeare, written while he was an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard.

[From 'V. Measure for Measure'] At first sight, Measure for Measure, like so many other of Shakespeare's plays, seems strongly individual. Its general effect, certainly, — the mood into which it throws you, — is unique: a little consideration however, reveals, in both its motive and its method, the economy of invention so characteristic of Shakespeare. In Julius Caesar, as we have seen, he expressed very plainly the sense of irony which now for a while so pervades his artistic feeling. In All's Well that Ends Well he expressed his equally persistent sense that while men remain men and women remain women, there will surely be trouble. In Hamlet he expressed a fiercely passionate sense of the mystery which hangs over life, wherein the two preceding motives remain constant. In Measure for Measure all these motives reappear: the slightest consideration of the story of Angelo will reveal the two first; the prison scene [3.1], particularly when Claudio shudders in the face of death [3.1.118 ff], will reveal something of the last. So, too, more subtly but just as surely, we find in Measure for Measure the motives which underlie both series of the Sonnets: Claudio is another example of such fascinating youth and weakness as may have inspired the first series; and, though in the serious parts we have no actively evil woman, the stories of Isabella, of Mariana, and of Juliet, constantly suggest the evils which arise from the 215

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

fascinating fact of sex. What makes Measure for Measure seem individual, then, is not that its motives are new, but that they are newly combined; they differ from the old not in kind, but in proportion. Here, for example, the irony, while far more passionate than that of Julius Caesar, lacks the overwhelming intensity which marks Hamlet. Here, too, the sense of sexual evil is at once more profound than that of All's Well that Ends Well, and so firmly set forth that you feel its greater depth to imply more certain insight. Here, finally, while there is no direct self-revelation, the frequent analogies to the moods expressed in the Sonnets go far to make you feel that the mood of Measure for Measure is unstudied, spontaneous, sincere. In the matter of dramatic detail, even to many of the speeches, Measure for Measure is almost recapitulatory. The old stage situations and devices of the comedies — mistaken identity and self-deception — are persistently used. Their effect, however, is no longer comic. The disguised Duke is a very different figure from a girlish heroine in a page's hose and doublet. Still more, Angelo is a very different figure from Malvolio, or Benedick, or Falstaff. By almost any other Elizabethan dramatist, indeed, he might have been more ribaldly amusing. Imagine him and his situation on the modern French stage, and you will see for yourself what a chance for loose fun they afford. That this chance is neglected, that Angelo is rather a tragic figure than a comic, is deeply characteristic, both of Shakespeare and of this moment in his career. Recapitulation, with due variation, however, does not end with such general matters as these. The career and the fate of Lucio are closely akin to those of Parolles and of Falstaff, just as his ribald chat has something in common with Mercutio's. Clearly, too, Mariana simply revives the Diana of All's Well that Ends Well; and Claudio, at least in his weakness, has much in common with Bertram. The last acts of these two plays, furthermore, are so much alike that this portion of All's Well that Ends Well might almost be regarded as a study for this portion of Measure for Measure. Even more notable, however, is the reminiscent, if not exactly recapitulatory, flavor of many actual speeches. This is so marked that we may to advantage compare two passages from Measure for Measure with similar ones from earlier works. The first of these passages is that where Isabella pleads for mercy on Claudio; it instantly suggests Portia's more familiar plea for mercy with Shylock. Here is Portia's: — The quality of mercy is not strain'd It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath.. . [Quotes The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.184-97] Here is Isabella's plea with Angelo: No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,

Become them with one half so good a grace As mercy does.... [Quotes 2.2.59-66, 72-9] 216

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

The second passage from Measure for Measure which here deserves attention is Claudio's speech on death, which resembles Hamlet's great soliloquy, — 'To be or not to be,' etc. [Hamlet, 3.1.55]. A few lines should serve to remind everyone of that: — To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end.... [Quotes 3.1.59-68, 75-81] Compare with Claudio's speech: — Aye, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot. . .. [Quotes 3.1.117-31] With less direct quotation, it would have been hard to make clear a distinct difference, in something more tangible than mood or temper, between Measure for Measure and the plays we have considered before. The passages we have just read are enough alike to demonstrate that the very style of Measure for Measure has a certain heaviness which we have not met hitherto. The comparison also suggests that the change is due to increased activity of thought. Unimpulsively, but intensely and constantly, reflective, the mind which wrote Measure for Measure was actually overburdened with things to say. Here, then, we have a fresh symptom of the abnormal mental activity which pervades Hamlet. It reveals itself now in a compactness of style hitherto strange to Shakespeare. The passages just quoted are by no means the most compact of Measure for Measure, which often becomes positively obscure. One feels at last as if Shakespeare's abnormal activity of mind, prevented by his lack of inventive power from dashing into regions foreign to his older experience, were writhing about every concept he had, striving with the linear vehicle of language to enwrap elusive solidity of thought. While not constant hereafter, this trait is henceforth characteristic of Shakespeare's style. Taking all these considerations together, we find in the mood of Measure for Measure a normal reaction from the passionate sense of mystery so wonderfully phrased in Hamlet. Tacitly assuming, as usual, the conventional ideals of virtue and of life still instinctive to the normal English mind, Shakespeare faces the fact of sexual passion. Like the fate which Hamlet faces, the thing is at once mysterious and evil. In Hamlet Shakespeare expressed his sense of the mystery; in Measure for Measure he expresses his sense of the evil. Here his dominant mood is grimly contemplative, almost consciously philosophic. No more than in Hamlet can he offer any solution of the dreadful mystery; but he can state fact, and can comment on it inexhaustibly. The mood is a mood of reaction, — of slumbering passion, but of enormous, sombre latent feeling. Strangely enough, this mood has much in common with a potent contemporary mood which has left a widely different record, — the Calvinistic philosophy of the Puritans. As with them, life is a positively evil thing, made up of sin, of weakness, of whatever else should deserve damnation. Fate is overpowering; pure ideals are bent and broken in conflict with fact; and, above all, sexual love is a vast, evil mystery. Even though, here and there, a gleam of persistent purity suggest the possibility of 217

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

rare, capricious election, most men are bound by the very law of their being to whirl headlong toward merited damnation. In Measure for Measure - so strangely named a comedy — one may constantly find this unwitting exposition of Calvinism, with no gleam of hopeful solution. This evil fact is the real world; see it, hate it, grimly laugh at it if you can and will; God knows what it means; all we know is that it can surely mean no good. Meanwhile, however, it can afford us endless material for comment; and comment is essentially anaesthetic. So this mood, after all not peculiar to Shakespeare, but a mood very potent throughout his time, takes its place between the moods which his work has already expressed and the moods which are to come. Deeper and deeper insight they show into the depths of human experience; but not a spiritual insight which pierces higher and higher. (263-70)

218

43 Frederick S. Boas, a problem play 1896

From Shakspere and his Predecessors (London, 1896). Frederick Samuel Boas (1862-1957), born in Belfast, Ireland, into a Jewish family, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he won firsts in classical moderations, literae humaniores, and history. He converted to Anglicanism around the time of his marriage and taught as a Lecturer to the Oxford University Extension Delegacy (1887—1901) and then as a professor of History and English Literature at Queen's College, Belfast (1901—05). Between 1905 and 1927 Boas was Inspector in English Literature and History for the London County Council (1905—27), producing much of his scholarly work after his retirement. He edited, for example, The Year's Work in English Studies from 1922 to 1955 and wrote several influential books, including Christopher Marlowe: a Biographical and Critical Study (1940) and Shakspere and his Predecessors, in which Boas became the first critic to use the term 'problem play', taken from the contemporary drama of his own time, to describe All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet.

[From Chapter XIII: 'The Problem-Plays'] The opening of the seventeenth century coincides almost exactly with a sharp turning-point in Shakespeare's dramatic career. On one side of the year 1601 lie comedies of matchless charm and radiance, and histories which are half comedies. On the other appear plays, in which historical matter is given a tragic setting, or in which comedy for the most part takes the grim form of dramatic satire. The change has been compared to the passage from a sunny charming landscape to a wild mountain district whose highest peaks are shrouded in thick mist. The causes of this startling alteration in the poet's mood are, as has been shown, in great measure obscure. He was in the full tide of outward prosperity, and though his father died in 1601, this event could not have brought a keener pang than the loss of his only son in 1596, which seems to have left no shadow on his work. The Sonnets, with their record of mental anguish and disillusion, give a partial clue, but it must be acknowledged that the evidences of date tend to place the estrangement between Shakespeare and Will during the period of the brightest comedies, and their reconciliation just before the production of the graver plays. Another cause that has been suggested for 219

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the dramatist's change from gaiety to gloom, is the failure of the conspiracy of Essex, followed by the execution of the Earl and the imprisonment of Shakespeare's friend Southampton. To this we might find a parallel in Spenser's Complaints [1591], whose pessimistic tone is largely due to his grief at the death of Sidney and Leicester. It can scarcely be a mere coincidence that Julius Caesar immediately follows the Earl's tragic end, and it is remarkable that most of the plays which with more or less warrant may be assigned to the last three years of Elizabeth's reign, contain painful studies of the weakness, levity, and unbridled passion of young men. This is especially the case with All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. The last-named play is, of course, distinguished from the others by its tragic ending, but it is akin to them in its general temper and atmosphere. All these dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civilization is ripe unto rottenness. Amidst such media abnormal conditions of brain and of emotion are generated, and intricate cases of conscience demand a solution by unprecedented methods. Thus throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome, even when, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, the complications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth act. In Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet no such partial settlement of difficulties takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best we may. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them together as Shakespeare's problem-plays. (344—5) MEASURE FOR MEASURE, which first appeared in the folio of 1623, may be conjecturally assigned to about 1604. The revival in that year of a statute, which punished with death any divorced person who married again while his or her former husband or wife was living, is strikingly akin to the incident with which the play opens. According to an ingenious theory of Malone [No. 3], two passages, Act i. I. 67-72 and ii. 4. 27-31, are intended as a 'courtly apology for King James I's stately and ungracious demeanour on his entry into England,' which gave great offence to a people accustomed to the Tudor bonhommie. The date to which these references seem to point is supported by internal evidence. The perfect balance between thought and language, which marks the final group of historical plays and the joyous comedies, is replaced by a compression of style which often makes the rhythm harsh and sense obscure. The play has practically the same percentage of lines with double ending as All's Well (21), but is without the rhyming passages distinctive of that work. As in All's Well, we have the rescue of a brother by a sister, though Shakespeare shows his usual skill in producing variations. The tie is here one of blood, not of adoption, and it is physical instead of moral death from which the strong-willed woman delivers the weak man. The repulsive instance of mistaken identity, which gave Helena to the arms of Bertram instead of Diana, is repeated in the case of Mariana and Isabella, although in the source from which Shakespeare took the plot of Measure for Measure there is no suggestion of this device. With Hamlet the play is linked by its deeply reflective tone, its brooding sense of the pollution spread by lust in the single soul 220

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

and in society at large, and the shivering recoil of the man of phantasies from the mystery of the unknown hereafter. Claudio's gloomy meditations on death sound like an echo from the soliloquies of the Danish Prince. It is this wealth of philosophic thought, this concern with the deepest issues of life here and beyond the grave, that give the play a massive weight which the original framework of plot might well have seemed too slight to bear. The story was first told by the Italian novelist Cinthio in his Hecatomithi. There Ludovico is sentenced to death for seduction by Juriste, the Emperor's deputy in Innspruck. Ludovico's sister Epitia pleads for his life, and the deputy becoming enamoured of her, succeeds, by a promise of marriage and pardon to her brother, in making her yield to his desires. He thereupon violates his double pledge, but the lady appeals to the Emperor, who forces Juriste to marry her and then condemns him to death. At Epitia's intercession however he is pardoned, and henceforth lives a reformed life. This story was dramatized in 1578 by George Whetstone in his Promos and Cassandra. Whetstone's play was in two parts, containing ten Acts, of which the first five deal with the iniquity of the deputy, and the latter with its discovery by the king, who now first appears in person. The work was written in a curious medley of metres, from ballad-lines to blank verse, and, besides introducing a comic underplot from low life, it modified the original story. The brother, here called Andrugio, is not executed, but set at liberty by the governor of the prison, who sends the head of a criminal in his place. Thus, when the lady marries the deputy at the close of the play, we are spared the revolting spectacle of a heroine's union, not only with her own seducer, but with her brother's judicial murderer. This grim use of mistaken identity to save the brother's life may have suggested to Shakespeare another more repulsive use of the same device to save the sister's honour. Hence the introduction in Measure for Measure of Mariana, whose relation to Angelo further serves to throw a strong light upon the deputy's character. Besides this cardinal change the dramatist made a number of minor alterations, all adding to the plausibility and moral significance of the plot. Yet in spite of these improvements, Measure for Measure has never won the suffrages of the majority of readers, and has been condemned by a number of critics, including Coleridge, who calls it 'the most painful — say, rather, the only painful — part' of Shakespeare's genuine works, and who speaks of the comic scenes as disgusting, the tragic as horrible.' ' Such criticism, besides entirely passing over the wonderful technical skill which has smoothed away most of the difficulties in peculiarly stubborn materials, is grossly unjust to the spirit of the play. Such epithets as 'disgusting' and 'horrible' can only be fairly applied to scenes which violate aesthetic decencies from sheer love of the foul or barbarous. In Measure for Measure, though undeniably strong meat is served up, the most repulsive details have all their place in the general scheme, which is indisputably noble, while numberless lustrous shafts of poetry and thought pierce the sombre atmosphere in which the action moves. The general effect of that atmosphere has been vividly caught by Watkiss Lloyd in an otherwise singularly inappreciative study of the play: 'We never get into the free, open, joyous atmosphere so invigorating in other works of Shakespeare: the oppressive gloom of the prison, the foul breath of the brothel, are only exchanged for the 221

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

chilly damp of conventual walls or the oppressive retirement of the monastery.'[2] Vienna, whither Shakespeare shifts the scene, is, as here portrayed, a city of dreadful night, wherein Corruption boils and bubbles Till it o'errun the stew. [5.1.318-19] Lust holds its shameless saturnalia in the open, and society is perishing of inward corruption. Beneath the mild sway of a shy, meditative ruler, animal instincts have broken loose in uncurbed riot. For fourteen years the 'strict statutes and most biting laws' (1.3.19) designed for the restraint of these evils have been let sleep. Justice, like the rod hung up in the child's sight, but never used, is mocked at rather than feared; liberty plucks it by the nose; the law is as a scarecrow, which has kept one shape so long that it has become a perch for the birds of prey, instead of their terror. The Duke's sluggish temperament has at length been aroused to the gigantic proportions of the disease, and he determines to set the rusty machinery of the law once more in motion. But with the sensitiveness of a finely-strung nature he shrinks from the tyranny of rigorously punishing sins to which his own laxity had granted a 'permissive pass' [1.3.38], and he withdraws for a time into seclusion, whence, in the disguise of a friar, he can watch the progress of events. The Duke's scruples, as he himself confesses, are not his only, perhaps not his chief, motive for his retirement. Otherwise it would have sufficed to appoint as his deputy the experienced and capable Escalus, who has the prior claim to this office. But 'with a leavened and prepared choice' [1.1.51] he gives the first place on the commission to a younger man, Angelo, and we gradually realize that the desire to test this man's character has at least as much to do with the Duke's strange course as his dislike of inconsistency. Angelo is the product of an age of licence — generated by a process of recoil. In this mediaeval Sodom he is determined that there shall be at least one righteous man. While others dally along the primrose path, he walks straight on in the narrow way. He subdues the flesh by a system of penitential discipline, and even libertines, who do not hesitate to talk scandal of the duke, admit that Angelo is A man whose blood Is very snow-broth; one who never feels The wanton stings and motions of the sense, But doth rebate and blunt his natural edge With profits of the mind, study and fast. [1.4.57-61] Escalus is the spokesman of public opinion when he asserts that Angelo is worthy beyond all others to fill the office of deputy. But the deep-sighted Duke is suspicious of virtue so entirely self-concentrated, and there is a flavour of irony in the solemn address with which he prefaces the appointment: Angelo . . . 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, 222

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not. [1.1.26, 29-35] And the Duke's distrust of this precisian, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, yet values above all things his reputation in their eyes, is more explicitly avowed to Friar Thomas: Lord Angelo scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be. [1.3.50-4] The Duke thus acts on the principle of the Greek proverb [arche dexei andra], * but his deputy's private life has already given a significant hint of what may be looked for from him in his wider sphere. He had been affianced to Mariana, sister of the great soldier Frederick, but between the time of contract and the appointed day of nuptial, Frederick had been lost at sea, and with him had gone down Mariana's dowry. Whereupon this 'well-seeming Angelo' [3.1.223], pretending discoveries of dishonour in her, had swallowed all his vows and left her in her tears. The virtue which does not shrink from cold-blooded treachery may well be suspect, and is deservedly exposed to the searching ordeal of irresponsible sway. The moment Angelo feels the sword of justice in his grasp he proves to the world that it is no longer to be borne in vain. The 'drowsy and neglected act' [1.2.170] punishing immorality with death is revived. The officers of justice hale with newborn zeal suspected offenders before the deputy and his colleague. Draconian severity is substituted for the laxity of the previous regime. Yet the results of this rigid censorship are decidedly equivocal. While the suburban dens of iniquity are demolished, those in the city are allowed to 'stand for seed' [1.2.99], because 'a wise burgher put in for them' [1.2.100]. It is the opinion of experts that the sin aimed at will not be 'extirped till eating and drinking be put down' [3.2.103], and that if men lose their heads for it, in ten years there will be wanted a commission for more heads. Moreover there are divided counsels on the judgement-seat, as appears in the examination of Froth and the disreputable clown Pompey. Angelo, irritated by the blundering charge of constable Elbow, who is evidently next of kin to Dogberry, and by the realistic circumlocution of Pompey's defence, hurries abruptly away, with the grim wish that his colleague may find good cause to whip them all. Escalus continues the investigation with imperturbable patience and good humour. He laughs at Elbow's mistakes, pulls Pompey up short in his long-winded digressions, by concise, leading questions, scans Froth narrowly for signs of his character, and in the end delivers an impartial but merciful judgement. Froth is discharged with a few kindly words of caution, Pompey is threatened with a whipping should he appear at the bar again, and the constable, whose own private life has proved not to be beyond reproach, is warned that it would be advisable for him to pass on his office to some other sufficient man in his ward. The divergent conception which Angelo and Escalus hold of their duties is yet 223

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

more clearly illustrated in the case of a more highly-placed offender, Claudio. With deliberate distinctness, which hasty reading must not be allowed to blur, Shakespeare has set forth the circumstances which bring this young man, who in Whetstone's version was an ordinary libertine, within the scope of the terrible statute. He has been contracted to Juliet, and had lived with her as his wife, though the outward form of marriage had been postponed, because Juliet's dowry remained in the coffer of her friends, whose favour had yet to be gained for the union. A contracted couple, from the Elizabethan point of view, were looked upon as joined in wedlock, and thus Claudio's sin was merely one in name. Moreover — and it is one of the dramatist's most subtle and original uses of parallelism — Claudio's relation to Juliet had been almost of a piece with that of Angelo to Mariana. But where the one had for worldly reasons left his already affianced bride in the lurch, the other with generous impetuosity had preferred disregard of an outward form to heartless desertion. Thus Claudio's transgression is in itself most venial, and Angelo is the last man justified in visiting it with condign penalties. The humane Escalus pleads the mitigating effect of circumstances, the infirmity of human nature, the unsullied record of Claudio's house. He upholds that the true function of law is to cure, not to destroy, to 'rather cut a little than fall and bruise to death' [2.1.5—6]. But Angelo is remorseless. He is the consummate type of the martinet official whose circle of vision is bounded by the narrow horizon of his department, who drives a code mercilessly through the delicately complex mechanism of society, and to whom the claims of red-tape are more sacred than those of human flesh and blood. The one imperious idea that the law must take its course fills his mind to the exclusion of all else, and Escalus' appeal is met with the dry, pitiless formula, 'Sir, he must die' [2.1.31]. In his desperate strait, with less than twenty-four hours between himself and death, Claudio sends for help to his sister Isabella. There is flagrant irony in the fact that he must choose as messenger the dissolute Lucio, who has seduced a maid under promise of marriage, and shaken himself free of her by perjury. And it heightens the irony that this libertine should have to seek Isabella within the convent of Saint Clare. For Claudio's sister is about to turn her back upon the world, and to become a votarist. The travail of the senses, which is convulsing the social fabric of Vienna, is absolutely stilled within this retreat, where the nuns may speak with men only in the presence of the prioress, and may not speak and be seen at the same time. Yet even these privileges are too large for Isabella, and she would fain be subjected to a more strict restraint. Like Angelo she disciplines her nature by austerity of life, but instead of starving body and soul alike, she subdues the flesh to the service of the spirit. Her virtue is not an external property laboriously won, a distinguishing badge, a phylactery made abroad to be seen of all men. It is the bloom and fruitage of noble energies, of a life fed from the inexhaustible depths where all sense of self is lost. 'Isabella,' it has been said, 'is the only one of Shakespeare's women whose heart and eyes are fixed upon an impersonal ideal, to whom something abstract is more, in the ardour and energy of her youth, than any human personality.'' Helena had been stirred by missionary ardour, but its concentration upon one object had robbed it of the impressiveness which catholicity alone can bestow. Isabella's gaze is not thus narrowed: it is fixed full upon the surpassing splendour of the beatific vision, and her 224

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

face, as the virginal 'cheek-roses' [1.4.16] testify, is luminous with the reflected glow. Yet this rapture of the spirit has not deadened her to sweet earthly affections. She prizes the memory of her father; she speaks of her school-fellow Juliet under a tender fiction of kinship, and she holds her brother very dear. Though mistrusting her own power, she answers at once to his call for help, and hastens to the deputy. At first it would seem that her lack of confidence in herself is but too well-grounded. Her brother's vice is abhorrent to her; she is 'at war 'twixt will and will not' [2.2.33], and she petitions for condemnation of the sin, but mercy on the sinner. As Lucio declares, she could not plead more tamely for a pin, and it needs all the pressure that he can bring to bear to prevent her withdrawing upon Angelo's first refusal of her suit. But the frozen surface of her vestal nature gradually thaws, and the imprisoned eloquence streams from the depths beneath. Though acknowledging the justice of the statute, she pleads for mercy in words that recall those of Portia, but, as befits her character, she anchors her claim more avowedly upon divine precedent: Why all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. [2.2.73—5] Angelo is sufficiently moved to offer a justification of his rigour, and even to cloak it under the semblance of pity. But the flimsy covering shrivels in the white flame of Isabella's scorn, as she reminds the deputy that 'it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant' [2.2.107-9]. And autocratic officialism, exultant in the exercise of its short-lived power, meets its annihilating indictment in the majestic irony of the supposition: Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder. [2.2.110—14] Angelo visibly wavers beneath this attack, and Isabella presses home her advantage by a personal appeal. She bids the deputy knock at his own bosom, and ask of his heart if it confess a natural guiltiness like Claudio's: in that case he must 'sound no thought' [2.2.140] against her brother's life. Escalus had already used the same argument in vain, but on the lips of this saintly advocate it has a novel power. The die is cast, when he utters the simple words: 'I will bethink me — Come again tomorrow' [2.2.144, 155). Isabella has prevailed, but not through the avenue of which she thought. She has not softened Angelo's heart, or convinced his reason, but inflamed his desire. His nature has just kinship enough with her own to feel the full seductive charm of her immaculate purity. He recognizes in her the ideal which all his efforts reproduce, but in distorted and fragmentary form, and he covets its possession. Thus he is attacked through the very virtue in which he fancied himself so securely entrenched, and the man whose blood had never been stirred by wanton allurements, finds in the chastity of a vestal a more subtle and irresistible snare. As he cries in the moment of self-revelation, 225

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint With saints doth bait thy hook! Most dangerous Is the temptation that doth goad us on To sin in loving virtue. [2.2.179-82] But it is not easy, when Isabella returns, to put his thoughts into words. He discloses himself by riddling questions, whence she only gradually gathers his purpose. She thinks at first that he is merely making trial of her virtue, and the martyr-spirit that welcomes pain as the deliverance from dishonour leaps out to meet the challenge: Were I under the terms of death, The impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies And strip myself to death, as to a bed That longing have sick for, ere I'd yield My body up to shame. [2.4.100-4] But Angelo takes advantage of her confession that women are 'ten times frail' [2.4.128] to return to the attack. He bid her be what she is — a woman, for, if she is more, she is none, and he declares his passion in unequivocal terms, with her brother's pardon as the reward for her compliance. Her infinite scorn can only find voice in the repetition of the single epithet 'seeming, seeming' [2.4.150], though with feminine readiness she at once assays to turn to Claudio's profit the tactical advantage given her by the deputy's proposal. But she now learns the unscrupulous meanness of this cold-blooded calculating man of affairs. To her threats of denunciation the would-be sensualist opposes the bulwark of his 'unsoiled name' [2.4.155], and in a brutal outbreak of the cruelty which in Shakespeare's eyes is the reverse side of lust, he proclaims that, in case she resists his suit, Claudio shall suffer torture as well as death. But the pain which Isabella does not dread for herself, she does not dread for others. She carries in her breast, as Kreyssig^ ^ has said, 'the categorical imperative' which forbids her, under whatever pressure of circumstance, to swerve an inch from the rigid line of inexorable moral law. Yet even the most unfaltering virtue, in the hour of its probation, welcomes the fellowship of another human heart, and Isabella hurries away to the prison on the hope of hearing her resolution endorsed from Claudio's lips. She finds him in the company of the friar-duke, who is seeking to make death less terrible to him by fixing his gaze upon all that is mean, paltry, and pestilent in life. But, though Claudio murmurs assent to these platitudes, his personality gives them the lie. The floral grace of this youth jars with the blackness of the sepulchre. Though at Isabella's first mention of the price by which he may be saved, he delights her by the brave ring of his protest, yet the passionate instinct of the living to clasp life, by whatever means, proves itself too strong. 'Death is a fearful thing' [3.1.115], moans the quaking wretch, who already feels its chill hand upon his brow. With panic-born eloquence he gives voice to the mutiny of the warm tingling flesh and of 'the delighted spirit' [3.1.120] against the terrors of the impenetrable Beyond, with its vista of charnel-house pollution for the body, and infernal tortures for the soul. In the paroxysm of his despair he can only grasp the one fact — that his sister's honour 226

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

may be flung as a sop to the grisly shape that hovers over him, and imploringly he pleads for its sacrifice. A modern dramatist would doubtless have here seen the materials for a theatrically effective situation, in which the heroine was torn by the conflict between sisterly love and her ideal of duty. But Shakespeare did not consider that the drama's function was to elaborate such a situation, with the inevitable result of blurring the line between right and wrong. Isabella's recoil is instantaneous, absolute, final. 'The swift, vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white spirit,'[6) and if her wrath is stern, wellnigh savage, it is the elemental rage of unsophisticated purity against sin. Up to this point, which forms the exact centre of the play, all has been wrought in Shakespeare's mightiest manner, but henceforward, through the remainder of Act iii and Act iv, the workmanship flags. The scenes are written chiefly in a prose of a comparatively tame character, and the rapidity with which they succeed one another is confusing. But the action advances in a number of material points. Isabella proves that her outburst of defiance to Claudio does not spring from callousness to his sufferings, for she lends herself to the Duke's stratagem whereby her seeming assent to Angelo's overtures is to save her brother and secure the happiness of the forsaken Mariana. The glimpse of the lonely woman at the moated grange gives the outline which the Lincolnshire poet of our own day was to fill in with sombre detail from the landscape of the fens.'7' A pleasanter glimpse is that of Angelo's brick-walled garden, abutting on a vineyard with a planched gate. But the scene lies for the most part in the prison and its precincts, where the disguised Duke adds hourly to his experiences of criminal life, and gathers fresh evidence of the results of his deputy's administration. Once having entered upon the downward path, Angelo finds himself driven ever lower and lower. Having secured, as he believes, the fruits of his nefarious compact, he violates it from fear of after-consequences, and he even orders Claudio's execution at an illegally early hour. The threads thus somewhat loosely scattered are gathered into a knot in the fifth act. This act in its structure closely resembles the final scene of All's Well that Ends Well. The ruler again sits in judgement, and there are the same charges, arrests, and threats of death, the same deliberate mystification before guilt is brought home to the evil-doer. But the denouement is more impressive in the present play, which rises once again to something of its earlier power. The Duke's proclamation of redress to petitioners on his re-entry into the city has disquieted Angelo, and his worst fears are fulfilled when Isabella steps forth to accuse him in the open street. Yet outwardly he maintains his composure, and even when Mariana denounces him, he seeks to quell her with a sneer. But the discovery that the Duke, 'like power divine' [5.1.369], has beheld his 'passes' [5.1.370], completely crushes him, and he begs for immediate sentence and sequent death. The shrine of outward respectability at which he had worshipped so zealously is shivered, and in the agony of his humiliation he may well crave to be buried among its ruins. Coleridge deplores that he is not taken at his word, that he is not sacrificed to 'the strong indignant claim of justice. '^ But Angelo's character is not conceived of as irredeemably vile. It was the previous austerity of his life, and the overstrained self-confidence which this begot, that left him prone to the overwhelming temptation that burst upon him from the most 227

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

unforeseen quarter. Isabella herself admits that 'a due sincerity governed his deeds' [5.1.446] till he looked upon her, and though she believes that Claudio has died by his command, instead of clamouring for vengeance she petitions Angelo's pardon on the ground that he has sinned but in intent. Mariana, with whom he has been constrained to fulfil his marriage-contract, sues for his life on the plea that 'best men are moulded out of faults' [5.1.439]. The Duke for a time poses as inflexible: An Angelo for Claudio, death for death! Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure, Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure. [5.1.409-11] But the spirit of the play is in reality the negation of the maxim which serves as its title. Even while the Duke thus pronounces judgement he knows that Claudio is alive, and that the capital sentence on Angelo is merely a feint. The deputy is saved by that humane interpretation of the law against which he had battled so tenaciously. In the years passed since The Merchant of Venice was written Shakespeare had reached a loftier conception of justice. The earlier play had furnished an ideal illustration of 'measure for measure.' Shylock took his stand upon the letter of the law, and by the letter he was overthrown. But here the fanatical worship of the letter is shown to conflict with the genuine principle of equity, and we realize that codes and charters may become a curse instead of a blessing to society, unless they are applied in a remedial and not a nakedly retributive spirit J9] That such will henceforth be the case in Vienna is guaranteed by Isabella's elevation to a share in the ducal seat. She does not return to the nunnery, yet in her cloistral whiteness of soul she bears abroad the stamp and seal of her novitiate. Her leavening presence at the core of the state promises a speedier regeneration of the devotees of Venus genetrix in her impure form than the most Draconian enactments. In her we salute what Angelo had so miserably failed to become, a 'saviour of society,' and if the light that streams from her countenance is at first dazzling in its pure severity, it turns if we gaze but long enough into a soft, benignant glow. (357—69)

228

44 Georg Brandes, Measure for Measure and Puritan hypocrisy 1898 From William Shakespeare: A Critical Study [trans. William Archer and Diana White] (2 vols, London, 1898). Volume II. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842—1927) was educated at the University of Copenhagen, where he graduated B.A. in 1864 and Ph.D. in 1870. He taught at that university for several years, but left when denied a chair because he was a Jew, political radical, and professed atheist. After several years in Germany and other European countries, in 1902 he was able to return to a professorship at the University of Copenhagen. His principal publications include Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature (1872—90; English edition, 6 vols, London, 1901 — 05), Aristocratic Radicalism (1895-96), and William Shakespeare (3 vols, Copenhagen, 1895-96). These show the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), about whom he published a book in 1909. Brandes is one of the most important examples of the biographical approach to Shakespeare.

[From Chapter XX: 'Measure for Measure,' pp. 70—80; Brandes has discussed All's Well That Ends Well in the previous chapter and begins this one by noting 'some incidental mockery of the increasing Puritanism of the time' in that play which 'reappears still more clearly in the choice of the theme treated in Measure for Measure.'] What attracted Shakespeare to this unpleasant subject was clearly his indignation at the growing Pharisaism in matters of sexual morality which was one outcome of the steady growth of Puritanism among the middle classes. It was a consequence of his position as an actor and theatrical manager that he saw only the ugliest side of Puritanism — the one it turned towards him. Its estimable sides well deserved a poet's sympathy. Small wonder, indeed, that independent and pious men should seek the salvation of their souls without the bounds of the Anglican State Church, with its Thirty-Nine Articles, to which all clergymen and state officials were bound to swear, and to which all citizens must make submission. It was a punishable offence to use any other ritual than the official one, or even to refuse to go to church. The Puritans, who dreamed of leading the Christian Church back to its original purity, and who had returned home after their banishment in the reign of Mary with the ideal of a democratic Church before their 229

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

eyes, could not possibly approve of a State Church subject to the crown, or of such an institution as Episcopacy. Some of them looked to Scottish Presbyterianism as a worthy model, and desired to see Church government by laymen, the elders of the congregation, introduced into England, in place of the spiritual aristocracy of the bishops. Others went still farther, denied the necessity of one common form of worship for all, and desired to have the Church broken up into independent congregations, in which any believer might officiate as priest. We have here the germs of the great party division in Cromwell's time^ ^ into Presbyterians and Independents. So far as we can see, Shakespeare took no interest whatever in any of these ecclesiastical or religious movements. He came into contact with Puritanism only in its narrow and fanatical hatred of his art, and in its severely intolerant condemnation and punishment of moral, and especially of sexual, frailties. All he saw was its Pharisaic aspect, and its often enough only simulated virtue. It was his indignation at this hypocritical virtue that led him to write Measure for Measure. He treated the subject as he did, because the interests of the theatre demanded that the woof of comedy should be interwoven with the severe and sombre warp of tragedy. But what a comedy! Dark, tragic, heavy as the poet's mood — a tragi-comedy, in which the unusually broad and realistic comic scenes, with their pictures of the dregs of society, cannot relieve the painfulness of the theme, or disguise the positively criminal nature of the action. One feels throughout, even in the comic episodes, that Shakespeare's burning wrath at the moral hypocrisy of selfrighteousness underlies the whole structure like a volcano, which every moment shoots up its flames through the superficial form of comedy and the interludes of obligatory merriment. And yet it is not really against hypocrisy that his attack is aimed. At this stage of his development he is far too great a psychologist to depict a ready-made, finished hypocrite. No, he shows us how weak even the strictest Pharisee will prove, if only he happens to come across the temptation which really tempts him; and how such a man's desire, if it meets with opposition, reveals in him quite another being — a villain, a brute beast — who allows himself actions worse a hundredfold than those which, in the calm superiority of a spotless conscience, he has hitherto punished in others with the utmost severity. It is not a type of Shakespeare's opponents that he here unmasks and brands - it is a man in many ways above the average type, as he saw it. The chief character of Measure for Measure is the judge of public morality, the hard and stern Censor morum,^ who in his moral fanaticism believes that he can root out vice by persecuting its tools, and imagines that he can purify and reform society by punishing every transgression, however natural and comparatively harmless, as a capital crime. The play shows us how this man, as soon as a purely sensual passion takes possession of him, does not hesitate to commit, under the mask of piety, a crime against real morality so revolting and so monstrous that no expression of loathing and contempt would be too severe for it, and scarcely any punishment too rigorous. From its nature such a drama ought to end by appeasing in some satisfactory manner the craving for justice awakened in the spectator. But comedy was what Shakespeare's company wanted; and besides, it would have been unwise, and perhaps 230

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

even dangerous, to carry to extremes this question of the punishment of moral hypocrisy. So the knot in the play was summarily loosed, without any great expenditure of pathos, by the provident care and timely intervention of a wise and invisibly omnipresent prince, an occidental Haroun-al-Raschid. ' Fastidious in his choice of means this prince was not. With an ingenuity which is profoundly unsatisfactory to any one of the least delicacy of feeling, he substitutes a lovable girl, whom the iniquitous judge had at one time promised to marry, for the beautiful young woman who is the object of his bestial desire. The Duke, wishing to test his servants, gives out that he is leaving Vienna on a long journey. He intrusts the regency during his absence to Angelo, an official of high standing and reputation. No sooner does Angelo come into power than he begins a regular crusade against licentiousness and all laxity in the domain of morals. In the first place, he decrees that all houses of ill-fame in the city of Vienna are to be pulled down. In the older drama by Whetstone, which Shakespeare used as a foundation for his play, there was a whole troop of disreputable personages, procuresses, prostitutes, bullies, improper characters of every description. Shakespeare retains part of this company; he has a single procuress, Mistress Overdone, who reminds us slightly of Doll Tearsheet, a single bully, that very amusing personage, Pompey; and he adds to them an extremely entertaining character, the utterly dissolute but witty tattler and liar, Lucio. But the chief alteration he makes in the subject-matter is that the Duke, disguised as a friar, is witness from the beginning of Angelo's abuse of his power as ruler and judge. Among other advantages resulting from this modification, we must reckon the fact that the spectators are thus reassured in advance as to the final issue. On the Duke's disguise, moreover, depends most of the comic effect arising out of the character of Lucio, who is constantly repeating to him the most absurd slanders about himself, as if he had them from the best authority. Further, the Duke's concealed presence is essential to the other great change made in the story, namely, that Isabella is not really required to sacrifice herself for her brother, her place being filled, as in All's Well that Ends Well, by a woman who has old claims on the man concerned. In this manner the too revoltingly painful part of the subject is avoided. Shakespeare has imagined one of the men who were the bitterest enemies of his art and his calling invested with absolute power, and using it to proceed against immorality with cruel rigour. The first step is his attack on common prostitution, which he persuades himself he can exterminate. This vain imagination is repeatedly ridiculed. 'What shall become of me?' [1.2.105] says Mistress Overdone. 'Come; fear not you: good counsellors lack no clients' [1.2.106—7]. In the Act ii. sc. 1 we read: — Escalus. How would you live, Pompey? by being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? is it a lawful trade? Pompey. If the law would allow it, sir. Escal. But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna. . .. [Quotes 2.1.224-34] And Lucio (iii. 2) also ridicules Angelo's severity as fruitless: 231

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Lucio. A little more lenity to lechery would do no harm in him: something too crabbed that way, friar.... [Quotes 3.2.97-106] But besides taking strict proceedings against actual debauchery, Angelo revives an old law which has long been in disuse - according to the Duke for fourteen, according to Claudio for nineteen years — making death the punishment of all sexual commerce without marriage; and by this law young Claudio is condemned to death for his relation to Juliet. It was an innocent relation. He says (i. 2): She is fast my wife Save that we do the denunciation lack Of outward order: this we came not to, Only for propagation of a dower Remaining in the coffer of her friends. [1.2.147—51] But this avails nothing. An example is to be made. It is in vain that even the highly respectable Provost feels compassion for him, and says (ii. 2): All sects, all ages smack of this vice, and he To die for it! [2.2.5-6] The young men of the town cannot explain this insane severity in any other way than by the supposition that Lord Angelo is a man with 'snow-broth' [1.4.58] in his veins in place of blood. It soon appears, however, that he is not the man of ice he is taken to be. Escalus, an old, honourable nobleman, bids him bear in mind that though his own virtue be of the straitest, it has, perhaps, never been tempted; had it been exposed to temptations, it might not have stood the test better than that of others. Angelo answers haughtily that to be tempted is one thing, to fall another. But now comes Claudio's sister, Isabella, young, charming, and intelligent, and beseeches him to spare her brother's life (ii. 2): — Good, good my lord, bethink you: Who is it that hath died for this offense? There's many have committed it. [2.2.87—9] He is inexorable. She shows the unreason of punishing so stringently the errors of love: Isab. Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet.... [Quotes 2.2.110-17] And she continues in such a strain, that we cannot but hear the poet's voice through hers: But man, proud man! Drest in a little brief authority.... [Quotes 2.2.117-23] 232

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

And she appeals to his own self-knowledge: Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That's like my brother's fault. [2.2.136-8] He invites her to come again the next day; and hardly is she gone when, in a monologue, he reveals his hateful passion, and even hints at his still more hateful purpose of forcing her to gratify it in payment for her brother's release. He makes her his proposal. She is appalled; she now sees, like Hamlet, what life can be, what undreamt-of horrors can happen, to what a pitch villainy can be carried, even on the judgment-seat: — O, 'tis the cunning livery of hell, The damned'st body to invest and cover In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio? — If I would yield him my virginity, Thou mightst be freed. [3.1.94-8] She cannot even denounce him, for, as he himself points out to her, no one will believe her; his stainless name, his strict life and high rank, will stifle the accusation if she dares to make it. Feeling himself safe, he is doubly audacious. Thus, when, at the conclusion of the play (v. 3), she lays her indictment before the reinstated Duke, Angelo says brazenly, 'My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm' [5.1.33]. Then follows, as if in continuation of Isabella's just-quoted speech, the fiery protest springing from the poet's intensest conviction: — Make not impossible That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible, But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, As Angelo. [5.1.51-5] But the protest has no immediate result. Isabella is, for the time being, sent to prison for slandering a man of unblemished honour. And the irony is kept up to the last. The Duke, in his character as a friar, has learnt bitter lessons; amongst others, that there is hardly enough honesty in the world to hold society together. But when he himself, in his disguise, relates what he has witnessed, his own faithful servants are on the point of sending him also to prison. In his role of Haroun-al-Raschid, he has seen and realised that law is made to serve as a screen for might. Thus he says — My business in this state Made me a looker-on here in Vienna, Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o'errun the stew. . . . [Quotes 5.1.316-23] As a play, Measure for Measure rests entirely on three scenes: the one in which Angelo is tempted by Isabella's beauty; that in which he makes the shameless 233

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

proposal that she shall give her honour in exchange for her brother's life; and, thirdly, that most dramatic one in which Claudio, after first hearing with fortitude and indignation what his sister has to tell him of Angelo's baseness, breaks down, and, like Kleist's prince of Homburg two centuries later, ' begins meanly to beg for his life. Round these principal scenes are grouped the many excellent and vigorously realistic comic passages, treated in a spirit which afterwards revived in Hogarth and Thackeray^ , and other scenes designed solely to retard the dramatic wheel a little, which, therefore, jar upon us as conventional. It is, for example, an entirely unjustifiable experiment which the Duke tries on Isabella in the fourth act, when he falsely assures her that her brother's head has already been cut off and sent to Angelo. This is introduced solely for the sake of an effect at the end. In this very unequally elaborated play, it is evident that Shakespeare cared only for the main point — the blow he was striking at hypocrisy. And it is probable that he here ventured as far as he by any means dared. It is a giant stride from the stingless satire on Puritanism in the character of Malvolio to this representation of a Puritan like Angelo. Probably for this very reason, Shakespeare has tried in every way to shield himself. The subject is treated entirely as a comedy. There is a threat of executing first Claudio, then the humorous scoundrel Barnardine, whose head is to be delivered instead of Claudio's; Barnardine is actually brought on the scene directly before execution, and the head of a man already dead is sent to Angelo. A noble maiden is threatened with dishonour; but another woman, Mariana, who was worthy of a better fate, keeps tryst with Angelo in her stead, and this danger is over. Finally, threats of retribution close round Angelo, the villain, himself; but after all he escapes unpunished, being merely obliged to marry the amiable girl whom he had at an earlier period deserted. In this way the play's terrible impeachment of hypocrisy is most carefully glozed over, and along with it the pessimism which animates the whole. For it is remarkable how deeply pessimistic is the spirit of this play. When the Duke is exhorting Claudio (iii.l) not to fear his inevitable fate, he goes farther in his depreciation of human life than Hamlet himself when his mood is blackest: Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep.... [Quotes 3.1.6-41] Note with what art and care everything is here assembled that can confound and abash the normal instinct that makes for life. Here for the first time Shakespeare anticipates Schopenhauer. ^ It is clear that in this play the poet was earnestly bent on proving his own standpoint to be the moral one. In hardly any other play do we find such persistent emphasis laid, with small regard for consistency of character, upon the general moral. For example, could there be a more direct utterance than the Duke's monologue at the end of Act iii.: — 234

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

He who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe. . . . [Quotes 3.2.261-70] Similarly, and in a like spirit, the moral pointer comes into play wherever there is an opportunity of showing how apt princes and rulers are to be misjudged, and how recklessly they are disparaged and slandered. Thus the Duke says towards the close of Act iii.: No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure scape: black-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? [3.2.185-8] And later (iv. 1), again: — O place and greatness! millions of false eyes Are stuck upon thee. Volumes of report Run with these false and most contrarious quests Upon thy doings. [4.1.59-62] It is quite remarkable how this dwelling on baseless criticism by subjects is accompanied by a constant tendency to invoke the protection of the sovereign, or, in other words, of James I., who had just ascended the throne, and who, with his longaccumulated bitterness against Scottish Presbyterianism, was already showing himself hostile to English Puritanism. Hence the politic insistence, at the close, upon a point quite irrelevant to the matter of the play: all other sins being declared pardonable, save only slander or criticism of the sovereign. Lucio alone, who, to the great entertainment of the spectators, has told lies about the Duke, and, though only in jest, has spoken ill of him, is to be mercilessly punished. To the last moment it seems as if he were to be first whipped, then hanged. And even after this sentence is commuted in order that the tone of comedy may be preserved, and he is commanded instead to marry a prostitute, it is expressly insisted that whipping and hanging ought by rights to have been his punishment. 'Slandering a prince deserves it' [5.1.524], says the Duke, at the beginning of the final speech. This attitude of Shakespeare's presents an exact parallel to that of Moliere in the concluding scene of Tartuffe, sixty years later.' ' The prince, in accordance with James of Scotland's theories of princely duty, appears as the universally vigilant guardian of his people; he alone chastises the hypocrite, whose lust of power and audacity distinguish him from the rest. The appeal to the prince in Measure for Measure answers exactly to the great Deus-ex-machina speech in Tartuffe, which relieves the leading characters from the nightmare that has oppressed them: — Nous vivons sous un prince, ennemi de la fraude, Un prince dont les yeux se font jour dans les coeurs Et que ne peut tromper tout 1'art des imposteurs. ' In the seventeenth century kings were still the protectors of art and artists against moral and religious fanaticism. (71-80) 235

45 Sidney Lee, Shakespeare elevated 'a degraded and repellent theme' 1898

From A Life of William Shakespeare (London and New York, 1898); Rewritten and Enlarged Version, Second Edition (London and New York, 1916). Sir Sidney Lee (1859-1926) was born into a Jewish merchant family as Solomon Lazarus Lee, but changed his name to Sidney at the advice of Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, where Lee matriculated in 1878 and earned his B.A. in 1882. Although he did not have a distinguished career at Oxford, the articles on Shakespeare he contributed to the Gentleman's Magazine caused F. J. Furnivall (No. 34) to recommend Lee for an assistant editorship under Leslie Stephen on the newly planned Dictionary of National Biography. Lee was assistant editor from 1883 until 1891, thereafter editor until 1917. His lengthy article on Shakespeare, which appeared in 1897, formed the basis for A Life of William Shakespeare. Lee was a prolific scholar and published many volumes on Shakespearian and other topics, including The Shakespeare First Folio: Some Notes and a Discovery (1899), A Census of Extant Copies of the First Folio (1902), Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, with Other Essays (1906), The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare's Art (1909), The French Renaissance in England: An Account of the Literary Relations of England and France in the Sixteenth Century (1910), and Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance (1915). His 1898 biography of Shakespeare was reissued twelve times between 1899 and 1931. The excerpt below is reprinted from the 1916 revision printed in London.

[From Chapter XVIII: 'The Highest Themes of Tragedy'. Lee records that Shakespeare's Company had become the King's Player's at the accession of James I to the throne.] Under the incentive of such exalted patronage, Shakespeare's activity redoubled, but his work shows none of the conventional marks of literature that is produced in the blaze of Court favour. The first six years of the new reign saw him absorbed in the highest themes of tragedy; and an unparalleled intensity and energy, which had small affinity with the atmosphere of a Court, thenceforth illumined almost every scene that he contrived. 236

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

To 1604, when Shakepeare's fortieth year was closing, the composition of two plays of immense grasp can be confidently assigned. One of these — Othello — ranks with Shakespeare's greatest achievements; while the other — Measure for Measure — although as a whole far inferior to Othello or to any other example of his supreme power - contains one of the finest scenes (between Angelo and Isabella, II. ii. 43 seq.) and one of the greatest speeches (Claudio on the fear of death, III. i. 116—30) in the range of Shakespearian drama. .. . [Discusses performance and publication history of the two plays and Shakespeare's use of his source in Othello.] France seems to have first adapted to literary purposes the central theme of Measure for Measure; early in the sixteenth century French drama and fiction both portrayed the agonies of a virtuous woman, who, when her near kinsman lies under lawful sentence of death, is promised his pardon by the governor of the State at the price of her chastity.1 The repulsive tale impressed the imagination of all Europe; but in Shakespeare's lifetime it chiefly circulated in the form which it took at the hand of the Italian novelist Cinthio in the later half of the century. Cinthio made the perilous story the subject not only of a romance but of a tragedy called Epitia, and his romance found entry into English literature, before Shakespeare wrote his play. Direct recourse to the Italian text was not obligatory as in the case of Cinthio's story of Othello. Cinthio's novel of Measure for Measure had been twice rendered into English by George Whetstone, an industrious author, who was the friend of the Elizabethan literary pioneer, George Gascoigne. Whetstone not only gave a somewhat altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy play of Promos and Cassandra (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he also freely translated it in his collection of prose tales, called Heptameron of Ciuill Discourses (1582). Measure for Measure owes its episodes to Whetstone's work, although Shakespeare borrows little of his language. Whetstone changes Cinthio's nomenclature, and Shakespeare again gives all the personages new appellations. Cinthio's Juriste and Epitia, who are respectively rechristened by Whetstone Promos and Cassandra, become in Shakespeare's pages Angelo and Isabella." There is a bare likelihood that Shakespeare also knew Cinthio's Italian play, which was untranslated; there, as in the Italian novel, the leading character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was known as Juriste, but Cinthio in his play (and not in his novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which doubtless suggested Shakespeare's designation. In the hands of Shakespeare's predecessors the popular tale is a sordid record of lust and cruelty. But Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother's life. The central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare's alterations, like the Duke's abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily conceived. But his creation of the pathetic character of Mariana 'of the moated grange' [3.1.264] — the legally affianced bride of Angelo, Isabella's would-be seducer - skilfully excludes the possibility of a settlement (as in the old stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of marriage. The dramatist's 237

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

argument is throughout philosophically subtle. The poetic eloquence in which Isabella and the Duke pay homage to the virtue of chastity, and the many expositions of the corruption with which unchecked sexual passion threatens society, alternate with coarsely comic interludes which suggest the vanity of seeking to efface natural instincts by the coercion of law. There is little in the play that seems designed to recommend it to the Court before which it was first performed. But the two emphatic references to a ruler's dislike of mobs, despite his love of his people, were perhaps penned in deferential allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was notorious. In Act I. sc. i. 67—72 the Duke remarks: I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes.... [Quotes 1.1.67-72] Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act II. sc. iv. 27-30): The general [i.e. the public], subject to a well-wish'd king, . . . Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence.4 (387—93)

238

46 C. H. Herford, a play 'full of prophetic intimations' 1899

From The Works of Shakespeare. Edited with Introductions and Notes by C. H. Herford (10 vols, London, 1899). Volume III. Charles Harold Herford (1853—1931) was born in Manchester and educated at a private school and then Owens College, before matriculating at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1875. Fluent in German, after Cambridge he attended the University of Berlin and later published Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (1886). He taught at University College, Aberystwyth, from 1887 to 1901 and then at Manchester University until his retirement in 1921. Herford was appointed co-editor with Percy Simpson of the eleven-volume Clarendon Press edition of the works of Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925—52), but died after completing the first two volumes. His many publications included The Age of Wordsworth (1897), Robert Browning (1905), Shakespeare (1912), The Normality of Shakespeare Illustrated in His Treatment of Love and Marriage (1920), and Wordsworth (1930), besides his work on the ten-volume 'Eversley' edition of Shakespeare. The following material is from its reissue (New York and London, 1902).

[From the Introduction to Measure for Measure; after sketching the publication history and date, Herford begins his discussion of the play.] . . . The grave strenuousness of character which distinguishes Helena from the Rosalinds and Beatrices of the preceding group of Comedies is carried a step further in the passionate intensity of Isabel. In both, an immense inner force is normally concealed by a reserve not at all characteristic of Shakespearian womanhood; in both it breaks out at moments in splendours of poetry such as Portia alone among the women of the Comedies approaches. The device of Mariana is clearly adapted from the story of Helena. The affinities with Hamlet lie less in the characters than in the moral atmosphere. Both plays are pervaded by an oppressive consciousness, new in Shakespeare, of the might of evil; the state of the world is something rotten, and those who would better it are paralysed by inner flaws of mind or will. Denmark is out of joint, and Vienna a sink of vice; the duke and Hamlet alike recognise, and alike seek to evade, the reformer's task. Hamlet groans and procrastinates; the duke quietly appoints a deputy, and the deputy, a saint among sinners, is made a sinner by 239

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

a saint. In both Hamlet and the duke, it may be added, different critics have discovered resemblances to the bustling Solomon who had, perhaps, just taken his seat upon the English throne. (Ill, 231—2) [Herford discusses Shakespeare's use of his main source, Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra.] What arrested Shakespeare in this story was clearly the three great dramatic situations, here rudely outlined: — the sister pleading for her brother's life, the stern lawgiver violating his own law, and the brother pleading for his life at the cost of his sister's honour. Whetstone had spoiled two of these by making both Promos and Andrugio plead with success, and he had only contrived, by a series of violent suppositions, to bring the fortunes of brother and sister to a happy issue. So far as Claudio's deliverance is concerned, Shakespeare improves somewhat, but not very greatly, upon his original. Instead of the compassionate gaoler who simply lets his prisoner free, we have the provost - an admirable sketch of well-meaning but cautious and disciplined officialdom — who with difficulty consents merely to postpone his execution. Instead of the head of an executed prisoner, the counterfeit of Claudio is derived from 'a pirate who died this morning of a cruel fever' [4.3.70—1] — a change which saves the plot from an incongruous element of tragedy, but is otherwise of questionable merit. Cassandra's fate called for a more radical change. Such a fall as hers was absolutely repugnant to Shakespeare's art; at no period of his career would he have tolerated such an incident, on either of the hypotheses between which Whetstone so uneasily fluctuates. But the device by which Isabel's honour is saved cannot be acquitted of a certain poverty of invention: so supremely original a character as Isabel deserved a better fate than to play once more a played-out role from All's Well. The duke who wanders in disguise among his people and 'like power divine looks upon our passes' [5.1.369-70] has some advantages over Whetstone's absentee prince, but probability is not one of them; and his final distribution of rewards and punishments hardly affects to be plausible. Angelo's pardon and Isabel's marriage are concessions to the conventions of a comic denoument, lacking in inner congruity with their character and antecedents, and scarcely true to the promise of the title. Evidently, though Shakespeare meant to supply his company with a comedy, he treated the conventions of Comedy merely with an outer deference. The determining animus of the wonderful transformation which he wrought in the story of Promos and Cassandra belongs to a wholly different order of ideas and experience. He had exhibited in Twelfth Night the comedy of an honest, borneman infatuated with self-esteem; in Julius Caesar, the tragedy of a man of high but narrow principles rigidly applied to a complex situation; in Hamlet, the tragic paralysis of a noble will under the spell of a restless imaginative sensibility. It was an intellect charged with the ironic sense of the disasters which await the well-meaning in a world where only a passion for goodness can morally hold its own, that created the virtuous precisian Angelo out of the 'lewd tyrant' Promos, and the refined weakling Claudio out of the commonplace Andrugio; and that set over against both the sublime and unique figure of Isabel. Angelo is best understood when approached on the side on which he is akin to Brutus. He is 'a precisian in power,' a man of austere principle, untried but perfectly 240

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

sincere. But Brutus' simple and transparent nature forges its way through the drift of circumstances unchanged, provoking its own doom, but undergoing no moral collapse; while Angelo, after his first doctrinaire blunder, finds himself suddenly assailed at an unarmed point, and, with scarcely a thought, is ready to surrender the whole moral capital laid up in a blameless life as the price of the person of Isabel. The irony of his career is accentuated by the unseen presence at his elbow of the moral Mephistopheles who has armed him with power and who awaits the destined hour to call him to account. It is characteristic of the temper of the play that Shakespeare thus substituted for Whetstone's absentee ruler this incredible but effective Friar. Claudio owes still more than Angelo to Shakespeare's refining art. He is relieved with exquisite delicacy against the hideous throng whose sin the law identifies with his. His first words of keen humiliation instantly distinguish him from the brazen Lucio. He has the virtues and the failings of the impulsive temperament. His imagination is as rich as Isabel's, but his will takes the colour of its changing visions. He cannot be said, like Angelo, to comply with or infringe a moral rule; he rather abandons himself to a stream of illuminated emotions, tending, as it may happen, to good or ill. Within a few sentences he is ready to 'encounter darkness as a bride' [3.1.83], and to shudder at the image of the 'cold obstruction' [3.1.118] and the 'kneaded clod' [3.1.120]. 'Conscience' makes a coward of him, — a conscience inflamed with the vision of sensuous pleasures and pains. Angelo and Claudio are failures in opposite schools of life; without much straining, we might say that they foreshadow the characteristic weaknesses of the Puritan and of the Cavalier. But, with whatever irony Shakespeare may have contemplated the pretensions of both ideals, so far as they were realised in his time, the character of Isabel assures us that a type of impassioned holiness such as inspired the finest embodiments of both, yet more akin on the whole to the austere and imperious holiness of Puritanism, appealed powerfully to Shakespeare when he wrote. In moral intensity, and also in her total absence of humour, she is rather Miltonic than Shakespearian — Miltonic in the gracious way of the lady in Comus, save that she has the higher grace of a chastity which she is ready to die for, but which it does not occur to her to celebrate. Her obvious affinities with Portia make the contrast more glaring. Like Portia, she intervenes to check legal crime; but Portia's plea for mercy cannot compare in ethical grip any more than in tragic intensity with hers. Portia's is an eloquent exposition of the beauty of well-doing; Isabel's is penetrated to the core with distrust of human nature, when armed with the demoralising engine of power. Put forth in the first years of the momentous seventeenth century, this great though dramatically unequal play is full of prophetic intimations: the scathing ridicule of tyrants may be put beside the courtly compliments, in the first scene, to a popular king. The temper of stern recognition of the heights and depths of good and evil pervades it; and through the web of ethical seriousness there runs a thread of that brooding intellectual curiosity apparent in the whole Hamlet period, the zest for probing the secrets of human nature, and finding 'what these seemers be' [1.3.54]; for analysing character (whence the countless books of 'Characters' from Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour downwards); for beating at the gates of the unknown, and urging a charioted imagination to nights in the mystery beyond. (Ill, 236—40) 241

47 Hamilton Wright Mabie, a 'painful and repellent' play 1900

From William Shakespeare: Poet, Dramatist, and Man (New York and London, 1900). Hamilton Wright Mabie (1845-1916) was born in Coldspring, New York, to a mother of Scottish-English descent and a father of French descent. He matriculated at Williams College in 1862, and after graduation entered Columbia Law School, but even though he obtained a position at a good law firm he disliked the profession, and took up journalism. From 1879 until his death he worked for a weekly magazine, The Christian Union (later The Outlook). He became a literary critic of no particular accomplishment — being savagely mocked by H. L. Mencken in his Smart Set criticism — but was popular and also representative of his age (that is, idealistic, optimistic, and sentimental). His comments on Measure for Measure clearly reflect the views of Coleridge (No. 17), Dowden (No. 32), and Boas (No. 43). The excerpt below is reprinted from the third, corrected edition of William Shakespeare (New York and London, 1901).

[From Chapter XIV: 'The Later Tragedies'] Shakespeare was now in the depths of the deep stirring of his spirit which has left its record in the Tragedies. The darkest mood was on him, apparently, when Hamlet and the three succeeding plays were written, — the mood in which the sense of evil in the world almost overpowered his belief in the essential soundness of life, and the mystery of evil pressed upon the imagination with such intensity that he was tempted to take refuge in fundamental cynicism. It is in the plays of this period that Shakespeare gives place to the deep-going irony which pervaded the Greek drama, and which at times obscures the essential freedom and shaping power of personality. In his darkest mood, however, the sanity and largeness of the poet's mind asserted themselves and kept the balance against the temptation to narrow the vision by tingeing the world with the colour of a mood, or by substituting for clear, direct, dispassionate play of the mind on the facts of life the easy process of reading universal history in the light of personal experience. How completely Shakespeare escaped a danger which would have been fatal to him is seen in the changes he wrought in the story which forms the basis of Measure for Measure. This play, like All's Well that Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, is 242

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

painful and repellent; it is tinged with an irony which has a corrosive quality; it is touched with a bitterness of feeling which seems foreign to Shakespeare. The evil of life was evidently pressing upon his imagination so heavily that it had become a burden on his heart. In Hamlet he had portrayed a rotten society; in Measure for Measure he depicted a state full of iniquity and a group of men corrupted by the very air they breathed; in Troilus and Cressida the same vileness was personified in the most loathsome characters. In the great Tragedies we breathe an air which is charged with fate, and feel ourselves involved in vast calamities which we are powerless to control; in the plays which have been named we breathe an atmosphere which is fetid and impure, and human nature becomes unspeakably mean and repulsive. This is, perhaps, the effect of the terrible strain of the tragic mood on Shakespeare's spirit; and these plays are to be accepted as expressions of a mood of depression verging upon despair. They are often classed with the Comedies, but they belong with the Tragedies, not only in temper, but in time. Even in this blackness of thick darkness the poet's sanity is never lost. In a dull play by George Whetstone, published in 1587, called Promos and Cassandra and based on an Italian novel by Cinthio, who also worked it into a tragedy, Shakespeare found the plot of Measure for Measure; the story was told in prose by Whetstone four years later in a collection of tales which he called Heptameron of Civil Discourses. In the title of the play the earlier dramatist affirmed that it showed in the first part 'the unsufferable abuse of a lewd magistrate; the virtuous behaviour of a chaste lady; the uncontrolled lewdness of a favoured courtesan; and the undeserved estimation of a pernicious parasite.' Shakespeare's modifications of the plot are highly significant: in the older versions Isabella surrenders her virtue as the price of her brother's life; in Measure for Measure her impregnable purity gives the whole play a saving sweetness. To Shakespeare's imagination is due also the romantic episode of the moated grange and the pathetic figure of Mariana. In the murky atmosphere of this painful drama Isabella's stainless and incorruptible chastity invests purity with a kind of radiancy, and she finds her place in the little company of adorable women in whom Shakespeare's creative imagination realized and personified the eternal feminine qualities. (314—16)

243

48 Richard G. Moulton, Measure for Measure as 'a moral experiment' 1903

From The Moral System of Shakespeare: A Popular Illustration of Fiction as the Experimental Side of Philosophy (New York and London, 1903); reissued as Shakespeare as a Dramatic Thinker (London, 1907). Richard Green Moulton (1849—1924) was born in Preston, England, the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister. He was educated at London University and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1874. After moving to America he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and began a long career (1892—1919) at the University of Chicago as professor of English, and from 1901 until retirement Professor of Literary Theory and Interpretation and Head of the Department of General Literature. A renowned lecturer, his areas of interest were Shakespeare, classical drama, and the Bible. Both in his twentyone-volume The Modern Reader's Bible (1896—98), and in his Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885) and The Moral System of Shakespeare, Moulton used the study of literature as a source of and stimulus to moral and cultural enlightenment.

[From Chapter VII: 'Moral Problems Dramatised'. Moulton first discusses King Lear.] In this play the problem takes the form of disturbed equilibrium in the moral world working out to a position of rest. In Measure for Measure the movement is of a different character: the complexity of a situation may present itself to our minds as a problem, and the solution will display complexity gradually drawn into moral harmony. Much of our thinking on ethical subjects falls into the form of antitheses: not oppositions, as when good is set against evil, honesty against fraud; but relations of ideas which may be in opposition, but also may be in harmony. A twofold conception of this kind underlies the plot of Measure for Measure. One is the antithesis of purity and passion. For the other, the old antithesis of outer and inner life appears in the form of the law and the individual. These two antitheses underlie all parts of the plot, bringing its complexity up to the level of a moral problem; the climax reveals the diverse elements, in complete reconciliation. The life presented in Measure for Measure takes a threefold form as it is surveyed 244

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

from the standpoint of purity. We have what may be called respectable life: the law of purity is here fully accepted; there is sin against purity in Angelo and Claudio, but their full acceptance of the law plunges them in bitter remorse. Between this and its opposite we find, represented in Lucio, that "which is excellently described by the term ordinary conversation applies to it - loose life: respectability is claimed, yet there is tampering with vice, the spirit of raillery acting like Milton's conception of an easy bridge from earth to hell. And in the third place we have low life: not only is it vicious, but vice is an accepted institution. At this point a question arises which is a disturbance to many readers: Why should low life of this type be allowed to appear on the stage at all? The iniquity of the brothel and the life of prostitution we are unwilling to name even in ordinary social intercourse, although we all know of its existence. Yet in the poetry of Shakespeare we find such life presented; more than this, we seem often led into a sort of half sympathy, not indeed for the thing itself, but for some of those who are involved in the evil. The question is part of a wider one; and the answer is the easier if we look at life from the standpoint of our second antithesis, that of the law and the individual. No moral system can be complete that does not make provision for what may be called Institutional Ethics: the complex ethical attitude that has to be maintained to the institution and to the individuals involved in it. War, considered in itself, must be classed as a moral wrong: founded on hate, its instruments bloodshed and violence, involving at times ruthlessness as a positive duty. Yet who will question that among warriors are sometimes to be found the highest types of moral greatness, while the work of war will often serve as a school of self-sacrifice and virtue? Poetry has always known how to consecrate the ideal of outlaw life by special types of it, although in itself this life is in antagonism to fundamental laws of property. Every reader of Paradise Lost feels in the course of the poem the attractiveness of Satan as a grand moral personality, although this Satan, by his position in the universe, is irreconcilably at war with supreme Good, and is seeking to seduce innocence into his own perversion. We have to separate, mentally, the institution and the individual; responsibility for the institution is one thing, responsibility of the individual is another. Wheresoever the responsibility for war rests, there is terrible guilt; but this does not suspend the moral law for the individuals plunged into war without fault on their part. In practical life it may be almost impossible to separate the two responsibilities. The judge may not say to a prisoner: The burglary of which you have been convicted deserves a ten years' sentence, but, in consideration of the magnificent stand you made against the police while your young comrade was escaping, I reduce your sentence by one half. The judge would be more likely to increase the sentence for an additional offence against social order; yet the irresponsible bystander would nevertheless be touched by self-sacrificing comradeship, and all the more touched by the fact that it was exhibited in a burglar. Now, in all art we who see or read are in the position of spectators: we may give our full sympathy to the individual without any sense of responsibility for the institution. There is, of course, nothing in Shakespeare to make the vicious institution itself attractive. The Friar voices our loathing of it: 245

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

The evil that thou causest to be done, That is thy means to live. Do thou but think What 'tis to cram a maw or clothe a back From such a filthy vice. [3.2.20-3] The preacher's moralising on lust as the path to destruction does not come home so keenly as Pompey's humour when he finds himself in the common prison. I am as well acquainted here as I was in our house of profession: one would think it were Mistress Overdone's own house, for here be many of her old customers.. .. [Quotes 4.3.1-4, 12-19] Meanwhile, even in this region of accepted vice, moral differences are yet to be discriminated, and our sympathy distinguishes between such as Overdone, who is vicious and nothing else, and Pompey, in whom, though he may be as guilty as his mistress, the salt of humour has kept the human nature from going entirely bad. Not only the general field of life surveyed but also the individual personages rest for their dramatic interest on the same ideas. The most important personages of the play group themselves naturally around the antithesis of purity and passion. Especially interesting is Angelo. The contrast between the Angelo of the opening scenes and Angelo fallen is not a contrast to be explained by hypocrisy. Angelo is sincere in his devotion to purity, and Isabella in time comes to see this [5.1.450 ff]. But his devotion - though he is ignorant of the fact until he is tested — is not to a principle, but to a cause: Angelo is a partisan of purity. It has become a battle-cry between parties; Angelo has taken his side, and eagerly adopts all the livery of his party and enthusiasm of the fight, illustrating how zealously a man may strive on behalf of a principle which nevertheless has not entered deeply into his heart. The Duke's word, 'Lord Angelo is precise' [1.3.50], suggests the 'precisian' or Puritan ; we hear of'the outward-sainted deputy' [3.1.88], of his 'settled visage' [3.1.89], his 'dressings, characts, titles, forms' [5.1.56]; the vicious in the story sneer at Angelo as if his blood were 'very snow-broth' [1.4.58], how 'a sea-maid spawned him' [3.2.108], or 'he was begot between two stock-fishes' [3.2.109]; he himself makes 'levity' [5.1.222] in Mariana his excuse for forsaking her. Above all, under the full force of temptation he gives us a glimpse of self-revelation: Yea my gravity, Wherein - let no man hear me - I take pride, Could I with boot change for an idle plume. [3.4.9-11] At an opposite point from this Angelo we have Isabella, in whom purity is a passion. Not only is her brother's, crime 'the vice she most abhors and most desires should meet the blow of justice' [2.2.29—30], but even legitimate passion she has renounced; she is entering upon a celibate life, and desiring a stricter restraint for the sisterhood [1.4.4]. Her innocence is of course spotless from first to last; but, instead of love harmonised with purity, we here have an over-balancing as between the two forms of good, and, passionate for purity, Isabella is cold to claims of love. Hence even 246

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Lucio appears at a moral advantage for a moment, when he presses upon Isabella the duty to her brother from which she shrinks: Lucio.

Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt. [1.4.77-9]

The crisis of the story distracts Isabella between claims of kinship and defence of outraged purity; we see the overbalanced nature in the cruel rage with which she turns upon her brother in his moment of weakness. Even before this in soliloquy she has said — More than our brother is our chastity. [2.4.185] No one will dare to contradict: but what do we think of the woman who can calmly formulate the principle? Two more types complete this group. Mariana is all passion, but it is passion within the law of purity. If she seems to descend from the highest tone in consenting to the device by which the faithless Angelo is won, yet this measures the depth of the love which prompts the sacrifice. Mariana again is an illustration of the strange power of love to fasten upon the ideal, to love the man not for what he is but for what he is capable of becoming. In Claudio and Juliet we have passion in conflict with the letter of the law. Their love is pure, their mutual fidelity inviolate; what they have sinned against is the conventional form of marriage which society throws as a hedge around the law of purity, and they have done this from motives of pecuniary interest [1.2.149 ff.]. Accordingly discovery not only brings them into danger, but also plunges them in remorse. The administration of justice in this story gives us a small group of characters, distinguished by their relations to the antithesis of the law and the individual. The Provost is perfect in the balance of his allegiance to both. As a subordinate official, law is to him his oath of office, and under the strongest temptation he will not violate this [4.2.181]; within this one limit he is seen forever toiling to soften the rigour of justice for those with whom he has to do; the Duke recognises this. This is a gentle provost; seldom when The steeled gaoler is the friend of men. [4.2.86—7] Elbow the constable belongs to the shallowest nature of which men can be made; he is fussily all for justice, as that whereby he gains self-importance. The most interesting of the group is Escalus. The administration of justice is a perpetual conflict; between law as an orderly science and the infinite variety of individual cases to which it has to be applied. The opening of the play presents Escalus as deeply versed in legal science. Duke. 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. [1.1.9-13] 247

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

But what we see of this magistrate in the action of the play shows a bias towards individuality rather than law. He is not weak and if necessary can be severe; but what he seems to love in each case is to study the human nature of the persons brought before him; he will pooh-pooh form and precedent if he can, with humour and rough leniency, find some practical course to fit the special case, and give everybody another chance. We are familiar with the idea of lynch law: in Escalus we seem to have lynch mercy. When we turn from interest of personality to interest of action the character of the play as a problem with its solution becomes much more clear. We find in Measure for Measure perhaps the purest example in poetry of a moral experiment. This is no case of a crisis arising of itself in the course of human events; the Duke, in his withdrawal from Vienna, is designedly contriving special conditions in which he will be able to study the workings of human nature. But the scientific experimenter knows that nature is infinitely complex in its operations; he can determine for himself what forces he will set to work, but as to the mode in which they will manifest themselves he must be prepared for the unexpected; he must watch his experiment, use means to keep it within the channel he desires, and be prepared with resources to meet what may arise of the accidental. Hence the Duke does not really withdraw from his city, but hovers in disguise around the experiment he has set in motion; he secretly interferes from time to time, and at the proper moment reveals himself and terminates the situation. Both the complication and the resolution of the plot have their chief motive force in the Duke. The design underlying the experiment of the plot rests upon the antithesis of the law and the individual; it is a double design, with an application alike to the dispensers of justice and to its victims. Imperfection in the administration of justice may arise from the shortcomings of those who administer it; moreover, so deeply does precedent enter into the idea of law, that the laxity of the past gives a tinge of injustice to later strictness. This is exactly what the Duke puts to his confidant. Duke. We have strict statutes and most biting laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds, Which for this nineteen years we have let slip; Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey.... [Quotes 1.3.19-39] Inspired by this perplexity the Duke has installed in his place the two magistrates Angelo and Escalus, representing the two horns of the dilemma: the workings of unpitying strictness and of considerate clemency are to be studied side by side. Angelo awakes 'all the enrolled penalties which have like unsecured armour hung by the wall' [1.2.166-7]; he will not have the law made a mere scarecrow [2.1.1]. Escalus, urging moderation, addresses himself directly to the personality of his colleague: might not even his strictness have yielded had he been subject to a sorer trial? Angelo answers: 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall.. .. [Quotes 2.1.17-23] 248

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Thus the characters of the men chosen by the Duke are just fitted for bringing out one element in the experiment — the relationship between law and the personality of those who administer justice. But the personalities of those on whom justice is to be exercised, not less than the characters of the judges, may raise the conflict of law and individuality. Here again may be seen opposite bias in the colleagues on the bench. When appeal of this kind is made to Angelo, he answers: Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it? Why, every fault's condemn'd ere it be done: Mine were the very cipher of a function, To fine the faults whose fine stands in record, And let go by the actor. [2.2.37-41] Escalus has no authority to interfere; but he feels bitterly the unequal pressure of justice on different individuals. Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall: Some run through brakes of vice, and answer none; And some condemned for a fault alone. [2.1.38—40] In its general scope then the experiment of the Duke is clear and simple: strictness of justice and lenity are to be set separately to work. But neither the Duke nor any one else could foresee the exact issues that would arise as particular cases set these forces in operation. Scarcely has Vienna been left to its new deputies when the crime of Claudio — one who has grossly violated the outward form of law while he is true to its spirit — brings into full play the opposing principles: Escalus emphasises the extenuating circumstances, Angelo looks only at the offence. But this Claudio has a sister Isabella, who pleads with Angelo for her brother: at once new moral issues appear of the deepest interest. The first affects the character of Angelo. To a certain extent the Duke had foreseen this. Angelo, There is a kind of character in thy life, That to th' observer doth thy history Fully unfold. [1.1.26-9] The expression 'a kind of character' seems to veil a slight doubt in the ruler's mind as to what the outer stamp upon the life of Angelo might reveal to the assayer; it is part of his experiment that the possession of power should force the character of seeming precision to reveal its true nature. But no one could have guessed in what form the assaying would come: that Angelo should be confronted by a purity as zealous as his own, yet wholly different in kind; to use Angelo's own word, that 'gravity' [2.2.9] should be tempted by 'gravity.' What's this, what's this? is it her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?. . . . [Quotes 2.2.162-71, 178-82] As Isabella slowly warms to her work of interceding for Claudio her womanly intui249

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

tion penetrates the mystery of Angelo's nature; with the insight of ideal purity, she distinguishes between internal and external purity, she catches Angelo's zeal for the cause, his ambition to be its foremost champion. So you must be the first that gives this sentence, And he that suffers. O, it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant. [2.2.106-9] By the mere contact then of Angelo with Isabella a double effect has been produced: Angelo has been suddenly revealed to himself, and is being gradually revealed to Isabella. And with all this is conjoined another moral issue of high interest: Isabella's own personality has been drawn into the area of experiment, and there is distraction in her soul between passionate purity and brotherly love. How then at this point does the plot of the play stand, considered as an experiment in the field of morals? One side of the design has been fully revealed in the light of events — the relation between justice and the character of the judge ; and the conclusion of the third act can moralise in the style of an epilogue: He who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe. [3.2.261-2] But this stage of the experiment has been attained only at the cost of a great moral conflict: Angelo is at deadly feud with Angelo, Isabella the nun knows not how to be true to Isabella the sister of a brother Claudio; Claudio himself is confronted with the fullest vengeance of a law which, of all such offenders, Claudio has least offended. Here then a fresh stage in the plot unfolds itself: the experimenter must come to the aid of his own experiment, and complication passes into resolution. The soliloquy just quoted proceeds: 'Craft against vice I must apply' [3.2.277]. The expression may be somewhat startling, for fiction has accustomed us to associate intrigue with purposes of evil; but there is no reason why secret agency and finesse of contrivance may not be employed in the service of good. The craft of the Duke is of the craftiest: upon a grave moral crisis and impending sin of Angelo is brought to bear a former moral error of the same man, and so used that the one is averted and the other repaired. Duke. Have you not heard speak of Mariana, the sister of Frederick the great soldier who miscarried at sea? Isab. I have heard of the lady, and good words went with her name. Duke. She should this Angelo have married; was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed: between which time of the contract and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister. . . . [Quotes 3.1.209-30] By the substitution of Mariana for Isabella, a crime committed in intention by Angelo is made to redress his former injury; a supposed sin of Isabella saves her tempter from actual guilt; and further, the fancied sin is the price of salvation for Claudio. 250

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

But the unforeseen plays a part in all experiment. It comes as a surprise, and yet is perfectly true to nature, that Angelo, in moral revulsion and spiritual turmoil at his surrender to sin, should plunge from one crime to another, from fear of consequences basely withholding the price of his victim's ruin, and secretly hastening the execution of her brother [4.2.120 ff.]. The Duke must find some expedient to meet this: he intrigues to substitute a hardened criminal, long designated for well deserved execution, instead of the Claudio whom over-rigorous justice was demanding. But an obstacle arises: at the last moment this Barnardine is found to be in a reprobate frame of mind, utterly unmeet for death. The whole experiment is threatened, when suddenly accident - that plays so large a part in the providence of Shakespeare intervenes to save. Provost. Here in the prison, father, There died this morning of a cruel fever One Ragozine, a most notorious pirate, A man of Claudio's years; his beard and head Just of his colour. [Quotes 4.3.69-77] With this final touch craft has done its full work against vice: in all but the outward show of things, reserved for the final scene, the main resolution of the plot is complete. Meanwhile, in the person of Escalus, the other side of justice is allowed its scope, that relaxes law in order to study the individual, and find a treatment fitted to each single case; the paternal justice, that hopes against hope for the reformation of the sinner. Escalus on the bench has evidently a keen enjoyment in studying the human nature in front of him; he can bandy wit with low-life, and meet it on its own ground [2.1.212 ff.]. The fussy constable he soothes, and gently leads up to the idea that society has been doing him an injustice in burdening him so long with office. For the prisoners the lenient justice of Escalus takes two forms. The first is, in spite of plain guilt, to give one more opportunity of amendment; but this proves vain for such ingrained evil as that of Overdone and Pompey. Pompey. Whip me? No, no; let carman whip his jade: The valiant heart's not whipt out of his trade. [2.1.255—6] Where this kind of leniency has failed, there is yet possible mercy in another form discrimination of character. The woman, in whom there is nothing for amendment to lay hold of, is left to her fate [3.2.205]. But Pompey, whose irrepressible humour reveals some depth of soil in his original nature, has a sphere for himself even in prison life. He even comes to be promoted - promoted to the office of underhangman: the common executioner however fears that one 'of Pompey's former mode of life will discredit our mystery' [4.2.28-9]. The type of character represented in Lucio has also had its part in the action. We do not build a gallows for a butterfly; it satisfies the fitness of things when loose humour is encountered by irony of situation: here is a jocose problem and solution [4.3.159 ff; 5.1.356 ff.]. Lucio who is hail-fellow with all men, turns his light wit 251

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

upon the strange Friar; the raillery that spares no subject, and insists upon bringing everything down to its own level, plays upon the character of the absent Duke — how 'the Duke had crotchets in him' [3.2.127], how he would have had good reason for dealing differently with sins like Claudio's. Duke. Sir, the Duke is marvellous little beholding to your reports; but the best is, he lives not in them. Lucio. Friar, thou knowest not the Duke so well as I do: he's a better woodman than thou takest him for. Duke. Well, you'll answer this, one day. Fare ye well.... [Quotes 4.3.159-69] Lucio proceeds with confidential gaiety to blab his own misdeeds, and hands justice a rod with which to scourge him. He enters boisterously into the excitement of the final scene, enjoying his own audacity as he puts on to the Friar his own slanders of the Duke. Then, when all seems to go against this mysterious stranger, Lucio is the first to lay violent hands upon him and pull off his hood: levity itself gives the last touch that brings the shock of denouement to the plot. 'Thou art the first knave that e'er madest a Duke' [5.1.356]. Thus the complication of this exquisite plot has reached its adequate resolution; the moral problem has been fully solved, and the reconciling force emerges as Mercy in its many-sidedness. Angelo, in his zealous service for the cause of purity, has encountered a shock, revealing to him that he is not pure; giving his sensual race the rein, he has plunged from sin to sin. All the while, unknown to him, his slighted love has been an embodiment of mercy, by dark means restoring him to himself, still innocent as regards actions, and for guilty intentions giving the hope that best men may be moulded out of faults. Isabella, cold to love in her passion for purity, has nevertheless been led to become an angel of mercy for her unhappy brother, while for herself she has, without seeking, found in the Duke a power that will make purity and passion one. Claudio and Juliet by their sufferings have made atonement to the letter of the law which they have violated, while they were true to its spirit, and so have their part in the harmony of mercy. We seem to see a reconciling force beneath the course of events as we behold levity encountered by irony; or again, as characters that have sunk to the depths find in the lowest depth some recognition of what is yet good in them. Surveying from all its sides this drama of justice we catch a majestic presentation of Mercy, not as diluted and weakened justice, but as something transcending justice, holding allegiance equally to the law and the individual, giving scope for the warmth of passion while it does reverence to the light of purity. What Shakespeare dramatises in concrete, Spenser had already celebrated in ideal form. For if that virtue be of so great might, Which from just verdict will for nothing start, But, to preserve inviolated right, Oft spills the principal to save the part: So much more, then, is [Mercy] of power and art 252

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Which seeks to save the subject of her skill, Yet never doth from doom of right depart; As it is greater praise to save than spill, And better to reform than to cut off the ill.4 (143-57)

253

49 A.C. Bradley, miscellaneous comments 1904

From Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London, 1904); 2nd edition revised (London, 1905). Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851-1935), the younger brother of the famous philosopher, F. H. Bradley, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read classics under Benjamin Jowett. He was a Fellow of Balliol from 1874; the first professor of literature and history at University College, Liverpool, 1882-90; professor of English language and literature at Glasgow University, 1890—1900; and professor of poetry at Oxford, 1901—1906. During his retirement he produced one of the most famous and influential works of English literary criticism, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Other publications include Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), Miscellany (1929), and the posthumous Ideals of Religion (1940).

[From 'Lecture II: Construction in Shakespeare's Tragedies'] ... Such things as the scenes of Duncan's murder or Othello's temptation, such speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare thought defects. Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat: prolonged and repeated thought must have gone to them. But of small inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless. He seems to have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married somehow. And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill will turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his imagination. It may truly be said that what injures such passages is not inspiration, but the want of it. But, as they are mostly passages where no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say that here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is 254

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

determined to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton, Pope, Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left probably scarcely anything that they felt they could improve. No one could dream of saying that of Shakespeare. Hence conies what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his works. Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble that of nature. It organises and vitalises its product from the centre outward to the minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn upon it the most searching light you can command, when you dissect it and apply to it the test of a microscope, still you find in it nothing formless, general or vague, but everywhere structure, character, individuality. In this his great things, which seem to come whenever they are wanted, have no companions in literature except the few greatest things in Dante; and it is a fatal error to allow his carelessness elsewhere to make one doubt whether here one is not seeking more than can be found. It is very possible to look for subtlety in the wrong place in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible to find too much. But then this characteristic, which is one source of his endless attraction, is also a source of perplexity. For in these parts of his plays which show him neither in his most intense nor in his most negligent mood, we are often unable to decide whether something that seems inconsistent, indistinct, feeble, exaggerated, is really so, or whether it was definitely meant to be as it is, and has an intention which we ought to be able to divine; whether, for example, we have before us some unusual trait in character, some abnormal movement of mind, only surprising to us because we understand so very much less of human nature than Shakespeare did, or whether he wanted to get his work done and made a slip, or in using an old play adopted hastily something that would not square with his own conception, or even refused to trouble himself with minutiae which we notice only because we study him, but which nobody ever notices in a stage performance. We know well enough what Shakespeare is doing when at the end of Measure for Measure he marries Isabella to the Duke — and a scandalous proceeding it is; but who can ever feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some not unimportant points in Hamlet are due to his own want of eyesight or to Shakespeare's want of care? (76—8) [From 'Lecture VII: King Lear'] . . . He wrote also in these years [the 'tragic period'] (probably in the earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida and perhaps All's Well. But about these comedies there is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little mirth; in Measure for Measure perhaps, certainly in Troilus and Cressida, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. . . . (n. 1, 275) [From 'Lecture VIII: King Lear'] ... The results in the two cases [of Hamlet and Cordelia] differ correspondingly. No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much; but to use many words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety. 255

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

I am obliged to speak of her chiefly because the devotion she inspires almost inevitably obscures her part in the tragedy. This devotion is composed, so to speak, of two contrary elements, reverence and pity. The first, because Cordelia's is a higher nature than that of most even of Shakespeare's heroines. With the tenderness of Viola or Desdemona she unites something of the resolution, power, and dignity of Hermione, and reminds us sometimes of Helena, sometimes of Isabella, though she has none of the traits which prevent Isabella from winning our hearts. Her assertion of truth and right, her allegiance to them, even the touch of severity that accompanies it, instead of compelling mere respect or admiration, become adorable in a nature so loving as Cordelia's. She is a thing enskyed and sainted, and yet we feel no incongruity in the love of the King of France for her, as we do in the love of the Duke for Isabella. (316-17)

256

50 H. C. Hart, a critical introduction 1905

From Measure for Measure. Edited by H. C. Hart. The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1905). Henry Chichester Hart (1847-1908) was an Irish botanist and naturalist who wrote several botanical books, such as Flora of the County Donegal (1898), while at the same time devoting himself to scholarship in Renaissance drama. He edited several plays for the first series of the Arden Shakespeare under the general editorship of W. J. Craig (1899-1906), including Love's Labor's Lost, the three parts of Henry VI, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Othello, as well as Measure for Measure, and also edited Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1903) for the King's Library and The Works of Ben Jonson (1906) for Methuen's Standard Library.

[From Hart's 'Introduction,' pp. ix—xxviii] What a swift alteration we have in this play from the brimful cheeriness and buoyancy in those later ones of Queen Elizabeth's reign — from, for example, The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It! One is almost tempted to suggest that the loss of his royal mistress, and the advent of that heavy-witted pedant James I., had for the moment smitten our poet's spirits hip and thigh. Be this as it may, Measure for Measure can never have been popular upon the stage. The main incidents of the plot are painfully repugnant. The serious business is full of diatribes levelled against a slackness of morality which would hardly find an echo in the breasts of the bulk of the courtiers of the time; while the lighter prose portions, where a relief of this tension should appear, and an atmosphere of merriment take its place, are renewed and bitter attacks upon immorality on its lower platforms — satirical strictures upon the vices of the lowest of the low, but slightly enlivened by any frivolous fun or humour. Throughout we are held by the hand and led through these mazes of iniquity with a high purpose and a stern sense of a duty that must be accomplished, and our reward is to be found in the gift of some of the most beautiful passages of dignified poetry to be met with anywhere in Shakespeare — passages which are as household words to all who love their language at its best. . .. (xi—xii) Shakespeare has written few more powerful scenes than those between Angelo and Isabella, and especially that between the latter and her brother in the third Act. There 257

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

is, to my thinking, hardly a dialogue in all his plays where, at the first reading, one's anxiety is so tensely strung as in this, to see how Claudio will pass through his fearful ordeal; and those two words 'Alas! alas!' [3.1.132] wrung from Isabella's anguish at his final breakdown after the conflict in which he dives into the horrors of death, form a climax of despair and agony that words could not better express. And how swiftly and naturally her grief turns to hate and horror! It is noteworthy that when Isabella hurls her defiance at Claudio, renouncing him as a brother, and refusing to hear him more, their intercourse is practically concluded. For when in the last scene of the play the Duke discloses her pardoned brother to Isabella, she says not a word. Her last reference to him is, 'My brother had but justice / In that he did the thing for which he died' [5.1.448—9]. But we are left to suppose it will take a longer interval of time than the play permits, for forgiveness and reconciliation. The Duke hardly seems to be a personage to delight in. It is not merely his didactic platitudes and his somewhat overdone pompousness that get upon one's nerves, but his inner character. We first meet him too timid or irresolute to enforce his own laws and deputing his duty to another, while he himself plunges into a vortex of scheming and intrigue; concluding by falling into love with a votary. At 3.1.167 does he not transgress against the confessional? Again, he must have known of Angelo's treatment of Mariana, at least we are left to suppose he did (3.1.228), and was not his (the Duke's) a very shifty way of bringing him to justice, instead of a straight prosecution? Then the freedom with which he lies (4.3.108-15) is not prepossessing. I imagine Shakespeare was not in love with his Duke. 'A shy fellow was the Duke' [3.2.130—1]. But at the close of the play all these feelings are quenched in the general atmosphere of mercy and forgiveness which replaces the pursuit of crimes, and the dispositions of retribution and punishments which form the working of the play. And how like a bright particular star of purity Isabella shines out from and above the whole of her surroundings! In her shining armour of chastity, and in her absolute confidence in the supposed sanctity of the Duke, she adopts his methods of deception. In the truth of her spirit she has courage for anything so long as it is not spiritually foul. The unworthy position of intrigue she has to adopt is entirely of the Duke's workmanship, and Isabella suffers no taint thereby. And after all these intrigues, what does the Duke gain? It is true he gains a wife who is a million times too good for him (excepting perhaps in worldly position), but that has nothing to do with the motive of the play. He upsets all his crafty schemes for setting up his tottering justice and infirm authority by a general forgiveness and gaol-delivery all round. So much so that even where he justifies the title of the play, 'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!' [5.1.409] he is in his own mind making a mockery of it. We are not even certainly informed as to whether punishment has been administered to those characters representing the lower forms of wickedness. Where does it appear that the law is anything more than an accustomed scarecrow to them? Pompey is indeed imprisoned for a brief space, but he receives there what is to be regarded as promotion to a lawful mystery — to the grade of hangman. For a long and beautifully composed analysis of Isabella, who 'of all the characters alone has our sympathy,' the reader must refer to Mrs. Jameson's Characteristics. As it is largely based upon the beauties of Isabella's various sentiments and speeches, 258

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

which are fully quoted, it is too lengthy for insertion here. The comparison she draws between Portia (Merchant of Venice) and Isabella is a masterpiece of subtle delineation of character. Isabella, the writer finds, is less mixed in character than Portia, yet 'they are portrayed as equally wise, gracious, virtuous, fair, and young. . . . Isabella is distinguished from Portia, and strongly individualised by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity which render her less attractive and more imposing.' The characters are widely different indeed, and we cannot conceive the sagacious and worldly-wisely witted Portia lending herself at any price to the Duke's stratagems. Measure for Measure has received severe treatment at the hands of some critics. Coleridge says: 'This play is to me the most painful, say rather the only painful part of his genuine works. It is Shakespeare's throughout. The comic and tragic parts equally borders on the (hateful) — the one being disgusting, the other horrible,' etc. etc. Coleridge's language is too violent and intemperate to be quoted with patience. It runs away with itself. . . . Coleridge called special attention to the artifice of Isabella and her seeming consent to the suit of Angelo, which are undoubtedly the worst radical blots in the play. But I put them wholly down to the power and to the discredit of our Duke of dark corners. Furnivall (Leopold Shakespeare) especially notices the 'stifling air of this drama.' He decides that Isabella is 'Shakespeare's first wholly Christian woman, steadfast and true as Portia, Brutus's wife, pure as Lucrece's soul, merciful above Portia, Bassanio's bride, in that she prays forgiveness for her foe, not her friend; with an unyielding will, a martyr's spirit above Helena's of All's Well, the highest type of woman that Shakespeare has yet drawn.'' ' There are more lovable women in Shakespeare, but there are none who stand out so brilliantly against the foil of her surroundings and the characters with whom she is brought in contact. Furnivall goes on, 'She is the first of the three splendid women who illumine the dark Third Period: she, glorious for her purity and righteousness, Cordelia for her truth and filial love, Volumnia for her devotion to honour and her love of her native land. Perhaps we may add a fourth, Portia, Brutus's wife, for nobleness and wifely duty. But the highest of all is Isabella.' Gervinus (1850), after noticing that the play found little favour with English critics, Hunter, Knight, and others, even an admirer like Coleridge, 4* gives a lengthy analysis of the motion of action, and the passions, in order to 'discover their psychological connection.' Like Coleridge, he [Gervinus] appears to conceive that Angelo was incapable of sincere repentance, - and that he has only the prospect of becoming a greater criminal, unless he raises himself to lasting virtue — a contingency which Coleridge deemed impossible, and which there is no show of in the play. This indignant justice, so requisite as it appears to be, was not executed. In Coleridge's eyes this is a degrading result. Here the old play is followed.... I imagine Shakespeare intends us to forgive Angelo, and regard him as a converted character. Such sudden moral transformations are happily rare in Shakespeare. They become a regular property of the stage in later plays, such as The London Prodigal,^ and most of those of Massinger6'. And earlier we find a good one in Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy. ' In a note to The London Prodigal, Halliwell says Shakespeare did 259

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

not adopt them because they have no existence in real life. On the other hand, a more modern authority writes Qames' Varieties of Religious Experience): 'Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down man's liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities' (p. 230, ed. 1903). But the difficulty in most of these dramatic instances is to overcome the scepticism one naturally feels at a conversion that owes its being, not to a sudden awakening of conscience, but to detection of guilt and a presence of alarming consequences. Gervinus's explanation of these unjustifiable mildnesses is ingenious if not convincing. As the Duke's own sentences and penalties of the law had fallen into disuse, before his abdication, so now in conclusion is he compelled by the force of circumstances to mitigate all forfeitures and punishments, and let all criminals escape, in spite of his overcunning astuteness. And this is Measure for Measure. I am not sure if Gervinus exactly meant this, so lengthy and wire-drawn are his periods, but he implies it, and I think it commends itself. Perhaps we may regard the play as a satirical jeremiad for mercy and against severity. Hazlitt's words are always worthy of a full meed of attention. He says (Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817): 'This is a play as full of genius as it is of wisdom. ... ' Hazlitt lays special stress on the famous scene between Claudio and Isabella (3.1); and its strong dramatic contrast with the preceding lecture given to Claudio by the Duke, recommending an absolute indifference to life. Hazlitt's liberal remarks are to the point. He generally seems to say much of what one would wish to have said one's self — especially where he prods fun at Schlegel when he puts in a word for those vagabonds of the play — the worst and most unwholesome spirits of the piece. What he says with regard to Isabella comes as rather a shock after the ethereal position allotted to that enskyed and ensainted heroine by such writers as Mrs. Jameson. .. . So many men, so many minds; and more might be referred to. . . . Johnson says the comic part is very natural and pleasing. As compared with scores of other comic scenes in Shakespeare, I disagree with that. Johnson thinks that the Duke 'must have learned the story of Mariana in his disguise, or he delegated his power to a man already known to be corrupted.Blackstone thought he had learnt it in some of his former retirements, 'having ever loved the life removed' [1.3.8]. And the Duke had a suspicion (says Blackstone) that Angelo was but a seemer, and therefore he stays to watch him.For the suggestion 'seemer,' see the last words of Act 1. Scene 3. But I think the Duke meant there merely 'we'll see if he is really as absolutely perfect as he pretends to be'; and since the action of the play cannot permit of the Duke's acquiring this information (apart from our being aware of his doing so) subsequently to his appointment of Angelo, that appointment of his, of one whom he knew to be capable of such base behaviour, fully justifies Lucio's epithet fantastical [4.3.157] to him. . . . (xxi—xxviii)

260

51 Algernon Charles Swinburne, an 'unclassifiable play' with a 'half satirical title' 1905

From Shakespeare. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. Written in 1905 and Now First Published (London, 1909). Swinburne here elaborates on his comments on Measure for Measure made in A Study of Shakespeare (1880), No. 37 above. Whereas twenty-five years earlier he declared Measure for Measure a tragedy, here he hedges and asserts that it is 'unclassifiable' or a 'comi-tragedy'. For biographical information on Swinburne, see the headnote to No. 37.

.. . The same ethical fault [as in the treatment of Oliver in As You Like It], if ever such fault may reluctantly and diffidently be found with any work of Shakespeare's, might be found with another masterpiece as far remote from this in tone and atmosphere as the depth of midnight from the height of noon. The great indefinable poem or unclassifiable play which bears the surely half satirical title of Measure for Measure stands too high by right of might in tragic impression to be seriously impaired or vitiated even by the moral flaw which induced even Coleridge to blaspheme.It is undeniable that for such monsters of base and abject atrocity as Oliver and Angelo a lifelong seclusion from intercourse with the humanity they dishonour would be the irreducible minimum of the penalty demanded rather than deserved by their crimes of intention and of action. But this moral defect in the equity of dramatic art which for once or for twice brings down Shakespeare as a playwright to the ethical level of Fletcher is not a more serious dereliction in the dark and deep tragedy of the graver play than in the pastoral romance of As you like it. And apart from this entirely subordinate question there can be no doubt and no denial of the obvious truth that 'the true tragedy' of human life and character never found more terrible exposition than in the tragic scenes of this magnificent if not faultless comi-tragedy. It is not the least among the miracles wrought by the almighty hand of Shakespeare that it should have been able to create one of the supreme glories of all poetry, one of the crowning examples which testify to his transcendent power, out of the shameful agony of a shameless coward in face of nothing more terrible than death. Too sublime for attraction, too severe for fascination, Isabella is yet not only 'one of Shakespeare's women' but one of his noblest and most memorable. Some injustice has been done to her excellent duke by critics who condemn or deride him as a busybody on the score of his rather theatrical satisfaction 261

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

in the sensational conduct of his detective business: he is on the whole a not unrighteous or ignoble justicer, and not unworthy to redeem the heroic object of his admiring affection from the threatened stagnation of a cloister. But, superb as is all the tragic part of this unique and singular play, it can be questioned only by the most questionable of moralists that the comic part, lit up as it is by rare occasional flashes of Shakespearian power (with a streak in it of Jonsonian brutality), is generally far less humorous as well as less good-humoured than usual, and decidedly not less gross than the kindred scenes of brothelry in a play [Pericles] to which they can have been contributed by no feebler hand than Shakespeare's. (38—41)

262

52 E. K. Chambers, 'the limits of comedy .. . sorely strained' 1906

From Measure for Measure. The Red Letter Shakespeare (London, 1906). Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1866—1954) was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, taking a first-class degree in classics. Failing to gain a fellowship, Chambers accepted a position in the British Civil Service on the Board of Education, where he eventually became second secretary in 1921. While earning his living as a civil servant, Chambers pursued the other career for which he is still renowned, that of historical scholar, particularly of the medieval and Elizabethan drama. His many publications include The Mediaeval Stage (2 vols, London, 1903), The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, Oxford, 1923), and William Shakespeare (2 vols, Oxford, 1930), all essential works containing many original documents pertaining to the social, political, and economic background of the drama of the period. He was awarded the K.B.E. in 1925. Chambers's introduction to Measure for Measure in his 'Red Letter Shakespeare' (39 vols, London, 1904—8) illustrates his approach to literary criticism, and was reprinted with slight stylistic changes in Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1925). I reprint the earlier, but provide page references to both versions. The reader will note echoes of F. S. Boas (No. 43) throughout.

Many honest readers of Shakespeare quite frankly resent the very existence of Measure for Measure. They have formed a conception of the poet as the great idealist; as one who, although he has indeed sounded the heights and depths of experience, has yet kept unspotted his romantic soul; as one with whom they may be sure of breathing the ampler ether and diviner air, and who, through whatever searchings of heart he may lead them, may always be trusted in the long run to present and vindicate the eternal laws of righteousness. There are plays of Shakespeare, written in the healthy optimism of his youth or in the golden serenity of his waning years, which fit in well enough with this temper. There are others upon the purport of which it is able to put a subtle misconstruction. But Measure for Measure falls within neither of these categories. It just perplexes and offends with its deliberate painting of the seamy side of things, through which intolerable personages pass to an end that is certainly determined by no principles of poetic justice. We are in unwholesome company, with Mistress Overdone the bawd and Pompey the pander. Claudio, who would sacrifice his sister's honour to save his life, is allowed to keep both his life and his 263

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Juliet. Even the hypocrite Angelo has no worse fate than quiet days of oblivion with Mariana in his garden circummured with brick. There is no clear issue here, and to no profit of righteousness has Isabella's white soul been dragged about the mire. So the play is condemned, and all its beauties cannot save it; not the sleepy music of the moated grange, nor the marvellous psychology of the scenes between Isabella and Angelo in the second Act and between Isabella and Claudio in the third, nor the haunting phrases that constantly startle the imagination at turn after turn in the murky way. In vain Isabella tells us in her passion of chastity — 'The impression of keen whips I'ld wear as rubies' [2.4.101]; in vain is the deep maxim of the Duke — Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues; [1.1.34-5] in vain the splendid flicker of poor weak Claudio's soul, when he thinks for a moment that he is going to be a hero — If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in my arms. [3.1.82—4] Measure for Measure is an unpleasant play, and there is an end of it, for the sentimentalist. Fortunately the critic has long ago made up his account with sentimentalism, and has come to the firm conviction that his business is with the understanding, stage by stage, of Shakespeare's spiritual development, rather than with the wish, certainly idle and probably insolent, that this development had been otherwise. He, therefore, without reference to any a priori conception, may take Measure for Measure for what it is, as forming, together with the group of plays to which it belongs and which includes also All's Well that Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, the singularly interesting record of a particular phase in the poet's shifting outlook upon humanity and upon the universe to which humanity is bound. They are all unpleasant plays, the utterances of a puzzled and disturbed spirit, full of questionings, sceptical of its own ideals, looking with new misgiving into the ambiguous shadows of a world over which a cloud has passed and made a goblin of the sun. It is perhaps hardly worth while to speculate what causes, within or without, may have precipitated a mood so alien to that in which, quite recently, such light-hearted comedies as As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night had been written. To seek them in the misadventure of the Sonnets, or in the disconcerting politics of the Essex rebellion, is less to employ evidence than to indulge in the pleasant sport of biographical conjecture. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that for a period in Shakespeare's history near the beginning of the seventeenth century the rose-red vision gave place to the grey, and that, if he still wrote as an idealist, it was as an idealist into whose imagination had passed the ferment of doubt and the bitterness of disillusion. And so Measure for Measure wears the rue of comedy with a difference. Lucio is of the tribe of Mercutio, just without Mercutio's saving grace of the readiness to throw away his life for the sake of the game. The milieu of Mistress Overdone is the milieu of Mistress Quickly, and you may catch a veritable echo of the talk of mine hostess of 264

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Eastcheap in Pompey's description of the stewed prunes, 'which at that very distant time stood, as it were, in a fruit-dish, a dish of some threepence. Your honours have seen such dishes; they are not China dishes, but very good dishes' [2.1.91-4]. The change is not in the puppets, but in their observer and interpreter. Sin, which was human, has become devilish. Here are the forms of comedy, the by-play of jest and the ending of reconciliation. But the limits of comedy, which may be serious but must be suave, are sorely strained. There is a cruel hint in the laughter, and the engineer of the reconciliation is surely a cynic. It is perhaps characteristic of the state of mind out of which Measure for Measure came, that it is not only a painful, but also an extremely difficult play. Like certain modern plays, to which its affinities are perhaps closer than to anything in its own age, while the general critical intention is evident, it succeeds in evading rigid analysis. The intelligence of the spectator is stimulated, rather than satisfied. And in fact it may be doubted whether Shakespeare wrote it with any very clear scheme before him. It suggests rather the random and tentative exercise, in various directions at once, of a mordant analysis, resulting in a somewhat intricate design of unresolved and interwoven themes. It is the work of a man searching somewhat vaguely for truth in unfamiliar paths. Some threads of these cross-purposes may perhaps be disentangled. There is one which resumes the earlier criticism levelled in Love's Labour's Lost at the life against nature. The philosophers of Navarre shut their ears to the voice of nature's most imperious instinct, until that instinct takes its rapid and disconcerting revenge. More tragically disastrous is the issue of the less playful attempt of the ruler of Vienna to shut out the wantonness of the flesh. Claudio has hardly sinned. 'He hath but as offended in a dream' [2.2.4], says the Provost. But the too hasty revival of the forgotten edict shatters his youth and Juliet's, and hurries him to a fiery ordeal which his frail soul proves ill-fitted to endure. So is the idle way of a man with a maid turned to tragedy. To Lucio's satire of the man 'whose blood is very snow-broth' [1.4.58], in whose house-caves 'sparrows must not build, because they are lecherous' [3.2.175—6], one need not attach too much weight; for Lucio, in spite of his honest reverence for the 'enskied and sainted' [1.4.34] Isabella, speaks with the voice of unregenerate Vienna. Yet there is practical wisdom, did the Duke but know it, in the worldling's warning that the nature of the vice is such that 'it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down' [3.2.102—3]. It is Angelo's own history, however, which affords the most complete refutation of the folly of endeavouring to bind human nature by too strait bonds of discipline, in the picture of the austere man tripped by the very fault he most condemns, and driven through hypocrisy into the darkest ways of tyranny, violation, and judicial murder. Another very obvious element in Measure for Measure is the remorseless analysis which probes the inmost being of man and strips him naked before the spectators while he — Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep. [2.2.121—2] It is the temper of the inquisitor; and you can but shudder as a soul is brought into 265

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the torture-chamber and shrivels into nothingness before some sharp test of circumstance. The slow degradation and exposure of the prenzy [3.1.93] Angelo is a case in point; and still more the pitiful failure of the lad Claudio when called upon unawares to make his choice between death and disloyalty. It is a terrible scene, led up to with grave irony by the Duke's philosophical disquisition upon the vanity of life and of man, who is merely 'death's fool' [3.1.11]. Claudio, indeed, is resigned to death, when a door to life, even though a dishonoured life, suddenly swings open before him. At first - for he is an honest boy - he rejects the thought. And then his imagination begins to work and to terrify itself with the details of mortality. Isabella knows her brother, and her spirit girds itself for quick battle with his weakness. Claudio. Isabella. Claudio.

Death is a fearful thing! And shamed life a hateful! Ay, but to die, and go where we know not where. . . .

[Quotes 3.1.115-31] Claudio has undergone his ordeal, and has failed. It is but a step now to the unmanned cry of'Sweet sister, let me live!' [3.1.132] and to the pitiful contemplation of the ruins of a human soul. Is it the corroding atmosphere of moral suspicion which hangs about the play that leaves one not absolutely certain whether Isabella too has not had her ordeal and in her turn failed? She is a saint, of course; even Lucio feels that; and perhaps it comes quite naturally to a saint to say, 'More than our brother is our chastity' [2.4.185]. Shakespeare does not suggest an alternative; but is it not legitimate to think that the question whether Isabella was wholly justified in the eyes of her creator is one of the enigmas of this most enigmatic play? In any case I am quite sure that the actual issue which is found in the pretended submission of Isabella and the device of the substituted Mariana, commonplace of romance as the latter may be, does not commend itself to the modern conscience. It is, however, perhaps a shade less displeasing than the inversion of the same situation in All's Well that Ends Well. But is the criticism of Measure for Measure confined to humanity, or is Shakespeare already, as in some of his later plays, unable to exclude man's maker from his indictment of man? The 'old fantastical duke of dark corners' [4.3.157], from whose absence Angelo's brief authority springs, who amicably assists the development of the plot, and finally returns to reward the evil-doers and to abash Lucio, is a somewhat mysterious personage. It is not quite clear what is the dramatic purpose of Lucio's scandal about him, or how far he has judged the character of Angelo, of whose relations with Mariana he is aware, before the beginning of the action. His part in the story is a version of the familiar Haroun-al-raschid^ theme; and he must, I think, be held in a play dealing seriously with the problems of life to symbolize the workings of Providence. But then surely the treatment of Providence is ironical. Just as in the almost contemporary Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare is almost certainly turning to ridicule the traditional ideals of heroic romance, so here the duke can be nothing but a travesty of a Haroun-al-raschid. Theoretically it is his function to resolve all the complications of the plot, and to re-establish the shaken foundations of eternal justice by punishing the wrong-doers and rewarding the innocent. In effect, after prying 266

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

about in disguise and preaching sermons throughout the greater part of the play, he is unable to perform his simple task without a wholly unnecessary structure of superfluous mystification and intrigue. Why does he conceal from Isabella, in her grief, the knowledge that her brother yet lives? To what purpose is the further prolongation of her agony, after his return, by the pretended disbelief of her story and the suspicion cast upon the friar, in whose person he has counselled her? These are the antics of a cat with a mouse, rather than the dispositions of a wise and beneficent ruler; and it is difficult to see anything in the grave elaboration of them, except a satirical intention of Shakespeare towards theories about the moral government of the universe which, for the time being at least, he does not share. As yet, indeed, his nascent pessimism has only advanced to the point of finding ineffectiveness and not deliberate ill-will in the ordering of things. The thorough-going denunciations of King Lear are still to come. But a narrower spiritual gulf divides Measure for Measure from the tragedy of King Lear than from the comedy of As You Like It. I do not suppose that everyone will read the play exactly as I read it. Like all works of art that spring out of a vexed, and not out of a limpid mood, it lends itself to many and diverse interpretations. It must be confessed that it is broken music, and that broken music is not the highest form of composition; but at least it takes on new interest when the harp from which it is struck is the heart of a Shakespeare. (1906, 5— 14; 1925, 208-17)

267

53 Morton Luce, Measure for Measure and 'the philosophy of morals' 1906

From A Handbook to the Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1906); second edition, revised (London, 1907). Morton Luce (1849—1943) was educated privately and then at London University, became a Lecturer at Bristol University, but worked mostly as an independent scholar. He published several books and essays on Tennyson. For the first Arden Shakespeare, under the general editorship of W. J. Craig, he edited The Tempest (1902) and Twelfth Night (1905), both revised in 1918. He also produced a general study, Shakespeare, the Man and his Work (1913). The excerpt below is from the second edition of the Handbook. The emphasis on the influence of Sir Francis Bacon upon Shakespeare is rather unusual.

[From Chapter VI: 'Introductions to the Works': '(30) Measure for Measure, 1604', 'Critical remarks'] The main motive of this play may be found in its title; 'Measure for measure must be answered' (3 Henry VI, 2.6.55); it was death for death in the earlier play, and though the fine is remitted, it is 'death for death' here (5.1.16); for 'where the evill is derived from a man's own fault, there all strikes deadly inwardes and suffocateth.' But, adds Bacon, 'the reprehension of this colour is first in respect of hope, for reformation of our faultes is in nostra potestate. Therefore Shakespeare pardons Angelo, for sorrow sticks deep in his penitent heart. There is a good deal of philosophy in all the plays of Shakespeare; there is most in the three plays, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida - problem plays, I might almost call them. Hamlet, as I have pointed out, is Shakespeare's philosophy and criticism of life in general, but embodied in the person of one individual; in the other two plays, though we have the Duke in one and Ulysses in the other, the philosophy is more special; in the first it is the philosophy of morals, notably in the light of the new Puritanism; in the second, of politics and society. Appreciation of these three plays - we may add, of Shakespeare - is impossible without an acquaintance with the writings of Shakespeare's great contemporary, Bacon. In this volume I cannot always support a statement with an illustration, for the subject is vast and details must sometimes be sacrificed; but it may encourage the student that I direct him to Bacon's Colours of Good and Evil and his Meditationes 268

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

sacrae and the earlier Essays [1597], which I think Shakespeare must have been studying about this time. ... And in dealing with this philosophy of morals as we find it in Measure for Measure, I must again refer to Bacon; for the doctrines of Shakespeare are based, like Bacon's, on the classics, the schools, on logic good or bad, even on verbal quibbles; but seldom on religious dogma; neither writer will permit his philosophy to encroach on the province of that 'eternal blazon' which 'is not for mortal ears' [Hamlet, 1.5.21—2]. It is possible, however, that Shakespeare, who in Twelfth Night had smiled at the social extravagancies of the Puritans, may here, in Measure for Measure, be delivering his protest against their extravagance in doctrine. But the poet in Shakespeare comes first, and the philosopher only second; and the title of the play should rather be 'Isabella.' It is better to know the dramas of Shakespeare by their women than by their philosophy; and of these women Isabella is the best. You may like them for several virtues, these women; and by the word 'best' I mean the most 'moral'; this accords with the whole scheme of the play. Isabella — we conclude with the poet's own description - is a saint. I am not quoting 'a thing ensky'd and sainted' [1.4.34]; these words have reference to the cloister; but I allude to 2.3.181—2. Again, let me illustrate, and by comparison; there is no inductive method in literature. Isabella we may compare with the Portia of The Merchant of Venice, and the distinction is most striking; she combines all the daring of Portia with cold calmness and a hesitancy of peculiar charm. Portia would have importuned Angelo quite otherwise (2.2); Isabella is at war 'twixt will and will not [2.2.33]; but for the urgency of Lucio she might have withdrawn from the contest; this is one of the finest things in the play. But as she proceeds, love dominates the scruple of morality, and she gains the respite of another interview. But although the character of Isabella is magnificent and especially belies that current doctrine, 'virginity, though valiant in the defence, yet is weak' (All's Well, 1.1.126), there are still some traces of convention in the play: 'Women are frail' (2.4.124); 'Then was your sin of heavier kind?' (2.3.28); these, however, are slight, compared with the enormous advance in Shakespeare's art and ethics as illustrated by Isabella. But even Mariana is an example of womanly virtue and constancy, well worthy to inspire two of the most characteristic of Tennyson's lyrical poenW , nor are we reconciled to her devotion to Angelo, however repentant. Indeed the character of Angelo involves a difficulty; this is not the only occasion on which we find Shakespeare blowing hot and cold with the same breath; the dramatist sets before us a man whose past is pure, but whose pride of doctrine comes before a fall; yet Angelo's past is by no means pure; 'thou cruel Angelo' [5.1.207], said Mariana; this was the Angelo of five years before, and he merely renews his crimes by the despicable attempt to throw mud (5.1.220-3) on the woman, his combinate wife, whom he had deserted because she lost her fortune; Isabella 'partly thinks / A due sincerity governed his deeds' [5.1.445-6]; so does Shakespeare; it suits his moral scheme; but I prefer the estimate of Mariana and the overwhelming evidence of all that early baseness. The character of Claudio is distressing to the last degree; I find no stumblingblock, moral or artistic, in the Mariana episode or the Duke's slender disguise; all this is implied and involved in the ideal; but Claudio's abject and clamorous 'Nay, hear 269

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

me Isabel!' (3.1. 147) is the most dreadful mistake in all the drama of Shakespeare; one fire drives out another's burning; and this fire from hell pales if it does not quench the flame on the altar of Vesta.^ So Shakespeare sacrificed Emilia for Desdemona or Caesar for Brutus. But there is more in it; among the antitheta in the play, none are so elaborate as the antitheta of life and death;4 and for their full exposition this treason of Claudio was essential. I have already called attention to Bacon and his philosophies and his methods; herein they find their best illustration; and as Bacon's Essays on Death are in praise not of death but of fortitude, so Shakespeare in this play would teach us that life is best, but (5.1.402-3) That life is better life, past fearing death, Than that which lives to fear. Of the Duke as a reflection of Shakespeare, and an earlier Prospero, I have spoken elsewhere; and this personal interest of the dramatist is the best explanation of the somewhat unusual proportion of the drama that is assigned to this character. I do not often complain of the humorous element in these dramas, but the interruptions of Lucio in the closing scenes are like ribald laughter heard in some august cathedral. Nor do I complain of their obscenity; this I take with the times; in those days it had not been excluded from art by progressive morality; moreover, Shakespeare's use of wit is always artistic, that is, progressive. The rhyming couplets in 3.2.275—96, are sometimes regarded as un-Shakespearian; but Shakespeare often falls off when he changes for rhyme; and such a change he is accustomed to make in a moralizing soliloquy; other rhymes here may be compared with the 'Aside' in 3.2.111-17. (287-92)

270

54 Robert Bridges, on the 'inconsistency in the character of Angelo' 1907

From 'On the Influence of the Audience', The Works of William Shakespeare. In Ten Volumes. The Stratford Town Edition. Edited by A. H. Bullen. (10 vols, Stratford-on-Avon, 1904-7). Volume X, pp. 321-34. Robert Seymour Bridges (1844—1930) graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1867, then studied medicine, but practiced only briefly. His main interest was literature, and he wrote many volumes of poetry, including the philosophical The Testament of Beauty (1929), and was appointed poet laureate in 1913. He edited the Poems (1918) of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins, and produced several works of literary criticism, including Milton's Prosody (1893) and John Keats: A Critical Essay (1895). In this essay Bridges attacks the influence of a vulgar audience on Shakespeare, which (he claims) caused him to violate decorum and fail to provide adequate motivation for the actions of some of his characters, including Angelo in Measure for Measure.

... Next among the things condemned by instinctive judgement, I will name the readiness with which offences of the first rank are sometimes overlooked and pardoned. Valentine's reconciliation with Proteus [The Two Gentlemen of Verona}, and the pardon of Angelo, will hardly find an advocate. What justification I have met with has been that this easy forgiveness was due to Shakespeare's great gentleness of mind, and was an idiosyncrasy in him; and passages are collected to illustrate it.1 One must not overlook that Shakespeare required repentance before pardon: yet this off-hand repentance is unsatisfying. The offence in both the above cases denotes a vicious mind, and the mere disavowal of a criminal attempt that has not succeeded offers no trustworthy guaranty of future behaviour, which is what we, with our interest in the persons of the drama, immediately demand; — 'the offender's sorrow lends but weak relief [Sonnet 34.11]. But whether Shakespeare had, or had not, this view of the duty of all men to forgive all injuries on the first offer of repentance, yet such an extreme of gentleness cannot be attributed to his audience, and the appeal to such a disposition in them would have failed. If they could forgive Proteus and Angelo, it would be on the ground of their own indifference to the crimes, and because of a moral bluntness which did not discriminate; and my explanation would be that Shakespeare took advantage of this, and where his plot demanded a difficult reconciliation, he assumed its possibility, and accomplished it by a bold stroke, which 271

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

any manoeuvering would have frustrated. One may grant also that if his audience looked for an extra-brutality of conduct, it was only reasonable in them not to insist on its punishment. Some critics argue that the end of the Two Gentlemen must have been tampered with; but the end of the Winter's Tale, which I shall notice later, is worse, and will, with other instances, corroborate the solution here proposed: and if that be agreed on, we have passed away from mere concession to the audience, and are come to discover Shakespeare taking advantage of their stupidity, and admitting inconsistencies or impossible situations for the sake of dramatic effect or convenience, where he knew that the liberty would be well tolerated. We are at the same time passing from matters which we decide unhesitatingly by our feelings, to matters in which the appeal, however aroused, is to the reason. As an example of this class, I will first examine what seems to me inconsistency in the character of Angelo in Measure for Measure. Angelo, as introduced to us, is not a hypocrite, meaning by that term an unprincipled man who wears a mask. He is rather a Pharisee, a hard, cold, austere professor of virtue, with an introspective, logical mind of considerable intelligence and ambition. His most marked and consistently maintained characteristics are heartlessness and over-regard for his reputation: he is therefore unholy, and yet he deems himself a saint: he is consequently a self-deceiver, and presumably a sincere one. He sets out on his main course in the drama stiff with the pride and self-confidence of his saintly reputation; then meeting with a strange experience, which something hitherto unsuspected or repressed within him converts into a temptation, he commits horrible crimes. His fall works his salvation, for he is thereby undeceived, and, knowing himself, repents, and is pardoned, and, we suppose, reformed. Further we learn that five years before the time of the events in the play, he had courted and won the love of a lady without loving her, though it is possible that he persuaded himself that he loved: but his love vows had been only the formal procedure towards a desirable marriage, for when her dowry was lost, they went to the winds, and he saved appearances by defaming her character. That this old scandal obtains but little attention in the play does not lessen its enormity; and, making all allowance for self-deception, it is almost irreconcilable with sincerity of pose. His character, however, as introduced, is with this exception maintained till the end of his first interview with Isabella; after which he is, in a few hours, completely changed from a high-principled, stoical self-deceiver, to a licentious hypocrite trafficking in crime. The situation might be satisfied either with an unprincipled or with a passionate man. Angelo is neither: there is no passion in his calculating lust. He seems to have been purposely constructed incapable of the required reaction. His temperament does not, I think, tally with the notion of the sudden outburst of an uncontrollable animal instinct which had been artificially repressed. Nor would the security of irresponsible power, which tempts some men to luxury, have undermined his motives for virtue, drawn as they were from public repute and self-esteem, which his promotion would heighten. His contact with Isabella one would think to be just the experience likely to evoke his better nature. Again his self-knowledge began with his temptation, and was complete at his fall: yet this unmelting man shows no remorse until he is 272

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

publicly discovered. He is now just like Borachio: and how should the disgrace of exposure remodel such a villain in fifteen minutes? Reminded, as we are at this juncture, of his conduct to Mariana, we believe that he has been a solid hypocrite all along; that, having no virtue to fall from, he never fell; that the spiritual conflict of his 'temptation' could not have occurred: and, as there was nothing in his first character to respond to the call to crime, so now, in the revelation of his second phase, there is, — except his demoniacal passion for Isabella, — nothing left of him to be pardoned and married to Mariana. This drama was written in the height of Shakespeare's attainment, and if he had left not a record beside, we should know him from Isabella's three great scenes to have been by far the most gifted dramatist of all time. Even the short scene between the Duke and Julietta, - where the Duke, graciously playing the confessor's role, finds himself at every professional move baffled and checkmated by the briefest possible replies of a loving, modest, and true heart, till he is rebuffed into a Christlike sympathy, — appears to me a masterpiece which in its kind no other dramatist has equalled. How strange then is this blurred outline of Angelo, and how incomprehensible the neglect of Isabella at the close, when her brother, whom she thought worse than dead, is restored to her. The actress is not denied a fine opportunity, but the situation passes without a word, and it must be concluded that the audience took no interest in Isabella's religious character: reserved for the first prize in the stagemarriages she has to stand up with the sinners, and patiently endure the exposure and torment of the theatrical suspense and display, which the good Duke has devised to wind up the drama: and in order to lighten the elaborate finale Shakespeare associates with him the worthless profligate, Lucio; who, if he amused the audience by his impertinent intrusion half as much as he degrades the already difficult situation, must have been a great success. What better illustration could we have of Hamlet's speech to the players?. . . . (324-7)

273

55 Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare's representation of 'a weak world' 1907

From Shakespeare. English Men of Letters (New York and London, 1907). Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) was educated at University College, London, and King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1885. After some time teaching in India, Oxford, and Manchester, he became professor of modern literature at University College, Liverpool, in 1890, succeeding A. C. Bradley. He published extensively in the next several years, with books on The English Novel (1894), Robert Louis Stevenson (1895), Style (1897), and Milton (1900). Raleigh subsequently held chairs of English literature at Glasgow and Oxford. His later critical works included Wordsworth (1903), Lyrical Poems of William Blake (1905), Shakespeare for the 'English Men of Letters' series, Johnson on Shakespeare (1908), and Six Essays on Johnson (1910). Knighted in 1911, thereafter he wrote mostly on historical subjects dealing with World War I.

[From Chapter V: 'Story and Character'] . . . A stranger testimony to the wealth of his creative genius may be found in its superfluous creations. Some of his characters incommode him by their vitality, and even refuse the duties for which they were created. Barnardine, in Measure for Measure, is one of these rebels. In the Italian original of the story Isabella, to save the life of her brother, yields to the wicked deputy, who thereupon breaks his promise, and causes Claudio to be executed in the prison. George Whetstone, who handled the story before Shakespeare, mitigated one of these atrocities; in his version the gaoler is persuaded to substitute the head of a newly executed criminal for the head of Claudio. In Shakespeare's play we find, along with Claudio, a prisoner called Barnardine, who is under sentence of death, and is designed to serve as Claudio's proxy. He is a Bohemian born, 'a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal' [4.2.142-5]. All arrangements are made for the substitution, and Barnardine is called forth to his death. Then a strange thing happens. Barnardine, a mere detail in the machinery, comes alive, and so endears himself to his maker, that his execution is felt to be impossible. Even the murderer of Antigonus has not the heart to put Barnardine to death. A way out must be found; the disguised Duke suggests that Barnardine is unfit to die, and the 274

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Provost comes in with the timely news that a pirate called Ragozine, who exactly resembles Claudio, has just died in the prison of a fever. So Barnardine, who was born to be hanged, is left useless in his cell, until at the close of the play he is kindly remembered and pardoned. The plot is managed without him; yet, if he were omitted, he would be sadly missed. He is a fine example of the aristocratic temper. In that over-heated atmosphere of casuistry and cowardice he alone is self-possessed and indifferent. He treats the executioner like his valet: 'How now, Abhorson? What's the news with you?' [4.3.39-40]. His decision of character is absolute: 'I will not consent to die this day, that's certain' [4.3.55—6]. Those who speak to him, Duke and tapster alike, assume the deprecating tone of inferiors. 'But hear you —' [4.3.61] says the Duke, and is interrupted: 'Not a word: if you have anything to say to me, come to my ward; for thence will not I to-day' [4.3.62—3]. So the Bohemian goes back, to hold his court in the straw. It is a wonderful portrait of the gentleman vagabond, and is presented by Shakespeare to his audience, a perfect gratuity. . . . (148—9) .. . Those whose sympathies have been captured by the human situation may well feel some impatience with Shakespeare's habitually delayed solutions. It is an unpardonable indignity that is put upon Isabella, in Measure for Measure, when the disguised Duke, who is by way of being the good angel of the piece, deludes her into thinking that her brother is dead, and keeps her crying her complaints in the streets, in order that he may play a game of cat and mouse with the wicked deputy. All this is done, he alleges, that the case against Angelo may proceed 'By cold gradation and wellbalanced form' [4.3.100]; but the true reason for it is dramatic; the crisis must be kept for the end. So Isabella, who deserved to hear the truth, is sacrificed to the plot. . . . (157-8) . .. Of Measure for Measure Hazlitt says: 'This is a play as full of genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it. . . . There is in general a want of passion; the affections are at a stand; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions.'' ' The feeling of repulsion is caused in part, no doubt, by the well-nigh intolerable dilemma which is the subject of the play. Of the alternatives presented to Isabella neither can be a matter for triumph; and Shakespeare himself evades the consequences of the choice. But it is also true that in this play, as in some others, Shakespeare is too wide and strong, too catholic in his sympathies and too generous in his acceptance of facts, for the bulk of his readers. His suburbs are not their suburbs; nor is his morality their morality. Hazlitt himself, in the best word ever spoken on Shakespeare's morals, has given the explanation. 'Shakespeare,' he says, 'was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations.' This is indeed the everlasting difficulty of Shakespeare criticism, that the critics are so much more moral than Shakespeare himself, and so much less experienced. He makes his appeal to thought, and they respond to the appeal by a display of delicate taste. Most of those who have written on Measure for Measure are of one mind with the 'several shabby fellows' of Goldsmith's comedy; they are in a concate275

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

nation with the genteel thing, and are unable to bear anything that is lowJ2^ They cannot endure to enter such and such a place. They turn away their eyes from this or that person. They do not like to remember this or that fact. Their morality is made up of condemnation and avoidance and protest. What they shun in life they shun also in the drama, and so shut their minds to nature and to Shakespeare. The searching, questioning thought of the play does not find them out, and they are deaf to the commentary of the Duke: Thou art not noble, For all the accommodations that thou bear'st Are nurs'd by baseness. . . . Thou art not thyself, For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains That issue out of dust. [3.1.13-15, 19-21] The ready judgments which are often passed on Shakespeare's most difficult characters and situations are like the talk of children. Childhood is amazingly moral, with a confident, dictatorial, unflinching morality. The work of experience, in those who are capable of experience, is to undermine this early pedantry, and to teach tolerance, or at least suspense of judgment. Nor is this an offence to virtue; rather virtue becomes an empty name, or fades into bare decorum, where sin is treated as a dark and horrible kind of eccentricity. In criticisms of Measure for Measure, we are commonly presented with a picture of Vienna as a black pit of seething wickedness; and against this background there rises the dazzling, white, and saintly figure of Isabella. The picture makes a good enough Christmas card, but it is not Shakespeare. If the humorous scenes are needed only, as Professor Dowden says, 'to present without disguise or extenuation a world of moral license and corruption, why are they humorous? The wretches who inhabit the purliues of the city are live men, pleasant to Shakespeare. Abhorson, the public executioner, is infamous by his profession, and is redeemed from infamy by his pride in it. When Pompey, who has followed a trade even lower in esteem, is offered to him as an assistant, his dignity rebels: 'A bawd, Sir? Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery' [4.2.28—9]. Pompey himself, the irrelevant, talkative clown, half a wit and half a dunce, is one of those humble, cheerful beings, willing to help in anything that is going forward, who are the mainstay of human affairs. Hundreds of them must do their daily work and keep their appointments, before there can be one great man of even moderate dimensions. Elbow, the thick-witted constable, own cousin to Dogberry, is no less dutiful. Froth is an amiable, feather-headed young gentleman to dislike him would argue an ill nature, and a small one. Even Lucio has his uses; nor is it very plain that in his conversations with the Duke he forfeits Shakespeare's sympathy. He has a taste for scandal, but it is a mere luxury of idleness; though his tongue is loose, his heart is simply affectionate, and he is eager to help his friend. Lastly, to omit none of the figures who make up the background, Mistress Overdone pays a strict attention to business, and is carried to prison in due course of law. This world of Vienna, as Shakespeare paints it, is not a black world; it is a weak world, full of little vanities and stupidities, regardful of custom, fond of pleasure, idle, and abundantly human. No one need go far to find it. On the other side, over against the 276

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

populace, are ranged the officers of the government, who are more respectable, though hardly more amiable. The Duke, a man of the quickest intelligence and sympathy, shirks his public duties, and plays the benevolent spy. He cannot face the odious necessities of his position. The law must be enforced, and the man who enforces it, putting off all those softer human qualities which are dearest to him, must needs maim himself, for the good of the social machine. So the Duke, like many a head of family or college, tries to keep the love of the rebels by putting his ugly duties upon the shoulders of a deputy, and goes into exile to watch the case secretly from the opposition side. Shakespeare does not condemn him, but permits him to learn from the careless talk of Lucio that he has gained no credit by his default of duty. In his place is installed the strong man, the darling and idol of weak governments. The Lord Deputy, Angelo, is given sole authority, and is prepared to put down lust and licence with a firm hand, making law absolute, and maintaining justice without exception. His defence of the strict application of law, as it is set forth in his speeches to his colleague, Escalus, contains some of the finest and truest things ever said on that topic. He has no misgivings, and offers a convincing proof of the need for severity. So the train is laid. Quietly and naturally, out of ordinary human material, by the operation of the forces of every day, there is raised the mount on which Claudio and Isabella are to suffer their agony. A question of police suddenly becames a soul's tragedy. Claudio is in love with Juliet. Her friends are opposed to the match, and there has been no marriage ceremony: meantime, the lovers have met secretly, and Juliet is with child by him. The solution offered by Isabella is short and simple: 'O, let him marry her' [1.4.49]. But the new and stricter reign of law has begun, old penalties have been revived, and Claudio must die. There is no appeal possible to the Duke, who has disappeared; and the one hope left is that Isabella may move the deputy to take pity on her brother. What she has to say is no answer to the reasons which have convinced Angelo that strict administration of the law is needful. The case contemplated has arisen, that is all. If, from tender consideration for the sinner, the law is to be defeated, will not the like considerations arise in every other case? It is worth remarking that Shakespeare hardly makes use of the best formal and casuistical arguments employed by Cinthio's heroine. After pleading the youth and inexperience of her brother, and discoursing on the power of love, the lady of the novel takes up the point of legality. The deputy, she says, is the living law; if his commands are merciful, they will still be legal. But the pleading of Isabella is for mercy as against the law. The logic of Angelo stands unshaken after her most eloquent assaults. He believes himself to be strong enough to do his duty; he has suppressed in himself all sensual pity, but sense is not to be denied, and it overcomes him by an unexpected attack from another quarter. The beauty and grace of Isabella, pleading the cause of guilty love, stir desire in him; and he propounds to her the disgraceful terms whereby Claudio's life is to be saved at the expense of her honour. She does not, even in thought, entertain the proposal for an instant, but carries it to her brother in the prison, that her refusal may be reinforced by his. At the first blush, he joins in her indignant rejection of it. But when his imagination gets to work on the doom that is now certain, he pleads with her for his life. This is the last horror, 277

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

and Isabella, in a storm of passion, withers Claudio by her contempt. 'Let me ask my sister pardon,' he says, when at last the Duke enters; 'I am so out of love with life that I will sue to be rid of it' [3.1.171-2]. The rest of the play is mere plot, devised as a retreat, to save the name of Comedy. Of all Shakespeare's plays, this one comes nearest to the direct treatment of a moral problem. What did he think of it all? He condemns no one, high or low. The meaning of the play is missed by those who forget that Claudio is not wicked, merely human, and fails only from sudden terror of the dark. Angelo himself is considerately and mildly treated; his hypocrisy is self-deception, not cold and calculated wickedness. Like many another man, he has a lofty, fanciful idea of himself, and his public acts belong to this imaginary person. At a crisis, the real man surprises the play-actor, and pushes him aside. Angelo had underestimated the possibilities of temptation: O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint With saints dost bait thy hook! [2.2.179-80] After the fashion of King Claudius in Hamlet, but with more sincerity, he tries to pray. It is useless; his old ideals for himself are a good thing grown tedious. While he is waiting for the interview with Isabella, the blood rushes to his heart, like a crowd round one who swoons, or a multitude pressing to the audience of a king. The same giddiness is felt by Bassanio in the presence of Portia, and is described by him in almost the same figures. When the wickedness of Angelo is unveiled, Isabella is willing to make allowances for him: I partly think A due sincerity governed his deeds, Till he did look on me. [5.1.445-7] But he is dismayed when he thinks of his fall, and asks for no allowance: So deep sticks it in my penitent heart, That I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it. [5.1.475—7] Shakespeare, it is true, does not follow the novel by marrying him to Isabella, but he invents Mariana for him, and points him to happiness. Is the meaning of the play centred in the part of Isabella? She is severe, and beautiful, and white with an absolute whiteness. Yes it seems that even she is touched now and again by Shakespeare's irony. She stands apart, and loses sympathy as an angel might lose it, by seeming to have too little stake in humanity: Then Isabel live chaste, and brother die; More than our brother is our chastity. [2.4.184-5] Perhaps it is the rhyming tag that gives to this a certain explicit and repulsive calmness: at the end of his scenes Shakespeare often makes his most cherished characters do the menial explanatory work of a chorus. He treats Cordelia no better, without the excuse, in this case, of a scene to be closed: 278

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down; Myself could else outfrown false Fortune's frown. [King Lear, 5.3.5—6] When we first make acquaintance with her, Isabella is on the eve of entering a cloister; we overhear her talking to one of the sisters, and expressing a wish that a more strict restraint were imposed upon the order. She is an ascetic by nature, and some of the Duke's remarks on the vanity of self-regarding virtue, though they are addressed to Angelo, seem to glance delicately at her. Shakespeare has left us in no doubt concerning his own views on asceticism; his poems and plays are full of eloquent passages directed against self-culture and the celibate ideal. In a wonderful line of A Midsummer Night's Dream he pictures the sisterhood of the cloister — 'Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon' [1.1.73]. There is a large worldliness about him which makes him insist on the doctrine of usury. Virtue, he holds, is empty without beneficence: No man is the lord of anything, Till he communicate his parts to others. [Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.115, 117] He goes further, and, in a great passage of Troilus and Cressida [3.3.118—23, 145— 80], teaches how worth and merit may not dare to neglect or despise their reflection in the esteem of men. No man can know himself save as he is known to others. Honour is kept bright by perseverance in action: love is the price of love. It is not by accident that Shakespeare calls Isabella back from the threshold of the nunnery, and after passing her through the furnace of trial, marries her to the Duke. She too, like Angelo, is redeemed for worldly uses; and the seething city of Vienna had some at least of Shakespeare's sympathy as against both the true saint and the false. In this play there is thus no single character through whose eyes we can see the questions at issue as Shakespeare saw them. His own thought is interwoven in every part of it; his care is to maintain the balance, and to show us every side. He stands between the gallants of the playhouse and the puritans of the city; speaking of charity and mercy to these; to those asserting the reality ot virtue in the direst straits, when charity and mercy seem to be in league against it. Even virtue, answering to a sudden challenge, alarmed, and glowing with indignation, though it is a beautiful thing, is not the exponent of his ultimate judgment. His attitude is critical and ironical, expressed in reminders, and questions, and comparisons. When we seem to be committed to one party, he calls us back to a feeling of kinship with the other. He pleads for his creatures, as he pleads in the Sonnets for his friend: For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense; Thy adverse party is thy Advocate. [Sonnet 35.9-10] Measure for measure: the main theme of the play is echoed and re-echoed from speaker to speaker, and exhibited in many lights. 'Plainly conceive, I love you' [2.4.141], says Angelo; and quick as lightning comes Isabella's retort: My brother did love Juliet; and you tell me That he shall die for 't. [2.4.142-3] 279

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

The law is strict; but the offence that it condemns is knit up with humanity, so that in choosing a single victim the law seems unjust and tyrannical. Authority and degree, place and form, the very framework of human society, are subjected to the same irony: Respect to your great place; and let the devil Be sometime honour'd for his burning throne. [5.1.292-3] The thought that was painfully working in Shakespeare's mind reached its highest and fullest expression in the cry of King Lear: None does offend, none, I say none; I'll able 'em; Take that of me, my friend, who have the power To seal th' accuser's lips. [4.6.168-70] Many men make acquaintance with Christian morality as a branch of codified law, and dutifully adopt it as a guide to action, without the conviction and insight that are the fruit of experience. A few, like Shakespeare, discover it for themselves, as it was first discovered, by an anguish of thought and sympathy; so that their words are a revelation, and the gospel is born anew. (164—73)

280

56 Andrew J. George, a play dramatizing 'the central truth of Christian morality' 1907

From The Complete Works of Shakespeare. With Annotations and a General Introduction By Sidney Lee (40 vols, London and New York, 1907-09). Volume XII. Andrew Jackson George (1855-1907) graduated from Amherst College, Massachusetts, in 1876, A.M. in 1881, and Litt.D. in 1903, and became head of the English Department of Newton High School in Massachusetts. He published editions of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Milton, Browning, and several Shakespeare plays. The following excerpts from his introduction to Measure for Measure are reprinted from the version of the Sidney Lee edition called 'The University Press Shakespeare', 'Editor's Autograph Edition' (vol. 12, New York, 1907).

.. . Measure for Measure reveals Shakespeare's familiarity with the old Italian tales, translations, and adaptations, for the ground-work of the plot is to be found in a collection of novels by Giraldi Cinthio, known as the Hecatommithi, or Hundred Tales, published in 1565. Cinthio also dramatised the story in his Epitia. George Whetstone, an English aspirant for dramatic fame, had twice translated and adapted Cinthio's romance; once in a double play of Promos and Cassandra in 1578, and again in his collection of prose tales Heptameron of Civil Discourses, in 1582. Shakespeare evidently knew all of these works, although Cinthio's play was not translated into English, tor his leading character, Angelo, is, in name at least, suggested by Angela of the play; but he followed Whetstone's play in many details. The society of the city in which Shakespeare lays the scene of his play is the same in character as that of Whetstone; but the leading characters are as far removed from his as art is from the commonplace. The works both of Cinthio and Whetstone are sordid in nature and crude in form; neither has any redeeming feature, as both sacrifice the heroine's chastity to redeem her brother from death. Shakespeare lifted the play out of the depths of cruelty and dishonour by a master movement of artistic ingenuity when he caused Isabella to maintain her dignity and chastity in spite of temptation from every side. Again, by diverting the plot of the old play at a critical juncture in creating the character of Mariana, he was able to save Isabella from humiliation, while at the same time he yielded a motive for the strange conduct of the Duke, and produced Angelo's pardon. Here as everywhere Shakespeare is true to his ideal of art in that he 281

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

never preaches, but sets pity, honour, and chastity over against cruelty, baseness and lust Notwithstanding the play is a product of the maturity of Shakespeare's genius, it has not succeeded in becoming a favourite with the general reader. Various reasons have been assigned for this; the first being that the subject-matter is repellent to modern taste; and the second, that the poet has presented puritanical severity and the vices contrasted with it in too glaring colours for the purposes of art. The third and most plausible reason has been given by Hazlitt. He says: 'Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations.'^1' Professor Raleigh adds significantly: 'This is indeed the everlasting difficulty of Shakespeare criticism, that the critics are so much more moral than Shakespeare, and so much less experienced. He makes his appeal to thought, and they respond to the appeal by a display of delicate taste.'^2' Whatever the causes of this neglect may be, the fact remains that few plays so rich in the elements of language and composition, so representative of the highest artistic merit in many of its scenes, so masterly in the development of character, and so noble in moral temper, have received so little approbation. The story out of which this play, so full of moral and practical wisdom, was created is of the simplest nature, and may be told in a few words.... [George gives a one-paragraph plot summary.] The characters in the play fall naturally into three groups: one represented by the aristocratic Barnardine and his associates in Vagabondia, who make no excuses for being what they are, and have at least one good trait, that of being honestly base; a second, represented by Isabella and her friends, who make no claims for praise because they prefer to follow honour; and the third, of which Angelo is the type, who, obedient to the letter of the law, claim to be superior to ordinary mortals, while in reality they are the supreme law-breakers. These three types are still constituent parts of our latest and somewhat boastful civilisation, and it is in the contrast of these three that the moral purpose of Shakespeare's art is to be seen. The action of the play centres in those masterly scenes where the Duke, Angelo, and Isabella are the prominent characters. By the Duke the plot is made possible, by Angelo it is developed, and by Isabella justice is rendered possible, - justice tempered by love. The motive which leads the Duke to lay aside his robes of office seems to be a mixed one, for he evidently wishes to avoid the responsibility of punishing those whom his inactivity has somewhat encouraged in their evil courses; and at the same time, being suspicious of Angelo's moral and political motives, he wishes to have an opportunity of testing them. By adopting the garb of a friar the Duke makes it possible for him to take a very active part in the development of the plot, for as an adviser of men's souls he gets at the heart of the mystery. He becomes a kind of unseen Providence in the play by which evil plans are led to good results. In the various interviews with Friar Thomas and with those who are in trouble, we see his humility, wisdom, and goodness at their best. Those with the friar are personal confessions; while those with the afflicted spirits, Juliet, Claudio, and Isabella and Mariana, are full of that tenderness and sympathy, that moral and meditative wisdom, 282

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

which characterise the noblest wearers of the cowl. Although some have thought the Duke manifested too much the spirit of intrigue to be altogether honourable, yet the results show that he pursued the good and the true, according to the best light that was given him, and disprove the old saying that the cowl does not make a monk. Although Measure for Measure lacks attractiveness of subject and situations, has less harmony of tone and consonance of parts, and fewer elements of perfection as a whole, than many of the plays, yet it is confessedly one of the best illustrations of the purpose of playing, whose end is 'to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to Nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure' [Hamlet, 3.2.21-5]. Mastery in this kind of revelation is found in the poet's development of the character of Angelo. It is evident that Angelo has been somewhat critical of the Duke for his leniency in matters of government, and has assumed that he himself possessed the qualities needed to enforce the law; as a result we see that he is not surprised at his promotion, when naturally the honour belonged to the wise, conservative, and statesmanlike Escalus. Thus, early in the play, Shakespeare, true to his philosophy of human character, that habit is the determining element in life, involves those forces out of which the catastrophe is to be evolved; and he does this so subtly that the hasty reader is often confused by the very method which to the careful reader becomes self-evident. By a few bold strokes he shows us how ignorant Angelo is of his own frailty; how blinded he is to his own condition. When Escalus mildly chides him for his severity toward others, and reminds him of the danger of similar crimes in himself, he answers in his self-righteousness, "Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall' [2.1.17—18]. Claudio sees through his pride of virtue, his love of praise for purity and integrity, and says: and for a name, Now puts the drowsy and neglected act Freshly on me: 't is surely for a name. [1.2.169-71] The same note is struck by the Duke when, speaking to Friar Thomas, he says: Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be. [1.3.50-4] To unmask this seeming is the purpose of the play; and in those wonderfully dramatic scenes with Isabella, scenes so full of power, passion, and pathos as to be unsurpassed in the whole range of the Shakespearian drama, the contrast between seeming and being, between hidden vice and open virtue, is made manifest. Angelo's true nature becomes revealed to himself, and in the depth of his degradation he cries: O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your Grace, like power divine, Hath look'd upon my passes. [5.1.366—70] 283

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

For his threefold crime the Duke utters this judgment: An Angelo for Claudio, death for death! Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure. [5.1.409-11] Many wish the play had ended here in tragic dignity and justice, but the poet ruled otherwise, and by the introduction of Mariana turned justice into mercy, and revealed his own philosophy of moral government, We do pray for mercy; And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. [The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.200-2] The fundamental traits of Isabella's character are strength of intellect, depth of feeling, simplicity and purity of thought and action, passionate religious enthusiasm, intense and balanced imagination. These are the weapons she uses with matchless skill in the task she is called from the quiet and seclusion of the cloister to perform for her suffering brother. At first she shrinks from the call and asks: what poor ability's in me To do him good? [1.4.75-6] but as she gradually rises to the consciousness of her great undertaking, not even the base-minded Lucio can refrain from paying her homage. He says: I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted; By your renouncement, an immortal spirit; And to be talk'd with in sincerity, As with a saint. [1.4.34-7] She raises no objection against the law by which her brother suffers, but she pleads for mercy in language unsurpassed for modesty, firmness, womanly gentleness, and pity for human weakness. What a piercing thrust she gives to Angelo's pride and pretended righteousness in the following: How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgement, should But judge you as you are? O, think on that; And mercy will then breathe within your lips, Like man new made. [2.2.75—9] Nevertheless, he does not yield, but sentences her brother to die on the morrow, and she says: O, it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant. [2.2.107-9] Her indignation now bursts forth in a withering scorn of great ones of the earth who, drest in brief authority, play fantastic tricks before high heaven. By the almost super284

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

natural power of her virgin mind and heart, 'dedicate to nothing temporal' [2.2.154— 5], in thus appealing to the personal element in his office he confesses when alone: Amen: For I am that way going to temptation,

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! [2.2.157-9, 179-80] At the next interview he begins by talking in riddles, which at first Isabella thinks merely a means of testing her; but as her replies cause him to doubt her real intentions, he at last unblushingly reveals his villainous desires; then she bursts out in vehement passion full of immortal wisdom, beauty, and nobility: Most pernicious purpose! — Seeming, seeming! — I will proclaim thee, Angelo; look for 't: . . . I'll tell the world aloud, What man thou art. [2.4.150-1, 53-4] She now goes to seek her brother with this saintly soliloquy upon her lips: Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die: More than our brother is our chastity. [2.4.186—7] Perhaps the greatest tribute to the character of Isabella is the fact that, notwithstanding the play is so little read, the most of what she voiced with such felicity, grace, and wisdom, has retained 'its freshness of immortal youth,' and has become almost as universal as the language itself. Shakespeare nowhere presents so definitely as in Measure for Measure the central truth of Christian morality. The main theme of the play, contained in the following from Isabella, is never lost sight of: Alas, alas! Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once; And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. [2.2.72—5] Shakespeare has been blamed by Coleridge and Hazlitt[3] because he acted consistently with this high philosophy, because he punished no one. In the presence of the Puritan justice he pleads for charity and mercy and in the presence of Bohemian callousness he asserts the claims of virtue and honour. In his godlike sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men lies the secret of his greatness as a teacher of mankind. His feelings compassed the total of humanity. All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. 4' (xv—xvi, xviii—xxiv) 285

57 A.B. Walkley, a play better read than acted 1907

From Drama and Life (London, 1907). Arthur Bingham Walkley (1855—1926) was educated at Corpus Christ! College, Oxford, graduating with first-class degrees in mathematics in 1875 and 1877. He had a highly successful career in the postal service as a civil servant, while at the same time writing book reviews and dramatic criticism for the Star, the Speaker, the National Observer, The Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. He published several books of criticism derived from his reviews, including Playhouse Impressions (1892), Frames of Mind (1899), and Drama and Life. Walkley reviewed the following production, which opened on 20 March 1908 (and included the famous Ellen Terry, not mentioned by Walkley, in the minor role of Francisca), for The Times.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE (ADELPHI THEATRE, MARCH 1906) THOUGH Measure for Measure does not happen to be one of my favourite livres de chevet, I would far rather read it than see it played. For in reading one can skip most of the 'story part' and all the 'comic business' in order to dwell at leisure on the 'sentiments' with their fine rhetorical moralising on the great commonplaces of life and death, mercy and justice, passion and chastity. In the theatre, of course, no such process of selection is possible. There the childishness of the plot is thrust under our noses, and the absolutely idiotic behaviour of the Duke is, so to speak, rubbed into us. There the jack-pudding nonsense of Pompey and the appalling tiresomeness of Elbow and the wishy-washy japes of Lucio must be doggedly endured. There, too, one cannot help seeing what a 'thin' piece of work is the character of Angelo and what a mere ficelle^ is Mariana. Thus the resultant impression from the acted play is by no means one of unmixed pleasure. We have seen a number of people, very few of whom we can entirely believe in and none of whom we can entirely like. We cannot like a Duke who deserts his post just to see how a substitute will behave in his place - for the reason he himself puts forward about a stricter administration of justice is, of course, too hollow to deceive an infant. We cannot entirely like so feeble a hero as Claudio. It is not that we necessarily dislike him for clinging to life even at 286

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

the price of his sister's shame. That is quite human. It is that he has not the courage of that position. We think that he ought to have made out a far better case for a brother's life versus a sister's chastity than he actually does. He never pushes his point; he seems a mere drifter. Nor can we entirely like Isabella herself. We feel that she exaggerates the importance of chastity, and we think of more amiable women, essentially as virtuous as she — a Saint Mary of Egypt, a Monna Vanna' ' — who took a saner view. It may be said that to feel like that is to quarrel with the whole motif of the play, and that one must concede to Shakespeare the right to adopt the moral view of his time. Of course; but then we do not take the historic standpoint in the theatre, we are subject to the sympathies and antipathies of the moment, and one undoubtedly feels a certain antipathy, along with one's admiration, for this 'thing ensky'd and sainted' [1.4.34]. When Isabella finally pairs off with the Duke, hugging and kissing a man in regard to whom she has previously shown not the slightest symptom of affection, we feel a positive disgust. As to Angelo, one might have liked him better, villain as he is, if he had shown a little genuine passion. But though he calls himself a sensualist, he does not offer, so far as I can see, the true characteristics. He is merely coldly and deliberately vicious. Finally, we cannot entirely like Mariana, who lends herself to an unworthy trick in order to secure Angelo for her husband. We do not like these people, and we do not like many of the sentiments which govern their actions. They had what are to us very odd views about marriage, for instance. Marriage made everything right; absence of 'marriage lines' made everything wrong. They had odd views about what the gentleman in The Mikado calls 'fitting the punishment to the crime. ' And they had odd views about fun, attaching a value to kicks and thwackings as elements of the humorous which we now consider excessive. Nor can we nowadays share their inordinate zest for Malapropisms. Once more, all views, of course, have their historical explanation. Everybody knows why Shakespeare held them, and could have held no others. But, once more, in the theatre one is not accounting for the play, or indulging in any mere intellectual exercise; one is seeking pleasure of the moment, and there are many moments in Measure for Measure which are anything but pleasurable. On the other hand, the one or two great scenes do, of course, profit immensely by stage-representation. There is the great scene wherein Isabella turns with rage and loathing upon Angelo. There is the still greater scene of Isabella's dismay and total bouleversemenr ^ when she finds that her brother clings more to his own life than to his sister's honour. These are two splendid opportunities for the actress who plays Isabella. Does Miss Lily Brayton make the most of them? Well, she makes a great deal of them. She has among her resources beauty, sincerity, 'petitionary grace' [1.2.82—6]; she has, too, the art of distinct, sonorous elocution. What she lacks is power. When she reaches what musicians would call the fff passages she shows signs of strain, her voice becomes monotonous, she has a tendency to 'scold.' But hers is a very difficult task. I cannot think at this moment of any ideal Isabella. Miss Brayton's limitations are obvious enough; within them her intelligence and skill and charm are no less conspicuous. The Claudio of Mr. Harcourt Williams' ' is quite a pretty fellow, a butterfly fluttering helplessly within gloomy prison walls; and I have no objection, for that is quite a tenable view to take of the Claudio of Shakespeare. Mr. 287

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Oscar Asche's Angelo is a fine sombre, not to say fuliginous, performance; so far as we can believe in the character at all we can put our faith in Mr. Asche's rendering of it. On the whole a creditable affair, this revival of Measure for Measure, and it is by no means through any shortcomings of the players that the dominant impression left on the mind is not altogether one of delight. (156-9)

288

58 Frank Harris, Duke Vincentio as Shakespeare's alter ego 1909

From The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (New York, 1909). James Thomas 'Frank' Harris (1856—1931) was educated at various schools in England and Wales, but ran away to America and studied law at the University of Kansas from 1872 to 1875. Returning to Europe, he studied in Germany at Heidelberg, Gottingen, and Munich. Widely read and fluent in several languages, he was made editor of The Evening News (1882—86) and went on to edit The Fortnightly Review (1886-94), and then The Saturday Review (1894-98), where he employed George Bernard Shaw (No. 38) and Arthur Symons (No. 40), among other eminent writers. An iconoclast when it came to Victorian morality, Harris is well-known today as the author of the quasi-autobiographical My Life and Loves (4 vols, 1922—27), but he also wrote six volumes of short stories, four novels, some plays, and Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (2 vols, 1916), Bernard Shaw: An Unauthorized Biography Based on Firsthand Information, with a Postcript by Mr. Shaiv (1931), and The Man Shakespeare, which seeks to identify the biographical element in Shakespeare's works and foreshadows psychoanalytic criticism. This selection is taken from the second, revised edition (London, 1911).

[From Chapter III: 'Duke Vincentio — Posthumus'] It may be well to add here a couple of portraits of Shakespeare in later life in order to establish beyond question the chief features of his character. With this purpose in mind I shall take a portrait of him, Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, and a portrait that is minutely finished and perfect, though consciously idealized, Posthumus, in Cymbeline. And the reason I take this careless, wavering sketch, and contrast it with a highly-finished portrait, is that, though the sketch is here and there hardly recognizable, the outline being all too thin and hesitating, yet now and then a characteristic trait is overemphasized, as we should expect in careless work. And this sketch in lines now faint, now all too heavy, is curiously convincing when put side by side with a careful and elaborate portrait in which the same traits are reproduced, but harmoniously, and with a perfect sense of the relative value of each feature. No critic, so far as I am aware, not HazlittJ11 not Brandes,'2' not even Coleridge,^3] has yet thought of identifying either Duke Vincentio or Posthumus with Hamlet, much 289

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

less with Shakespeare himself. The two plays are very unlike each other in tone and temper; Measure for Measure being a sort of tract for the times, while Cymbeline is a purely romantic drama. Moreover, Measure for Measure was probably written a couple of years after Hamlet, towards the end of 1603, while Cymbeline belongs to the last period of the poet's activity, and could hardly have been completed before 1610 or 1611. The dissimilarity of the plays only accentuates the likeness of the two protagonists. Measure for Measure is one of the best examples of Shakespeare's contempt for stagecraft. Not only is the mechanism of the play, as we shall see later, astonishingly slipshod, but the ostensible purpose of the play, which is to make the laws respected in Vienna, is not only not attained, but seems at the end to be rather despised than forgotten. This indifference to logical consistency is characteristic of Shakespeare; Hamlet speaks of 'the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns' [3.1.78-9] just after he has been talking with his dead father. The poetic dreamer cannot take the trouble to tie up the loose ends of a story: The real purpose of Measure for Measure, which is the confusion of the pretended ascetic Angelo, is fulfilled, and that is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shown what 'our seemers be' [1.3.54]. It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his alter ego, should order another to punish loose livers — a task which his kindly nature found too disagreeable. But, leaving these general considerations, let us come to the first scene of the first act: the second long speech of the Duke should have awakened the suspicion that Vincentio is but another mask for Shakespeare. The whole speech proclaims the poet; the Duke begins: Angelo, There is a kind of character in thy life, [1.1.26—7] Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be prose: There is a kind of confession in your looks. [2.2.279] A little later the line: Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues, [1.1.35-6] is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every reader on the track. The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also characteristic of Shakespeare. But the four lines, My holy sir, none better knows than you How I have ever loved the life removed, And held in idle price to haunt assemblies, Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep, [1.3.7-10] are to me an intimate, personal confession; a fuller rendering indeed of Hamlet's 'Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither' [2.2.309]. In any case it will be admitted that a dislike of assemblies and cost and witless bravery is peculiar in a 290

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

reigning monarch, so peculiar indeed that it reminds me of the exiled Duke in As You Like It, or of Duke Prospero in The Tempest (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of any one in real life. A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and the 'witless bravery' [1.3.10] of court-life were, as we shall see, characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to old age. In the first scene of the third act the Duke as a friar speaks to the condemned Claudio. He argues as Hamlet would argue, but with, I think, a more convinced hopelessness. The deepening scepticism would of itself force us to place Measure for Measure a little later than Hamlet: Reason thus with life: — If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep... . [Quotes 3.1.6-8, 17-23, 38-41] That this scepticism of Vincentio is Shakespeare's scepticism appears from the fact that the whole speech is worse than out of place when addressed to someone under sentence of death. Were we to take it seriously, it would show the Duke to be curiously callous to the sufferings of the condemned Claudio; but callous the Duke is not, he is merely a pensive poet-philosopher talking in order to lighten his own heart. Claudio makes unconscious fun of the Duke's argument: To sue to live, I find I seek to die, And seeking death, find life: let it come on. [3.1.42—3] This scepticism of Shakespeare which shows itself out of place in Angelo and again most naturally in Claudio's famous speech, is one of the salient traits of his character which is altogether over-emphasized in this play. It is a trait, moreover, which finds expression in almost everything he wrote. Like nearly all the great spirits of the Renaissance, Shakespeare was perpetually occupied with the heavy problems of man's life and man's destiny. Was there any meaning or purpose in life, any result of the striving? was Death to be feared or a Hereafter to be desired? — incessantly he beat straining wings in the void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His Richard II has sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the futility of man's hopes; he knew that man With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing. [Richard II, 5.5.40-1] And this sad knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking. Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an 'everlasting farewell' [Julius Caesar, 5.1.115] of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest. Hamlet dreads 'the undiscovered country' [3.1.78]; but unsentient death is to him 'a consummation devoutly to be wished' [3.1.62-3]. Vincentio's mood is half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no 'more than sleep' [3.1.17—19], he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this same play shudders away from 291

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

death as from annihilation, or worse, in words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's: Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot. . . . [3.1.117-18] A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness: 'there's nothing serious in mortality' [2.2.93]; life's a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. [5.4.26-8] And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save that 'our little life is rounded with a sleep' [The Tempest, 4.1.157-8]. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations, and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods. I now come to a point in the drama which at once demands and defies explanation. In the first scene of the third act the Duke, after listening to the terrible discussion between Isabella and Claudio, first of all tells Claudio that ' Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt' [3.1.60—61] Isabella, and then assures Claudio that to-morrow he must die. The explanation for these two falsehoods would be far to seek, unless we take it that they were invented simply in order to prolong our interest in the drama. But this assumption, though probable, does not increase our sympathy with the protagonist — the lies seem to be too carelessly uttered to be even characteristic — nor yet our admiration of the structure of the play that needs to be supported by such flimsy buttresses. Still this very carelessness of fact, as I have said, is Shakespearian; the philosophic dreamer paid little attention to the mere incidents of the story. The talk between the Duke and Isabella follows. The form of the Duke's speech, with its touch of euphuistic conceit, is one which Hamlet-Shakespeare affects: The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good: the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair. [3.1.180—4] This Duke plays philosopher, too, in and out of season as Hamlet did: he says to Isabella: 'Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful' [3.1.208], generalizing his praise even to a woman. Again, when Pompey is arrested, he passes from the individual to the general, exclaiming: That we are all as some would seem to be, Free from our faults, as some from faults seeming free. [3.2.38-9] 292

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Then follows the interesting talk with Lucio, who awakens the slightly pompous Duke to natural life with his contempt. When Lucio tells the Duke, who is disguised as a friar, that he (the Duke) was a notorious loose-liver — 'he had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service' [3.2.119—20] — the Duke merely denies the soft impeachment; but when Lucio tells him that the Duke is not wise, but 'a very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow' [3.2.139-40], the Duke bursts out, 'either this is envy in you, folly, or mistaking: .. . Let him but be testimonied in his own bringingsforth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier' [3.2.141-2, 144-6] which recalls Hamlet's 'Friends, scholars, and soldiers,' [1.5.141] and Ophelia's praise of Hamlet as 'courtier, soldier, scholar' [3.1.151]. Lucio goes off, and the Duke 'moralizes' the incident in Hamlet's very accent: No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure 'scape; backwounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? [3.2.185-8] Hamlet says to Ophelia: Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. [3.1.135-6] And Laertes says that 'virtue itself [1.3.38] cannot escape calumny. The reflection is manifestly Shakespeare's own, and here the form, too, is characteristic. It may be as well to recall now that Shakespeare himself was calumniated in his lifetime; the fact is admitted in Sonnet 36, where he fears his 'guilt' will 'shame' [line 10] his friend. In his talk with Escalus the Duke's speech becomes almost obscure from excessive condensation of thought — a habit which grew upon Shakespeare. Escalus asks: 'What news abroad in the world?' [3.2.221]. The Duke answers: None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness, that the dissolution of it must cure it: novelty is only in request. . . . There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accursed. [3.2.222-4, 226-8] Escalus then tells us of the Duke's temperament in words which would fit Hamlet perfectly; for, curiously enough, they furnish us with the best description of Shakespeare's melancholy: Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at anything which professed to make him rejoice. [3.2.234—5] And, lastly, the curious rhymed soliloquy of Vincentio which closes this third act, must be compared with the epilogue to The Tempest: He who the sword of Heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe.... [Quotes 3.2.261-4, 267-70] 293

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

In the fifth act the Duke, freed from making plots and plans, speaks without constraint and reveals his nature ingenuously. He uses words to Angelo that recall the sonnets: O, your desert speaks aloud; and I should wrong it, To lock it in the wards of covert bosom, When it deserves, with characters of brass, A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time And razure of oblivion. [5.1.9—13] Again, the Duke argues in gentle Shakespeare's fashion for Angelo against Isabella: If he had so offended, He would have weighed thy brother by himself And not have cut him off. [5.1.110-12] It seems impossible for Shakespeare to believe that the sinner can punish sin. It reminds one of the sacred 'He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone'. ' The detections and forgivings of the last act follow. It will be admitted, I think, on all hands that Duke Vincentio speaks throughout the play with Shakespeare's voice. From the point of view of literary art his character is very far from being as complex or as deeply realized as that of Hamlet or Macbeth, or even as that of Romeo or of Jaques, and yet one other trait besides that of sceptical brooding is so over-accentuated that it can never be forgotten. In the last scene the Duke orders Barnardine to the block and the next moment respites him; he condemns 'An Angelo for Claudio; death for death' [5.1.409], then pardons Angelo, and at once begins to chat with him in kindly intimacy; he asserts that he cannot forgive Lucio, Lucio who has traduced him, shall be whipped and hanged, and in the same breath he remits the heavy penalty. Truly he is 'an unhurtful opposite' whose anger has no steadfastness; but the gentle forgiveness of disposition that is so marked in Vincentio is a trait we found emphasized in Romeo, and again in Hamlet and again in Macbeth. It is, indeed, one of the most permanent characteristics of Shakespeare. From the beginning to the end of the play, Duke Vincentio is weakly-kind in act and swayed by fitful impulses; his assumed austerity of conduct is the thin varnish of vanity that will not take on such soft material. The Hamlet weakness is so exaggerated in him, and so unmotivated, that I am inclined to think Shakespeare was even more irresolute and indisposed to action than Hamlet himself. (36—46)

294

59 Charlotte Porter, 'a dramatized Sermon on the Mount of Genius' 1909

From Measure for Measure. By William Shakespeare. Edited, with Notes, Introduction Glossary, List of Variorum Readings, and Selected Criticism, by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York, 1909). First Folio Edition (40 vols, New York, 1903-13). Charlotte Endymion Porter (1857—1942) graduated from Wells College, New York, in 1875, and then spent some time at the Sorbonne. After returning to America and moving to Philadelphia, she began to edit, with the support of the well-known Shakespeare scholar Horace Howard Furness (first editor of the 'New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare'), the new periodical Shakesperiana. Subsequently, she and Helen Archibald Clarke (1860—1926), who also had an interest in Shakespeare, edited Poet Lore — a journal devoted to Shakespeare, Browning, and comparative literature — from 1889 to 1903. The 'First Folio Edition' of Shakespeare is mostly the work of Porter. In her introduction to Measure for Measure she became the first scholar to emphasize the importance of the Sermon on the Mount to the themes of the play, and her essay anticipates the conclusions of many later twentieth-century critics.

Measure for Measure is a dramatised Sermon on the Mount of Genius, that is brother to the Sermon on the Mount. Thence its name manifestly draws its origin, and the whole drama its spirit. The key to the grave and noble music of the Play is there sounded and there to be sought. The passage in Matthew vii.l—5, admonishing, — Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye, - this searching passage finds in the mouth of the Duke a strikingly parallel statement. At the climax of the dramatic action, when righteous judgment, embodied in the Duke, addresses itself to the task of stripping unrighteous judgment of its false 295

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

authority and scathing its hypocrisy, the speech put in his mouth has a kindred simplicity and pith. It strikes the same probing note. Escalus tells the Duke, disguised as a friar, that he has 'labour'd for the poore Gentleman' [3.2.251], the accused Claudio, but has found his brother-Justice, Angelo, 'so severe, that he hath forc'd me to tell him, hee is indeede Justice' [3.2.253-4]. The friar replies, — 'If his owne life Answere the straitnesse of his proceeding, It shall become him well: wherein if he chance to faile he hath sentenc'd himselfe' [3.2.255— 7]. Then, left alone, and knowing well, but as yet in secret, how great a beam offends just judgment in Angelo, while he is rigorously casting out the mote in Claudio, the righteous indignation of the real Duke, perforce smothered before beneath his disguise, bursts forth. Continuing what he has already said, in a veiled way before Escalus, in the same vein as the passage quoted from the Sermon on the Mount, he pronounces judgment in the same spirit. The lines he utters are slow and weighty-paced in rhythm and emphasis, but terse of speech and packed in thought. The different beat of the Doric whole notes has a strongly contrasting effect with the flowing prose talk preceding it. The contrast well becomes its prominent position here, closing the indirect and opening the direct influence of the speaker upon the trial of Angelo's hidden character. They strike home with a moral white heat that illumines both the genuine character of the Duke beneath his disguise and the turn the plot is now to take by his personal action and open authority: He who the sword of Heaven will beare, Should be as holy, as seveare: Patterne in himselfe to know, Grace to stand, and Vertue go: More, nor lesse to others paying, Then by selfe-offences weighing. Shame to him, whose cruell striking Kills for faults of his own liking: Twice trebble shame on Angelo, To weede my vice, and let his grow. [3.2.161—70] The dramatic rendering of Whetstone's story of Promos and Cassandra is throughout more obviously and in detail Shakespeare's source for the structure of his drama than the prose rendering of the same story in Whetstone's Heptameron. Yet it is scarcely to be doubted that he knew both. The name he gave his stronger, nobler, purer, altogether lovelier Cassandra seems to have been suggested by the prose rendering - 'The Rare Historic etc. Reported by Madam Isabella.' There is, besides, a thoughtful word or two put in the mouth of the King at the close of Whetstone's narrative, which throws light upon the new direction taken by Shakespeare's plot and also on the different spirit animating it. It tends to corroborate the turn of the Poet's mind toward the Sermon on the Mount when writing Measure for Measure. Here seems to be the very husk of the germinating plan which led him to begin his plot on lines essentially different from Whetstone's, although he used his external events and scenic background. He continues it in accordance with this different beginning upon an altogether new and exalted Mount of Vision. Surely the words 296

mAJKHGJKHRL

following caught the very eye of his creative thought when it was devising the radically different Play he wrote on Whetstone's clay foundation. 'No, Promos, no: Hoc facias alien, quod tibi vis fierv . You shall be measured with the grace you bestowed on Andrugio. O God! (quoth hee) if men durst bark as dogges, manie a judge in the world would be bewrayed for a theefe. It behooveth a Prince to know to whom he committeth authoritie, least the sword of justice appointed to chastise the lewd, wound the good.' This could have put Shakespeare's mind in train to associate with his spiritual deepening of the bearing on life of the story the more moving life-charged words of the Sermon on the Mount. The Latin maxim would suggest to him the direct and homely Anglo-Saxon wording of the Golden Rule. Anglo-Saxon and monkish Latin alike spring from the passage following in the Sermon on the Mount, recurring as naturally to his mind as to ours: '. . . all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.' The other words of Whetstone's Promos — if men could 'barke as dogges' to bewray their suspicion of a false judge; also, that 'it behoveth a Prince to know' him to whom he deputes authority — tally with the important constructive change upon which Shakespeare laid the basis of his new plot. He intimates from the outset the Duke's intuitive suspicion of Angelo, despite the moral eminence pointing him out as the fittest person on whom to rest the burden of moral authority for 'Mortallitie and Mercy.' But the 'fine issues, to which Spirits 'finely touch'd' [1.1.35-6] are bound, remain to be shown in Angelo. Till they 'goe forth' [1.1.34] they are unsubstantiated. 'T is as if he 'had them not' [1.1.35], until they are. The Duke, not being 'a dogge,' does not, of course, exactly 'barke' at Angelo as a suspicious character. Yet he shows his instinctive doubts, his lack of the certitude that Angelo's future conduct is requisite to prove. Not only does he show his doubts by watching Angelo's use of the authority he deputes. He shows it also in various subtle ways and words. A gifted actor of the part would need to give these forth as subtly. Such veiled ways and words are alone suited to the moral disguise he must wear, at first, while in the act of deputing his power. They are alone suited afterward to the actual disguise he must don while playing before others his part of private detective. His own words, however, in a scene where he does not labor under the need of a disguise (the Scena Quarta of the Folio) show clearly how differently, at the outset, from Whetstone's King Corvinus Shakespeare has motived his Duke. In fact, his Duke is made to act as Whetstone's King thinks a Prince ought to act. That is, as 'it behooveth,' him in order to be sure that 'the Sword of Heaven' committed by him to other hands, 'appointed to chastise the lewd,' shall not 'wound the good.' To do that, as Shakespeare construes it, means not merely to become in our modern sense a private detective of the evil-doer, whether of the prim Angelos or the reckless Lucios of social viciousness. The one-sided unhygienic course of so-called justice usual in the world is such that the office of detection is only directed toward evil. Shakespeare directs it in the person of his Duke toward the detection of any and all degrees of good, — of that honest evil which is half well-intentioned or that halfirresponsible evil which is made the cat's-paw of crafty evil. Even the corruption of 297

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the stews is lightened by the play of his leniency toward the under-dogs of vice — the mere tools and scapegoats, like Pompey and Mistress Overdone, of the worldling's secure profligacy, or the hardened instruments and benumbed products of social viciousness like Abhorson and Barnardine. So Shakespeare's Duke brings unsuspected good to light. He takes off the bushel that hid the modest candle, and befriends the trusty, kindly manhood of the Provost, and of Escalus, too, in his degree. He seeks the reparation of those more sinned against than sinning, as in Mariana; obtains recognition of the measure of virtue latent in faulty honest hearts, as in Claudio and Juliet. He himself falls in love with the humanly beautiful of soul, made known to him unblemished in Isabella. Thus in Scena Quarta, when he explains in his own person plainly the purpose of his desired disguise to Friar Thomas, he is represented as having more reasons for this action than the only one his leisure permits him at the time to render. The one reason is to detect the true inwardness of the 'precise' [1.3.50] person who scarcely confesses that his blood flows or that he has more appetite for bread than for stone. He would 'visit both Prince and People' [1.3.45] in disguise, in order to see 'If power change purpose' in him and ascertain just what 'our Seemers be' [1.3.54]. And the further reasons are dramatically made known in the progress of the Play, in their various relations to publicans and sinners, to jailers, justices, and offenders in their degree, as well as to her who shines 'en-skied and sainted' [1.4.34], both pure and strong, above them. In a word, the plot as Shakespeare manipulates it is so reanimated as to embody and enact as well as breathe forth the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount toward virtue as well as sin. The probing of the Duke scathes the false pretentions of hypocrisy and injustice, but it also honors the efficacy of a rectitude compatible with mercy and love. The Poet's own historical background — England itself in his day, with its increasing clamor of Precisians against loose living, is obviously behind Measure for Measure. Out of a full knowledge of the spiritual value of the struggle toward which he has been accused of holding himself coldly aloof, Shakespeare writes. In the stews, the prison and court scenes in 'Vienna,' who does not feel London — his London, and any London of any age and country? But more than a text against a false Puritanism is here in question. This is only the passive side of the plot. The positive side is a moral enthusiasm for an undefiled purity, that does justly, yet loves mercy. Perhaps this, even, instead of anti-Puritan, is essentially Puritan. But it does not assume to be so. It refrains from naming itself, content with being. The application of the spirit of the Play appears then, on its passive side, to rest on the Latin maxim and the denunciation of the Pharisee in the first passage quoted from the Sermon on the Mount. The application to the Play of the spirit of the later passage, expressing the converse side of the scathing of the hypocrite - 'all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them' — is positive and constructive. Mercy and Love dwell in this to inspire the ardor of right living. From the other, to condemn wrong living, Justice and a sword leap forth. This is the 'Sword of Heaven,' as Shakespeare calls it, and he puts it in the hand of the Duke to wield against Angelo only after having fully tested him and found him wanting. 298

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

The changes in construction and spirit wrought in Whetstone's plot by Shakespeare may be measured not alone by the transcendency of Isabella over Cassandra. They may be measured best of all by the lover of Isabella, — the Duke. He is the very pivot of the new plot, of its new spirit and conclusion. Like a Deus ex machina, he sets a crucial test of Angelo that leaves him at liberty to take his own course, and gives him a final chance, moreover, to free or to incriminate himself yet more deeply when he constitutes him his own Judge. The Duke watches the test in all of its effects and cross-relations and forbears to come into the plot to do justice until the critical moment. Meanwhile, he is a very present help in time of trouble. He devises the honest cheat of substituting Mariana for Isabella, repellent to those who dislike a bad name more than a bad thing, as an undeniable proof of the Precisian's lewd iniquity. Isabella's continued denial of Angelo's infamous desires could otherwise never have convicted him. It is part of the dramatic interest of the plot, adoitly made one with its wise ethical purpose, that he institutes the trial of Isabella and Mariana as false witnesses, in order not alone to bring out all intricacies clearly, but generously to give Angelo all the rope he justly needed wherewith to save or hang himself. And so, only when he is irredeemably noosed does the Duke appear openly before him. Like the gods of the drama of Euripides, he comes into the conclusion to bring about the good in an unsuspected manner. His dignity and ardor of soul as an independent character is obscured to the unpenetrating by his long continued disguise and the strictness of his duty to his prescribed role of divine inquisitor. Yet beneath his mask glow the eyes of the lover of love who is worthy of Isabella. As the character who is more than any other — even than Isabella herself— entirely the invention of Shakespeare, his relation to the Play can certify to its design and the intended correspondency of his words with those of the Sermon on the Mount, at the moment when the action turns toward its solution, (vii—xiv)

299

60 Mary Suddard, an attack on Puritanism 1909

From 'The Poet and the Puritan', The Contemporary Review 96 (July—Dec. 1909), 713-21. Reprinted as 'Measure for Measure as a Clue to Shakespeare's Attitude towards Puritanism' in Keats Shelley and Shakespeare: Studies & Essays in English Literature (Cambridge, 1912), pp. 136-52. Sarah Julie Mary Suddard (1888—1909) was a precocious student, who, after graduation from the University of Paris, became a teacher at L'Ecole Communale, Clermont-Ferrand. According to a short biographical notice by Harold Begbie prefacing (p. 712) her article in The Contemporary Review — written when she was only eighteen — Suddard 'went to her teaching with a nervous system utterly deranged by her [academic] labours, found that she could not keep order in a rather turbulent class, admitted to her mind the idee fixe that she was doomed to failure, and in the delirium of an illness which overtook her at that time, threw herself from a fourth floor window, ending her life after twenty journeys round the sun'. Her collection of essays cited above is an expansion of her Keats and Shelley Studies (Cambridge, 1912), both of them published posthumously. Her essay on Measure for Measure is a remarkable tour de force for someone so young, comparable to the discussion of the play by Georg Brandes (No. 44). My selection is taken from the slightly revised 1912 version.

The great wave of the Renaissance, having spent its force, ebbed slowly back, leaving behind an ever-rising heap of slime. Now that the age of Elizabeth was drawing to its close, its unrestrained liberty of life began to lose itself in excesses. At its best it had, if not encouraged, at least allowed of, a laxity of principle which among the lower minds degenerated into licence. Among a certain class, ever increasing in numbers, the voluptuousness of the Renaissance assumed uglier forms than Sybaritism. Its laugh had turned into a grin, its sparkling glance into a leer, its impulsive passion into deliberate foulness. However judgments might differ as to the moral gravity of the offence, there could be but one opinion on the danger of its practical consequences. Cressida found her counterpart in Mistress Doll; the pleasure of the libertine had to be paid for in disease. Debauch threatened death to the material as well as intellectual vigour of the nation. It called as urgently for a hygienic as for a moral reform. A change was close at hand. A new generation was being trained up in the 300

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

sound, if narrow, principles on which society might be re-organised. With the Puritans, as the apostles of law and order, the ultimate salvation of the country lay. They themselves adopted and, if they came into power, would enforce a system of discipline which, whatever its limitations, would at least deliver England from the abuses that were sapping the life as well as corrupting the moral sense of the nation. Any thoughtful observer might recognize in them the future rulers of England. Shakespeare had too thoroughly entered into the spirit of his time not to be, in a certain sense, ahead of it. Quick as he was to feel the very pulse of Renaissance thought he was equally quick to note all symptoms of decay and signs of coming change. Idealists might dream of a time in the near future when all the artificial restraints and restrictions of society would be suppressed, a time that should 'excel the golden age' [The Tempest, 2.1.168]. The Utopian visionary might say with Gonzalo: In the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none... . [Quotes The Tempest, 2.1.148-56, 160-5] But Shakespeare blows away the bubble with a sigh of impatience. He well knew that the coming age was more likely to prove the age of iron than the age of gold. Instead of relaxing the bonds of society, its first care would be to draw them closer. Gonzalo's 'commonwealth' might stand for an exact picture 'by contraries' of the Puritan Commonwealth. Such a commonwealth, with all the terms reversed, had Shakespeare represented by anticipation in Measure for Measure. Measure for Measure might indeed be looked upon as a precursor of those bold and often hazardous prophecies with which our modern socialistic literature is overrun. The poet had here undertaken to deliver a message from 'the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come' [Sonnet 107]. It seems hardly reasonable to doubt that in the corruptions of Vienna 'that boil and bubble till they o'errun the stew' [5.1.318—19] Shakespeare meant to depict the licence of London under its most loathsome aspect; that in the ill-judged leniency of the Duke, who actually bids vice prosper — 'for we bid this be done / When evil days have their permissive pass / And not the punishment' [1.3.37-9], he meant to censure the slackness of that morality which could not correct the excesses of its own adherents; finally, that in the sudden exaltation of Angelo to the post of governor he meant to show the passage of supreme power into the hands of the Puritans. The play may be safely accepted as a forecast of the effects of Puritan rule on England. What gives it its abiding value is its extremely solid basis. Shakespeare does not dive at haphazard into the future, he develops the future out of the present. The corruptions described are those he had witnessed with his own eyes in many a flourishing house of ill fame, corruptions to whose actual existence in the present many another passage in his works bears witness; the Puritans brought on the stage are still 301

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

children of the Renaissance, though in process of transformation; the only respect in which he may be said to have anticipated the course of events is in attributing to the Puritans at this stage a political power that only developed fifty years later. However, it may be that the accession of James I to the English throne (taking the play to have been written about 1603—4) led him to expect a sudden inroad of reforming zeal from Puritanic Scotland. Shakespeare exposes with unsparing severity the corruption of Renaissance life among the frivolous middle classes; he admits, in fact insists upon, the necessity of a reform; he already foresees from what quarter it will come; now the question arises: How far is Puritanism fitted to play the part it seems to be on the point of assuming? how far would it be expedient to entrust it with supreme power? He now examines the validity of its titles to authority. In order to remain just, he takes it on its own ground. Puritanism is studied as much in its effects on its own disciples as on outsiders. Shakespeare, with his usual impartiality, continually changes the touch-stone applied. To get an all-round view of the question, he adopts now the stand-point of the initiated, now that of the unbeliever. He investigates now its effect on the individual, now its effect on society. The different methods employed in this psycho-sociological study all, however, as usual in Shakespeare, lead to the same result. Puritanism is treated by Shakespeare essentially as a moral discipline, divested of all religious peculiarities. None of its distinctive doctrines, opinions, or dialect, varying from sect to sect, from generation to generation, are insisted upon in Measure for Measure. He left its transient aspects to be depicted by the author of Bartholomew Fair, he himself was concerned only with its underlying principles. And all its principles, from an ethical point of view, may be summed up in one, the establishment and maintenance, at any price and under any circumstances, of hard and fast lines of distinction between good and evil, virtue and vice, the saint and the sinner. In this inflexibility, now rising into heroic constancy, now hardening into rigidity, lies its saving strength as well as its fatal weakness. On the one hand it prevents all compromise with sin, on the other it denies all possibility of redemption. The effects of this training on the individual, as displayed in the two main types of mind to which it can appeal, are exemplified on the one hand in Isabella, on the other in Angelo. Isabella represents Puritanism under its most favourable aspect. Puritanism from the beginning seems to have exercised upon the women of England the same fascination Jansenism, its Continental congener, exercised upon the women of France. Had Isabella been allowed to follow out her self-appointed course she would have developed into an Angelique Arnauld. * All woman's yearning devotion and self-sacrifice, absorbed by passion in Italian Juliet, are absorbed by principle in Isabella. Her intellect delights in vanquishing the difficulties of Puritanic (in the play symbolised as conventual) discipline, her heart delights in offering itself up, unrewarded and unrepulsed, to an unattainable ideal. As St Simeon Stylites exulted in straining the cord of penance round his waist 'as tight as he could knot the noose, so Isabella, the young disciple of a young religion, exults in multiplying the restrictions of Puritanic rule. Her very first words strike the key-note of her character, so intense in its moderation, so passionate in its self-control: 302

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Isabella Nun Isabella

And have you nuns no farther privileges? Are not these large enough?. Yes, truly; I speak not as desiring more, But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon this sisterhood, the votaries of St Clare. [1.4.1—5]

A generation of such women would soon ensure the triumph of Puritanism in England. The chief object of the new discipline was to establish law, and the very mainspring of Isabella's nature is obedience to law, whatever suffering such obedience may imply: 'I had rather my brother die by the law than that my son should be unlawfully born' [3.1.189-91]. This obedience to the external law is only the outward sign of obedience to the moral law within. No considerations of human affection can weigh against principle. Rather than violate the virginal ideal of purity imposed by principle, Isabel will stifle the voice of feeling, sacrifice her brother without a tear: 'More than our brother is our chastity' [2.4.185]; indeed, at the very thought, inspired principle puts into her mouth the language of the Christian virgins fifteen hundred years before. To repel the attacks of the tempter her voice thrills with the ecstasy of martyrdom: Were I under the terms of death The impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies, And strip myself to death as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield My body up to shame. [2.4.100-4] Contrast this unflinching adherence to principle with the yielding of Isabella's prototype, Cassandra, in the original play, you will have caught the difference in spirit between the Renaissance ideal of mercy to the individual and the Puritanic ideal of obedience to the law. Isabella, for the first time perhaps in English literature, displays the wonderful power of Puritanism in conquering nature, that strength which has become the backbone of the Englishwoman's character, that implicit obedience to the laws of truth and chastity which silences alike the casuistry of conscience and the promptings of passion in Jeanie Deans and Jane Eyre. And yet has Isabella so completely broken with the tradition of the Renaissance? In truth, this strength of principle had always lain dormant in the Englishwoman's nature. The frankness and fidelity of Chaucer's Dorigen^ ' needed little transformation to develop into the Shakespearian heroine, and Shakespeare's women are all Puritans at heart. The latent tendencies of all are simply brought to consciousness in Isabella. She is first cousin, if not sister, to Imogen and Desdemona. As the highest type of Renaissance woman shares Isabella's austerity of principle, so Isabella shares the other's impulsiveness of emotion. As live water may be seen dashing and dancing along under thin ice, so feeling in Isabella seems always on the point of bursting through the set coldness of Puritanic or conventual reserve. Puritanic principles merely fit over the more delicate impulses of her own nature to shield their purity from harm. Puritanism for her meant no more than a moral discipline; it served simply to protect the feeling it could not repress. When the time 303

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

comes the husk slips off like the sheath off a catkin, leaving a silken tenderness beneath, soon to blossom out in fragrant, tremulous beauty. Had Isabella always remained a voluntary prisoner in her convent, wrapt in silent meditation, only peeping out at the world through a grating, — in other words, could she have held fast to her Puritanic principles without bringing them to the test of fact, — the slumbering warmth of her nature could only have been divined from an occasional flash; it would never have burnt through to a steady glow and shone out in its own eventual radiance. But Isabella is brought into contact with real life, and with life in the form her training teaches her to most abhor. She is forced to plead for sin, to become the apologist of human frailty and human passion. The first moral crisis of her life reveals to her the inadequacy of her principles to cope with problems whose magnitude she had never before realised. Her icicles of logic, which seemed before so fair and firm, thaw, dwindle, melt away at the first warm breath of feeling. Or, to be more just, the logic of the intellect is transcended by the logic of emotion. In Isabella, as in most women, the logic of the intellect moves in extremely narrow grooves. It had sufficed to regulate her own personal judgment, opinions and conduct. But a finer intuition tells her it will no longer apply to the case she has undertaken to defend. This new need calls forth the supple logic of emotion, reaching the right solutions by the wrong means, ignoring all the process of formal reasoning, yet instinctively working itself out to a result no formal reasoning could have given. The struggle between the two and her fruitless efforts to reconcile them are what confer its half-pathetic, half-humorous interest on her first interview with Angelo: There is a vice that most I do 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. [2.2.29-33] This contention of principle and feeling, at which she herself seems frightened and abashed, is leading her into a higher sphere. In Shakespeare's women feeling always carries principle along with it, not denying its validity, but extending its application. Struggle as she will, 'a something wild within her breast, / A greater than all knowledge beats her down: not love, but charity, the divine Amor. It takes her back to the gracious mercy, the infinite forgiveness of the Redeemer: Why, all the souls that were forfeit once, And he who best the 'vantage might have took Found out the remedy. . . . [2.2.73—5] From such a height, she may look down with an indignation, too holy to be scorn, on the petty rules and regulations of 'proud man drest in a little brief authority' [2.2.117-18] as no better than the gambols of an 'angry ape' [2.2.120] Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep. [2.2.121—2] 304

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

But what has become of her Puritanism? In her highest, most heroic burst, her early training has been not only transcended, but unconsciously condemned. Contact with real life has thrown her back on Christianity; before the sorrow and suffering of humanity, Puritanic morality she had thought so lofty now seems narrow; its solutions she had thought so just seem almost flippant. Through Isabella the Renaissance pays Puritanism a magnanimous tribute, and takes at the same time a worthy and magnificent revenge. Shakespeare is, however, very far from wishing to prove the inability of Puritanism to retain a firm hold on its disciples. Over against the complex character of Isabella he sets the more elementary nature of Angelo. On him Puritanism has set its distinctive and ineffaceable seal. We have said that Isabella used the austerity of Puritanism as a moral discipline for her own passionate nature; Angelo turns this purely personal and spiritual discipline into a mechanical drill, to be applied to all minds alike. Puritanic principle, as before said, serves rather as a shell to protect her tenderest feelings from injury; Angelo, carrying his narrow logic to its extreme consequences, tries to assimilate the creature to the shell, to fossilize the living heart within. Puritanism appealed to Isabella through its superhuman difficulty of application; it appeals to Angelo, on the contrary, through its extreme simplicity. What acts as a restraint on a passionate heart serves as a support to a cold intellect. Live entirely by the brain, suppress feeling, and Puritanic morality becomes the easiest of all to follow. The only penalty Angelo will have to pay for his complete surrender to Puritanic rule is loss of power, under any circumstances whatsoever, to shake off the habits of mind he has acquired. The difference in the effect of such a discipline on the superior and on the average mind can only be brought out by contact with reality. Angelo, like Isabella, brings his Puritanism to the test of fact and, to the credit of the strength if not the liberality of his training, preserves its logical integrity much longer. The paradox of the situation requires one Puritan to convert the other.8 Isabella, forced by her instinct to desert her own tenets, beckons to Angelo to follow her up to the summit she has reached. In their first interview the faith of both is shaken. But the result of the crisis is widely different in the complex and the elementary nature. Feeling is in both cases brought into play, but feeling of a radically different character. Departure from Puritanic morality in Isabella meant return to Christian grace, in Angelo it means return to Nature in its lowest form. As in intellect he has never advanced beyond the logic of the understanding, so in emotion he has never advanced beyond animal desire. The worst feature of Puritanism now makes its appearance. In its anxiety to keep virtue from being sullied by the least contact with vice, it denies all possibility of the two being combined in one, - consequently all possibility of redemption. A false step, once taken, can never be retrieved. At the first offence, the deserter from its ranks is sentenced to be shot. The words of a modern Puritan exactly express the attitude of Puritanism towards the fallen though still believing sinner: 'The breach once made by sin in the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired' (Hawthorne: Scarlet Letter).^^ The knowledge of this essential rule drives Angelo to despair. After the minute and morbid self-analysis Puritanism, to its own great 305

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

danger, encouraged, Angelo comes to the conclusion he is but as carrion corrupting in the sun. His conduct has always been governed by abstract principle. No sense of human tenderness can restrain him from taking human life. No artistic awe and respect of beauty can prevent him from desecrating Isabella, for the brutality of his proposal is of a piece with the Vandalism which was later to disgrace for ever Puritanic rule. No feeling for 'the pity of it' [Othello, 4.1.195-6], so strong even in uncivilised Othello, can hold him back from shattering the virginal ideal of purity enshrined in Isabella's soul. That is, no consideration but law can keep him from committing the foulest crimes, and Angelo's inner law, once broken, as it admits of no forgiveness and requires no repentance, practically gives the offender scope for all his desires of lust, murder or revenge. With the words I have begun, And now I give my sensual race the rein, [2.4.159—60] Angelo curses his better angel from his side and falls to reprobation. His supposed seduction of Isabella, the initial sin, is followed up in quick succession by breach of promise towards his victim, the judicial murder of Claudio, the lie of direct denial to the Duke and the slander of Mariana. Over and above all, may be added the passive hypocrisy of keeping up appearances. Shakespeare takes pains to show that hypocrisy is not the fundamental vice of Puritanism (a necessary warning to the future author of Hudibras) , * but he foresees that, on account of its intangible, indefinable character, it offers Puritanic severity the only means of compounding with human weakness. To such a compromise has the severe and upright judge been brought, not from the sin of following Nature, but from the iniquity of the training which, by cutting off all hope of pardon, has urged him on from crime to crime. For the training of the Puritans leaves as lasting a mark as the training of the Jesuits, and through his worst excesses Angelo remains a Puritan at heart. His rigidity of virtue has simply turned into rigidity of evil. Milton's Satan is a renegade Puritan. In Isabella and Angelo Shakespeare not only embodies the two main types of Puritan, but sets forth all the advantages and defects of Puritanic training. He does full justice to its abstract loftiness of principle, to its power of resistance, its strength in warding off evil, its straightforward language, its uncompromising divisions between right and wrong, its freedom from all the sophistries of a more indulgent morality. But his praise is emphatically confined to Puritanism in the abstract. Notice that the common test which neither Isabella nor Angelo can resist is coming into contact with real life. Puritanism has done its part as a training and may still last as an ideal; for practical purposes it must give place to a larger and more liberal morality, on pain of falling below itself. Its worthiest disciples will surpass it, its lower ones disgrace it. Different as its result may seem on Angelo and Isabella, the two studies point to the same conclusion: Puritanism, in its present state, unmodified, is unfit to come into contact with society. To borrow the words of Lamb, 'it is an owl that will not bear daylight.' [11] Not only is Puritanism unfit to come into contact with society, but society unfit to come into contact with Puritanism. The rigidity of principle in the one case, the terrible elasticity of conscience in the other, makes all hope of a mutual understanding vain. 306

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

True, the moral beauty of Puritanism possesses a certain power of appeal even to the most corrupt. The libertine Lucio, for whom no woman is sacred, seems awed into respect and almost into decency in the presence of Isabella. 'He holds her as a thing enskyed and sainted / And to be talked with in sincerity / As with a saint' [1.4.34—7]. But her influence is not fully acknowledged, nor its power brought to bear directly on the little feeling his life has not yet beaten out, till the wonderful scene where the austerity of Puritanism has been absorbed by the Christian need of mercy. Puritanism in its logical form, as written on the settled visage and expressed through the deliberate word of Angelo, meets with universal hostility and derision. Blindly conscious of its isolation, secretly irritated at the resistance it encounters, Puritanism strikes at random in the dark, with a nervous obstinacy significant of weakness rather than of strength. Angelo's administration commits a series of blunders grotesque in form, but tragic in result. In its anxiety to tear away the great social fungus which is eating into the heart of the tree, it pulls down still sound and flourishing branches. Repenting offenders, willing to make good the wrong, are sentenced without reprieve; hardened sinners, who can plead no excuse beyond antiquity, escape with admonition. Novices must be prosecuted with the full rigour of the law; all mercy and tenderness is reserved for procuresses and profligates. For the first slip, scarcely to be termed a fall, Juliet must be branded with irretrievable disgrace; Mrs Overdone, 'who has worn her eyes out almost in the service' [1.2.109— 10], will be considered. For an informality Claudio must lose his head, nay perhaps be conducted to the scaffold by Pompey promoted to the post of executioner's assistant. Finally, all unprofessional licence of the Lucio type may be hidden under the goodly veil of hypocrisy. All Shakespeare's irony and indignation are summoned up to expose the inefficacy of Puritanism outside its own circle. Its utter ignorance of the temper of the nation, its utter want of tact and sense in its treatment of abuses, above all, its presumption and self-sufficiency are what call forth his bitterest attacks. How can the general scheme of Measure for Measure be interpreted save as an onslaught on Puritanism, if not as an individual yet as a social force? And does not the denouement mean the downfall of Puritanic rule, the humbling of Puritanic pride, the restoration of the Renaissance? Angelo's delinquencies are all exposed, his decisions all reversed, he himself dismissed with the mercy which he would not show. Like Shylock he is taught 'to know the difference of their spirits' [The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.368]; Puritanic, like Judaic morality, with which it shows many points of contact, is absorbed and taken up into Christianity. The Duke, enlightened by his experience, after carrying Puritan logic to its barbarous conclusion, declares the futility in life and before reason of'Measure still for Measure' [5.1.411]. But in the course of fifty years a change was to take place. The spirit of the nation was to change. Puritanism was to settle down into English character, chiefly, as Shakespeare seems to have foreseen, through the agency of women. What had been the exception was to become the rule. When the Puritans actually came into power the body of the people went with them. Puritanic rule was no longer imposed as a penance, but exacted as a right. Those fifty years' transition between the death of 307

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Elizabeth and the founding of the Commonwealth wrought a change Shakespeare could not have foreseen. Reality would have given his play just the opposite denouement. Measure for Measure therefore may stand as the supreme study of Puritanism in its essence, detached from all external accidents; to this psychological study it owes its lasting value; it presents the further interest of a record of the reception Puritanism met with from the Renaissance; it must not be accepted on trust as a prophecy of fact. (136-52)

308

61 George Saintsbury, 'an early, half finished piece' 1910

From 'Shakespeare: Life and Plays', The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (14 vols, Cambridge and New York, 190717). Vol. V (1910), Chap. VIII. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury (1845—1933) was educated at Merton College, Oxford, where he read classics. After teaching in schools for some years he moved to London and began to earn a living as a critic, competent in both French and English literature. His many publications include Dry den (1881), Specimens of English Prose Style from Malory to Macaulay (1885), A History of Elizabethan Literature (1887), and Essays in English Literature: 1780-1860 (1890). After being appointed Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University in 1895, he published even more prolifically, including A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day (3 vols, 1900—4), A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (3 vols, 1906-10), A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912), The English Novel (1913), and twenty-one chapters for The Cambridge History of English Literature. I cite page numbers from both the Cambridge and New York editions, which differ.

. . . Measure for Measure is a more difficult play [than The Merry Wives of Windsor} — one not so liable to be undervalued from inability to perceive that a comic microcosm may be thoroughly cosmic, but more apt to disconcert, if not actually to disgust, by reason of its singular apparent discords, its unusual scheme of conduct and character and its scant reconcilableness with that un-puritan, but fairly severe, system of poetical justice which Shakespeare generally maintains. Its 'disagreeableness' - to use a word often laughed at but expressive and without a synonym — is less to some tastes than that of All's Well that Ends Well; but, to a certain extent, it exists. On the other hand, its power is unquestionable, and it contains some of the greatest things in Shakespeare. It was certainly (or almost certainly) performed in 1604, and it has been customary to accept that year as the approximate date of the composition. To the present writer, this seems very improbable, and he would select Measure for Measure as the strongest instance of the suggested earliness, in a more or less incomplete form, of many more plays than are contained in Meres's list.' Shakespeare, indeed, has improved immensely on the original Italian story and on Whetstone's two English 309

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

versions, in novel and drama. He has not only added the magnificent scenes between Isabella and Angelo, and Isabella and her brother, and the character (dramatically important, inasmuch as it helps to save Isabella and provides a denouement) of 'Mariana in the moated grange' [3.1.264-5]; he has lavished his nepenthe of poetry on a not particularly attractive theme. But, in the first place, it seems very unlikely that he would have chosen that theme so late; and, in the second, it is nearly certain that, if he had, he would have worked it up with different results. His seventeenth century plays generally contain nothing so crude as the cruder parts of Measure for Measure, while these are very like parts of the early comedies and of Pericles. Moreover, even if Pompey and Lucio were cleaner-mouthed, they would still be unfinished studies, companions of Launce and Launcelot, not of Touchstone and Feste. ' The play, as a whole, gives one the idea of an early, half finished piece which the writer has resumed, which he has improved immensely, but on which he has rather hung additional and separate jewels than spent the full labour of the thorough refashioning and refounding. Had it come straight from the hands of the Shakespeare of 1604, we should surely have had a much more defensible and, in fact, intelligible duke, than the person who runs his state and his servants into difficulties in order that he may come to the rescue as a rather shabby Providence — an Angelo more of a piece, less improbably repentant (not to say so improbably flagitious) and less flagrantly 'let off If one cared to conjecture, it might be possible to show a strong case for an original intention to adopt the story in its blackest shape, Titus fashion; a disgust with this leading to the abandonment of the thing for a time; an inspiration to create a 'Saint Isabel' and a consequent adaptation and transformation to 'happy ending' and poetical injustice. But even a Shakespeare cannot reshape ends in a manner entirely contrary to their rough-hewing, without some loss of accomplishment, verisimilitude, and effect. (Cambridge, V, 190-1; New York, V, 213-15)

310

62 Elmer Edgar Stoll, historical criticism and Measure for Measure 1910

From 'Anachronism in Shakespeare Criticism', Modern Philology, 7 (April 1910), 1-19. Elmer Edgar Stoll (1874-1959) obtained an A.B. from Harvard in 1895 and an A.M. in 1896. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1904. He taught English literature at Adelphi College, Harvard, Western Reserve University, and then the University of Minnesota until his retirement. His many books include Othello: An Historical and Comparative Study (1915), Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study (1919), Shakespeare Studies, Historical and Comparative in Method (1927), Poets and Playwrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, Milton (1930), Art and Artifice in Shakespeare: A Study in Dramatic Contrast and Illusion (1933), Shakespeare and Other Masters (1940), and From Shakespeare to Joyce (1944). Stoll was one of the first of a generation of historical critics who revolutionized the study of English literature in British and American universities by emphasizing the conventions that governed the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Stoll begins this lengthy essay with the following sentence: 'Criticism forgets that Shakespeare wrote in the sixteenth century', and then explains his own critical methodology: 'The function of criticism is not to make the poet in question the contemporary of the reader, but to make the reader for the time being a contemporary of the poet' (p. 1). The essay examines the way in which critics and scholars 'have not taken up the historical spirit unreservedly and consistently or put impressionism or anachronism behind them' (p. 2).

. . . So little interested in ideas as he is, Shakespeare is hardly the one to put them into his plot. He writes no plays with central ideas, as Grant White ' insisted years ago, still less a problem play, a drame a these. To mistake him at this point is to mistake for art of today — most insidious of anachronisms! — that of three centuries ago. It is to plunge Shakespeare into the company of Ibsen or M. Hervieu. ' It is to conceive of the Merchant of Venice after the fashion of M. Sarcey: Tidee mere de 1'oeuvre, c'est que 1'argent et le souci de 1'argent sont ce qu'il y a au monde de plus vil . . . et que 1'amour est le premier des biens!''3' M. Sarcey wrote from the heart of a dramatic world to which the idea is everything; but Shakespeare's interest — as has been recognized by Professors Raleigh and Baker, ' who have studied Elizabethan drama as a whole — lay in story. To us, of course, as to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 311

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

the most interesting thing is the characters. But with the Elizabethans it was otherwise; and there is no other explanation for such anti-climaxes as in the Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet, for such denouements as in Measure for Measure, All's Well, Much Ado, and most of the other comedies, for cases of 'stupidity' such as that of Emilia or of'subservience' such as that of the Danish court, than that Shakespeare's art was on the same plane as that of his fellow Elizabethans, the Greeks, and the Spanish, of all popular drama, indeed, before the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, much of our popular drama today, putting story first and character after. In drama in which story is thus pre-eminent over character, what, then, of the underlying idea? At that stage of culture - except as allegory - it simply is a thing unknown. Every attempt to trace it in Shakespeare — the recent tactful ones as well as Schlegel's or Ulrici's^ - breaks down. In Love's Labor's Lost Professor Dowden and others after him, have detected a 'protest against youthful schemes of shaping life according to notions rather than according to reality, a protest against idealizing away the facts of life. ' But at the end the King and his lords are sentenced to a year in a monastery to do penance for breaking the vows of study and seclusion against which Shakespeare is here supposed to be protesting; and there are many indications in the text that Shakespeare considers it more of a weakness, though an amiable one, for the King and lords to break their vows than to have made them. Likewise the attempt breaks down with the 'gloomy' comedies All's Well and Measure for Measure, which have seemed especially tendenzios. Professor Wendell discovers a Calvinistic contempt for an evil world pervading the latter, and a profound sense of sexual evil pervading both. Views somewhat like are entertained by many; but, as Mr. Raleigh observes, 'if the humorous scenes, in which most of the corruption comes to light, are needed only to present without disguise or extenuation a world of license and corruption, why are they humorous?. . . . For Shakespeare this world of Vienna is not a black world; it is a weak world, full of little vanities and stupidities, regardful of custom, fond of pleasure, idle, and abundantly human'.[8] Only, at this point Mr. Raleigh is himself slipping into the error of a unifying mood or idea, and one a bit highflown for Shakespeare at that. A Vienna given over to carnal pleasure is demanded by the story — to provoke the Duke to revive the old law of death. The morality to which Shakespeare adheres in presenting this is but the rough-and-ready, conventional morality of the England of his day. The upper classes - Claudio, Juliet, and Angelo - are judged by it: the young pair confess and repent roundly and without reserve. Love does not count. The lower classes, on the other hand — the bawds and their various hangers-on — though they and Angelo are the really vicious ones, are treated, with Elizabethan amplitude, as matter for gibe and jest. Like the homme moyen sensuel today, Shakespeare looks askance at the lady for her prank and laughs at the maid; and, like Chaucer and the Elizabethan novelists, he enjoys saying more of either than his conscience warrants. Consistency, then, unity of principle, there is none; as appears, indeed, if nowhere else, in the case of the character of the novice Isabella, 'a thing enskied and sainted' [1.4.34], who is shocked into virtuous rage by her brother's prayer for life at the cost of her compliance, but who acts out that part, by means of the substitute Mariana, even to the point of crying aloud the loss of her virtue in the market-place. (8—9) 312

63 John Masefield, 'one of the greatest works of the greatest English mind' 1911

From William Shakespeare. Home University Library (London and New York, 1911). John Edward Masefield (1878-1967) was educated at the King's School, Warwick, and then went to sea on the merchant navy schoolship Conway. After being discharged because of ill health, he travelled for several years in America, returned to England in 1897, and started a career as a poet, his first volume being Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and his most famous Reynard the Fox or The Ghost Heath Run (1919). Having met and been influenced by Yeats in 1900 and Synge in 1903, he began to write plays, mostly naturalistic and mostly forgotten today. He is best remembered as England's poet laureate from 1930 to 1967, and his William Shakespeare displays both the poetic and critical sides of his nature to good advantage. I reprint from the New York edition.

[From 'Chapter III: The Plays,' 'Measure for Measure'] This play is now seldom performed. It is one of the greatest works of the greatest English mind. It deals justly with the case of the man who sets up a lifeless sentimentality as a defence against a living natural impulse. The spirit of Angelo has avenged itself on Shakespeare by becoming the guardian spirit of the British theatre. In this play Shakespeare seems to have brooded on the fact that the common prudential virtues are sometimes due, not to virtue, but to some starvation of the nature. Chastity may proceed from a meanness in the mind, from coldness of the emotions, or from cowardice, at least as often as from manly and cleanly thinking. Two kinds of chastity are set at clash here. The one springs from a fire in the personality that causes Isabella to think death better than contamination, and gives her that whiteness of generosity which fills nunneries with living sacrifice; the other comes from the niggardliness that makes Angelo jilt Mariana rather than take her without a dower. Both are obsessions; both exalt a part of life above life itself. Like other obsessions, they come to grief in the presence of something real. These two characters make the action. The play is concerned with the difficulty of doing justice in a world of animals swayed by rumour. The subject is one that 313

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

occupied Shakespeare's mind throughout his creative life. Wisdom begins in justice. But how can man be just without the understanding of God? Who is so faultless that he can sit in judgment on another? Who so wise that he can see into the heart, weigh the act with the temptation, and strike the balance? Sexual sin is the least of the sins in Dante. It is allied to love. It is an image of regeneration. No sin is so common, none is more glibly blamed. It is so easy to cry 'treacherous,' 'base,' and 'immoral.' But who, while the heart beats, can call himself safe from the temptation to this sin? It is mixed up with every generosity. It is a flood in the heart and a blinding wave over the eyes. It is the thorn in the side under the cloak of the beauty of youth. In Shakespeare's vision it is a natural force incident to youth, as April is incident to the year. The young men live as though life were oil, and youth a bonfire to be burnt. Life is always wasteful. Youth is life's test for manhood. The clown finds in the prison a great company of the tested and rejected, calling through the bars for alms. In spite of all this choice, another victim is picked by tragical chance. Lucio, a butterfly of the brothel, a dirtier soul than Claudio, is spared. Claudio is taken and condemned. The beautiful, vain, high-blooded youth so quick with life and glad of the sun, is to lie in earth at the bidding of one less full of April. Angelo, the man whose want of sympathy condemned Claudio, is in the state of security that precedes so much in Shakespearian tragedy. He has received the name of being more than human because (unlike his admirers) he has not shown himself to be considerably less. He has come through youth unsinged. He has not been betrayed by his 'gross body's treason' [Sonnet 151.6]. Both he and those about him think that he is proof against temptation to sexual sin. Suddenly his security is swept away. He is betrayed by the subtler temptation that would mean nothing to a grosser man. He is moved by the sight of the beauty of a distressed woman's mind. The sight means nothing to Claudio, and less than nothing to Lucio. The happy animal nature of youthful man has a way of avoiding distressed women. The cleverer man, who has shut himself up in the half life of sentiment, cannot so escape. He is attacked suddenly by the unknown imprisoned side of him as well by temptation. He falls, and, like all who fall, he falls not to one sin, but to a degradation of the entire man. The sins come linked. 'Treason and murder ever kept together' [Henry V, 2.2.105]. When he is once involved with lust, treachery and murder follow. He is swiftly so stained that when the wise Duke shows him as he is, he shrinks from the picture, with a cry that he may be put out of the way by some swift merciful death so that the horror of the knowledge of himself may end, too. The play is a marvellous piece of unflinching thought. Like all the greatest of the plays, it is so full of illustrations of the main idea that it gives an illusion of an infinity like that of life. It is constructed closely and subtly for the stage. It is more full of the ingenuities of play-writing than any of the plays. The verse and the prose have that smoothness of happy ease which makes one think of Shakespeare not as a poet writing, but as a sun shining. . . . It deserves with characters of brass A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time. [5.1.11—12] 314

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

The thought of the play is penetrating rather than impassioned. The poetry follows the thought. There are cold lines like Death laying a hand on the blood. The faultless lyric, 'Take, O take those lips away' [4.1.Iff] occurs. Some say Fletcher wrote it, some Bacon. 'Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love' [3.2.150—51]. The music of the great manner rings — Merciful Heaven! Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak, Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep. [2.2.114—22] The prose accompaniment to what is unrestrained in youth provides a cruel comedy. (174-80)

315

64 C. E. Montague, William Poel's 'Elizabethan' production 1911

From Dramatic Values (London, 1911); first published in February 1911; 2nd edition, reprinted below, also published in London, April 1911. Charles Edward Montague (1867-1928) was educated at Balliol College, Oxford (1887—89), where he graduated with first-class honors in classics and second-class honors in modern literature. He then became a journalist for the Manchester Guardian from 1890 to 1925, apart from military service during the First World War. He wrote extensively on the theatre, and many of his reviews were reprinted in The Manchester Stage 1880—1900: Criticisms Reprinted from 'The Manchester Guardian' (1900), as well as in his collection Dramatic Values. He reviewed a performance of Measure for Measure which opened at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester on 11 April 1908; the review is part of a long essay, 'The Art of Mr. Poel', pp. 225-46.

In Measure for Measure, arranged for Miss Horniman's actors at Manchester,^ Mr. Poel^ was tackling greater stuff. No play has been more full of challenge to choice spirits. It stirred Pater^ to his best and Tennyson'4] almost to his. Mariana and her moated grange have become part of the received landscape and figures of the English romantic imagination. The song sung to Mariana is a possible candidate for the place of finest lyric in the English language. Claudio's 'thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,' speech [3.1.117-31] might run Macbeth's 'To-morrow and to-morrow and tomorrow' speech [5.5.19—28] and Prospero's 'insubstantial pageant faded' speech [4.1.148-58] close for the place of finest speech in Shakespeare, were such competitions decent. The grisly humour of Barnardine and Pompey jesting at the dawn with death is the prototype of who knows how many modern essays in the macabre, and none of them touches it. On the other hand the means taken to dish Angelo are pretty nasty; the liquidation of the whole imbroglio by the Duke is lethally slow and wordy; the Duke himself, for whom our respect is seemingly invited, is a sad skulker, who shirks the odium of his own decrees; the final pairing-off is a sorry business all round; and the steepness of some of the things we are asked to believe — Isabella's assent to the strategem, for instance - approaches the vertical. In staging this jumble of beauties and uglinesses Mr. Poel's Elizabethanism went about as far as it could without rebuilding the Gaiety theatre. For the essence of the Elizabethan theatre was the fusion or interpenetration of stage and auditorium, and 316

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

the essence of the modern theatre is their separation by the proscenium arch. The Elizabethan theatre was a deliberate reproduction of the accidental conditions of the previous performances of strolling players in inn-yards, like the well-known yard of the 'Tabard.'' 5 ' The players would rig up on trestles, against one wall of the quadrangle, a platform to play on. It did not run the whole length of the wall, but jutted out from its centre into the yard, and so the crowd in the yard (the modern 'pit'), could look on from the sides as well as from in front; and the guests of the inn, standing on the continuous balconies of each floor (the originals of our 'dress circle,' 'upper circle,' and 'gallery') could watch the play from at least three sides. The postRestoration importation of the proscenium arch from the Continent, and afterward the gradual drawing back of almost the whole stage to within it, were, together, a deep-going change. Instead of being looked at and heard from three sides at once, the actor is now only seen and heard from in front. Instead of being presented to the spectator like a statue, 'in the round,' he is presented like a picture, in perspective and with a frame. Mr. Poel did wonders, but he could not get rid of the proscenium arch. What he gave us was not an Elizabethan stage as it was to Elizabethan playgoers, but a picture of an Elizabethan stage seen through the frame of a a modem proscenium. So we gained a good visual idea of a Shakesperian stage, but not the Elizabethan sensation of having an actor come forward to the edge of a platform in the midst of ourselves and deliver speeches from a position almost like that of a speaker from a pulpit or from a front bench in Parliament, with only the narrowest scope for theatrical illusion, with no incentive to naturalism, and with every motive for putting his strength into sheer energy and beauty of declamation, giving his performance the special qualities of fine recitation as distinct from those of realistic acting. But, without that, we got a good deal. We saw better than ever the needlessness, as well as the destructiveriess, of the quite modern method of taking Shakespeare's shortest scenes. They arc usually scurried through by actors -who maintain a precarious footing on a strip of boarding between the footlights in front and a bellying sail painted with landscape, which swells out at them from behind. In Mr. Poel's Elizabethan arrangement a roomy front portion of the stage is divisible from the rest by a curtain which can be either passed through at its middle or walked around at its ends; the rear portion of the stage is in turn divisible into two or more planes of distances as it retreats into the 'tiring house' at the very back. With this arrangement those short scenes and the long ones flow into one another without the slightest jolt or scrappincss. The use of the upper stage, too, was surprisingly effective and undisturbing; it made you see why Shakespeare's stage directions so often bring in people 'above,' 'on the walls,' or otherwise aloft. But in fact the whole performance threw 'side-lights on Shakespeare' by the dozen, while - just cause for thanksgiving - it never froze up the imagination of us ordinary, half-instructed persons, as reconstructive scholarship often does. As for scenery, one did not think about it, either in the way of missing it, or of being glad it was away. But if any people did imperatively need to be distracted from the play, they could look at the dresses, which were quaint and rich to admiration, and, we understood, prodigies of historical accuracy only another Mr. Poel should venture to speak more dogmatically. 317

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Last, and very large, there was the pleasure of the acting of Angelo by Mr. Poel himself, an actor who did not wait for Irish amateurs or Sicilian peasants to teach him to act as if he meant it. Whatever he may be doing at the moment, the consuming energy with which he conceives a part communicates itself to the spectator; the character is so vehemently imagined by the artist that its expression seems almost independent of the ordinary symbolism of tones and looks. Or, rather, while he uses just the means which other actors use, they mean more to him; they stand for a more ardent realization, by him, of the idea, say, of an Angelo. When once the spectator is caught up into itself by this authentic heat of passionate imagination in an actor, the actor can then do nothing wrong; thenceforth his technics seem scarcely to matter; you feel as if you had got past all that, as you get past any little inexpressivenesses in a friend. So Mr. Poel's acting seizes you up and makes you more intimate with the character than its own speeches are. (242-6)

318

65 Edgar C. Morris, characterization, style, and structure 1912

From Measure for Measure. Edited by Edgar C. Morris. The Tudor Shakespeare (New York, 1912). Edgar Coit Morris (1864-1916) received his undergraduate degree from Hamilton College in 1889. After some years teaching, he took a further degree at Harvard and taught at Syracuse University, New York, for the rest of his academic career. His publications include editions of Elizabethan drama, several Shakespeare plays, and this Introduction to Measure for Measure for the Tudor Shakespeare (40 vols, 1911—13, general editors W. A. Neilson and A. H. Thorndike), which utilized individual editors for each play, such as Hardin Craig on Richard II and E. E. Stoll on Titus Andronicus. Morrris supplied some original commentary on the play's style and characterization.

Date of Composition. — The date of the present form of the play, if we may judge from the matter, spirit, and style, cannot have been much earlier than 1603. Measure for Measure is one of several plays dealing essentially with problems growing out of sex. Many of the terrible things which can happen because men are men and women are women are here portrayed; but pure women and noble men are still dominant in the world. In Hamlet the impure love of a man and a woman sets the tragedy going; but the hero puts aside his love for a pure woman in order to carry out the paternally imposed vengeance. Sex relations are powerful for evil, but a few men are still above their control. In Much Ado, the sex motive almost brings about a tragical conclusion, which is prevented by the revelation of Hero's innocence. In Othello, on the other hand, the innocence of Desdemona becomes her weakness against the machinations of lago, as does the intensity of Othello's love. Finally, in Troilus and Cressida, every phase of the sex relation as presented tends towards vulgarity and impurity. Now Measure for Measure presents a phase of the sex question more nearly akin to those of Othello and Troilus and Cressida. Illicit love of man for woman sets the action going and keeps it going, but virtue wins, and the misled are reclaimed. Such treatment and the ultimately optimistic attitude of mind closely associate themselves with Much Ado and Hamlet rather than with Troilus and Cressida and Othello. Finally, the ironical touches in purely humorous prose, the condensed phrasing mingled with direct simplicity, the many beautiful verses, and the growing frequency of run-on lines, weak endings, and feminine endings, point also to at least a middle period for the

319

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

composition of the play. The consensus of opinion places the main part of the present text at about 1603, with a possible revision for the festivities of Christmas, 1604. (viii—ix) Style. — In few of the other plays attributed entirely to Shakespeare is there such diversity of style as in Measure for Measure. The prose is sometimes direct, simple, effective, and yet in adjoining passages is crude and vulgar. It has no distinctive use, as in some plays, but is employed for both comic and serious passages. Although Elbow at times suggests Dogberry, the gap between them in effectiveness of phrasing is immense; and although Pompey plainly imitates the language of others of Shakespeare's clowns, his language is without real wit when compared even with Shakespeare's early work in this kind. The serious prose of the Duke and Escalus is burdened with pompous phrases partly due to their frequent homilies, but partly to their mere wordiness. The verse is consistently used only for serious parts, but like the prose is uneven in technique. The best of it has the distinguished qualities of the middle period: firmness, music, fluidity, and a tendency to terseness almost if not quite bordering on obscurity. It is an adequate poetical style a bit too firmly grasped, and even, perhaps, a trifle self-conscious in places. The hurry or carelessness of its composition is shown by the unusual number of imperfect lines, — some falling four to six syllables short of the measure, and others running two or three syllables over. That these lines are due to haste or neglect is made plausible by the simplicity and obviousness of numerous emendations offered by critics. The best that can be said of the style as a whole is, that a large amount of inadequate phrasing stands side by side with some of the most beautiful lines Shakespeare ever wrote. Interpretation. — The inequalities found in the style of this play are repeated in the characterization. Only two characters are well rounded out, finished products of the dramatist's art, — Isabella and Angelo. The others are more or less unskillful combinations of not infrequently inharmonious traits, and result in ineffective impressions. The secondary characters are largely imperfect sketches of their betters in other and, curiously enough, earlier plays. For instance, Elbow is a sketch of Dogberry, who is the finished portrait; Froth bears a similar relation to Slender; and the Justice to Justice Shallow. Lucio is a debauched Mercutio combined with Gratiano. Low comedy characters from a brothel are naturally rather fixed as types, but here they are less convincing than they are in similar scenes in Pericles, or in the Middleton plays, by which they are almost certainly suggested. It is, however, in Claudio and the Duke that we find inconsistencies in most striking contrast with the plausibility of Isabella and Angelo. Claudio is reminiscent of Hamlet in some of his speeches; but within a few lines he can fall from the courage evinced in 'I will encounter darkness as a bride' [3.1.83], to the abjectness of 'Sweet sister, let me live' [3.1.132], though at the cost of her honor. Most unsatisfactory of all, however, is the Duke. Knowing the debauchery of his people, and not wishing to incur their displeasure, he appoints a deputy, whose mistreatment of Mariana must have been known to him, to enforce the old neglected laws. A coward in morals himself, he is full of moral platitudes and devoted to indir320

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

ectness under the guise of his friarhood. Although not liking to 'stage himself in the people's eyes' [1.1.68], he resorts to the most dramatic methods to bring the guilty to justice, and then lets them all off without punishment of any importance. Finally he takes for his own bride an unreleased novice from a nunnery! Isabella and Angelo, on the other hand, are perfect dramatic creations, according to the almost unanimous verdict of the best critics. The beauty of Isabella's character is only equaled by the adequacy of its presentation. Always simple, natural, forceful in her unsullied purity, she is one of Shakespeare's most ideal women. Although it is impossible to sympathize with Angelo in any way, he is still a most convincing portrait of a self-deceived man. Were he mistaken in a less revolting matter, he would easily have been a sympathetically tragic character instead of a despised failure. From the mere point of view of effective characterization, he stands side by side with Othello in his supreme self-confidence and resulting abject overthrow: but the intellectual confidence of Othello is balanced against real love, while the moral failure of Angelo removes him absolutely from our pity. Unlike, then, as Angelo and Isabella are in their power to arouse our sympathy, they are equally perfect as dramatic creations of real individuals. Structure of the Play. ~ The unevenness of style and characterization, the defects of the play as a whole, are easily accounted for in an analysis of its construction. The play is not a coherent whole, but a putting together without artistic fusion of several popular and effective incidents into striking scenes of an unharmonious whole. The disguised Duke had been used by Marston in The Malcontent, the sacrifice of a sister's honor for a brother's safety in the sub-plot of Heywood's Woman Killed with Kindness, brothel scenes in Dekker and Middleton were well known then, and the court scene is better done in Much Ado, and the vicarious saving of the woman's honor is less displeasing in All's Well. The simple plot of a magistrate demanding the honor of a woman to save the life of a man whom she loves and then failing to keep his promise is too much cumbered with inharmonious incidents. The use in the subplot of characters from the stews, for counter emphasis and low fun, was then popular, but to-day has lost much of its humorous element. The substitution of a former sweetheart of Angelo's for Isabella, to save the latter's honor and to do the former a right, is distinctly displeasing, however popular it may have been in old romances. The self-deception of Angelo is here made intensely effective, but in its over-emphasis makes a comedy solution only the more forced. That these elements might have been made to seem harmonious is quite possible; but they are certainly not so composed here. The end of the play is endurable only on the supposition that all has been meant in fun. The old law is not enforced against Claudio after all the effort, and no excuse is offered. Angelo has become guilty of the same offense while acting as deputy of the city to enforce that very law, but is pardoned also. Lucio, a notoriously dissolute fellow who has most basely slandered the Duke in public and private, is let off with a scolding on condition he marry the girl he had wronged. Pompey is put in prison, but is promoted from a common bawd to a hangman's assistant — at least a lawful profession. Barnardine, a notorious criminal of the lowest type, is pardoned before he repents in the general amnesty due to the happiness of the Duke, who has decided to marry the beautiful novice without asking even the 321

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

permission of the Lady Superior! Thus do four weddings and a pardon for a capital crime end a play of deepest intrigue, lawlessness in high places, and civic debauchery. Certainly this is not Shakespeare's mature and careful work. At best it must be a hasty revision ot an old play. Can it have been one of his own youthful efforts? In places his genius is apparent; in others the crudeness of youth is no less so. It is a great temptation to wonder whether this can possibly have been the lost play mentioned by Meres in 1598 as Love's Labour's Won. (xii—xvi)

322

66 Stopford A. Brooke, an 'eminently disagreeable' piece of cynicism 1913

From Ten More Plays of Shakespeare (London and New York, 1913). Stopford Augustus Brooke (1832-1916) graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1856 after a highly successful academic career and became an Anglican priest in 1857. He rose to a position as chaplain-in-ordinary at St James's in 1867 and preached to Queen Victoria for several years, but in 1880 he left the Church of England for the Unitarian creed. Brooke's many publications as a man of letters include Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life (1894), The Poetry of Robert Browning (1902), On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (1905), Studies in Poetry (1907), and Ten More Plays of Shakespeare (1913). Brooke's general comments on Measure for Measure are reminiscent of the attitude of the eighteenth-century Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, and display his vocation as a preacher. I reprint from the New York edition.

. . . There are . . . many resemblances in the thoughts on death, and on grave problems of life, and even in words and phrases, between this play and Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, which suggest that Measure for Measure belongs to the years between 1601 and 1606, the period of the great tragedies. It is commonly put between Othello and Macbeth. I might put it alongside of either Troilus and Cressida or Timon of Athens — after the first, before the latter. This, however, is conjecture, and the conjecture is only based on a feeling, which may be called literary, that the style, the metrical movement, the not infrequent abruptness and comparative obscurity of the verse, and, above all, the temper of the play, are not as much in harmony with Othello and Macbeth as they are with Troilus or Timon. Moreover, Othello and Macbeth are written with Shakespeare's highest power, and in every part of them the power is equal to that which he desired to represent. In Measure for Measure the power is not the same as it is in Othello or Macbeth. It wavers: great in one page, it is at a much lower level in the next. Nor do the characters always explain themselves. In Othello and Macbeth they do. Again, the poetry, its imaginative reach, its grip on the heart of the thing or thought in hand, are, beyond expression, penetrating, equal, and splendid in Othello and Macbeth. In Measure for Measure these qualities are sometimes as great as they are in Othello and Macbeth, but they are so in patches. There are passages where this high poetry lags behind, where clearness and splendour seem not to have deserted the house of Shakespeare's imagination, but to be less at home in it. 323

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

This is strange, I repeat, if this play was written between Othello and Macbeth. However, the critics may be right. Shakespeare, like Homer, sometimes sleeps. Perhaps the subject influenced Shakespeare wrongly. An artist sometimes seizes a subject which he thinks will suit his mood, or which suddenly attracts him, and it comes to pass, when he has been at work on it for some time, that he finds it is not in sympathy with his genius, or that it does not turn out, and come home to him, as well as he expected. He would like to throw it aside, but either it seems to him that he ought to finish it, that it is due to his genius to master it; or the work may exercise a kind of tyranny over him. In any of these cases, he is sure not to do as good work as he would do did he love his subject, or did his subject at the time altogether suit him. And this may be true of Shakespeare and Measure for Measure. If it were, I do not wonder, for the subject was eminently disagreeable. A society eaten to its core by mere fornication, which is the social basis of the play, is not a delightful milieu for a great artist to choose his subject from; nor, in itself, does the subject contain or produce any of the deep-striking passions whose presentation arrests the souls of men. No great, noble, or terrible tragedy such as we find in Macbeth, Othello, or Lear, could come out of it. In order to get into the subject an arresting representation of the passions, he is driven to create extremes of human nature — Isabella, of enskied but exaggerated chastity; Angelo, of revolting, though sudden sensualism; Claudio, shamefully dishonoured by the fear of death. The subject carries with it, and perforce, elements of sensationalism. It was also predoomed, though naturally tragic, to be turned into a Comedy, and Measure for Measure wears with extraordinary awkwardness the garments of Comedy. Shakespeare did his best with it. He so arranged events as to make this ugly story into a representation in the characters of high-souled chastity; of the break-up of mere outward virtue into sensualism; of the fear of death; and, as a side issue, of the danger and limits of authority, — and these are subjects which underlie the Drama. But they have, in an extreme representation of them, been foisted into the story. They do not grow naturally out of it. Isabella's chastity is mingled with an ascetic severity. Angelo's hypocrisy is almost out of nature. Claudio's fear of death borders on meanness; is not in character with his training, his rank, and his honour as a gentleman. Shakespeare, in this play (even in the minor characters), is, not unfrequently, a little outside nature. He owed that, I think, to the choice he made of a subject. It was a sword which did not quite fit his hand. Whenever he struck with it his blow went somewhat awry. I believe, as I have said elsewhere, that there was a twist in Shakespeare's life at this time, of which we know nothing, and which turned into gloom and sometimes into a transient cynicism the charming nature of the man. . . . (139-42) Cynicism, even of this transient kind which I impute to Shakespeare, lowers all the powers of genius. It has its own powers, powers of the pit, but they are jealous and envious of the heavenly powers in genius; and they taint and depress them. They did so now to Shakespeare. Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet are not cynical. Pity overrides their darkness, and we feel that human justice is done, even if the gods, as in Lear, seem unjust. In Measure for Measure — intercalated among the great tragedies — we are in contact with this transient cynicism, and we are not touched with pity for the 324

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

sorrowful or the guilty. We can feel little compassion for Mariana's pain; and her conduct at the end of the play, though natural enough, is wanting in womanly dignity and honour. Her excited desire to have Angclo for life as her husband (knowing, as she docs, his baseness in and out) could only exist in a society which had lost good taste, honourable feeling, and the common sense of life. I have no pity for Claudio. He dishonours himself. Angelo is too vile for pity, and Isabella too austere. Moreover, justice is not done in the play, and too light a treatment of natural justice, as if it did not matter, is a main characteristic of cynicism. Angelo, whose criminality is almost overdone, who violates his solemn oath to Isabella, who promises at the price of her dishonour to save her brother's life, and who takes that life within a few hours of his ravishment ot the sister — lest Claudio should hereafter reveal his iniquity — Angelo is saved, married, and lives at case in Vienna. It is the end that cynicism would make. We are defrauded ot justice; and we feel with indignation that we are defrauded. And then every one who stands by at the end when this failure of justice takes place, even Isabella, is lowered in our eyes. The whole society where such a pardon was accepted is in a degraded state, and we arc asked to accept it as all right. Indeed, this degeneration of society is plain in the play. From the Duke down to Barnardine (with the sole exception of Isabella), none of the characters belong to a noble society. They are all weak or wicked. The Duke has not enough intellect to rule rightly, though he knows what is right. Conscious of his want offeree as a governor, he becomes a student, and then when things become too bad to be endured, the only way he can think of to discover or mend them is to become a spy, sniff about in the prisons, and try to detect Angelo, •whose goodness he suspects, in sin. We must remember, during the whole conduct of the play, that the Duke knows, even when he hands the government over to Angelo, the dishonourable way in which Angelo had some years before acted towards Mariana. He has been affianced to her; she is greatly in love with him. Her brother was drowned, and with him Mariana's dowry. Angelo, when her money was lost, threw her away, and to excuse this, spread evil reports about her reputation. This villainy in the past is in the Duke's knowledge; and it is plain that one of the reasons he disguises himself is to find out whether Angelo is all he seems to be. 'Lord Angelo,' he says, 'is precise': Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone; hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be. f 1.3.50—4] Very good business for a friar — but surely quite unworthy of a great ruler; and so thinks Friar Thomas to whom the Duke reveals his trickeries. The Duke succeeds in his aims, but we do not like his way; and his scenic business, with its low cleverness, at the end of the play is equally unworthy of a high-minded ruler. Then, Escalus is a good-natured piece of commonplace. Angelo, a hypocrite in grain, slips into an odious villain, without a trace of the gentleman, till he is condemned to death. Claudio is a weak-minded gentleman, who has lost the fibrous stuff of a man in a dissipated life. Lucio and his friends call themselves gentlemen, but their conversation is as abominable as it is feebly cynical. Nor has it the saving grace of humour. When 325

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

we read what these etiolated gentlemen say, how deeply do we regret Sir Toby Belch! Lucio, who shows some sparks of gentlehood at the beginning of the play, falls towards the end into gross blackguardism of mind. What he is then does not fit in with himself as we first see him. This is an instance of the wavering hand of Shakespeare of which I have spoken. Then Abhorson is as his name, and Barnardinc is a picture of the brute in man, in whom the brutal elements, accompanied by even the lowest ray of intelligence, are far worse than in any animal. As to Mariana, she is a nonentity. Isabella alone shines clear and pure, an unapproached star; but when Shakespeare marries her to the Duke, his irony is almost too deep. What possessed Shakespeare, if not a passing wave of cynicism, to descend to this base and ugly realism, unrelieved, as he would have made it at another time, by humour? Humour lifts the base; where laughter is, wickedness is redeemable. But the sole worthy effort of humour in this play is in the sketch of Elbow the Constable; and it is below the ordinary level of Shakespeare's humour. Where is, we ask as we read, the hand and the mind which created Dogberry and Verges? There are, it is true, some snatches of natural humour in the lower characters. Pompey, Froth, as well as Elbow, make us smile at human nature. Abhorson is not without his fantasy. He objects to a bawd like Pompey being associated with him as the executioner. 'A bawd, sir? Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery' [4.2.29]. Even Barnardine has a touch of humour. He refuses to be executed because he has been drunk all night. He refuses to die except at his own consent. Barnar. I swear I will not die to-day for any man's persuasion. Duke. But hear you, Barnar. Not a word: if you have anything to say to me, come to my ward; for thence will not I to-day. [4.2.59-63] And they are true to their nature. In the state of society Shakespeare is painting, the lower ranges of the people who are consciously vicious are really much better folk than the upper classes who are vicious and conceal it. The frankness with which they maintain that their vice is natural, arid that they mean to continue it, has much more chance of change into a higher life than the hypocrisy of Angelo, or the calculated looseness of the rest of the gentlemen of the play. These were the elements and characters Shakespeare chose to combine in this play; and as none of them, save Isabella, were noble enough, or strong enough in passion or in intellect, in what they did or in what they suffered, to be woven into the loom of Tragedy, Shakespeare was forced to make his work into a Comedy; Angelo and Claudio are saved from death, Isabella is married to the Duke. To do that, Shakespeare, with great cleverness (too great, I think, for noble art), invented the story of Mariana, which saves Isabella's chastity, and by a side issue Claudio's life, and in the end Angelo's. The play makes a poor comedy — one of the amorphous things they call a tragicomedy. It ought to have been a tragedy. But in order to be that, Shakespeare would have had to have conceived all the characters on nobler lines, even Isabella's. Angelo would then have accomplished Isabella's ruin; Claudio would have been really sacrificed to Angelo's fear; Isabella would have slain herself like Lucretia; the Duke would 326

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

have had to be lifted out of a spy into a steadfast justicer - and Angelo, despairing and accursed, been carried away, like lago, to meet his death. Every one, on the contrary (after all the odious business), departs home in peace, to go on, no doubt, in the same fashion as before; the Duke and Claudio just as weak, Isabella even more austere, Lucio and his friends just as dissipated and degraded, Mariana as foolish, and Angelo frightened into a deeper hypocrisy. The happy ending is really a more wretched ending than that of King Lear. After the tragic horror, the social convulsion of that play, the society in which these dreadful things were wrought will improve. After the close of Measure jot Measure, the social state will worsen. Its guilt will be more concealed, but it will not be less, but more. Again, with regard to this play, I have sometimes wondered if Shakespeare, for once in his life, wrote with a moral aim - to paint the baseness of a society in which fornication flourished, and ate away the power, greatness and magnanimity of a State. If so, this aim being mixed up with an artistic one, would partly account for the broken, unequal work, for the want of grip on the main issues. If a man's aim be single, his whole work is full of light; it it be double, his work is in twilight, and confused in it. And cynicism is often very fond of being moral. It never lays before us the unreached perfection, but it does enlarge (like the writer of Ecclesiastes) on morality, on the impropriety and unprofitableness of vice, on the peace that comes from obedience to law, from harmonising oneself with the ordinary course of things, however wretched an affair the cynic may think it to be. And then, if this cynic, in this mood, be a writer of plays, he would write, if he could, just such a play as Measure for Measure, with a good worldly ending, to warn men against the foolish vices which make society less comfortable, more disagreeable, more difficult for clever men to manage. Perhaps Shakespeare, for a brief period, fell into this error. If so, let us be forever grateful that he never did it again. He has certainly failed to make outward morality interesting or attractive. . . . (144 -9) The play opens with the Duke handing over his powers to Angelo and Escalus; but chiefly to Angelo whose austere and honourable worth is known to all Vienna. The Duke does this in one of those philosophic and moral speeches which are characteristic of this play; which occur in it like golden patches on a somewhat dirty gown; and which do not always fit happily into the circumstances. These half-orations are full of Shakespeare's wise and serious thought on life and death, and many of their profound phrases have become tests for the household uses of mankind. The Duke is one of their chief speakers. But the more he speaks in this fashion, the less do we think him fit to be a ruler of men. He is a thinker, not a man of action; a dilettante philosopher in a wrong place. He makes an excellent Friar, and it \vould have been well for Vienna had he continued a Friar — to console the dying, to help poor maidens out of trouble, and to preach to naughty people. But to manage a State, to set its evils right — one has only to think that he let Angelo off the judgment to sec that he is not fit to be a Duke. Here is his first little piece of philosophic morality; and an excellent thing it is. He is urging Angelo to make full use of his virtues in affairs 327

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves.... [Quotes 1.2.32-40] With that, the Duke departs, not on a journey, but to take up his office as an ecclesiastical spy on his Dukedom. And Angelo, as we hear from the next scene, has put into practice an old law against fornication which had fallen out of use, and under which he condemns Claudio to death, though Claudio's offence against it had been committed in the past when the law was not enforced. But Shakespeare makes it plain that natural justice would consider the penalty of death too severe for this sin; that its infliction would bring justice into disrepute; and that it was still more unjust to make the penalty retrospective; and finally, in the mouth of Pompey — Act 2. Sc. 2 — that such a law was absurd. Vienna would be depopulated. Sexual appetite is stronger than the fear of death. Then, another view of the matter is presented. Claudio, who is condemned by this unjust law, repents his deed, though he had made the woman his wife in all but 'outward order' [1.2.149]; and, being an honest gentleman, tries to persuade himself that the law is just. Yet Shakespeare, by his mouth, shows how an unjust law lowers the high prestige of the lawgivers, and with that, the honour of justice. Claudio thinks that Angelo, who, by the way, has sinned twice as deeply as Claudio, is seeking for mere popularity by this severe morality. Like a new broom, he does too much; or he wants to sting the 'body public' [1.2.159] into the belief that at last they have got a governor. Therefore he puts into force a law which has hung unused on the wall for nineteen years. There's yet a chance however of my life, he tells Lucio; go and beg my sister, who is to enter the cloister to-day, to persuade Angelo to be less strict. Her youth has a 'prone and speechless dialect' [1.2.183] which moves men, and her discourse is persuasive. Thus Angelo and Isabella are brought into touch with one another. Both Angelo and Isabella, who meet like black and white, are sketched, in Shakespeare's preparing fashion, before they come together. They are both severely chaste, but chastity in Isabella is part of a noble and good nature quite capable of passion; in Angelo part of a mean and bad one. Angelo's blood is said to be very snow-broth. He does not feel the stings and motions of appetite; chaste because he is cold, not because he is in love with virtue. Therefore, when temptation does come, he has no guard. Once his blood is heated, the very novelty of it is greatly attractive; he yields at once to the sensual impulse, and with so great an intensity that all his seeming virtues topple into odious vices. Great is the fall of this house built upon the sand. As to Isabella, we meet her first at the convent. Her severity at once appears in her conversation with Sister Francisca. Isab. And have you nuns no farther privileges? Fran. Are not these large enough?... [Quotes 1.4.1-5]. The impression she makes on Lucio, that wild gentleman, accords with this. He does not dare to play with her cold serenity. 'I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted' 328

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

[1.4.34]. And when he tells her Claudio's story, and begs her to soften Angelo's harshness, she shrinks at first from interfering. The sin is so hateful to her she can scarcely bear to plead for pity. But at last she yields. Then they meet - Angelo and Isabella — he resolved to maintain his authority by holding fast to the sentence he has pronounced on Claudio, she to induce him, for the sake of mercy, to reverse that sentence. It was a situation that Shakespeare would love to tackle; and indeed it has brought out all his powers. There is not a subtler piece of work in all the plays. We must remember that Isabella was a young girl, forced to speak of a subject she blushed to think of before a grown, grave man; and moreover feeling, in her young and ignorant austerity, that the law is just which condemns her brother. This accounts for her seeming coldness at the beginning of her pleading, and for the shyness as well as the conviction with which she suddenly gives up her effort, when Angelo declares the law O just but severe law! I had a brother, then. [2.2.411 And she turns to go. You are too cold, says Lucio. And Isabella, while confessing that the law is just, now pleads that it should be tempered with mercy, and that mercy ought to be an attribute of authority. Angelo has the right, she thinks, by law to modify the law. And henceforth her appeal is directed to him as a ruler. Like Shylock (not for revenge, but to support his austere reputation), Angelo stands for law. Like Portia, Isabella maintains the sanctity of law; but claims that mercy is a part of eternal justice, and may very well be a part of earthly justice. Indeed, it is worth remarking that through the whole of this play the question of Authority and its limits, of the temptations it brings to those who possess it, and of the sins it may fall into, is debated and illustrated by Shakespeare. It is one of three great subjects which engaged his thought, as he, musing on the \vorld of men, wrote this play. The second is the Fear of Death, and the third is the terrible rapidity with which sin, and especially sensual sin because of its public shame, generates sin; with which seven devils are born of one, and fifty of seven. . . . (151—5) [Discusses Authority in terms of Angelo's treatment of Claudio, the attitudes of Escalus, the Duke, and Isabella, and with much emphasis on the debate between Isabella and Angelo in 2.2.] Then comes Shakespeare's presentation of the tremendous rapidity with which sin, and sensual sin especially when it is accompanied by personal dishonour, doubles and redoubles its progeny. It is not in youth, but in middle age, that the fiercest temptations come, that the worst overthrows are wrought. And the temptation arrives with appalling suddenness, like the typhoon out oi a clear sky. All is commonplace life and peace at noon. Before the afternoon has come, the certainties of life have suffered earthquake, the soul is devastated. It was so with Angelo. I have quoted his soliloquy when Isabella leaves him; here is his soliloquy when he awaits her next morning. He is no hypocrite to himself. He knows and reveals how irresistibly his evil passion has gripped his will. When I would pray and think, I think and prayTo several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words.. .. [Quotes 2.4.1-7] 329

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Weary of State affairs, he would give all his gravity of which he is proud, to be as light as an idle feather. Place and form, once everything to him, only wrench awe from fools, and tie the wise to hypocrisy. The surging blood of sense commands him altogether, and disenables all the powers within him of their fitness to resist or command his appetite. In that temper he meets Isabella the second time. The dialogue is even more subtle than the last, but finally Angelo is stung by his furious senses out of all delicate approaches, and is grossly clear. His first guilt begets brutality - and his brutality begets cruelty. 'I have begun,' he cries, And now I give my sensual race the rein. [2.4.159-60]. 'And if thou dost not yield, Claudio shall not only die, he shall die in torment !' So quick, so desperately quick, does baseness follow on baseness. He can scarcely be worse, we think, but he becomes viler still. When he has fulfilled, as he supposes, his sensual desire; then when one would have imagined that dishonour could go no further, the multiplication of guilt increases. He gives swift order for Claudio's hurried death — Claudio whom, at the price of his sister's honour, he has sworn to save. And the reason for this damnable villainy makes it still more damnable. It is lest Claudio hereafter might tell the story and injure his repute. Isabella, he thinks, will, for her own sake, not dare to betray him. With this almost inconceivable rapidity, to this multitudinous hurry of guilt on guilt, one temptation, yielded to, may bring a cold, precise, and steady man in twenty-four hours. It is a terrible study, but it is true. Morality is not always virtue. The third matter Shakespeare dwells on is Death, and the fear of it. He does not debate it; he presents various aspects of it in his characters.... (158—9) [Discusses the attitudes of Isabella, the Duke, and Claudio, concluding with Isabella's frantic interchange with her brother at 3.1.115—50.J That sounds almost too harsh on a sister's lips to a brother -who is to die to-morrow! And many have blamed Isabella for unwomanliness. But chastity such as hers, which repudiated all union with a man, even in marriage, as impure, •was directly against nature, and has always induced into its advocates and practisers an unnaturalness in their actions and judgments. Moreover, she was young, and the young have not known yet the weakness of human nature, and therefore do not excuse it. And she was innocent, and her innocence had been so insulted that she was on the top of rage and misery. And innocence is not merciful to sin or to dishonour. It is the experience of one's own guilt that awakens in us mercy and tenderness. And she was bitterly disappointed in her brother who should have thought her honour dearer than his life. And such strength as she possessed is severe on weakness, because it does not comprehend it. And she was austere by nature. Her defiance of Claudio, her wrath, are in right harmony with her previous character; and finally, her native austerity on this special matter of chastity had been deepened by convent religion. I do not think that these considerations wholly excuse her fierce outburst, her flashing refusal to speak to Claudio any more. After all, he is her brother, and she seems to violate natural piety; but they do lessen the offence of her -words. She has been wrought to the very ultimate thrill of nervous strain by a desperate situation, containing the blackest insult to her womanhood. She who could then be careful of her words, who would not be lifted into a region where all human relationships, brothers, husbands, fathers, were nothing in the balance, would not be true woman at 330

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

all. Isabella is none the less noble for her outbreak. Its motives are sufficient, given the nature born with her, but her nature was a little unnatural. And Cordelia, Desdemona, Imogen would not have put her reproach into these violent words. They would, however, have felt the greater part of it. The Duke, Isabella, Claudio have thus, driven by events, imaged before us their thoughts on Death and the fear of it. There is yet another presentation of the matter. Claudio's bottom thoughts (when the chance of escape is offered to him) are those which in a soft luxurious age, when sensual immorality has corrupted every rank in society, cultivated men think with regard to death. Shakespeare now contrasts this type with its extreme opposite. He paints, still haunting this question of death, the brutal man, hopelessly material, in Barnardine. Death to him is nothing at all. He thinks less of the deprivation of life than he thinks of the deprivation of drink. He has no care for the past, the present, or the future. He makes his roaring joke in the presence of instant death. The sketch is rapid and vivid. No one can mistake Shakespeare's intention to contrast him with Claudio. Yet both, in different circumstances and rank, are the direct products of the kind of society Shakespeare has painted in this play. Lastly, we are allowed to see how a man feels with regard to death, when, having been on the summit of repute, he is cast hopelessly down into an abyss of shame. Then Angelo cries out — good prince, 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. * * * * * I crave death more willingly than mercy; 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it. [5.1.370—4, 476—7] In the last depth of shame, as well as in the last height of ideal joy, death is welcome. These are grave subjects, and though they awaken our thought, they do not sir us to delight. Nor does the picture of a base society give us pleasure. Both have no charm; nor have either the stern loveliness they might have had if the play had been a tragedy. There is but one thing in the whole play which has romantic beauty. It is the image of the moated Grange where Mariana mourns, and the song which her attendant sings. Its music shall close this essay, that, after much distress, the reader may have some pleasure Take, O, take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn: But my kisses bring again, bring again; Seals of love, but seal'd in vain, seal'd in vain. [4.1.1-6] (162-4) 331

67 Brander Matthews, a play 'as painful as it is ill-shapen' 1913

From Shakspere as a Playwright (New York, 1913). James Brander Matthews (1852-1929) graduated from Columbia College, New York, in 1868 and Columbia Law School in 1873. Matthews wrote for periodicals such as The Nation and Scribner's Monthly and soon established himself as a literary man whose friends included W. D. Howell, Andrew Lang (No. 41), Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling. He was appointed professor of literature at Columbia on 1892, and in 1900 became the first chaired professor in America. His voluminous publications include both fiction and criticism, including An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896), The Historical Novel (1901), A Study of the Drama (1910), Shakspere as a Playwright (1913), A Book about the Theater (1916), The Principles of Playmaking (1919), and Playwrights on Playmaking (1923). He espoused the principles of the 'well-made play' associated with Eugene Scribe and Victorien Sardou in France, Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero in England.

[From Chapter XII: 'The Comedy-Dramas'] . . . Yet he had already finished his apprenticeship. . . . He had proved his mastery by tragedies as different as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. It is strange, therefore, that he should ever have -written three plays as comparatively empty of dramatic power as All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. It is still stranger that he should have written these plays at this period of his development as a dramatist. They contain single scenes that only Shakespeare could have handled and occasional passages that only he could have phrased; but none the less are they among his poorest productions. And the critic who does not feel keenly the inferiority of these three pieces is disqualified for a full appreciation of the immense superiority of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, of The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It. In considering no other group of his pieces is the lack of an ascertained chronology more annoying than in dealing with these somber plays, two of them comedydramas and the third a bitter and ribald satire devoid of the gaiety of true comedy. All the evidence tends to prove that these three pieces were composed in the same brief space of years in which he was also composing Julius Caesar and Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. Now these are well-made plays on worthy themes, and they certify to 332

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Shakespeare's attainment of a high degree of technical dexterity. Why then should he have at this time written three pieces, All's Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, ill made on unworthy themes, carelessly thrown together and repugnant in temper? The current explanation is that these were hurried work, thrown off hastily while his mind was focused on the more important and more interesting plays which he was producing in the same period. That Shakespeare often worked under pressure is very likely, since he had a hand in nearly forty pieces in about twenty years, from 1591 to 1611, from his twenty-seventh year to his forty-seventh. This averages about two plays a year; and haste might account, more or less, tor the slovenliness of the plot-making in these three pieces, since structural symmetry can be achieved only by taking thought. But haste alone is an inadequate explanation for the artistic lapses of these plays. It docs not supply any justification for the themes themselves or for the harsh tone which characterizes them. It does not account tor the almost wilful violation of those dominating principles of the drama which ought to have become almost second nature to Shakespeare at this time and by which he was being guided in the composition of Hamlet and Othello. And yet haste on the one side and on the other his absorption in more interesting work arc the only excuses that have been urged for the reckless composition of these plays, while their unlovely atmosphere has been credited, more or less tancifully, to some personal experience of his own at about that time. This last suggestion may have a certain weight, although it is not borne out by the facts ot literary biography, which tend to show that many of the most humorous books have flowered out of their authors' melancholy in periods of depression. Perhaps there is more validity in the explanation which calls attention to the popularity of what may be termed sex-problem plays by Middleton and Marston in the half dozen years after 1600, the very period when Shakespeare, always keenly responsive to the influence of the contemporary theater, was composing these comedy-dramas. Whatever the reason may be, the fact remains that Shakespeare did descend to the writing of these three dramatically inferior pieces in the same years that he was composing his noblest plays. . .. (220-2) Fortunately for us, it was not often that he let himself sink to this low level; and Measure for Measure, open as it is to much of the same adverse criticism which has been here bestowed upon All's Well, is distinctly a better piece of work. Its theme is repugnant, but it is not uninteresting. The most conscientious of playwrights could not make a really good play on the subject of All's Well, whereas it is possible that the subject of Measure for Measure might be worked up into a fairly coherent plot, even if Shakespeare himself fails to do this. Even as he treats the theme there are at least three scenes of genuine dramatic value, which he handles with secure mastery. There are, first, the discovery by Angelo that he lusts after Isabella; then the scene in which he proposes his evil bargain to her; and finally the scene in which she tells her brother of the fearful price she would have to pay for his life, and in which Claudio's courage deliquesces in the imminent fear of death. These episodes are rendered with Shakespeare's customary power; they are rich in poetry and in psychology; they grip the interest of the spectator with unfailing authority. But the story as a whole is 333

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

haphazard in its movement; it again is only a narrative cut into dialogues, and not compactly built up into a logical structure, rising scene by scene to its climax. Shakespeare's method is here no better than that of the writers of the chronicle-plays who held the stage when he first came up to London; and this method called for the inclusion of needless episodes of mere buffoonery. The play is as medieval in manner as it is in substance. The theme is not so obnoxious as that of All's Well, and it has dramatic possibilities, even if Shakespeare neglected to make the most of them. It demands that nocturnal substitution of one woman for another, which Shakespeare had already used in All's Well, and which the elder Dumas was to employ in Mile, de Belle-hie^ This unseemly device is not quite so forced in Measure for Measure as it is in All's Well, since the volunteering of Mariana of the later play may have a justification wholly lacking to the Diana of the earlier play. But the artifice itself is unlovely, and it cannot be made acceptable. In employing it Shakespeare is invading the territory of Beaumont and Fletcher, to whom it seems more naturally to belong. There may be much of the same make-believe in the Merchant of Venice, but there at least the characters are alive; Shylock rings true, Portia and Jesica and Nerissa are human and womanly and feminine, whereas in Measure for Measure all the characters are more or less wooden. Even Isabella is open to this criticism at times; her appeal to the Duke in the last act is eloquent, but not heartfelt; it is essentially rhetorical at a moment when rhetoric is out of place. The rest of the persons in the piece are little better than puppets. Claudio is the best of them, although he is only sketched in. Angelo admits that he is a sensualist, but he displays rather the chilly viciousness of the stage-villain than the hot ardor of a truly passionate nature. The Duke is absurd in his solemn disguises, put on and put off, for purely theatrical effect. The scenes which follow the Duke's return are merely plot for the sake of plot itself; they evince a Scribe-like complexity without Scribe's ingenuityJ3' Mr. A. B. Walkley was uttering the opinion of every honest critic when he declared that 'we do not like these people, and we do not like many of the sentiments by which they are governed.'' The comic characters are not quite so dreary as those in All's Well. Lucio (obviously composed for the actor who had played Mercutio and Gratiano) has a flippant briskness which is at least less wearisome than the dull fooling of the clown. Mrs. Overdone (obviously impersonated by the performer of Mrs. Quickly and of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet) is set before us with full appreciation of her type. Escalus (possibly undertaken by Shakespeare himself) has a dignified simplicity. Elbow is plainly a replica of Dogberry (and was certainly intended for the same actor, probably Armin).'5'. But Elbow lacks the spontaneity of Dogberry; his garrulity is tedious, and he has the ineffectiveness which is likely to be the result of any mechanical attempt to repeat an earlier hit. As a group the avowedly comic characters contribute very little to the gaiety of nations. Whatever appeal the play may have is due wholly to Isabella; and she is not quite equal to the burden laid upon her shoulders. She does not rise to the possible heights of the situation; she is a little deficient both in feeling and in intelligence. That, resolved as she was to enter a nunnery, she should pair off with the Duke at the end 334

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

of the play, so that the so-called comedy may end with three weddings, leaves her in our memory as a figure sadly diminished from the heroic. The Duke has not wooed her, and apparently he has never given her a thought as a possible consort. She has shown no liking for him; and yet she accepts him offhand, practically selling herself for rank, although she had refused to sell herself to save her brother's life. That is all of a piece with the huddled confusion of the final act and with the topsyturvy morality which underlies its conclusion. Even the villain Angelo is spared and dismissed to matrimony — a matrimony which has a slight promise of bliss for the injured Mariana; but as Mariana also is devoid of interest, this matters little. The play has many fine lines — passages such as only Shakespeare could pen. It contains certain of his most significant ethical judgments on sin and mercy and death. But it is as painful as it is ill-shapen; and at the core of it is a distasteful device. What lingers in the memory after its performance is the figure of Isabella, nobly conceived, even if inconsistently presented. And it is due solely to the histrionic opportunities of the part of Isabella that the piece is still seen at rare intervals on the stage, from which All's Well and Troilus and Cressida have long been banished. Even when it now emerges before the footlights its stay is but brief, for it gives the playgoer neither the purging pleasure of true tragedy nor the sparkling joy of genuine comedy. 'It is a comedy where Death holds the place of Love,' so Andrew Lang declared; 'there is no beautiful shape of Love in the whole of it, and the very mirth is miserable.'161 (226-30)

335

68 William Winter, a play 'unfit for the modern Theatre' 1913

From The Wallet of Time (2 vols, New York, 1913). Volume I. William Winter (1836-1917) graduated from Harvard Law School in 1857, but although admitted to the bar never practiced law. Instead he became a drama critic for the New York Tribune from 1865 to 1909. Winter's many publications on actors and the stage include Henry Irving (1885), Life and Art of Edwin Booth (1893), Other Days: Being Chronicles and Memories of the Stage (1908), and Shakespeare on the Stage (2 vols, 1911—15). The Wallet of Time contains chapters on such well-known actors and actresses as Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), Edwin Forrest (1806-72), and Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923). Influenced by Longfellow, Winter was both sentimental and moralistic in outlook. He neither liked nor understood the theatre of Ibsen and other proponents of realism, as we see from his comments on the all-too-realistic Measure for Measure.

[From Chapter XXIX: 'Helena Modjeska, 1840-1909'] . . . The grim and painful play of Measure for Measure, powerful, pathetic, and wonderfully eloquent though it is, and abounding in knowledge of human nature, is one that might well be spared from the Stage. Its treatment of a dark subject is superb. Its language is frequently magnificent. Its discriminative delineations of character are transcendently able and true. It is peculiarly felicitous in its searching inspection of the human heart and its truthful exposition of the motives of human conduct. It is remarkable for the wisdom, stern yet lofty and merciful, with which it depicts human infirmity and at the same time relentlessly enforces the duty of its subjugation. In contrast with the numerous disreputable dramas which, within recent years, have trifled with the theme of carnal propensity, it towers into grandeur. Its effect when represented, has, however, always been gloomy and depressing, and if acquaintance is to be made with it at all, it is better to be read than to be seen, for it is unfit for the modern Theatre. Modjeska produced it and impersonated Isabella, — giving perhaps the most powerful of her Shakespearian performances. The womanhood of Isabella cannot be expressed by mere simulation. The character is one that, in a special sense, exacts the authoritative, final force of intrinsic nobility. The soul of Isabella cannot be assumed with the garments. Modjeska identified herself with the part and was adequate to it in every particular, — in daintiness of person, natural 336

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

dignity of demeanor, sad beauty of visage, melting tenderness of voice, and, above all, in the tremulous sensibility and passionate ardor of intrinsic goodness. In execution her performance lacked the aspect and vigor of youth, and occasionally it lacked clarity of articulation, but in ideal, — an ideal that comprised nobility, sanctity, ecstatic devotion, and involuntary feminine allurement, — it was perfect. It would not perhaps be saying too much to say that Isabella was the finest of all her many impersonations. It revealed in a clear light the lovely sincerity of her spirit and the beauty of her felicitous art, and it went far toward redeeming all that is repulsive in the play. . . . (I, 389-90) . . . Modjeska, though at first she refused to act in Camille, because perceptive of the bad influence radiant from it, sometimes resented, as much as a spirit so gentle and amiable could resent, the adverse criticism elicited by that play and by the play of Magda, and also she was displeased at objection to the powerful but obnoxious drama of Measure for Measure. Disapproval of such criticism was at one time, February, 1898, made known by her, in a public manner, accompanied by intimation that she supposed the writers of it were desirous that the Theatre should be conducted as 'a kintergarten' (sic). That position had often been taken, and it is still assumed, by defenders of objectionable playsJ 4 ^ (I, 395-6)

337

69 Lafcadio Hearn, Measure for Measure and 'the ethical spirit of western literature' 1915

From Interpretations of Literature, ed. John Erskine (2 vols, New York, 1915; London, 1916). Volume II. Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was educated in Catholic schools in France and England. Between 1869 and 1887 he worked as a reporter and journalist in Cincinnati and New Orleans, published regularly in Harper's Bazaar, Harper's Weekly, and Harper's Monthly, and then travelled extensively. In 1890 he moved to Japan, taught English at various schools, married a Japanese wife, and became a Japanese citizen in 1896. An enthusiastic exponent of its culture, he published a dozen books about Japan. The excerpts below arc from the London edition of Interpretations of Literature.

[From Chapters I: 'Shakespeare', pp. 1-33, and II: 'Note on the Study of Shakespeare', pp. 34—8] . . . Measure for Measure must be classed as a comedy; the ending of it is according to the rules of comedy. But, as has well been said, 'it oversteps the bounds of comedy.' There is no play more sombre and more psychologically terrible than Measure for Measure. From first to last the nerves of the spectator or the reader are kept in a state of extreme tension, which sometimes accentuates into real pain - I may almost say agony. Few tragedies could be more tragical without bloodshed; yet we have classed this play as a comedy. ('Shakespeare', 19) ... But I have not yet touched the question of my own preference in the selection of a play for study. Some years ago, when conversing with a foreign professor, I asked him why so little attention had been given in the higher study of Shakespeare by university students to Measure for Measure. It is not of course a play to be read by little boys, but there is no play which seems to me to deserve more attention from a literary class of young men. After some conversation on the subject he remarked that in Japan the play could hardly be understood. Now the remark, as far as the popular theatre is concerned, was very true. It would require a great deal of changing to make that play acceptable to a Japanese public. Even in England it has been very 338

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

seldom heard of on the stage in modern times. But I should recommend the study of this play to you just because the dominant moral idea in it is very different from the corresponding idea in oriental countries, and because to understand the ethical spirit of western literature in general, the eastern students must begin by getting a perfect understanding of these foreign ideas. It is not at all necessary that you should be in sympathy with them; it is only necessary that you should comprehend them sufficiently to sympathise with the pain or pleasure of the characters who in a drama are influenced by them. For example, in this play that I speak of, the actions of Isabel can be perfectly understood only by one who perfectly understands the mediaeval idea of chastity, the superstitions relating to it, the enormous exaggeration of its importance in religious teaching and especially in ascetic doctrine. To help in a thorough understanding of this, I should especially recommend the reading of the remarkable chapters on this subject in Lecky's History of European Morals. ' But once understood, I think that any intelligent student could not fail to be very much impressed by the sombre and powerful passion of the play, by its terrible yet truthful picture of human weakness in the person of a judge, and of moral strength on the part of a weak girl who has to meet and master one of the most cruel problems that could be offered to a woman during the middle ages. This play is my own favourite among what are usually called the comedies; and I think that the very difficulties connected with the studies of it are difficulties important for you to master. ('Note on the Study of Shakespeare', 37-8)

339

70 Benedetto Croce, the 'happy ending . . . fails to persuade' 1920 From Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille. By Benedetto Croce. Translated by Douglas Ainslie (London and New York, 1920). Benedetto Croce (1866—1952) was educated in Naples and then at the University of Rome. He returned to Naples in 1886 to concentrate on literary and antiquarian studies, founding the journal La Critica, which he edited from 1903 to 1930. Interested in philosophy and aesthetics, he became internationally famous for his La Filosqfia dello Spirito (4 vols, 1902—16; English trans., 4 vols, 1903—21), a phenomenology of the mind which sees its four main activities — art and philosophy (theoretical), political economy and ethics (practical) - as complementary. Politically active, Croce became a senator in 1910 and minister of education in 1920—21, but resigned his political appointments, as well as his professorship at Naples, when Benito Mussolini came to power. Croce returned to politics only after Mussolini's fall in 1945, becoming a delegate to the Italian Parliament and President of the Italian Liberal Party (1945—47). His publications include La Poesia di Dante (1920; English trans. 1922), Letteratura della Nuova Italia ( 6 vols, 1914—40), and several books on Italian history. Douglas Ainslie, Croce's translator, noted in his preface that Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille is founded upon his idealist aesthetic theory set out in the first volume of the Filosofia dello Spirito, emphasizing 'the independence and autonomy of the aesthetic fact, which is intuition-expression, and . . . the essentially lyrical character of all art' (iv). Croce's critical approach is ahistorical and anti-biographical and foreshadows what came to be called in America the 'New Criticism'. The excerpts below are from the New York edition.

[From Chapter IX: 'Motives and Development of Shakespeare's Poetry', pp. 274-99, Part 2: 'The Longing for Romance'] . . . A sense of unreality is therefore diffused upon the romantic plays, not of falsity, but just of unreality, such as we experience in the play of fancy, when we recount a fairy tale, well aware that it is a fairy tale, yet greatly enyoying the passage to and fro before us of the prince, the beauty, the ogre, and the fairy. A proof of this is to be found in the summary treatment of the characters and the turning-points or crises of the action, the easy pardoning and making of peace, and the bizarre expedients adopted to bring the intrigue to an end. Instances of the second sort are the adventure 340

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

of the lion in the Forest of Arden, the reconciliation of the two enemy brothers in As You Like It, the dream of Posthumus in Cymbeline, the advent of the bear and the shipwreck in the Winter's Tale, and the like. And as regards summary treatment, where could we find a more off-hand lago than the Hyacinth of Cymbeline, guilty of the most audacious and perverse betrayals, as though by chance, yet later on, when he confesses his sins, he is forgiven and starts again, so far as we can see, a gentleman and perfect knight. We do not speak of Posthumus, of Cloten, of King Cymbeline and of so many personages in this and others of the romantic plays. The wicked turn out to be all the more harmless, the greater their wickedness; the good are good nunc et semper, ' without intermission, exactly as introduced at the beginning of the play; the most desperate situations, the most terrible passes, are speedily and completely overcome, or one foresees that they will be overcome. Here romance has no intention whatever of ending unhappily or in pensive sadness; it wishes to stimulate the imagination, but at the same time to keep it agile and happy and to leave it contented. Indeed, in those rare cases when we do meet with painful or terrible motives, which are not easily overcome in the course of the imaginative development of the work, we are sensible of being slightly jarred, and this is perhaps the reason for that 'displeasure,' which such fine judges as Coleridge note in Measure for Measure, so rich, nevertheless, in splendid passages, worthy of Shakespeare. Not only does this comedy verge upon tragedy, but here and there it becomes immersed in it, vainly attempting to return to the light romantic vein and end like a fairy story, with everyone happy. (196—8) [From Chapter IX, Part 6: 'Justice and Indulgence'] . . . I n Measure for Measure, in the scene [3.1] where Claudio is in prison and condemned, the usual order is inverted; first we have the prompt persuasion and decision to accept death with serenity, and a few moments later the will to live returns with furious force. The make-believe friar, who assists the condemned man, sets the nullity of life before him in language full of warm and rich imagery: it is troublous and such as 'none but fools would keep' [3.1.8], a constant heart-ache for the fear of losing it, a craving after happiness never attained, a falsity of affections, a crepuscular condition, without joy or repose; and Claudio drinks in these words and images, feeling that to live is indeed to die, and wishes for death. But his sister enters, and when she tells him how she has been offered his life as the price of her dishonour, he instantly clutches hold again of life at that glimmer of hope, of hope stained with opprobrium, and dispels with a shudder of horror the image of death: To die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible and warm motion to become A kneaded clod; . . . 'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death. . . . [3.1.119-22, 129-33] 341

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

And in the same play the singular personage of Barnardine is placed before us, the criminal and almost animal, indifferent to life and death, but who yet lives, gets drunk and then stretches himself out and sleeps soundly, and when he is awakened and called to the place of execution, declares firmly, that he is not disposed to go there that day, so they had better leave him alone and not trouble him; he turns his shoulders on them and goes back to his cell, where they can come and find him, if they have anything to say. Here too the feeling of astonishment at an eagerness for life, which does not exclude the tranquil acceptance of death, is accentuated almost to the point of becoming comic and grotesque. (264-6) [From Chapter X: 'The Art of Shakespeare', pp. 274-99.] . . . His art, then, was neither defective nor vitiated in any part of its own constitutive character, although certain works are obviously weak and certain parts of other works, in the vast mass that goes under his name. Such youthful plays as Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen, the Comedy of Errors, are not notable, save for a certain ease and grace, only manifesting in certain places the trace of his profound spirit. The 'historical plays' are, as we have already shown, fragmentary and do not form complete poems animated with a single breath of passion. Some of them, and especially the first part of Henry VI, have about them an arid quality and are loosely anecdotal; in others, such as Henry IV and Henry V, is evident the desire to stimulate patriotic feelings, and they are further burdened with scenes of a purely informative nature. Coriolanus too, which was apparently composed later and is derived from a different source, also lacks complete internal justification, for it consists of a study of characters. Timon (assuming that it was his) is developed in a mechanical manner, although it is full of social and ethical observations and possesses rhetorical fervour. Cymbeline and the Winter's Tale contain lovely scenes, but are not as a whole works of the first order; the idyllic and romantic Shakespeare appears in them to have rather declined in comparison to the author of the earlier plays of the same sort, inspired with a very different vigour. Measure for Measure contains sentiments and personages that are profoundly Shakespearian, as the protagonist Angelo, the meter-out of inexorable justice, so sure of his own virtue, who yields to the first sensual temptation that occurs, in Claudius, who wishes and does not wish to die, and in the Barnardine already mentioned. This play, which oscillates between the tragic and the comic, and has a happy ending, instead of forming a drama of the sarcastic-sorrowful-horrible sort, fails to persuade us that it should have been thus developed and thus ended. (293-4)

342

Notes

2 WILLIAM RICHARDSON [1] The Folio reads 'That's like my brother's fault' 3 EDMOND MALONE [1]

See Mr. Tyrwhitt's note. [Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730—86), an Oxford classicist, wrote in Observations and Conjectures upon Some Passages of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1766): I cannot help thinking that Shakespeare [in 1.1.67-72 and 2.4.26-30J, intended to flatter the unkiiigly weakness of James the first, which made him so impatient of the crowds that flocked to sec him, especially upon his first coming, that ... he restrained them hy a Proclamation. Sir Sytnonds D'Ewcs, in his Memoirs of his own Life, has a remarkable passage with regard to this humour of James. After taking notice, that the King going to Parliament, on the 30th of January, 1620-1, 'spake lovingly to the people, and said, "God bless ye, God bless ye" '; he adds these words, 'contrary to his former hasty and passionate custom, which often, in his sudden distemper, would bid a pox or a plague on such as flocked to see him'

(quoted from A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare 'Measure for Measure', ed. Mark Eccles [New York, 1980], p. 18.) 2 [Thomas] Wilson's Hist, of K.James, ad ami. 1603. [3] Actually, the First Folio reads 'its' and not 'his' at 1.2.4. [4] Edward Capell (1713-81) published his 10-volume edition of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies in 1768 and completed his 3-volume commentary, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, in 1779-80 (published 1783). [5] Lewis Theobald (1688-1744) published his 7-volumc edition of The Works of Shakespeare in 1733. 4 GEORGE STEEVENS [1] George Toilet (1725-79) contributed to the 1778 Johnson-Steevens edition. [2| John Monck Mason (1726 1809), Irish lawyer and politician, planned an edition of Shakespeare, but most of his textual and critical notes had already been incorporated into the 1785 edition of Johnson, Steevens, and Reed. He published instead (Comments on the Last Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1785), Comments on the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher with an appendix, Additional Comments on the Plays of Shakespeare, Extended to the Late Editions of Malone and Steevens (London, 1797—98), and a corrected and heavily 343

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION revised version of the earlier books, Comments on the Several Editions of Shakespeare's Plays, Extended to Those of Malone and Steevens (Dublin, 1807). 5 FRANCIS DOUCE [1] The revised Short-Title Catalogue of English Books 1475—1640, however, identifies it as excerpted from Ihesus. The floure of the commandments of god (1510, 1521), a work translated from the French by A. Chertsey (STC 23876-7). [2] Cf. Virgil, Aeneid 6.739-42: ergo exercentur poenis verterumque malorum supplicia expendunt: aliae panduntur inanes suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto infectum elitur scelus aut exuritur igni quisque suos patimur Manis.

[3]

[4]

[5] [6] [7] [8] 9

('Therefore are they schooled with penalties, and for olden sins pay punishment: some are being stretched out to the empty winds; from some the stain of guilt is washed away under swirling floods or burned out in fire'; Virgil, tr. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols, rev. edn London, 1950, p. 557.) Thomas Phaer's The seven first bookes of the Eneidos converted in English meter was published in 1558; subsequent editions, completing the translation, appeared in 1562—63, 1573, and 1584, the whole being reprinted in 1596, 1600, 1607, and 1620 (STC 24799-24805a). The Kalender of Shepherdes, translated from a fifteenth-century Franch almanac and encyclopaedia, Le Compost et Kalendrier des bergiers, had eighteen editions between 1508 and 1631 (STC 22408-23). Cf. Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls 11. 78—81, in F. N. Robinson (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1957), p. 311. In this dream-vision cum love-debate Chaucer draws some details from 'Cicero's dream of Scipio', the Somnium Scipionis, which is recorded in Cicero's fragmentary De re publica, Bk vi. This text, preserved by Macrobius (about 400 A. D.), was illustrated by him with a long commentary, which became immensely popular in the Middle Ages and after. In it Scipio Africanus recounts a dream vision of the universe which ends with an incitement to virtue, which will be rewarded in heaven, while 'the spirits of those who are given over to sensual pleasures and have become their slaves, .. . and who violate the laws of gods and men at the instigation of those desires which are subservient to pleasure - their spirits, after leaving their bodies, fly about close to the earth, and do not return to this place except after many years of torture'. The Short-Title Catalogue 1641-1700 (P2980) ascribes Vitis degeneris ...a treatise of antient ceremonies (1668, 1669) to Jonas Porre. Cf. Comus, 11. 810-12. See The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1765), I, 377-8; reprinted in Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, or CHS, V, 105. See Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, Shakespear Illustrated, 3 vols (London, 1753—4), I, 27, 36—7. Dr. Johnson in his dedication to the above lady's work, speaking of Shakespeare, says, 'he lived in an age when the minds of his auditors were not accustomed to balance probabilities, or to examine nicely the proportion between causes and effects. It was sufficient to recommend a story that it was far removed from common life, that its changes were frequent, and its close pathetic' [dedication 'To the Right Honourable John, Earl of Orrery', Shakespear Illustrated, I, viii—ix; reprinted in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur 344

M E A S U R E FOR MEASURE

10

Shcrbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols (New Haven, 195890), VII, 49J. How much at variance is all this with the sentiments that follow on our play, and how it serves to mark the folly and absurdity of hireling dedications! It may well be doubted whether Shakespeare ever saw the story as related by Cinthio. There was not, as far as we know at present, any English translation of it in his time. He might indeed have seen the French version by Gabriel Chappuys, printed at Paris, 1583, 8vo; but it is certain that his chief model for the plot was the old play of Promos anil Cassandra, a circumstance unknown to Mrs. Lenox. All must admit that the mode of saving the deputy's life is much better managed by Shakespeare than by Whetstone.

6 HENRY JAMES PYE [1] [2]

Actually, 'Away with her!' (5.1.46), spoken by the Duke, who later also says, 'To prison with her!" (5.1.121). In fact, in John Philip Kemble's acting edition of Measure for Measure (London, 1803) there is a stage direction which reads: 'Claudio discovers himself, Isabella runs and embraces him' (see Arthur Colby Spraguc, Shakespeare and the Actors [Cambridge, Mass., 1944], p. 66). Kcmble played the Duke and Mrs. Sarah Siddons played Isabella at Drury Lane and Covent Garden from 1794 to 1812 (sec Frank A. Marshall, 'Stage History' of Measure for Measure, in The Works oj William Shakespeare, ed. Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall, 8 vols, [New York, 1888-90|, V, p. 169).

7 MRS. ELIZABETH INCHBALD [1| 2

I.e., deception. To vindicate this incident, the well known story of Kirk may be told - but that proves no more than a possible, not a probable event. [Mrs. Inchbald's allusion is to the notorious Colonel Percy Kirke, an officer in the employment of James II at the time of Monmouth's Rebellion in 1685 who committtcd an outrage (successful in his case) analogous to that of Angelo in Shakespeare's play. Kirkc's story is recounted in David Hume's The History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 168X, 8 vols (Edinburgh, 1810), VIII, pp. 231-3. See also No. 23 below, n. 3]

9 WILLIAM HAZLITT |1]

Thomas Otway (1652-85) wrote several verse tragedies, pre-eminently Venice Preserv'd (1682); Edward Moore (1712-57) was known for sentimental tragedy; Hannah More (1745—1833), one of the Blue Stocking Circle that included such luminaries as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and James Boswell, was a highly successful author of poems, plays, and social tracts. [2] Sir Joshua Reynolds (1732-92), portrait painter and man of letters, suggested to Samuel Johnson that he form the famous Literary Club. His Discourses (1769-90), originally delivered to the Royal Academy, end with the essay on Michaelangelo. [3] 'Vetus' was the pen name of John Sterling (1806-44), a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, and known as founder of the Sterling Club, whose members included Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson. [4[ Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), eldest daughter of Roger Kcmble (1722-1802) and Sarah Ward, was the most famous and highly regarded actress of her time in a career that spanned 1782-1812.

345

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION 10 NATHAN DRAKE

1 2

Illustrations of Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 132., where several passages, which may have suggested the imagery in Claudio's description, are quoted. Lectures on Dramatic Literature, vol. ii. p. 169.

12 THOMAS BOWDLER 1

Kirk. [See No. 7, n. 2 above, and No. 23, n. [3] below.]

13 P. P.

[1] The author refers here, and in the last paragraph of his 'Remarks', to the acting version performed at Covent Garden in February 1816, and published in 1822, edited by William Oxberry. 2 Kirk. [See No. 7 above, n. 2, and No. 23 below, n. (3).] [3] See No. 23 below, note [3]. [4] Ben Jonson's 'To the Reader', line 2 (poem facing Shakespeare's portrait in the First Folio). [5] Johnson's 'Preface' to vol. I of The Plays of William Shakespeare (London, 1765); reprinted in CHS, V, 63. 14 AUGUSTINE SKOTTOWE [1] Skottowe is using the 4th Folio, which prints 'off rather than the 1st Folio 'of. 15 GEORGE DANIEL [1] See Samuel Johnson (ed.), The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1765); reprinted in CHS, V, 105; and Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, Shakespear Illustrated, 3 vols (London, 1753-54); reprinted in CHS, IV, 110. [2] Augustus William Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (2 vols, London, 1815); rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London, 1846), p. 388. [3] John Philip Kemble (1757-1823), eldest son of actor-manager Roger Kemble (1722-1802) and Sarah Ward (d. 1807), had a long career as actor and theatre manager. [4] See No. 9 above, footnote [4]. 16 ANNA BROWNELL JAMESON [1] Mrs. Jameson now discusses the sources of Measure for Measure, criticizes Samuel Johnson for not discussing Isabella, castigates Mrs. Charlotte Lennox for treating her 'as a coarse vixen', expresses dismay that William Hazlitt could criticize Isabella for 'her rigid chastity', approves of William Richardson's appreciation of Isabella ('but his remarks are rather superficial'), and gives only halfhearted approval to A. W. von Schlegel's comments on the play, because he does not 'distinguish Isabella from many other characters'. [2] 2 Corinthians 11:14. 17 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE [1] Greek, meaning 'a thing that has to be hated'. 346

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

[21

The Night Walker or the Little Thief (c. 1611), a comedy written by John Fletcher (15791625) and performed in London at the Whitefriars, was later revised by James Shirley (1596-1666) and performed at the Phoenix (1633). Algripc is a rich usurer contracted to Alanthe, 'the little thief, whom he has formerly forsaken, but she still accepts him when he reforms.

19 CHARLES KNIGHT [1] Knight alludes to Stecvens's description of the play's metre: above, p. 39. 2 'Chronological Order,' p. 387. [3] This information was obviously added by Knight to his second edition. See also No. 20 below, note [2]. 4 'Heptameron of Civil Discourses,' 1582. 5 'Retrospective Review,' vol. vii. p. 381. [6] See No. 7, n. 2, and No. 23, n. [3]. [7] Charlotte Lennox in her Shakespear Illustrated, 3 vols (London, 1753-54), I, pp. 32, 34; reprinted in CHS, IV, pp. 114, 115. [8] George Chalmers (1742-1825) in A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers (London, 1799) elaborated upon the suggestion by Malone (No. 3) that Shakespeare alludes to the behavior of King James I in 1.1.67-72 and 2.4.26-30 of Measure for Measure. 20 J. PAYNE COLLIER [1] G. B. Giraldi Cinthio (1504-73) also wrote a play, Epitia, based on his prose tale, but it was published posthumously in 1583, and not known to Shakespeare scholars until the latter part of the nineteenth century. [2] In 1842 Peter Cunningham published what apppeared to be definitive proof of the date of the first performance of Measure for Measure when he edited Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (London: Printed for the Shakespeare Society), and his friend Collier was the first to use his findings in the passage cited above. However, in 1868 Cunningham's integrity was called into question when it was revealed that he had recently attempted to sell the Revels Accounts for 1604—5 and 1611—12 to the British Museum. He had never returned them to the Audit Office after editing them for the Shakespeare Society. Moreover, Cunningham's work for the Shakespeare Society also fell under suspicion, especially when his close personal relationship with the already notorious Collier came to light. Both The Athenaeum and Daily News soon carried stories that the play lists were forgeries (see Ernest Law, Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries [London, 1911], pp. 17-27). However, in 1880 J. O. Halliwcll-Phillipps noted in Memoranda on Shakespeare's Comedy of 'Measure for Measure' (No. 36) that he had found in the papers of Edmond Malone (who died in 1812) a memorandum corresponding with Cunningham's list, written well before the supposed forgery. Ernest Law (cited above) has convincingly corroborated Halliwell-Phillipps and exonerated Cunningham (63-72). [3] Although Collier may have fabricated it, the opinion that Coleridge allegedly expressed about Isabella in 1818 certainly conforms with his statements in both The Literary Remains and Specimens of The Table Talk and suggests that his main reason for disliking the play was Isabella's participation in the bed-trick. See George L. Geckle, 'Coleridge on Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 (1967), 71-3. 347

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION 21 JOSEPH HUNTER [1] Hunter is probably referrring to 'Mariana' (1830) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809—92), but Tennyson also wrote 'Mariana in the South' (1832). [2] William Collins (1721—59) knew Samuel Johnson, who wrote about his ill-fated life in Lives of the English Poets (1779—81). The poem in question is 'Dirge in Cymbeline . [3] Simon Goulart, Histoires admirables et memorables de nostre temps ... , 2nd edn (Rouen, 1606). [4] Edward Grimeston, Admirable and Memorable Histories ... (London, 1607). 5 Much has been done for Whetstone [1550—87] by the modern writers of this period. I add that he appears to have been a native of London. There is an inquisition abstracted in one of the volumes in the Harleian Library, known as Cole's Escheats, (Harl. 411), on the death of a Robert Whetstone, who died in 1557, leaving five sons - Robert, Bernard, George, Francis, and John, of whom Robert, the eldest, was then aged 17. He had a tenement called The Three Gilded Anchors, in West Cheap, and five messuages in Gutter Lane. [William] Fleetwood, the Recorder, was related to Whetstone, as appears by the dedication to him of Promos and Cassandra. [6] Zoophilos, or, Considerations on the Moral Treatment of Inferior Animals (1819; enlarged 1820), was written by Henry Crowe (1778—1851), also the author of Animadversions on Cruelty to the Brute Creation, Addressed Chiefly to the Lower Classes (1825). [7] Sir Thomas Hanmer (1677-1746) edited Shakespeare's Works in 1743-44 and again in 1745. [8] Styan Thirlby (d. 1753) provided manuscript emendations in his copies of several editions of Shakespeare's Works, those of Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, and Samuel Johnson. [9] Samuel Johnson edited Shakespeare's Plays in 1765. [10] Either an error for Virgil, the main source for Claudio's description of cold purgatory (cf. Eccles, op. cit., p. 142), or an unidentified allusion. 22 HERMANN ULRICI [1] In a long footnote Ulrici explains that in his first edition, following Ludwig Tieck, he had argued that Measure for Measure was written in 1612, but that the work of Peter Cunningham (see No. 20, footnote [2]) has proved otherwise. 'And yet . . . I think that it was subsequently remodelled by Shakespeare, and considerably altered.' Why so? Because Ulrici wants to argue that the play is an attack on 'the Puritanical proceedings'; see p. 104. 2 Mrs. Jameson [No. 16], and R. Grant White [No. 27] in his Shakspeare's Scholar, p. 133f. 23 GULIAN C. VERPLANCK [1]

Samuel Johnson (ed.), The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1765), I; reprinted in CHS, V, p. 105. See p. 4 above. [2] See No. 20 above, footnote [3]. [3] Thomas Babington Macaulay, in The History of England: From the Accession of James the Second. A New Edition in Two Volumes (New York, 1875), relates at length the story of 'Colonel Percy Kirke, a military adventurer whose vices had been developed by the worst of all schools, Tangier.' Assigned in 1685 with his soldiers of'the First Tangier Regiment' to suppress rebellious counties in the West of England, he displayed extreme cruelty and was also guilty of extortion. Kirke was also, in his own coarse and ferocious way, a man of pleasure; and nothing 348

MEASURE FOR MEASURE is more probable than that he employed his power for the purpose of gratifying his licentious appetite. It was reported that he conquered the virtue of a beautiful woman by promising to spare the life of one to whom she was strongly attached, and that, after she had yielded, he showed her suspended on the gallows the lifeless remains of him for whose sake she had sacrificed her honour. This tale an impartial judge must reject. It is unsupported by proof. The earliest authority for it is a poem written by [John] Pomfret [1667—1702]. The respectable historians of that age, while they speak with just severity of the crimes of Kirke, either omit all mention of this most atrocious crime, or mention it as a thing rumoured but not proved. Those who tell the story tell it with such variations as deprive it of all title to credit. Some lay the scene at Taunton, some at Exeter, Some make the heroine of the tale a maiden, some a married woman. The relation for some as her brother, and by some as her husband. Lastly the story is one which, long before Kirke was born, had been told of many other oppressors, and had become a favourite theme of novelists and dramatists. Two politicians of the fifteenth century, Rhynsault, the favourite of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and Oliver le Dain, the favourite of Lewis the Eleventh of France, had been accused of the same crime. Cintio had taken it for the subject of a romance. Whetstone had made out of Cintio's narrative the rude play of Promos and Cassandra; and Shakespeare had borrowed from Whetstone the plot of the noble tragicomedy of Measure for Measure. As Kirke was not the first, so he was not the last, to whom this excess of wickedness was popularly imputed. During the reaction which followed the Jacobin tyranny in France, a very similar charge was brought against Joseph Lebon, one of the most odious agents of the Committee of Public Safety, and after inquiry, was admitted even by his prosecutors to be unfounded. (I, 309-11) 24 J. O. HALLIWELL [1]

[2]

This is the opening sentence of Hudson's essay on Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, and The Winter's Tale, the eighth of his Lectures on Shakespeare (New York , 1848), I, p. 288. See No. 22; Halliwell is quoting from the 1846 Morrison translation.

25 H. N. HUDSON [1]

[2] [3] [4] [5]

[6]

See No. 17, The Literary Remains; the Greek term used by Coleridge means 'a thing that has to be hated'. See No. 17 also for Hudson's subsequent quotation from Coleridge's Specimens of the Table Talk. 'Persons': 'characters'. See No. 22; Hudson is referring to the 1846 Morrison translation. See No. 18, where Hallam also speaks of Isabella's 'virtue' as 'something very grand and elevated'. This is a quotation from Bishop Joseph Butler's (1692-1752) sermon 'Preached before the House of Lords, in the Abbey-Church of Westminster, on Friday, January 30, 1740-41. Being the Day Appointed to Be Observed as the Day of the Martyrdom of King Charles I'. It is a sermon upon hypocrisy, and the heading of the section containing the quotation is: 'But self-deceit has a large share'. See The Works of Joseph Butler, ed. The Right Honorable W. E. Gladstone, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), II, p. 324. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Devil's Thoughts', lines 23-4.

349

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION [7] Probably a reference to Escalus's 'Which is the wiser here? Justice or Iniquity?' (2.1.172). [8] Hudson appears to have provided his own translation of Schlegel (No. 8 above) from Uber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur: Vorlesungen (2 vols, Heidelberg, 1809-11). [9] Hudson here echoes Verplanck (No. 23), whom he quotes earlier in his introduction. [10] See Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21, Matthew 7:12, and Luke 6:31. [11] From Coleridge's Osario. A Tragedy (1797); but the passage reads: 'Know you not, / What Nature makes you mourn, she bids you heal?' (Act 1, lines 229—30). 27 RICHARD GRANT WHITE [I] Joseph Hunter, No. 21, opening paragraph. [2] Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), was a statesman and diplomat, a witty and suave writer well-versed in the ways of the world. [3] Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Love' (c. 1800) is set 'Beside the ruined tower' (line 8); in the second stanza the speaker tells the reader: 'The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene,/ Had blended with the lights of eve; / She stood and listened to my lay,/ My own dear Genevieve!' (lines 9—12). [4] See No.19, p. 90; see also No. 16. [5] French for 'very strong concerning chastity'. [6] 'But might you .. .to him?' in Folio. [7] Paradise Lost, 2.560. [8] Son of Zeus and Europa and one of the three judges (along with Minos and Aeacus) of the underworld in Greek mythology. [9] See No. 17 above, where Coleridge adds: 'and Claudio is detestable'. [10] Draco (Latin dracon: 'dragon') was an Athenian who codified the laws in 612 B.C.; his code was known for its harshness and cruelty, hence, 'draconian'. [II] See No. 18, p. 83. [12] The term 'gray mare' is a colloquial expression meaning 'A wife, esp. if dominant': Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7C edn (New York, 1970), p. 350. 28 WILLIAM WATKISS LLOYD [1] [2]

'That frightens — but that is always flattering'. See George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1578), Part I, 2.4; reprinted in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London, 1963), II, pp. 442—513.

29 CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE [1] [2]

SeeHazlitt, No., 11, p. 56. See Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (1818), chapter 15, where Jeanie Deans refuses to lie to save her sister, who is accused of the murder of her own child, from a sentence of death; her sister is subsequently pardoned and the child, a son, discovered to be alive. [3] Clarke expatiated further upon Isabella in his essay 'Shakespeare's Philosophers and Jesters', The Gentleman's Magazine, 234 (May 1873), 514-39 (see pp. 520-3), but without adding anything new. [4] That is, under the dining-table of a middle-class household. [5] The number of justices of the peace necessary to be present to transact business at sessions of court. 350

MEASURE FOR MEASURE [6]

Douglas William Jerrold (1803—57) was a dramatist and a contributor to Punch. In 1859 appeared The Wit and Opinions of Douglas Jerrold. [7] George-Louis Lecerc Buffon, Comte de (1707—88), was a famous naturalist and author of Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere, 36 vols (1749—88). [8] La Rochefoucald, Francois de Marillac, due de (1613—80), was a courtier and soldier most noted for his Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1665-78), popularly known as the Maxims. This is no. 387 in The Maxims of Francois Due de la Rochefoucauld, tr. F. G. Stevens (London, 1940), p. 123. 30 GEORG GOTTFRIED GERVINUS flj

See Nos. 19, 21, 17; Gervinus practically quotes Coleridge verbatim from The Literary Remains. \2\ Cf. Schlegel, No. 8, p. 50 above. [3] 'What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. / For he saith to Moses, I wTill have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. / So then it is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy' (Rom. 9:14—16). [4] George Chalmers (1742—1825), antiquary and historian, in A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers (London, 1799), cited ' "the statute [2 Ja. I. ch. II; 1604] to restrain all persons from marriage, until their former wives, and former husbands, be dead," for which such persons, so offending, were to suffer death, as in cases of felony' (p. 412). 31 WALTER PATER [1]

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) wrote The Decameron (1351—53), a collection of one hundred novelle that contains 'The Revenge of Tancrcd'. [2] Orcagna was the nickname of Andrea di Cione Arcangelo (1308—68). Giorgio Vasari described Orcagna's celebrated fresco of the Last Judgment on the wall of the Campo Santo in Pisa, which includes 'Death, flying through the air and clothed in black', dead bodies attended by 'devils, who take their souls out of their mouths and carry them to holes full of fire upon the top of a very high mountain', and shows 'the despair of the damned, as they are driven weeping to Hell by furious demons': Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550; rev. edn, 1568), tr. A. B. Hinds, 4 vols, Everyman Library (London and New York, 1963), I, pp. 143-5. [3] Fletcher, in [Rollo, Duke of Normandy, or] The Bloody Brother, gives the rest of it [in a second stanza). [4] Probably a reference to Alfred Tennyson's 'Mariana' (1830) and 'Mariana in the South' (1832). [5] From Dante's The Divine Comedy (1321): 'Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa': 'Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on' (Inferno, III.51). [6] Varrius Avitus Bassianus, known as Heliogabalus, was a Roman emperor (218—22) notorious for his debauchery; Denis of Sicyll is probably Dionysius the Elder (430—367 B.C), tyrant of Syracuse. Pater is quoting from Whetstone's Heptameron: cf. M. Eccles (ed.), Measure for Measure, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, (New York, 1980), p. 374. [7] The title character, Vittoria Corombona, in John Webster's The White Devil (1612). [8] Pater is probably referring to the second debate between Isabella and Angelo, 2.4.30-170. [9] Duke to Claudio: 'A breath thou art, / Servile to all the skyey influences, / That dost this habitition where thou keep'st / Hourly afflict' (3.1.8-11). 351

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION [10] Claudio to Isabella: 'Ay, but to die, and go we know not where' (3.1.117-31). 33 DENTONJ. SNIDER [1]

Cf. Isabella to Angelo: 'Alas! Alas! / Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, / And He that might the vantage best have took / Found out the remedy' (2.2.73-9); and Portia to Shylock: 'The quality of mercy is not strained' (4.1.184-205)

34 F.J. FURNIVALL 1

I speak on the authority of some college frietids who were students there, of an article in The Daily News a few years back, written by a long-dweller in Vienna, in which this malheur was largely used, and of later visitors to the city. [2] See No.28, p. 139. 3 The play was probably written during the plague of 1603 in London, in which 30,578 souls died. (Stoive.) [4] Furnivall quotes lines 71—72 of Tennyson's 'Mariana in the South' (1832). [5] This is presumably a privately communicated comment by Miss fi. H. Hickey, noted in Furnivall's DNB entry as 'a devoted admirer of Browning', and at whose instigation Furnivall founded the Browning Society in 1881. 6 See my friend Mr. W. H. Pater's admirable paper in The Fortnightly Review, 1874 or 1875. [Reprinted above, pp. 161-7.] 35 GEORGE WILKES 1

Mr. Furnivall is the Director of the new Shakespeare Society of London. [See p. 182 above.] [2] Furnivall's 'Trial Table' is part of his Introduction to the 1875 (and 1877 reprint) of Gervimis's work.

[3] See No. 17, p. 80. [4] See No. 30, p. 158. [5] Richard Farmer (1735-97), in The Plays of William Shakespeare. In ten volumes. With the Corrections and lUustratons of Various Commentators; To which are added notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. With an Appendix. (London, 1773), vol. 10: Sig. Oo5v: 'A stroke at the puritans' See Mark Eccles (ed.), Measure for Measure, New Variorum Edition' (New York, 1980), p. 62, note 509. 6 Dowdcn's Mind and Art of Shakespeare, pp. 83, 84 [p. 170 above.]. [7] See No. 10, p. 53. 1'he French sentence appears to be Wilkes's own interpolation. [8] See No. 19, p. 88. The quotation is a very loose rendering of what Knight actually wrote. 36 J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS [1]

See No. 20 above, note [2].

37 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

[1] See No. 17, p. 80. [2]

In the 'older .. .sense of the word", 'to baffle' was 'to disgrace a perjured knight with infamy', which included hanging upside down by the heels (OED, v. I. 1). 352

MEASURE FOR MEASURE [3]

4

Probably an allusion to Pistol's 'He hears with ears' and Sir Hugh Evans's response: 'The tevil and his tarn! what phrase is this? "He hears with ear"? Why, it is affectations' (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1.1.148-50). I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyric song. Shakespeare's verse, as all the world knows, ends thus: 'But my kisses bring again, bring again, / Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.' The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the remarkable feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into accordance with the close of his own. This appended verse [in Fletcher's Rollo, 162425], as all the world does not and need not know, ends thus: 'But first set my poor heart free, / Bound in those icy chains by thee.' Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their help convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, offer us a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, according equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render unto Fletcher the things which be Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the things which be Shakespeare's.

38 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [1] [2]

Actually, the First Gentleman, not Lucio, says this line. George Meredith (1828-1909) wrote several famous novels, including The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), The Egoist (1879), and Diana of the Crossways (1885).

39 HENRY MORLEY [1] [2]

[3]

Rosko is a comic character in Promos and Cassandra, who works for Lamia, a courtesan. From The Prelude: 'And simple Pleasure foraging for Death' (3.602). See The FourteenBook 'Prelude' by William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca and London, 1985), p. 77, where in a footnote the editor queries: 'A reference to patrons of prostitutes who acquired syphilis?' See Tennyson's 'Mariana' (1830) and cf. Pater (p. 164, note [4]).

40 ARTHUR SYMONS

[1] See No. 17, p. 80. [2] See Pater, 'a mere gilded, idle flower of youth indeed' (No. 31, p. 166). [3] William Hogarth (1697-1764), painter and engraver, is probably most famous today for The Harlot's Progress (1732) and The Rake's Progress (1733-35), biting pictorial satires. [4] Ithunel, an angel in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), carries a spear that exposes falsehood. [5] William Holman Hunt (1827—1910) was a member of the Pre-Raphaelites, a group that included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. His painting Claudia and Isabella (1850) can be found in the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain), London. 353

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

41 ANDREW LANG [I] An allusion to Wordsworth's Prelude. See No. 39 above, note [2]. [2] [Benoit-] C[onstant]. Coquelin, of the Comedie Francaise, wrote in 'Moliere and Shakspere': 'From 1610 to 1607 were written these dramas: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens — masterpieces, all of them, and all disconsolate; it is the triumph of evil; the more Hamlet thinks the more he is discouraged; and it finishes with the anathema of Timon giving society at large over to destruction' (The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 38 [May 1889-Oct. 1889], 822). William Winter (No. 68) wrote about the career of Coquelin (1841-1909) in The Wallet of Time, 2 vols (New York, 1913), I, pp. 398-413. [3] Haroun-al-Raschid (785-809) was an Arabian caliph of Baghdad who appears as an idealized figure in several tales of The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, most famously translated (1885-88) by Sir Richard Burton (1821-90). Haroun-al Raschid often went about his own country in disguise; cf. King Henry in Henry V, 4.2.34—284. [4] 'Hard-pan': 'the solid, underlying foundation'. (A metaphor from mining or geology, 'hard pan' being a layer of firm rock under soft soil.) [5] In The Histories, Cornelius Tacitus (A.D. 55?—117) wrote of the Roman emperor Servius Galba (5 B.C.?—A.D. 69): '. .. maior private visus dum privatus fuit, et omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset' ('He seemed too great to be a subject so long as he was subject, and all would have agreed that he was equal to the imperial office if he had never held it'); from Tacitus in Five Volumes. II. The Histories. Books I—HI, tr. Clifford H. Moore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), pp. 82-3. [6] See No. 18, p. 83. [7] An allusion to Nym's catch phrase in Henry V; for example: 'If you [Pistol] would walk off, I would prick your guts a little in good terms, as I may, and that's the humor of it' (2.4.57—9). [8] Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94), noted for his wit because of such works as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) and The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860), wrote in his novel The Guardian Angel (1867): 'The greatest saint may be a sinner that never got down to "hard pan" ' (ch. 30). [9] See No. 29 above, note [2]. See also Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, ed. Andrew Lang, vol. 6 of Border Edition of the Waverly Novels (London, 1898), p. 227. In his Editor's Introduction, Lang provides information about Helen Walker: 'In The Heart of Midlothian Scott set himself to draw his own people at their best. He had a heroine to his hand in Helen Walker, "a character so distinguished for her undaunted love of virtue," who, unlike Jeanie Deans, "lived and died in poverty, if not want." In 1831 he erected a pillar over her grave in the old Covenanting stronghold of Irongray' (p. xv). [10] Fra^ois de La Rochefoucauld (1613—80), Maximes, no. 26: 'Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement'; ed. J. Truchet (Paris, 1967), p. 13. [II] Odyssey, 11, 487. [12] See No. 31, p. 165. [13] See No. 31, p. 165. [14] Lines 61—8 of 'Mariana'; for the entire text of the poem see The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), I, pp. 206-9. [15] Tableau: a group of people in costume who remain silent and motionless. [16] See No. 31, p. 167. 43 FREDERICK S. BOAS [1] See No. 17, p. 80. 354

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

[2] See No. 28, p. 139. [3] Boas transposes the Greek proverb attributed to Bias, which transliterates arche andra dexei ('Authority will prove a man'); see Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Classical Quotations, ed. Hugh Percy Jones, New and Revised Edn (Edinburgh, 1949), p. 134. [4] See Dowden, No. 32, p. 169. [5] Friedrick Alexander Theodor Kreyssig, Vorlesungen u'ber Shakespeare, seine Zeit und seine Werke, 3 vols (Berlin, 1858-60); 3rd edn, 2 vols (Berlin, 1877), II, pp. 443-62. The term 'categorical imperative' was formulated by Immanuel Kant in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), to describe a moral requirement that binds anybody, regardless of his or her inclinations. [6] See Walter Pater's essay on Measure for Measure in his volume of Appreciations. [No. 31, p. 164 above.] [7] Alfred Tennyson (1809—92), author of 'Mariana' (1830), was born at Somersby in Lincolnshire. [8] See No. 17, p. 80. [9] Boas here echoes Gervinus, No, 30, p. 158.

44 GEORG BRANDES [1]

[2] [3] [4]

[5] [6]

[7] [8]

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) was Lord Protector during 1653-58. The term 'Independent' was first used in 1642 to describe the political party of which the Independent churches (having broken away from the Church of England) formed the chief element. In a further division, from 1645 onwards, this party was opposed by the 'Presbyterian'. Latin for 'supervisor of morals'. Censor was the title of two Roman magistrates who originally took the census and later also supervised public mores. See No. 41 above, note [3]. The patriotic Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1810) was the last play of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811); in it Prince Friedrich, condemned to die for disobedience, begs for his life and is pardoned. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811—64) was a satirist and caricaturist. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) developed a profoundly pessimistic philosophy in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea, 1819); English translation by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 3 vols (1883). Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere (1622—73) represents in the title character of Tartujfe (1664) a consummate religious hypocrite who is exposed and punished by kingly intervention. 'We serve a Prince to whom all sham is hateful. / A Prince who sees into our inmost hearts, / And can't be fooled by any trickster's arts' (The Misanhrope and Tartuffe, trans. Richard Wilbur [New York, 1965], p. 325).

45 SIDNEY LEE 1 2 3

Cf. Boas, University Drama, p. 19; Lee, French Renaissance in England, p. 408. Whetstone states, however, that his 'rare historic of Promos and Cassandra' was reported to him by 'Madam Isabella,' who is not otherwise identified. Richard Garnett's Italian Literature, 1898, p. 227. The name Angelo, however, figures in other English plays of the period. In Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors the goldsmith is so called, and in Othello (I.iii.17) there is mention of'Signior Angelo.' Subordinate characters bear the name in Ben Jonson's The Case is Altered, and in Chapman's May Day, both of which were written before 1602, though they were first printed in 1609 and 1611 respectively. 355

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION 4

When James I made his great progress from Edinburgh to London on his accession to the English throne, the loyal author of The true narration of the entertainment of his Royal Majesty (1603) on the long journey, noted that 'though the King greatly tendered' his people's 'love,' yet he deemed their 'multitudes' oppressive and published 'an inhibition against the inordinate and daily access of people's coming' (cf. Nichols's Progresses of King James I, i.76 and 327 «.2). At a later date King James was credited with 'a hasty and passionate custom which often in his sudden distemper would bid a pox or plague on such as flocked to see him' (Life of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, i.170).

46 C. H. HERFORD 1

Among many interesting detailed parallels we may note: Isabel's indictment of man 'dressed in authority,' and Hamlet's 'the insolence of office'; Claudio's and Hamlet's dread of the 'something after death.' And Isabel, like Hamlet, has to 'repel the insinuation that her righteous anger is the voice of madness' (V. i. 50). 2 The title was probably suggested by the phrase 'Blood axeth blood' in Whetstone (ed. Ha/litt, p. 227). [3] French 'borne': 'narrrow' or 'hidebound', a reference to Malvolio. 48 RICHARD G. MOULTON 1 2 3 4

Compare V.i. 430-46. Il.i, from 41; etc. E.g. Il.i. Faerie Queene, V.x.2.

49 A.C. BRADLEY [1] See Measure for Measure 1.4.34, where Lucio says to Isabella: 'I hold you as a thing enskied, and sainted'. 50 H. C. HART [1] [2] [3] [4]

See No. 16, p. 78. See No. 17, p. 80. See No. 34, p. 183. See No. 30, p. 153. Gervinus wrote: '...the play found little favour with most English critics, Hunter, Knight, and others; even an admirer like Coleridge...'. [5] The London Prodigal (anon., 1605), a comedy, concerns the redemption of the title character by his faithful wife. [6] Philip Massinger (1583—1640) wrote many plays, but is today best known for his comedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in which the villainous Sir Giles Overreach is himself overreached by trickery, does a good deed, and goes mad when he discovers that he been tricked. [7] In The Atheist's Tragedy (1606?; printed 1611) by Cyril Tourneur (c. 1575-1626), the title character confesses his ill deeds before dying, having inadvertently hit himself on the head with an axe while attempting to execute an innocent man. [8] William James (1842—1910), American psychologist and philosopher, is well-known for The Principles of Psychology (1890, 1892) and Pragmatism (1907), as well as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). 356

MEASURE FOR MEASURE [9] Hart quotes most of Hazlitt's remarks in No. 11 above. [10] Samuel Johnson (ed.), The Plays of William Shakespeare (London, 1765); reprinted in CHS, V, 105. [11] William Blackstone (1723-80), author of Commentaries on the Law of England, 4 vols (London 1765—69), was a contributor to Edmond Malone's edition of Shakespeare (No. 3); see The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (London, 1790), I, p. 131. 51 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE [1]

Swinburne is presumably referring to Coleridge's remarks in The Literary Remains, where he terms the comic parts of the play 'disgusting', the tragic parts 'horrible', and is particularly distressed with the forgiveness extended to Angelo; see No. 17, p. 80.

52 E. K. CHAMBERS [1]

[2]

One of the major textual cruxes in Shakespeare: the word 'prenzie', found at 3.1.93 and 3.1.96 in Measure for Measure, but nowhere else, has been debated for many years by scholars. The words 'princely' (found in the Second Folio of 1632) and 'precise' have been suggested as emendations. See Mark Eccles (ed.), Measure for Measure, New Variorum Edition (New York, 1980), pp. 138-9. See No. 41 above, note [3].

53 MORTON LUCE [1]

From Bacon's Of the Colours of Good and Evil (1597), The Works of Francis Bacon, collected and edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, New Edition (14 vols, London, 1857-74), VII, p. 87; 'in nostra potestate': 'in our own power'. [2] 'Mariana' (1830) and 'Mariana in the South' (1832). [3] Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth fire, and hence of the home and family. 4 See especially 3.1.1-150. 54 ROBERT BRIDGES 1

2

3

4

And thus the case of Proteus might possibly be the contemporary expression of the actual experience in Sonnet xl ['Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all / What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?'], etc. Consistency is a term which, when used of character, needs definition, and though it can hardly be misunderstood in this case, I will state that what I mean by it is merely that a character should 'hang together.' For instance, alternating moods might be part of a consistent character; but if contrarious moods are pushed far and not reasonably motived, then the personality is dissociated, and becomes a pathological study which cannot hold our respect. That Angelo's calumnies of Mariana were maliciously invented is implied in the structure of the plot. Since, if he had honestly doubted of her virtue, whether rightly or wrongly, he is then free in so far from reproach, and the motive for the introduction of Mariana's dowry is lost; the point of it being to balance Angelo's wrong against Claudio's. They each avoid a legal marriage for fear of a money-loss, and thus Angelo condemns Claudio for a fault similar to his own. It may be worth while to record that he is still a delight to the commonality in London: 357

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

April, 1906. [A reference to the March 20, 1906, production at the Adelphi in London reviewed by A. B. Walkley (No. 57).] 55 SIR WALTER RALEIGH [1] [2] [3]

See No. 11, p. 57. Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), 1.2.1-41. See No. 32, p. 169.

56 ANDREW J. GEORGE

[1] [2] [3] [4]

See No. 11, p. 57. See No. 55, p. 275. See No. 17, p. 80 and No. 11, p. 56. Matthew Arnold, 'Shakespeare' (1849), lines 12-14.

57 A.B. WALKLEY [1] Livres de chevet: 'bedside books'. [2] Ficelle: 'stage-trick'. [3] St. Mary of Egypt (344—421), mentioned by Cyril of Scythopolis in his Life ofCyriacus, is venerated by the Roman Catholic Church. Having long led a promiscuous life, she experienced a spiritual transformation and then for forty-seven years resided as a hermitess in the desert. [4] 'Monna Vanna' (the name can be found in Dante's Vita Nuova) is a famous oil painting (1866) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) in the Tate Gallery in London, originally known as 'Venus Veneta.' The painting portrays a red-haired woman in a sumptuous gown with a rather enigmatic look on her face, perhaps contemplating her effect on the painter or subsequent viewers. [5] Act 2 of the comic opera The Mikado (1885) by Sir William Schwenk Gilbert (1836-1911) and Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900): 'My object all sublime / I shall achieve in time - / To let the punishment fit the crime — / The punishment fit the crime'. [6] Bouleversement: 'confusion'. [7] Lily Brayton (1876-1953) and her husband Oscar Asche (1871-1936) were a famous acting duo who played major roles in several of Shakespeare's plays. [8] Harcourt Williams (1880-1957) acted with many of the famous actors of his day and became director of the Old Vic Theatre in 1929. 58 FRANK HARRIS

[1] [2] [3] 4

See No. 11, pp. 56-7. See No. 44, pp. 229-35. See No. 17, p. 80-1. One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watt-Dunton, has been kind enough to send me an article contributed to Colbourn's Magazine in 1873, in which he declares that 'Shakespeare seems to have kept a sort of Hamlet notebook, full of Hamlet thoughts, of which "To be or not to be" may be taken as the type. These he was burdened with. These did he cram into Hamlet as far as he could, and then he tossed the others indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies and histories, perfectly regardless of the character who 358

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

uttered them.' Though Mr. Watts-Dunton sees that some of these 'Hamlet thoughts' are to be found in Macbeth and Prospero and Claudio, he evidently lacks the key to Shakespeare's personality, or he would never have said that Shakespeare tossed these reflections 'indiscriminately into other plays.' Nevertheless the statement itself is interesting, and deserves more notice than has been accorded to it. 5 Cf. Sonnet 122 with its 'full character'd' [line 2] and 'razed oblivion' [line 7]. [6] John 8:7. 7 The critics are at variance over this ending, and, indeed, over the whole play. Coleridge says that 'our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape'; for 'cruelty with lust and damnable baseness cannot be forgiven' [p. 80 above]. Mr. Swinburne, too, regrets the miscarriage of justice; the play to him is a tragedy, and should end tragically with the punishment of the 'autotype of the huge national vice of England' [p. 194 above]. Perhaps, however, Puritan hypocrisy was not so widespread or so powerful in the time of Shakespeare as it is nowadays; perhaps, too, Shakespeare was not so good a hater as Mr. Swinburne, nor so strenuous a moralist as Coleridge was, at least in theory. In any case it is evident that Shakespeare found it harder to forgive Lucio, who had hurt his vanity, than Angelo, who pushed lust to outrage and murder, which strange, yet characteristic, fact I leave to the mercy of future commentators. Mr. Sidney Lee regards Measure for Measure as 'one of Shakespeare's greatest plays' [but see p. 237 above]. Coleridge, however, thought it 'a hateful work'; it is also a poor work, badly constructed and for the most part carelessly written. In essence it is a mere tract against Puritanism, and in form a sort of Arabian Nights' Entertainment in which the hero plays the part of Haroun-alRaschid [see No. 41, note [3] above]. 59 CHARLOTTE PORTER [1]

'Do unto another as you would wish done unto you' (Matthew 7:12).

60 MARY SUDDARD [1] Ben Jonson (1572—1637) wrote two satirical comedies in which Puritans were mocked, the characters Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome in The Alchemist (1610) and Zeal-of-theLand Busy in Bartholomew Fair (1614). [2] Angelique Arnauld-d'Andilly, also known as Mere Angelique de Saint Jean (1624-1684), was a writer and the mother superior of the novices at Port-Royal-de-Paris and, later, the abbess of Port-Royal-des-Champs. The Cistercian convent Port-Royal-de-Paris was the center of Jansenism, a Roman Catholic sect whose belief system was not unlike that of the Calvinists. The convent was suppressed by Louis XIV in 1660 and later dissolved by the Archbishop of Paris in 1664. [3] St. Simeon Stylites of Syria (d. 596) was an early ascetic who lived on the tops of various pillars (Greek stylos: 'pillar') for sixty-eight years. Alfred Tennyson's (1809—92) poem 'St. Simeon Stylites' contains the lines 'For many weeks about my loins I wore / The rope that haled the buckets from the well, / Twisted as tight as I could knot the noose' (62-4). [4] See No. 29 above, note [2]. [5] Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte features a heroine of wit, passion, and determination. [6] Dorigen, wife of Arveragus in 'The Franklin's Tale' (Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), is notable for her married fidelity. [7] From part 7 of Alfred Tennyson's The Princess; A Medley (1847-53): 'Something wild within her breast / A greater than all knowledge, beat her down' (lines 222—3).

359

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION 8

For a development of the relations between Angelo and Isabella see F. V. Hugo's preface to Measure for Measure [edn 1862; Victor Hugo, Oeuvres, 18 vols (Paris, 1859-66)]. [9] See chapter 18 of The Scarlet Letter (1850): 'And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired'; see The Scarlet Letter, ed. Seymour Gross et al., 3rd edn (New York, 1988), pp. 136-7. [10] Samuel Butler (1613—80) wrote the verse satire Hudibras (written and published in three parts between 1662 and 1680), whose title character is a Presbyterian knight. [11] Charles Lamb (1775-1834), critic and essayist, is well-known for such works as Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare (1808) and The Essays ofEHa (1823). In a letter to William Wordsworth dated 26 April 1816, he wrote: . . . 'I am almost aftaid that Kubla Khan is an owl that won't bear daylight...' (The Selected Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. T. S. Matthews [New York, 1956], p. 139).

61 GEORGE SAINTSBURY [1] Francis Meres (1565-1647) wrote Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (1598), in which he referred to several works written by Shakespeare: 'As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Loue labors lost, his Lous Labors wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King lohn, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet'; see E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930), II, p. 194. [2] The clowns in, respectively: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. 62 ELMER EDGAR STOLL [1] See No. 27 for an example of Richard Grant White's criticism. [2] Henrik Ibsen (1828—1906) is famous for such plays dealing with contemporary social issues as A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1882), and An Enemy of the People (1882). Paul Hervieu (1857—1915) was a French novelist and playwright who, like Ibsen, used his plays to reveal social ills and to suggest remedies for them. Among his 'problem plays' were La Loi de I'homme (1897), Le Reveil (1905), and Connais-toi (1909). [3] Francisque Sarcey (1827—99), drama critic for the Opinion Nationale and Temps, believed in shaping popular opinion rather than in insisting on the observance of rigid rules. The quotation from Sarcey can be roughly translated as: 'the basic idea of the work is that money and the anxiety about money are the most vile things in the world .. . and that love is the best thing'. [4] For Sir Walter Raleigh, see No. 55. George Pierce Baker (1866-1935), educated at Harvard, taught playwriting at Harvard and Yale and wrote The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907). [5] For Augustus William von Schlegel, see No. 8; for Hermann Ulrici, see No. 22. [6] Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, p. 63. See No. 32. 7 Generally, to be sure, Mr. Wendell is not to be reckoned among those who cling to anachronisms or perpetrate them anew. [For Barrett Wendell on Measure for Measure, see No. 42.] [8] For Raleigh, see No. 55, p. 276. 360

MEASURE FOR MEASURE [9]

Homme moyen sensuel: 'average feeling man'.

64 C. E. MONTAGUE [1]

[2]

[3] [4]

[5]

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman (1860-1937) was a wealthy and influential patron and theatre manager in Ireland and England from the end of the nineteenth century until her death. She founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (1904) and ran a repertory company at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester (1908-17). William Poel (1852-1934), actor, director, and manager, founded the Elizabethan Stage Society, which produced the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with Elizabethan settings and stage conventions. See No. 31, pp. 161-7. Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) wrote two poems inspired by the plight of Shakespeare's 'dejected Mariana' of 'the moated grange' (3.1.264—5): 'Mariana' (1830) and 'Mariana in the South' (1832). Chaucer's pilgims meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark in the 'General Prologue' to The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400).

65 EDGAR C. MORRIS [1]

See No. 61, note [1] above.

67 BRANDER MATTHEWS [1]

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) is author of the 'sex-problem play' The Honest Whore (with Thomas Dekker [c.1572-1632], Part I 1604), and John Marston (1576-1634) of The Dutch Courtesan (1605). [2] Alexandre Dumas pere (1802—70) wrote dozens of plays and novels, including Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1839), a prose drama in five acts. [3] Eugene Scribe (1791-1861) was the major creator of what came to be known as the 'wellmade play', in which logical and artificially-contrived plots dominated character and all else. [4] See No. 57, p. 287. [5] Robert Armm (c. 1580—1612) was one of the important actors of Shakespeare's company, succeeding Will Kempe as the chief comedian. Kempe, who was probably the original Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing (1598—99), left the company in 1600. [6] See No. 41, p. 214. 68 WILLIAM WINTER [1]

The great Polish actress Helena Modjeska played the role of Isabella in seventeen US cities between 1887 and 1898 (Eccles, op. cit., p. 473). [2] The heroine of La Dame aux Camelias (Camille, 1852), by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-95), is a courtesan named Marguerite Gauthier. [3] MagAa (Die Heimat, or 'home', 1893) by Hermann Sudermann (1857—1928) is a play representing the conflict between bourgeois mores and bohemian artists. [4] Winter made it even clearer that he did not agree with Modjeska by appending a long response he had made 'at the time of Modjeska's protest' (p. 396) in February 1898 that concluded: 'Actors are not expected to furnish "lessons." The Province of the Stage is 361

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Art, and the handmaidens of Art are Beauty and Romance. If that be a "kintergarten" doctrine, then by all means let us have the "kintergarten!" At least it could be visited without risk of nausea at the ribaldry of an insensate libertine or the woes of a sentimental drab' (p. 397). 69 LAFCADIO HEARN [1] William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) was an Irish historian, whose History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869) was a popular treatise on the relationship between theology and morality. 70 BENEDETTO CROCE [1] Hyacinth was a youth loved and accidentally killed by Apollo in Greek mythology. Croce seems to be referring to Jachimo in Cymbeline. [2] Nunc et semper, 'now and always'.

362

Select Bibliography

The bibliography lists all books and articles cited in the Introduction, all of those reprinted in the seventy selections, a selection of those referred to in the headnotes and Notes to the selections, and some studies and editions of general interest not cited elsewhere. Other books and articles referred to in this volume may be found through the General Index.

(A) HISTORIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM AND BACKGROUND STUDIES Abrams, M.H. (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, New York. Bullough, Geoffrey (ed.) (1957-75) 'Measure for Measure', Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols, London, II, pp. 399—530. Chambers, E. K. (1930) William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols, Oxford. Champion, Larry S. (1993) The Essential Shakespeare: An Annotated Bibliography of Major Modern Studies, 2nd edn, New York. Cunningham, Peter (1842) Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, London. Douce, Francis (1807) Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners, 2 vols, London. Farmer, Richard (1767) An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, Cambridge. Geckle, George L. (1965) 'A History of the Literary Criticism of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia. (ed.) (1970) Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'Measure for Measure': A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N. J. Hartnoll, Phyllis (ed.) (1983) The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 4th edn, Oxford. Hunter, G. K. (1997) English Drama 1586-1642: The Age of Shakespeare, The Oxford History of English Literature, vol. VI, Oxford. Jamieson, Michael (1972) 'The Problem Plays, 1920—1970: A Retrospect'. Shakespeare Survey, 25: 1-10. Kenrick, William (1765) A Review of Doctor Johnson's New Edition of Shakespeare: in which the Ignorance, or Inattention, of that Editor is exposed, and the Poet defended from the Persecution of his Commentators, London. Langbaine, Gerard (1691) An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, London. Law, Ernest (1911) Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, London. Meres, Francis (1598) Palladis Tamis: Wits Treasury, London. Miles, Josephine (1976) The Problem of'Measure for Measure': A Historical Investigation, New York. Pollard, A. W. and Redgrave, G. R. (1976-1991), A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640, rev. edn, ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols, London. Price, Jonathan R. (1969) 'Measure for Measure' and the Critics: Towards a New Approach'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 20: 179-204. 363

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Sajdak, Bruce T. (ed.) (1992) Shakespeare Index: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Articles on the Plays 1959-1983, New York. Skottowe, Augustine (1824) The Life of Shakspeare; Enquiries into the Originality of His Dramatic Plots and Characters, 2 vols, London. Smith, Robert M. (1950) 'Interpretations of Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Quarterly 1: 20818. Sprague, Arthur Colby (1944) Shakespeare and the Actors, Cambridge, Mass. Stead, C. K. (ed.) (1971) Shakespeare: 'Measure for Measure', Casebook Series, London and Basingstoke. Vickers, Brian (ed.) (1974-81) Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623-1801, 6 vols, London and Boston. (1993) Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels, New Haven and London. Wharton, T. F. (1989) Measure for Measure, The Critics Debate, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. (B) EDITIONS AND PLAYTEXTS (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER) Shakespeare, William (1623) Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, London. Davenant, Sir William (1662) The Law against Lovers, London. Adaptation of Measure for Measure. Gildon, Charles (1700) Measure for Measure, or Beauty the Best Advocate. Adaptation of Measure for Measure. Rowe, Nicholas (ed.) (1709) The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols, London. 'Volume the Seventh' (1710) contains both Charles Gildon's 'An Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England' and his 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare', which includes his comments on Measure for Measure, pp. 291—8. Pope, Alexander (ed.) (1723—5) The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols, London. Theobald, Lewis (ed.) (1733) The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols, London. Hanmer, Sir Thomas (ed.) (1743—44) The Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols, Oxford. Johnson, Samuel (ed.) (1765) The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added Notes by Sam. Johnson, London. and Steevens, George (eds) (1778) The Plays of William Shakespeare, 10 vols, London. Contains Edmond Malone's An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakespeare Were Written. Capell, Edward (ed.) (1768) Mr. William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, 10 vols, London. Malone, Edmond (ed.) (1790) The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes, London. Steevens, George (ed.) (1793) The Plays of William Shakespeare, 15 vols, London. Inchbald, Mrs. Elizabeth (ed.) (1808) Measure for Measure ... As Performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, The British Theatre (1806—9), London. Bowdler, Thomas (ed.) (1818) The Family Shakspeare, in Ten Volumes, London; 3rd edn, 8 vols, London, 1823. Oxberry, W. (ed.) (1822) Measure for Measure. ... With Prefatory Remarks. ... As It Is Performed at the Theatres Royal, The New English Drama (1818-24), vol. 16, London, 1823. D[aniel], Gfeorge] (ed.) (c.1826) Measure for Measure. A Comedy, in Five Acts. ...As now Performed at the Theatres-Royal London; in Vol. VII of Cumberland's British Theatre, London,

1823-31. 364

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Knight, Charles (ed.) (1838-43) The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere, 8 vols, London; 2nd edn, revised, 8 vols, London, 1867. Collier, James (ed.) (1842—44) The Works of William Shakespeare, 8 vols, London. Verplanck, Gulian C. (ed.) (1847) Shakespeare's Plays: With His Life. 3 vols, New York. Halliwell, J. O. (1850) The Complete Works of Shakspere, 3 vols, New York. Hudson, H. N. (ed.) (1851—56) The Works of Shakespeare, 11 vols, Boston and Cambridge, Mass. Singer, Samuel Weller (ed.) (1856) The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. The Text Carefully Revised with Notes by Samuel Weller Singer F. S. A. The Life of the Poet and Critical Essays on the Plays by William Watkiss Lloyd, 2nd edn, 10 vols, London. Contains Lloyd's 'Critical Essay on Measure for Measure', vol. I. Furnivall, F. J. (introduction by) (1877) The Leopold Shakspere, London. Irving, Henry and Marshall, Frank A. (eds) (1888-90) The Works of William Shakespeare, 8 vols, London. Morley, Henry (ed.) (1889) Measure for Measure, Cassell's National Library, London. Herford, C. H. (ed.) (1899) The Works of Shakespeare, The Eversley Edition, 10 vols, London. Bullen, A. H. (ed.) (1904—7) The Works of William Shakespeare. In Ten Volumes. The Stratford Town Edition, Stratford-on-Avon. Contains Robert Bridges's 'On the Influence of the Audience', vol. X. Hart, H. C. (ed.) (1905) Measure for Measure, The Arden Shakespeare, London. Chambers, E. K. (ed.) (1906) Measure for Measure, The Red Letter Shakespeare, London. Lee, Sidney (gen. ed.) (1907) The Complete Works oj Shakespeare, The University Shakespeare, 40 vols, London and New York; also known as the Renaissance Shakespeare. Contains Andrew George's 'Introduction' to Measure for Measure, vol. XII. Porter, Charlotte and Clarke, Helen A. (eds) (1909) Measure, for Measure, First Folio Edition, New York. Morris, Edgar C. (ed.) (1912) Measure for Measure, The Tudor Shakespeare, New York. Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur and Wilson, J. Dover (eds) (1922) Measure for Measure, The New Shakespeare, Cambridge. Craig, Hardin (ed.) (1951) The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Glenview, Illinois. Harrison, G. B. (ed.) (1952) Shakespeare: The Complete Works, New York. Lever, J. W. (ed.) (1965) Measure for Measure, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series, London and Cambridge, Mass. Eccles, Mark (ed.) (1980) Measure for Measure, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, New York. Bawcutt, N. W. (ed.) (1991) Measure for Measure, The Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford. Gibbons, Brian (ed.) (1991) Measure for Measure, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge. Bevington, David (ed.) (1997) The Complete Works of Shakespeare, updated 4th ed., New York. Evans, G. Blakemore et al. (eds) (1997) The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd. edn, Boston. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. (eds) (1997) The Norton Shakespeare, New York. Contains introduction to Measure for Measure by Katharine Eisaman Maus. Nagarajan, S. (ed.) (2nd rev. edn, 1998), Measure for Measure: With New and Updated Critical Essays and a Revised Bibliography, The Signet Classic Shakespeare, New York. (C) CRITICISM AND OTHER SECONDARY WORKS Adelman, Janet (1989) 'Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure'. In Holland, Norman N. et al. (eds) Shakespeare's Personality, Berkeley, 1989, pp. 151—74; rev. in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays; 'Hamlet' to 'The Tempest', New York, 1992, pp. 76—102. 365

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Agate, James (1943) Brief Chronicles: A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in Actual Performance, London. Albrecht, Louis (1914) Neue Untersuchungen zu Shakespeares Mass fur Mass, Berlin. Bagehot, Walter (1853) 'Shakespeare — The Man'. Literary Studies, ed. Richard Holt Hutton (1879), 2 vols, London; I, pp. 126-72. Baines, Barbara J. (1990) 'Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure'. Studies in English Literature, 30: 283-301. Barton, Anne (1997) 'Introduction' to Measure for Measure, The Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 579— 83; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Evans, G. Blakemore (1997). Battenhouse, Roy W. (1946) 'Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement'. PMLA.61: 1029-59. — (1978) 'Measure for Measure and King James'. CLIO, 7: 93-215. (1978) 'On Shakespeare's Timely Timelessness'. CLIO, 7: 220-2. Bawcutt, N. W. (1984) ' "He Who the Sword of Heaven Will Bear": The Duke versus Angelo in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 37: 89—97. Belgion, Montgomery (1938) 'The Measure of Kafka'. The Criterion, 18: 13-28. Bennett, Josephine Waters (1966) 'Measure for Measure' as Royal Entertainment, New York and London. Bentley, Eric (ed.) (1948) The Importance of Scrutiny, New York. Berger, Harry, Jr. (1997) 'What Does the Duke Know and When Does He Know It? Carrying the Torch in Measure for Measure'. In Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson, Stanford, pp. 335-426. Bernthal, Craig A. (1992) 'Staging Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of Measure for Measure'. Studies in English Literature, 32: 247—69. Berry, Ralph (1976/7) 'Language and Structure in Measure for Measure'. University of Toronto Quarterly, 46: 147-61. (1977) 'Measure for Measure on the Contemporary Stage'. Humanities Association Review, 28: 241-7. Birje-Patil, J. (1969) 'Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Studies, 5: 106—11. Bloom, Harold (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York. Boas, Frederick S. (1896) Shakspere and his Predecessors, London. Boose, Linda (1995) 'The Priest, the Slanderer, the Historian and the Feminist'. English Literary Renaissance, 25: 320-40. Bradbrook, M. C. (1941) 'Authority, Truth, and Justice in Measure for Measure'. Review of English Studies, 17: 385-99. Bradley, A. C. (1904) Shakesperean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, London; 2nd ed. revised, London, 1905. Brandes, Georg (1898) William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, 2 vols, London. Bridges, Robert (1907) 'On the Influence of the Audience'; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Bullen, A. H. (1904-7). Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space; reprinted Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972. Brooke, Stopford A. (1913) Ten More Plays of Shakespeare, London and New York. Brown, Carolyn E. (1986) 'Erotic Religious Flagellation and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure'. English Literary Renaissance, 16: 139—65. (1986) 'Measure for Measure: Isabella's Beating Fantasies'. American Imago, 43 (1986), 6780. (1989) 'Measure for Measure: Duke Vincentio's "Crabbed Desires"'. Literature and Psychology, 35: 66-88. Brown, John Russell (1957) Shakespeare and His Comedies. 366

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Cacicedo, Alberto (1995) ' "She is fast my wife": Sex, Marriage, and Ducal Authority in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Studies, 23: 187—209. Campbell, Oscar James (1943) Shakespeare's Satire, New York. Capell, Edward (1779-83) Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 3 vols, London. Chalmers, George (1799) A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers, London. Chambers, E. K. (1925) Shakespeare: A Survey, London. Chambers, R. W. (1937) 'The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure'. Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, Proceedings of the British Academy, 23: 135— 92; rev. and repr. in Man's Unconquerable Mind, London, 1939, pp. 277-310. Clarke, Charles Cowden (1863) Shakespeare-Characters; Chiefly Those Subordinate, London. (1873) 'Shakespeare's Philosophers and Jesters'. The Gentleman's Magazine, 234 (May): 514-39. Coghill, Nevill (1955) 'Comic Form in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 25: 14—27. Cole, Howard C. (1965) 'The "Christian" Context of Measure for Measure'. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 64: 425-51. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1835) Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Two Volumes, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, London. (1836-9) The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Collected and Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, Esq. M.A., 4 vols, London. — (1960) Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London; 1st edn, 1930. (1990) The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, Bollingen Series LXXV, vol. 14, Princeton, 1990. Cox, John D. (1983) 'The Medieval Background of Measure for Measure'. Modern Philology, 81: 1-13. Croce, Benedetto (1920) Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille, trans. Douglas Ainslie, New York. David, Richard (1951) 'Shakespeare's Comedies and the Modern Stage'. Shakespeare Survey, 4: 129-38. Dawson, Anthony B. (1988) 'Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 39: 328—41. Dodds, W. M. T. (1946) 'The Character of Angelo in Measure for Measure'. Modern Language Review, 41: 246-55. Dollimore, Jonathan (1985) 'Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure'. In Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan (eds) Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, Ithaca, New York, pp. 78-87. Doran, Madeleine (1954) Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama, Madison. Dowden, Edward (1875) Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, 3rd edn rev., London, c. 1879; 4th edn, London, 1879. (1885) 'Shakspeare's Portraiture of Women'. The Contemporary Review, 47: 517—35. Drake, Nathan (1817) Shakspeare and His Times, 2 vols, London. Dryden, John (1672) 'Epilogue to the Second Part of The Conquest of Granada', The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden, ed. Edmond Malone, 3 vols, London, 1800; I, part I, pp. 233-4. Durham, Willard H. (1941) 'What Art Thou, Angelo?'. Studies in the Comic: University of California Publications in English, 8: 155—74. Ellis-Fermor, U. M. (1936) The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation, London. Empson, William (1951) 'Sense in Measure for Measure'. The Structure of Complex Words, London, pp. 270-88. 367

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Fergusson, Francis (1952) 'Philosophy and Theatre in Measure for Measure'. Kenyan Review, 14: 103-20; repr. in Fergusson's The Human Image in Dramatic Literature, New York, 1957, pp. 126-43. Frye, Northrop (1957) Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton. (1983) The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, Toronto; repr. with new introduction, 1993. Gelb, Hal (1971) 'Duke Vincentio and the Illusion of Comedy or All's Not Well That Ends Well'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 22: 25-34. Geckle, George L. (1967) 'Coleridge on Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 18: 71—3. (1971) 'Shakespeare's Isabella'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 22: 163—8. (1995) Review of Measure for Measure. Shakespeare Bulletin, 13 (Winter): 12-14. George, Andrew (1907) 'Introduction' to Measure for Measure; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Lee, Sidney (1907). Gervinus, G. G. (1863) Shakespeare Commentaries, 2 vols, trans. F. E. Bunnett, London; revised edn, London, 1875. Gildon, Charles (1710) 'An Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England' and 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare'; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Rowe, Nicholas (1709). Gless, Darryl J. (1979) 'Measure for Measure,' the Law, and the Convent, Princeton. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988) 'Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne'. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley, pp. 129—63. Griffith, Mrs. Elizabeth (1775) The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated, London. Hallam, Henry (1837—39) Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, 4 vols, London. Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. (1880) Memoranda on Shakespeare's Comedy of 'Measure for Measure', London. Hamilton, Donna B. (1970) 'The Duke in Measure for Measure: "I Find an Apt Remission in Myself '. Shakespeare Studies, 6: 175—83. Harding, Davis P. (1950) 'Elizabethan Betrothals and Measure for Measure'. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 49: 139—58. Harris, Frank (1909) The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story, New York; 2nd edn London, 1911. Hawkins, Harriet (1974) 'What Kind of Pre-contract had Angelo? A Note on Some Nonproblems in Elizabethan Drama'. College English, 36: 173—9. (1978) '"The Devil's Party": Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 31: 105-13. (1987) 'Measure for Measure', Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare, Boston. Hayne, Victoria (1993) 'Performing Social Practice: The Example of Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 44: 1-29. Hazlitt, William (1816) Review of Measure for Measure in The Examiner. Reprinted in A View of the English Stage, London, 1818. (1817) Characters of Shakespear's Plays, London. (1930-4) The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols, London. Hearn, Lafcadio (1915) Interpretations of Literature, ed. John Erskine, 2 vols, New York; London, 1916. Howard, Jean E. (1983) 'Measure for Measure and the Restraints of Convention'. Essays in Literature, 10: 149-58. Howarth, Herbert (1965) 'Shakespeare's Flattery in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 16: 29-37. 368

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Hunter, G. K. (1973) 'Italian Tragicomedy on the English Stage'. Renaissance Drama, NS 6: 123-48. Hunter, Joseph (1845) New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, 2 vols, London. Hyman, Lawrence W. (1975) 'The Unity of Measure for Measure'. Modern Language Quarterly, 3: 3-20. Jameson, Anna Brownell (1832) Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical, 2 vols, London; new edn, London, 1879. Kcrnan, Alvin (1995) 'The King's Prerogative and the Law: "Measure for Measure", Whitehall, December 26, 1604'. In Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613, New Haven, pp. 50-70. Kirsch, Arthur C. (1975) 'The Integrity of Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 28: 89-105 Knight, G. Wilson (1930) 'Measure for Measure and the Gospels', The Wheel of Fire, London, pp. 73-96. Knights, L. C. (1942) 'The Ambiguity of Measure for Measure'. Scrutiny, 10: 222-33. Krieger, Murray (1951) 'Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Comedy'. PMLA, 66: 775-84. Lang, Andrew (1891) 'The Comedies of Shakespeare. . .. VI. Measure for Measure'. Harper's New Monthly Magazine 84: 62-77. Lanier, Gregory W. (1987) 'Physic That's Bitter to Sweet End: The Tragicomic Structure of Measure for Measure'. Essays in Literature, 14: 15—36. Lascelles, Mary (1953) Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure', London. Lawrence, William Witherle (1931) Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, New York; 2nd edn, 1960. Leavis, F. R, 'The Greatness of Measure for Measure'. Scrutiny, 10: 234—47. Lechter-Siegel, Amy (1992) 'Isabella's Silence: The Consolidation of Power in Measure for Measure'. In DiCesare, Mario (ed.) Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from the 21st Annual Conference, Binghamton, New York, pp. 371-80. Lee, Sidney (1898) A Life of William Shakespeare, New York; revised edn London and New York, 1916. Leech, Clifford (1950) 'The "Meaning" of Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 3: 66—73. Lennox, Charlotte Ramsay (1753—54) Shakespear Illustrated: or the Novels and Histories, On which the Plays of Shakespear Are Founded, Collected and Translated from the Original Authors, with Critical Remarks, 3 vols, London; I, 21—37. Levin, Richard (1974) 'The King James Version of Measure for Measure'. CLIO, 3: 129—63. (1978) 'Another King James Version of Measure for Measure'. CLIO, 7: 217-19. Levin, Richard A. (1982) 'Duke Vincentio and Angelo: Would "A Feather Turn the Scale"?'. Studies in English Literature, 22: 257—70. Lewis, Cynthia (1983) '"Dark Deeds Darkly Answered": Duke Vincentio and Judgment in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 34: 271-89. Lloyd, William Watkiss (1856) 'Critical Essay on Measure for Measure'; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Singer, Samuel Weller (1856). Luce, Morton (1906) A Handbook to the Works of William Shakespeare, London; 2nd edn, revised, London, 1907. Mabie, Hamilton Wright (1990) William Shakespeare: Poet, Dramatist, and Man, New York and London. MacFarlane, Linda (1993) 'Heads you win tails I lose'. Critical Survey, 5: 77—82. Marcus, Leah S. (1988) 'London'. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 160-211. Marshall, Frank A. (1889) 'Stage History' of Measure for Measure, vol. V; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Irving, Henry, and Marshall, Frank A. (1888-90). 369

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION Masefield, John (1911) William Shakespeare, London and New York. Mason, John Monck (1807) Comments on the Several Editions of Shakespeare's Plays, Extended to Those of Malone and Steevens, Dublin. Matthews, Brander (1913) Shakspere as a Playwright, New York. McCluskie, Kathleen (1985) 'The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure'. In Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan (eds) Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, Manchester, pp. 88—108. Mincoff, Marco (1966) 'Measure for Measure: A Question of Approach'. Shakespeare Studies, 2: 141-52. Montague, C. E. (1911) Dramatic Values, London; 2nd edn London. Moulton, Richard (1903) The Moral System of Shakespeare, New York. Mullaney, Steven (1988) 'Apprehending Subjects, or the Reformation in the Suburbs'. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, Chicago and London; repr. Ann Arbor, 1995, pp. 88-115. Nagarajan, S. (1963) 'Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 14: 115-19. (1998) 'Measure for Measure on Stage and Screen', New York, pp. 180-211; see (B) Editions and Play texts, Nagarajan, S. (1998). Nathan, Norman (1956) 'The Marriage of Duke Vincentio and Isabella'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 7: 43-5. Nuttall, A. D.(1968) 'Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?'. Shakespeare Studies, 4: 231-51. (1975) 'Measure for Measure: The Bed-Trick'. Shakespeare Survey, 28: 51—6. Ornstein, Robert (1957) 'The Human Comedy: Measure for Measure'. University of Kansas City Review, 24 (Autumn): 15—22; repr. in Ornstein's The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Madison, 1960, pp. 250-60. (ed.) (1961) Discussions of Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, Boston. Paris, Bernard J. (1981) 'The Inner Conflicts of Measure for Measure: A Psychological Approach'. The Centennial Review, 35: 266—76 Pater, Walter (1874) 'A Fragment on Measure for Measure'. The Fortnightly Review, NS 16 (July—Dec.): 652—8; reprinted with slight revisions in Appreciations: With an Essay on Style, 2nd edn, London, 1889. Pepys, Samuel (18 February 1662) The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970; III, 32. Pope, Elizabeth Marie (1949) 'The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 2: 66—82. Porter, Charlotte (1909) 'Introduction' to Measure for Measure; see B. Editions and Playtexts, Porter, Charlotte, and Clarke, Helen A. (1909). P. P. (1822) 'Remarks' on Measure for Measure; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Oxberry, W. (1822). Pye, Henry James (1807) Comments on the Commentators of Shakespear, London. Raleigh, Walter (1907) Shakespeare, English Men of Letters, New York and London. Ranald, Margaret Loftus (1979) ' "As Marriage Binds, and Blood Breaks": English Marriage and Shakespeare'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 30: 68—81 Reid, Stephen A. (1970) 'A Psychoanalytic Reading of Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure'. Psychoanalytic Review, 57: 263—82. Richardson, William (1789) Essays on Shakespeare's Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstajf, and on His Imitation of Female Characters, London. Riefer, Marcia (1984) '"Instruments of Some Mightier Member": The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 35: 157-69. 370

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Ritson, Joseph. (1783) Remarks, Critical and Illustrative, on the Text and Notes of the Last Edition ofShakspere, London. Rossiter, A. P. (1961) 'The Problem Plays'. Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey, London, pp. 108-28. Sachs, Hanns (1939) 'The Measure in Measure for Measure'. The American Imago, 1: 60—81. Saintsbury, George (1910) 'Shakespeare: Life and Plays'. In Ward, A. W. and Waller, A. R. (eds) The Cambridge History of English Literature , vol. V, Cambridge. Sale, Roger (1968) 'The Comic Mode of Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 19: 55— 61. Schanzer, Ernest (1960) 'The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 13: 81-9. (1963) The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of 'Julius Caesar', 'Measure for Measure', 'Antony and Cleopatra', London. Schlegel, Augustus William von (1815) A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2 vols, London; revised in one volume by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, London, 1846. Scott, Margaret (1982) ' "Our City Institutions": Some Further Reflections on the Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure'. ELH, 49: 790-804. Shaw, Bernard (1898) Preface to Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. By Bernard Shaw. The First Volume, containing the three Unpleasant Plays, London. (1898) 'Shakespear's Merry Gentlemen'. The Saturday Review, (26 February), 291-2. (1905) 'Bernard Shaw Abashed'. The Daily News, (17 April), 12. (1909) 'Some Misconceptions Concerning Shaw' by Felix Grendon. Poet Lore, 20: 376— 86; Shaw quoted on p. 382. (1958) Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West, New York. (1961) Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson, New York. Sitwell, Edith (1948) A Notebook on William Shakespeare, London. Skura, Meredith (1979) 'New Interpretations for Interpretation in Measure for Measure'. Boundary 2, 7: 39-59. (1981) The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process, New Haven. Snider, D. J. (1875) 'Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure"'. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 9: 412-25; rev. and repr. in System of Shakespeare's Dramas, 2 vols, St. Louis, 1877. Stevenson, David L. (1956) 'Design and Structure in Measure for Measure: A New Appraisal'. ELH, 23: 256-78. (1959) The Role of James I in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure'. ELH 26: 188-208. (1966) The Achievement of Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure', Ithaca, New York. Stoll, Elmer Edgar (1909-10) 'Anachronism in Shakespeare Criticism'. Modern Philology, 7: 119; MM (April 1910), 8-9. (1944) 'All's Well and Measure for Measure', From Shakespeare to Joyce: Authors and Critics; Literature and Life, New York, pp. 235—68. Suddard, Sarah Julie Mary (1909) 'The Poet and the Puritan'. The Contemporary Review 96: 713-21; repr. as 'Measure for Measure as a Clue to Shakespeare's Attitude towards Puritanism' in Keats Shelley and Shakespeare: Studies & Essays in English Literature, Cambridge, 1912, pp. 136-52. Sundelson, David (1981) 'Misogyny and Rule in Measure for Measure'. Women's Studies, 9: 8391. Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1880) A Study of Shakespeare, London. (written 1905) Shakespeare, London, 1909. 371

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Symons, Arthur (1889) 'Introduction' to Measure for Measure, vol. V; see (B) Editions and Playtexts, Irving, Henry and Marshall, Frank A. (1888—90). Reprinted and rev. in Symons's Studies in the Elizabethan Drama, New York, 1919, and London, 1920. Sypher, Wylie (1950) 'Shakespeare as Casuist: Measure for Measure'. Sewanee Review, 58: 262— 80. Taylor, Mark (1994) 'Farther Privileges: Conflict and Change in Measure for Measure'. Philological Quarterly, 73: 169-93. Tennenhouse, Leonard (1982) 'Representing Power: Measure for Measure in Its Time'. Genre, 15: 139-56. Tillyard, E. M. W. (1949) Shakespeare's Problem Plays, Toronto; rpt. London, 1950, with different pagination. Toole, Willliam (1966) Shakespeare's Problem Plays: Studies in Form and Meaning, The Hague. Traversi, D. A. (1942), 'Measure for Measure'. Scrutiny, 11: 40-58. Tyrwhitt, Thomas (1766) Observations and Conjectures upon Some Passages of Shakespeare, Oxford. Ulrici, Hermann (1846) Shakspeare's Dramatic Art: And His Relation to Calderon and Goethe, trans. A. J. W. Morrison, London; 3rd edn tr. L. Dora Schmitz, 2 vols, London, 1876. Upton, John (1746) Critical Observations on Shakespeare, London; 2nd edn 1748. Ure, Peter (1961) Shakespeare: The Problem Plays, Writers and Their Work: No. 140, London. Velz, Sarah C. (1972) 'Man's Need and God's Plan in Measure for Measure and Mark IV. Shakespeare Survey, 25: 37-44. Vessie, P. R. (1936) 'Psychiatry Catches up with Shakespeare'. Medical Record, 144: 141-5. Van Doren, Mark, (1939) Shakespeare, New York. Walkley, A. B. (1907) Drama and Life, London. Weil, Herbert S., Jr. (1970) 'Forms and Contexts in Measure for Measure'. Critical Quarterly, 12: 55-72. (1972) 'The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook's Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Survey, 25: 27—35. Wendell, Barrett (1894) William Shakspere: A Study in Elizabethan Literature, New York. Wentersdorf, Karl P. (1979) 'The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure: A Reconsideration'. Shakespeare Survey, 32: 129—44. Wheeler, Richard P (1981) Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn, Berkeley and Los Angeles. White, Richard Grant (1854) Shakespeare's Scholar, New York. Wilkes, George (1877) Shakespeare, From an American Point of View, London; New York; revised 3rd edn, New York, 1882. Williamson, Jane (1975) 'The Duke and Isabella on the Modern Stage'. In Price, Joseph G. and Willard, Helen D. (eds) The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, University Park, Penn., pp. 149-69. Williamson, Marilyn L. (1976) 'Oedipal Fantasies in Measure for Measure'. Michigan Academician, 9: 173-84. Wilson, Harold S. (1953) 'Action and Symbol in Measure for Measure and The Tempest'. Shakespeare Quarterly, 4: 375—84. Wilson, J. Dover (1932) The Essential Shakespeare, Cambridge. Winston, Mathew (1981) ' "Craft Against Vice": Morality Play Elements in Measure for Measure'. Shakespeare Studies, 14: 229-48. Winter, William (1913) The Wallet of Time, 2 vols, New York.

372

Index

The Index is arranged in three parts: I. References to Measure for Measure; II. References to Shakespeare's other works; III. General Index. All items are arranged alphabetically except 'Productions' in Part I, which are listed chronologically, and the subheading 'mentioned', which appears as a final subheading. In Part II references to individual characters that contain no specific mention of a play or plays are not repeated under the relevant works.

I MEASURE FOR MEASURE Abhorson, 8, 16, 38, 57, 141, 176, 213, 275, 276, 298, 326 Angelo, xxii-xxiii, 70-1, 164, 178, 179, 185, 222-4, 225, 278, 314; approved, 321; compared to Brutus (Julius Caesar), 240— 1; disapproved, 48, 59, 101-3; and the Duke, 208; hypocrite, 61-62, 100, 121-2, 157, 231-5; and Isabella, xxxi, 117-18, 128-32, 144-5, 149-50, 155-7, 257-8; and justice and mercy, 93, 155—8, 203; and the law, xxxii; and morality, xxxii; problem character, 269, 271-3; Puritan, 305—8; and purity, 246; self-deceived, 116—17, 119; sources of the character, 111-12; sympathetic, 124-6; villain, 189; mentioned, 2, 3, 4-5, 6-7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13-14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 35, 40, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57-8, 64-8, 72, 74-7, 80, 83, 87, 8891, 95, 104, 106, 109, 114, 115, 133, 1367, 137-9, 141, 143, 148, 151, 153-4, 15960, 162, 165, 166, 169, 174, 176-7, 180, 183-4, 187-8, 190, 194, 200, 202, 206, 209-13, 215-16, 221, 226-8, 237-8, 245, 247-52, 259-60, 261, 264-6, 268, 275, 373

277, 279, 281-5, 286-7, 290-2, 294, 2969, 301-2, 304, 310, 312, 313, 316, 318, 320, 324, 325-7, 327-31, 333-5, 342, 345n7.2, 357n54.3, 359n58.7 Barnardine, 149; approved, 51-2; as plot device, 274—5; mentioned, 6, 8, 16, 56, 62, 69, 87, 103, 109, 119, 141, 146, 149, 158-9, 163, 180, 183, 200, 202, 206, 21213, 234, 251, 282, 294, 298, 316, 321, 325-6, 331, 342 Bed-trick, xxviii-xxix, 3, 6-8, 11, 18-19, 223, 334, 347n20.3 Betrothal contracts, xxviii—xxix, 8, 11, 13, 22, 59, 18-19, 113-14, 116, 137, 223-4 Biographical readings, 16; see also related subheadings under Shakespeare (III General Index) Calvinism, 217—18, 312; see also Puritanism Catholicism, 190-1 Claudio, xxiii-xxv, 178, 203-4, 224, 241; and death, 341-2; and Isabella, 132; as welldrawn, 165-6; mentioned, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14-16, 18, 23, 32, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45,

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

48, 50, 51, 53-4, 56, 57, 59, 61, 65, 67, 71-2, 76, 78, 80, 82-3, 87, 88, 90, 100-1, 103, 108, 114, 116, 119, 124-6, 128-9, 130-1, 137-9, 142, 146, 150, 152, 15460, 162-5, 170, 179-80, 183-5, 187-9, 192, 202, 206-13, 215-17, 221, 225-8, 232-4, 237, 239, 240, 245, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 258, 260, 263, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 274, 277, 278, 282, 283, 284, 286, 287, 291, 292, 294, 296, 298, 306, 307, 312, 314, 316, 320, 321, 324, 325, 326, 328, 329, 330, 331, 333, 334, 345n6.2, 357n54.3 Comedy, Measure for Measure as, 15—18, 24—5, 72, 107-10, 119, 161-2, 172-3; see also Tragicomedy, Measure for Measure as Cultural Materialism, xxx, 21

Date of composition, 36-7, 84-5, 95, 99, 1067, 135-6, 137, 183, 185, 186, 193, 220-1, 309-10, 319, 323-4; see also Sources Death, xxiii-xxiv, 4, 97, 150, 183, 210-11, 226-7, 291-2, 330-1, 341-2 The Duke, 118-19, 222-3, 258; and Angelo, 157-8, 208; approved, 50; as Christ figure, xxix; compared to Hamlet, 289— 94; compared to Prospero, 270; as inert, 124; and Isabella, 23-4; and James I, 91; judicious, 99-100; and justice, 157-60; and justice and mercy, 173—5, 176—7; moralizer, 60—1; organizing and stabilizing force, xxi; philosopher, 91—3, 327— 8; as plot device, 231, 282; in recent criticism, 14—15; in religious criticism, xxix; and the Sermon on the Mount, 295-9; mentioned, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19-20, 20-2, 32, 33, 38, 401, 44, 45, 47, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59, 62, 67, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82-3, 88, 90, 95, 101-2, 104, 112, 114, 116-17, 120, 125, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135-6, 136-7, 139, 141, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 163, 169, 179, 180-1, 183, 184, 187-9, 190, 200, 201, 202, 206, 207, 211, 212, 213, 216, 227-8, 232-3, 2334, 234-5, 237, 246, 247-8, 248-50, 2502, 254, 255, 256, 259, 260, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 273, 274-5, 276, 277, 279, 281, 283-4, 286, 301, 306, 307, 374

312, 314, 316, 320-1, 325, 326, 329, 330, 331, 334 Elbow: compared to Dogberry, 108, 147; mentioned, 62, 69, 72, 83, 108, 125, 136, 140, 148, 159, 176, 202, 209, 223, 247, 276, 286, 320, 326, 334 Ending, xxv—xxviii, 4, 340—2, 359; and Mariana, 83, 91, 137 Epitia (character in Giraldi's Hecatommithi), as source for character of Isabella, 95, 111, 153, 206, 221, 237, 281; see also Hecatommithi Escalus: approved, 102-3; mentioned, 32, 40, 45, 62, 70, 100, 102, 116, 125, 136, 137, 148, 155, 158, 174, 176, 177, 180, 184, 202, 222, 223, 225, 231, 232, 247, 248, 249, 251, 277, 283, 293, 296, 298, 320, 325, 327, 329, 334 Family, 177-81 Feminist criticism, 19-21 Froth, 147-8; mentioned, 52, 57, 62, 103, 125, 190, 209, 223, 276, 320, 326 Giraldi Cinthio, G. B., see Hecatommithi Hecatommithi (Giraldi, Cinthio, G. B.), as source material, 1-2, 44, 47, 63, 69, 86, 88, 90, 95, 105, 111, 113, 140, 152-3, 162, 186, 200, 206, 237, 243, 277, 281, 345n5.10, 348-9; see also Sources Heptameron (Whetstone), as source material, 43, 85, 95, 111, 152, 162, 237, 243, 281, 296 Historical background, 37-8, 229-35, 236-8, 268-9, 298, 300-8, 311-12, 332-3; see also Sources Historical criticism, xxviii—xxix, xxx, 12—15, 21-2,311-12 Isabella, 137-40, 184-5, 203-4, 209-10, 224-6, 232-4, 241, 278-9, 284-5; and Angelo, 117-18, 149-50, 155-7, 257-8; approved, 34-5, 88-91, 101-2, 117-18, 124, 321; based on Giraldi's Epitia, 95, 111—12, 153, 206, 221, 237, 281; and chastity, xxviii, xxx—xxxi, 14, 16—17, 19, 66, 127—

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

8, 19, 44, 56, 59, 76-7, 95, 100, 101, 103, 34, 175-81, 210, 313, 339; compared to 111, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, Mariana, 133; compared to Portia, 74—9, 125, 139, 142, 143, 154, 155, 156, 157, 269; disapproved, 61, 127—34; idealiza160, 164, 174, 180, 187, 188, 189, 195, tion of, xix—xxi; as ideal woman, 34—5, 50, 53-5, 74-9, 141-5, 189-90, 199-200, 202, 203, 206, 208, 213, 215, 216, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227, 228, 234, 237, 239, 269; praised, 258-9; as Puritan, 302-8; and purity, 246—7; religious, 89—90; 243, 246, 250, 258, 260, 264, 266, 272, 273, 278, 281, 282-3, 284, 286, 287, 298, severe, 169—71; well-drawn, 164—5; 299, 306, 310, 312, 313, 320, 325, 327, mentioned, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 44, 45, 331, 335, 357n54.3 48, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58-9, 62, 63-5, 67, 71, Marriage-contracts, xxviii-xxix, 8, 11, 13, 22, 72, 73, 80, 82, 83, 87, 93, 97, 103, 109, 59, 18-19, 113-14, 116, 137, 223-4 114, 116, 120, 123, 126, 146, 154, 158, Measure for Measure: character of, 274—80; as comedy, 15-18, 24-5, 72, 107-10, 119, 160, 162, 163, 168, 183, 186, 187, 188, 192, 198, 202, 207-8, 211-12, 213, 215, 161-2, 172-3; compared to other works by Shakespeare, 182-5, 215-18; as dark, 216, 220, 227, 228, 231, 238, 239, 240, 243, 249-50, 252, 255, 256, 260, 261, 16, 168-71, 173, 201-4, 205-14, 220-2, 239-41, 242-3, 263-7, 323-31, 336-7, 264, 265, 266, 267, 270, 272, 273, 274, 338-9; as flawed, 45-6, 56-7, 58-9, 60, 72, 275, 276, 277, 282, 283, 287, 292, 294, 296, 298, 299, 310, 312, 316, 320, 324, 80-1, 82-3, 87-8, 96-8, 135^0, 261-2, 325, 326, 328-9, 330-1, 333, 334-5, 336, 286-7, 290, 309-10, 323-4, 333-6; popu346nl6.1, 347n20.3 larity of, 62, 85, 104, 282, 338-9; praised, 107-10, 257-8, 260, 313-15; as problem James I, as model for the Duke, 14—15, 20—2 play, 13, 15-18, 219-28, 268; quality of, Justice (and mercy), 44, 49-50, 70-3, 100-5, 44, 45-6, 107-10, 123, 161-2, 198, 206-7, 119-20, 152-60, 166-7, 173-81, 195, 282-3, 320-3, 323-4; as religious, 114, 247-51, 328-9 172-81, 190-1; as tragedy, 194-5, 242-3; as tragicomedy, 17—18, 201—4 Lucio, 108, 119, 120, 207, 251-2; approved, Mercy (and justice), 44, 49-50, 70-3, 100-5, 197; and Isabella, 143—4; 'meanest char119-20, 152-60, 166-7, 173-81, 195, acter in Shakespeare', 177—8; and the 247-51, 328-9 Provost, 145-7; mentioned, xxxii, 2, 6, Mistress Overdone, 62, 137, 147, 177, 180, 15, 16, 18, 32, 34, 37, 45, 50, 52, 56-7, 199, 231, 246, 251, 263, 264, 276, 307, 58, 59, 62, 72, 74-5, 78, 83, 88, 100, 103, 334 108, 117, 124, 129, 130, 131, 137, 138, Morality, 56-7, 58-9, 60, 70-1, 115-20, 163142, 148, 151, 155, 160, 164, 180, 183, 7, 244-53, 281-5, 312, 323-7, 329-30, 184, 196, 199, 200, 202, 206, 208, 209, 338-9 212, 213, 214, 216, 224, 231-2, 235, 241, 245, 247, 256, 260, 264, 265, 266, 269, New Historicism, 21—2 270, 273, 276, 284, 286, 293, 294, 297, 307, 310, 314, 320, 321, 325-6, 327, 328- Overdone, Mistress, 62, 137, 147, 177, 180, 9, 334, 359n58.7 199, 231, 246, 251, 263, 264, 276, 307, 334 Mariana: approved above Isabella, 133—4; and bed-trick, 18, 334; and the play's ending, Penal system, 158-9 83, 91, 137; and Isabella's chastity, 66, The Plague, 37 326; passionate but pure, 247; and Plot, 3-4, 45-6, 47-8, 72, 111-12, 123-4, 275, Tennyson's 'Mariana', 96, 183-4, 200, 321-2; see also Structure 212, 255, 269, 316; mentioned, 2, 3, 4, 6, Pompey, 148-9; disapproved, 103; 375

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

mentioned, 6, 16, 45, 52, 56, 58, 62, 100, 159, 199, 209, 213, 223, 231, 246, 251, 258, 263, 265, 276, 286, 292, 298, 307, 310, 316, 320, 321, 326, 328 Popularity of Measure for Measure, 62, 85, 104, 282, 338-9 Problem play, Measure for Measure as, 13, 15— 18, 219-28, 268 Productions (general comments), 22—4, 316— 18, 347n20.2; by King's Players (1604), 193; at Covent Garden (1816), 51-2; William Poel (1908), 22, 286-8, 316; Peter Brook (1950), 23; Michael Elliot (1963), 23; Tyrone Guthrie (1966), 23; John Barton (1970), 22, 23-4; Desmond Davis (1979, BBC television), 24; Michael Bogdanov (1985), 22; Nicholas Hytner (1987), 24; Steven Pimlott (1994), 24; Michael Boyd (1998), 24 Promos and Cassandra (Whetstone), as source material, 43-4, 63-9, 94-5, 199-200, 296-9, 309-10; mentioned, 41, 47, 83, 86, 88, 96, 105, 111, 140, 153, 154, 157, 162, 164, 166, 184, 186, 203, 206, 221, 231,237, 240,243,274,281 The Provost, 247; and Lucio, 145-7; mentioned, 8, 49, 57, 59, 126, 128, 141, 143, 148, 149, 155, 176, 180, 188, 192, 232, 251, 265, 275, 298 Psychoanalytic criticism, 19—20 Puritanism, 190-1, 217-18, 229-35, 300-8, 359; see also Calvinism Religious readings, xxix, 13—14; see also Measure for Measure: as religious; Morality; Sermon on the Mount

Sexuality, treatment of in Measure for Measure, 19-20 Sexually transmitted disease, 37 Sources, xxxi-xxxii, 39, 42-4, 47, 63-9, 94-5, 111-12, 140, 186-7, 205-6, 220-1, 231, 237, 239-40, 281; see also Date of composition; Hecatommithi (Giraldi, Cinthio, G. B.), as source material; Heptameron (Whetstone), as source material; Promos and Cassandra (Whetstone), as source material Structure, 3-4, 15-18, 321-2, 333-6; see also Plot Style, 320; see also related subheadings under Shakespeare (III General Index) Textual issues, 1.2.145-7, 31-2; 1.2.84 s.d., 31; 1.3.19-21, 32, 38; 2.1.172, 32-3; 2.3.402, 40; 2.4.24-6, 85; 3.1.117-22, 97-8; 3.1.120-7, 42-4, 55; 3.1.93-6, 40; 4.1.16, 195; 4.2.43, 38; 4.3.16, 33; 4.3.64-5, 33; 5.1.411, 38; 5.1.528-9, 40-1; 5.1.6-8, 40-1 Title, meaning of, 4-5, 5-6, 7, 9-11, 13, 44, 70, 104-5, 111, 120, 199, 228, 240, 243, 258, 261, 268-9; see also Sermon on the Mount Tragedy, Measure for Measure as, 194—5, 242— 3 Tragicomedy, Measure for Measure as, 17—18, 201-4 Vienna, corruption of, 136 Whetstone, George, 348n21.5; see also Promos and Cassandra (Whetstone), as source material

Sermon on the Mount, 5, 6, 13, 199-200, 295-9; see also Title, meaning of

II SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS (EXCLUDING MEASURE FOR MEASURE) As You Like It, 107, 152, 173, 197, 257, 264, 267, 291, 332, 341

All's Well That Ends Well, 9-10, 16, 17, 19, 31, 49, 119, 135, 137, 153, 168-9, 183-4, 198, 215-16, 219, 220, 227, 229, 231, 240, 242, 255, 259, 264, 266, 269, 309, 312, 321, 332-5

Bassanio (The Merchant of Venice), 183, 184, 259, 278 376

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Beatrice (Much Ado about Nothing), 2, 7, 169, 1 Henry VI, 342 3 Henry VI, 268 196, 197 Benedick (Much Ado about Nothing), 2, 108, Helena (A Midsummer Night's Dream), 169, 169, 196, 197, 216 183-4, 185, 198, 220, 224, 239, 256, 259, 336 Bertram (All's Well That Ends Well), 184, 185 Biron (Love's Labor's Lost), 195 Hob (Coriolanus), 37 Borachio (Much Ado about Nothing), 273 Hyacinth (Cymbeline), 341 Brutus (Julius Caesar), 183, 185, 240, 259, 270, lago (Othello), 341 291, 336 Imogen (Cymbeline), 127 Caliban (The Tempest), 51, 56 Calpurnia (Julius Caesar), 183 Julia (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 127 Cassius (Julius Caesar), 108 Juliet (Romeo and Juliet), 127 Claudius (Hamlet), 97, 183, 278, 342 Julius Caesar, 14, 16, 48, 108, 168, 182, 185, The Comedy of Errors, 172, 237, 322, 342 206, 215, 220, 240, 270, 291, 332 Cordelia (King Lear), 185, 202, 255-6, 259, 278, 331 King Lear (character), 103, 280, 292 King Lear, 5, 20, 31, 34, 82, 106, 110, 112, Coriolanus, 37, 61, 342 Cymbeline, 96, 99, 108, 153, 173, 289, 341, 342 202, 206, 244, 254-5, 267, 279, 323, 324, 327 Desdemona (Othello), 78, 127, 256, 270, 303, 319, 331 Love's Labor's Lost, 1, 107, 161, 265, 322, 342 Diana (All's Well That Ends Well), 137 Dick (Coriolanus), 37 Macbeth, 60, 82, 110, 124, 133, 206, 254, 289, Dogberry (Much Ado about Nothing), 62, 69, 292, 294, 316, 323, 324, 332 72, 83, 108, 133, 148, 184, 202, 223, 276, Malvolio (Twelfth Night), 169, 216 320, 326, 334 The Merchant of Venice, 5, 17, 44, 49, 75, 76, Doll Tearsheet (2 Henry IV, Henry V), 231 99, 101, 107, 120, 178, 197, 204, 216, Duncan (Macbeth), 254 228, 259, 269, 284, 307, 311, 332, 334 Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet), 196, 320 Falstaff (i and 2 Henry IV, The Merry Wives The Merry Wives of Windsor, 152, 172, 184, of Windsor), 34, 108, 113, 121, 169, 216, 186, 195, 257, 309 349 A Midsummer Night's Dream, 113, 173, 279 Miranda (The Tempest), 127 Gertrude (Hamlet), 183 Mistress (or Mrs.) Quickly (1 and 2 Henry IV, Gobbo (The Merchant of Venice), 184 Henry V), 184, 264, 334 Gonzalo (The Tempest), 301 Much Ado about Nothing, 1, 2, 49, 50, 62, 69, Gratiano (The Merchant of Venice), 320 72, 135, 148, 152, 154, 184, 197, 264, 312, 319, 321, 334 Hamlet (character), 37, 183, 197, 217, 239, 255, 289-94, 320, 358-9 Oliver (As You Like It), 88, 111, 209, 261 Hamlet, 16, 19, 38, 71, 82, 106, 124-5, 163, Ophelia (Hamlet), 78-9, 125, 183, 197, 293 166, 168, 182, 185, 204, 206, 207, 215, Orlando (As You Like It), 196 220, 233, 234, 240, 241, 242-3, 254, 268, Othello, 106, 107, 111, 112, 126, 178, 185, 206, 269, 273, 278, 283, 311, 319, 323-4, 332237, 254, 257, 306, 311, 319, 321, 323, 3 324, 333 1 and 2 Henry IV, 135, 342 2 Henry IV, 78, 135 Parolles (All's Well That Ends Well), 184 Henry V, 52, 57, 314, 342 Perdita (The Winter's Tale), 127 377

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Pericles, 1, 194, 209, 262, 310, 320 Polonius (Hamlet), 183 Portia (The Merchant of Venice), 7, 71, 74-9, 127, 129, 178, 183, 185, 216, 225, 239, 241, 259, 269, 278, 329, 334 Posthumus (Cymbeline), 341 Prospero (The Tempest), 56, 202, 270, 289, 291, 292, 316 Proteus (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 185, 189, 271

The Taming of the Shrew, 17, 37, 61, 172 The Tempest, 13, 19, 96, 107, 173, 268, 291, 292, 293, 301 Timon of Athens, 17, 34, 106, 206, 207, 323, 342 Titus Andronicus, 310, 319, 322 Troilus and Cressida, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 19, 1689, 194, 198, 220, 242-3, 255, 264, 266, 268, 279, 319, 323, 332-3, 335 Twelfth Night, 31, 37, 38, 107, 168, 172, 202, 240, 264, 269 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 45, 137, 173, 189, 203, 271, 310, 322, 342

Quickly, Mistress or Mrs. (I and 2 Henry IV, Henry V), 184, 264, 334 Romeo and Juliet, 18, 50, 72, 96, 110, 161, 168, 294, 312, 322, 332, 334 Rosalind (As You Like It), 7, 127, 196, 198 Rosaline (Love's Labor's Lost), 196

Valentine (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 45, 271 Viola (Twelfth Night), 127, 129, 256 Volumnia (Coriolanus), 185, 259

Shylock (The Merchant of Venice), 60, 76, 178, 216, 228, 307, 329, 334 Slender (The Merry Wives of Windsor), 320

The Winter's Tale, 1, 11, 13, 22, 24, 45, 173, 206, 272, 336, 341, 342

III GENERAL INDEX Abrams, M. H., 6 Adelman, Janet, 19-20 Africanus, Scipio, 344 Agate, James, 22-3 Angelo of the Netherlands, 112 Arcangelo, Andrea di Cione 351n31.2 Asche, Oscar, 288

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, 80—1, 99, 334 Belgion, Montgomery, 15 Bennett, Josephine Waters, 14 Berger, Harry, Jr., 14 Bernthal, Craig A., 22 Berry, Ralph, 20, 23-4 Blackstone, William, 260 Bloom, Harold, 15 Boas, Frederick S., 13, 219 Boccaccio, Giovanni, xxviii, 162 Bogdanov, Michael, 22 Boose, Lynda, 21 Bowdler, Thomas, 19, 58 Bradbrook, M. C., xxviii, xxix, 13 Bradley, A. C., 254 Bradshaw, Graham, xxxi—xxxii Brandes, Georg, 229, 289 Brayton, Lily, 287 Bridges, Robert, 271 Brook, Peter, 24

(Orcagna),

Bacon, Francis, 189, 191, 268-9, 270 Bagehot, Walter, 121 Baines, Barbara J., 20 Baker, George Pierce, 311 Barante, Baron de (Amable Guillaume Prosper Brugiere), 111 Barksted, William ('Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis'), 85 Barton, Anne, xviii, 23 Barton, John, 22, 23-4 Battenhouse, R. W., xxix, 13 Bawcutt, N. W., 15 378

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Brooke, Stopford A., 323 Brown, Carolyn E., 20 Brown, John Russell, 15 Brugiere, Amable Guillaume Prosper (Baron de Barante), 111 Burton, Robert, 20 Butler, Bishop Joseph, 117, 349n25.5 Cacicedo, Alberto, 21 Camp, Enoch E., 186 Campbell, Lord Chief Justice John, 189 Campbell, Oscar James, 15 Capell, Edward, 37, 343n3.4 Carrigan, Ann, xxxii Castaldo, Annalisa, xxxi-xxxii Chalmers, George, 91, 159 Chambers, E. K., 263 Chambers, R. W., 12-14 Charles the Bold of Burgundy, 111, 349 Chaucer, Geoffrey, xxvm, 43, 52, 182, 303, 312, 344n5.4 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 141 Coghill, Nevil, 13, 23 Cole, Howard C., 14 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6, 8, 9, 49, 52, 80, 87-8, 93, 95, 96, 109, 111, 113-14, 11516, 120, 123, 128, 133, 141, 153, 157, 161, 189, 195, 202, 214, 221, 227, 242, 259, 261, 281, 285, 289, 341, 347; Specimens of the Table Talk, 80, 116, 133, 186, 347n20.3 Collier, John Payne, 94, 109, 111, 347 Collins, William ('Dirge in Cymbeline'), 96 Coqueline, Benoit Constant, 206 Cox, John D., 14 Croce, Benedetto, 340 Cultural materialist criticism, xxx, 21 Cumberland's British Theatre, 70 Cunningham, Peter, 85, 347, 348n20.2

Dollimore, Jonathan, 21 Doran, Madeleine (Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama), xxix, 17— 18 Dorigen (character in 'The Franklin's Tale', Chaucer), 303 Douce, Francis, 42, 55 Dowden, Edward, 168 Drake, Nathan, 53, 190 Dryden, John, 1 Dumas, Alexandre, pere (Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle), 334 Durham, Willard H., 15 The Dutch Courtesan (Marston), 17, 333

Daniel, George, 70 Dante Alighien, 13, 49, 97, 109, 161, 164, 172, 194, 203, 215, 255, 287, 314, 340 Davenant, William, 1-2, 3 Dawson, Anthony B., 22 D'Ewes, Sir Symonds, 343 'Dirge in Cymbeline' (Collins), 96 Dodds, W. M. T., 16 Dolan, Patrick, xxxii—xxxiii 379

Essex Rebellion, 220, 264 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2" Earl of, 220 Ellis-Fermor, U. M., 12, 19 Empson, William, 20 Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Doran), 17 The Fawn (Marston), 21 Fergusson, Francis, xxix, 13 Fletcher, John, 17, 195, 261, 353; and Francis Beaumont, 80-1, 99, 334 Foucault, Michel, 21-2 Frye, Northrop, 16 Furmvall, F.J., 182, 186, 259 Gascoigne, George, 237 Geckle, George L., 14 Gelb, Hal, 15 George, Andrew J., 274 German poetry and mercy, 159 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 7, 152, 168, 182, 186, 189, 228, 259, 260 Gibbons, Brian, 22 Gildon, Charles (Measure for Measure, or Beauty the Best Advocate), 2, 5 Giraldi Cinthio, G. B., (Hecatommithi), 1—2, 44, 47, 63, 69, 86, 88, 90, 105, 113, 140, 152, 162, 186, 200, 243, 277, 348-9 Gless, DarrylJ., 14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 137, 159 Goulart, Simon, 96 Grimston, Edward (Admirable and Memorable Histories of our Time), 96 Guarini, Giambattista, 17-18

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Hallam, Henry, 82, 92, 106, 116, 134, 208 Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., 8, 18, 24, 95, 113, 192, 259-60, 347n20.2 Hamilton, Donna B., 14—15 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 97 Harding, Davis P., 18 Haroun-al-Raschid, 231, 233, 263-4 Harris, Frank, 289 Hart, A. C., 257 Hawkins, Harriet, 20 Hayne, Linda, 22 Hazlitt, William, 6, 7, 9, 24, 51, 56, 78, 91, 94, 113, 121, 141, 143, 240, 260, 275, 282, 285, 289 Hearn, Lafcadio, 338 Hecatommithi (G. B. Giraldi Cinthio), 1-2, 44, 47, 63, 69, 86, 88, 90, 105, 113, 140, 152, 162, 186, 200, 243, 277, 348-9 Herford, C. H., 239 Hervieu, Paul, 311 Heywood, John (A Woman Killed with Kindness), 192 Histoire de Dues de Bourgogne (Brugiere), 111 Hogarth, William, 108, 202 Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-94), 209 Horney, Karen, 20 Horniman, Annie Elizabeth Fredericka, 316 Howard, Jean E., 15 Hudson, H. N. (Lectures on Shakespeare), 113, 115 Hunt, Holman, 203 Hunter, G. K., 18 Hunter, Joseph, 96, 113, 123, 153, 259 Hyman, Lawrence W., 15 Ibsen, Henrik, 207, 311 Inchbald, Mrs. Elizabeth, 47 James I, 5, 10, 14-15, 20, 22, 36-7, 81, 88, 91, 111, 113-14, 135-6, 191, 220, 235, 238, 302, 343n3.1, 356 James, William, 260 Jameson, Anna Brownell, 74 Jane Eyre (Bronte), 303 Jeanie Deans (character in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian), 303, 350n29.2 Jesus Christ, 5, 13, 200 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 6, 31-3, 344; view of death, xxiv, 4—5; mentioned, 1, 6, 8, 9,

36, 39, 40, 44, 45, 48, 62, 70, 78, 90, 96, 97, 108, 119, 186, 190, 260, 274 Jonson, Ben, xviii, 15, 62, 98, 194, 237, 239, 241, 257, 302, 311

Kemble, John Philip, 58, 70, 72 Kennedy, Judy, xxxi—xxxii Kenrick, William, 5 Kernan, Alvin, 14 The King's Players, 85 Kirke, Colonel Percy, 48, 52, 88, 111, 348-9 Knight, Charles, 84 Knight, G. Wilson, xxix, 8, 12-14, 84, 85, 91, 106, 123, 128, 153, 190, 259 Knights, L. C., 12 Krieger, Murray, 15 Lamb, Charles, 70, 94, 141, 161, 306 Lang, Andrew, 205, 335 Langbaine, Gerard, 1 La Rochefoucauld, Fra^ois de Marillac, due de, 212 Lascelles, Mary, 17 Law, Ernest, 347 The Law against Lovers (Davenant), 1—2, 3 Lawrence, W. W., 12-14, 15, 17, 18, 21 Leavis, F. R., 12 Lechter-Siegel, Amy, 20 Lecky, William Edward Hartpole (History of European Morals), 339 Lee, Sidney, 236 Leech, Clifford, 16 Lennox, Charlotte, 3-4, 70 Lever, J. W., 18 Levin, Richard, xxix, 14 Lewis, Cynthia, 15 Lloyd, Willliam Watkiss, 135, 183, 221 The London Prodigal (anon.), 259 Longinus, Dionysius Cassius, 3 Luce, Morton, 268 Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 242 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 348—9 Macfarlane, Linda, 21 MacLellan, Janet, xxxi-xxxii The Malcontent (Marston), 21, 321 Malone, Edmond, 36, 85 Marcus, Leah, 22 Marston, John, 15; The Dutch Courtesan, 17, 333; The Malcontent, 21, 321

380

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Marx, Karl, 21 Masefield, John, 313 Mason, John Monck, 40, 343 Massinger, Phillip, 259 Matthews, Brander, 332 Measure for Measure, or Beauty the Best Advocate (Gildon), 2-3 Middleton, Thomas, 333 The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 287 Mincoff, Marco, 14 Milton, John, 6, 43, 107, 110, 203, 245, 255, 271, 274, 281, 306, 311, 323 Modjeska, Helena, 336-7, 361-2 Moliere, Jean Baptiste Poquelin (Tartuffe), 206, 235 Montagu, Elizabeth, 58 Montague, Charles Edward, 316 Morley, Henry, 199 Morris, Edgar C., 319 Moulton, Richard G., 244 Mullaney, Steven, 22 Murphy, Arthur, xxiv 'Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis' (Barksted), 85

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 274, 311 Reed, Isaac, 192 Reid, Stephen A., 19, 20 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare' (Gildon), 2 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 52 Richardson, William, 6, 34 Riefer, Marcia, 20 Ritson, Joseph, 31, 45 Rossiter, A. P., 18

Nuttall, A. D., 15, 18-19 O'Neill, Eliza, 52 Ornstein, Robert, 14 Paradise Lost (Milton), 6, 61, 155, 203, 245 Paris, Bernard J., 20 Pater, Walter, 161, 185, 211 Paterson, Joseph, 72 Pepys, Samuel, 2 Poel, William, 318 Pope, Elizabeth Marie, 12, 14 Porter, Charles, 295 P. P., 60 'Problem play' as a genre, 16—17 Promos and Cassandra (Whetstone), 43—4, 63— 9, 94-5, 199-200, 296-9, 309-10; mentioned, 41, 47, 83, 86, 88, 96, 105, 111, 140, 153, 154, 157, 162, 164, 166, 184, 186, 203, 206, 221, 231, 237, 240, 243, 274, 281 Pye, Henry James, 45 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 12 381

Sachs, Hans, 19 St. Paul, 200 St. Theresa, 78-9 Saintsbury, George, 309 Sajdak, Bruce, xxix Sale, Roger, 15 Sarcey, Francisque, 311 Schanzer, Ernest, 16—17, 18 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 6, 7, 13, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56-7, 72, 78, 118-19, 260, 312 Scott, Margaret, xxviii Scott, Sir Walter (The Heart of Midlothian), 111 Seward, Anna, xxiv Shakespeare: characters, xviii, xxii; composition, habits of, 254—5; conventions in the plays, 37; dialogue, 197; editing of, x— xiii; female characters, 127, 239; 'Hamlet notebook', 358—9; historical background, 344-5; and morality, 52, 56-7, 275-6; personal character, 5, 107-10, 121-2, 189, 207, 229-30, 234-5, 242-3, 263-4, 274-80, 290-4, 298; personal history, 219-20; praised, 71-3, 86-7, 88, 90-3, 107-8, 110, 154, 255; and religion, 55 Shaw, George Bernard, 196 Siddons, Sarah, 52, 73 Sitwell, Edith, 15 Skottowe, Augustine, 63 Skovmand, Michael, xxxii Skura, Meredith, 19 Snider, DentonJ., 172 Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of, 220 Spenser, Edmund Complaints, 220; The Faerie Queene, 252—3 Steevens, George, 39 Stevenson, David L., 15

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Stoll, Elmer Edgar, xxix, 15, 311 Suddard, Mary, 300 Sundelson, David, 20 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 194, 261 Symons, Arthur, 201 Sypher, Wylie, 16

Van Doren, Mark, 16 Velz, Sarah C., 13-14 Verplanck, Gulian C., 106 Vessie, P. R., 19 Virgil, 43

Walkley, A. B., 286, 334 Watt-Dunton, Theodore, 358-9 Tarlton, Richard, 31 Weil, Herbert, Jr., 15 Tarltons News out of Purgatory (Tarlton), 31 Wendell, Barrett, 215, 312 Taylor, Mark, 20 Whetstone, George, 348n21.5; see also Promos Tennenhouse, Leonard, 21—22 and Cassandra (Whetstone) Tennyson, Alfred ('Mariana', 'Mariana in the White, Richard Grant, 123, 311 South'), 96, 183-4, 200, 212, 255, 269, Wilkes, George, 186 316 Williams, Harcourt, 287 Tillyard, E. M. W., 16 Williamson, Jane, 23 Toilet, George, 40 Williamson, Marilyn L., 19 Traversi, D. A., 12 Wilson, J. Dover, 12 Winston, Mathew, 14 Ulrici, Hermann, 7, 8, 13, 91, 99, 110, 114, Winter, William, 336, 361-2 116, 312, 348n22.1 Upton, John, 3, 5 Young, Charles Mayne, 52

382