The Tao of Measure for Measure

Dara Kaye Introduction to Shakespeare, Fall 2005

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When Measure for Measure opens, the community of Vienna is in danger. Plagued by diseases of heart, mind, and body, its citizens are in increasingly desperate need of a ruler with enough foresight and strength to give Vienna the tough love it needs to regain its moral and physical standing. Viennas abrupt change to a theocratic government presided over by Angelo is an attempt to fix the imbalance, but instead the shift pushes the community to the other extreme. Whether the Duke gives power over to Angelo out of an inability to clean up after himself or out of a Machiavellian desire to preserve his Renaissance approval rating, his decision sets in motion a play whose action forces characters, and thus the audience, to examine such weighty things as the right way to govern, what morality means, the difference between sin and crime, and the tension between earthly obligation and religious mandate. Measure for Measure is a play that looks at extremes and comes to espouse the virtues of a middle way. The Vienna of Measure for Measure is obsessed with virtue and sin, and the issue of morality takes a front seat in this play. The play opens with a government in a state of near anarchy, and abruptly switches over to a theocratic dictatorship when Angelo comes into power. The audience can plainly see that neither way is the right way to govern, and that a happy medium must be found if Vienna is to heal. The conflicts in the play beg viewers to question the relationship between religion, morality, and legal legitimacy, and the relationship between morality and legal authority. One character, Angelo, makes an obvious attempt to exert authority over the moral and legal status of Viennas citizens. The Duke chooses to deputize Angelo because he knows Angelo will reform the corrupted city, and one of the first things the newly empowered Angelo

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does is to strictly enforce the harsh laws regulating premarital sex. Where the Duke was willing to condone immorality, Angelo enforces the strictest possible punishments on transgressors. Angelo is a complicated character because the audiences understanding of him changes so drastically over the course of the play. When we first meet him he seems to be the male version of Isabella, over-pious and over-righteous, but with enough power to enforce his own beliefs on the community at large. After he tries to extort Isabella, though, the audience sees that he is a kind of reflection of the community he is in charge of; he is basically good, in that he has no underlying sinister intent, but he has fundamentally diseased parts. He is obsessed with enforcing morality on his subjects, but cannot live up to his own standards. If he subjected himself to his own laws, Angelo would have had to sentence himself to death twice over for his behavior with both Mariana and Isabella. His sin is especially terrible because he is initially introduced as a man of firm convictions. Indeed, the Duke invests him with stewardship over the city in the first scene is because he thinks Angelo will be true to his principles; in explaining his reasoning to Friar Thomas, the Duke describes Angelo as a man of stricture and firm abstinence (I.iii.15). The Duke even specifically condemns hypocrites as being without virtue in the first scene of the play right before he deputizes Angelo [F]or if our virtues/Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike/As if we had them not (I.i.38-40). But Angelo does not live up to the Dukes hopes, and rather than restoring order and balance to Vienna, he drives it to the other extreme. Angelos rulership is based on a theocratic system; what is Christian sin is crime, and vice versa. He takes his moral stance and claims its legitimacy by way of traditional Biblical law. Where the Duke lumps together sin and crime and ignores both, Angelo lumps them together to

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enforce his own ideas of morality on the people of Vienna. Both rulers take an all-or-nothing approach. Thus Angelos betrayal of his own moral system when he tries to seduce and extort Isabella is that much more stomach-turning; rather than a religious and moral person, Angelo is revealed to be a hypocrite whose perversions are even worse than the sins he denounces. Whether Vienna is presided over by a ruler who condones or condemns immorality, the city is obsessed with it. One of the central moral quandaries in the play, whether Isabella will relinquish her virginity to save her brothers life, is presented in a high-stakes scene in Act II. The piece of the scene where morality is directly discussed gives Claudio a moment to ponder his own mortality, and gives a glimpse into Isabellas view of sexuality. She says indignantly that "[b]etter it were a brother died at once, than that a sister, by redeeming him, should die for ever." (II.iv.106-108) There is a mixed metaphor here, with death, sex, and death as a euphemism for orgasm all jumbled together. It gives the impression that Isabella might not have much of an idea what shes talking about, but is behaving as she thinks she should. Isabellas unwillingness to compromise her virtue to save her brother seems out of context because she is not adhering to the social rules the community actually follows, but the social and religious regulations the community prizes. Although she is cleaving to the virtues her religion and the ruler of her home advocate, she is acting strangely within the context of her social reality. That is why her immediate acceptance of Claudios sentence seems almost funny; lines like "O just but severe law!" (II.ii.42) are so far from how we expect her to react that they can elicit nervous laughter. Isabellas decision suggests that Angelos reformation and her own steadfast devotion to religion and regulation are not the answer to the problems of the community, but just trade in those problems for new ones. Neither a complete relaxation of moral standards nor a strict theocracy, where corruption leaks out in other ways, have a place for someone like Isabella.

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Isabella is the most eligible bachelorette in the play, and Angelo and the Duke, the plays most powerful men, trying to win her over. Given that one of Isabellas defining characteristics the one that most attracts Angelo, in fact is her complete rejection of her own sexuality, this nearly gets her into serious trouble. Ultimately, while their betrothal is framed as part of the overall tidy ending of a comedy, she is given no choice in her betrothal to the Duke. The play seems to be saying to women that perhaps steadfast chastity behind convent walls is not the only virtuous life, but that embracing love and being faithful can make you a happily married wife and mother with the man of your choosing, like Juliet and Mariana. Indeed, the people who walk the middle path seem to end up best they all marry whom they wish, and the play ends happily for them. It is worth pointing out that a precious few characters fall squarely in one category or the other. On one side, representing virtue untempered by practicality or human desire is Isabella, who is almost a caricature in her pursuit of righteousness. She craves regulation and sees things in terms of black and white; an action will either preserve her virtue or detract from it. On the other side are characters like Lucio, who has contracted multiple venereal diseases from his frequent outings to brothels, and Mistress Overdone, an aptly named bawd. All of them run into trouble stemming from their steadfast embrace of their respective modi operandi Isabella should be able to at least consider sacrificing her fierce devotion to virginity and righteousness to save her brother, and Lucio would do well to settle down if only to curb his growing list of diseases. The people of Vienna need a middle way, and the character that seems to best represent that way is Claudio. Claudio does not follow the letter of the law, but the spirit of it. He is

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essentially a good person, and his deviation from the law does not infringe on the authority of other individuals or the state, and doesnt do any harm to himself or the community at large. Even his overly righteous sister, who disapproves of Claudios sins, recognizes that the source of his sin was love rather than a more sinister motive, "My brother did love Juliet, and you tell me that he shall die for't" (II.iv.143) Claudios expectation in the first scene of Act III that his sister give in to Angelo for his sake leads the audience to believe that, were the situation reversed, he would be willing to do the same for her. Claudio places value not on the symbols of virtue, but on the actions of virtue. The little we hear from Juliet, Claudios pregnant fiance, says the same about her; she takes responsibility and repents for her sin, but takes a middle road between claiming she completely regrets the conception of her child and protesting that she did nothing wrong. When the Duke questions her seeming equivocation between repentance and lack of regret, she satisfies him with the response I do repent me as it is an evil/And take the shame with joy. (II.iii.35-36) The child she is carrying and the illegal action that prompted her pregnancy are associated with both joy and guilt, and she is able to feel them simultaneously. The most complicated character in the play is the Duke. He is the only character who gets to see what the audience sees, a complete picture from the outside. His complexity is in large part due to the fact that he actually takes on more than one personality; he is a character playing a character, specifically a Friar. It is an interesting choice; the very nature of a friar is to simultaneously stand back from the larger community (i.e., he is a member of an exclusive community of clergy) and, paradoxically, to be the moral advisor of and within the community. That is, he straddles the line between integrated and excluded. That is why the Duke-as-Friar is

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able to find out what was really going on; people confess to and confide in him, both because of his role in the community and because of his detachment from the community. The Duke in Measure for Measure stands out again in contrast to the character of the lawful Duke in Shakespeares other comedies (Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Alls Well That Ends Well, The Comedy of Errors, etc.). Generally the Duke is a fundamentally good man who serves as a deus ex machina to punish the evildoers, marry the single people, and generally put everything right again. But the Duke in Measure for Measure is not the righteous paragon of other plays. He forces marriages that do not seem as though they have much potential, and he fails to punish Angelo for his appalling, criminal behavior. The Dukes plan to trick Angelo into bedding and wedding Mariana is underhanded and certainly not virtuous; this cannot possibly result in a happy marriage. Angelos past rejection of Mariana and his unrequited desire for Isabella would be too much for the shaky foundation of an arranged marriage. Instead of delivering only justice or only mercy, the Duke takes a middle road Angelo is sort of punished, marriages that are sort of acceptable are made, and the loose ends are sort of tied up by the end. Here again, the Duke walks a middle road; essentially benevolent, but neither a great ruler nor a conventionally moral person. This uncharacteristically morally indefinite ending is because Measure for Measure is not exactly a comedy, and everything doesnt work out perfectly in the end. In other words, the play itself walks a middle way, neither comedy nor tragedy but somewhere in between. It recognizes the existence of a spectrum of morality, and distinguishes between those who wish to parade virtue and those who are virtuous because it is their nature to

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do good things and refrain from bad ones. The greatest virtue of all, Measure for Measure is saying, is to balance virtue in the context of real life and walk a middle path.

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