As Waters Bennett (1966) suggests, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1985) could be considered a comedy in name only; whilst all the major characters survive at the play’s conclusion the drama presents a picture that is “if not true to life, (then) at least a dire situation. Claudio is about to be beheaded for seducing his intended, and his sister is given a choice between her brother’s life and her chastity” (Waters Bennett, 1966: 6) Measure for Measure is a play that seems to skirt the borders of tragedy and comedy, on the one hand presenting what Samuel Johnson called a “light and comick” (Johnson, 1968: 538) linguistic bawdiness and on the other exploring deep and dark, psychological themes of sin, judgement and retribution.
If the tone of the play is one of obfuscation of dramatic convention – the blurring of the borderline between tragedy and comedy – then the themes and characters present clearly defined demarcations and classifications. In Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Comedies (1997), David Foley McCandless likens the play to the fairy tale, seeing in it many of its major elements: the figure of the “disguised ruler”, the “corrupt magistrate” (Foley McCandless, 1997: 79), the clearly defined choice between good and evil and, of course, eventually a redemption and punishment by a paternal authority. However, as Foley McCandless also points out, if Measure for Measure presents itself as a fairy tale it is a fairy tale for adults, where the sinning is corporeal and the retribution final:
“Measure for Measure invests the traditional tales from which it is derived, "The Corrupt Magistrate" and "The Disguised Ruler," with a degree of sexual perturbation greater than that of All’s Well That Ends Well (however)…Measure for Measure goes further than All’s Well in foregrounding the sexual dynamics embedded in its sources, it shares with All’s Well a tendency to suppress or mystify the psychodrama it enacts, principally by fitting two of its key characters to ecclesiastical personae.” (Foley McCandless, 1997: 79)
Nowhere is this sense of fairy tale more pronounced than in the relationship between Angelo, the canonical corrupt magistrate and figure of castrating legislature and the Duke, Vincentio, the beneficent ‘master of ceremonies’ who functions as a kind of deus ex machina or authorial voice: not only guiding the action and manipulating the characters but, ultimately deciding, who is to live and who to die.
This paper, then, aims to examine this pivotal relationship and ask the question “What greater significance does the sexual authority of Angelo and the Duke serve in the underlying psychosexual and socio-political subtext of the play?” As this paper will assert, Measure for Measure can be read as a satire on the Renaissance notion of temporal authority, the light bawdy language being a mask for the deeper themes of a highly regimented Catholic relationship to God that clearly delineates between the laws of the land and the tenets of religion, Wilson Knight (1971) suggests:
“In Measure for Measure we have a careful dramatic pattern, a studied explication of a central theme: the moral nature of man in relation to the crudity of man’s justice, especially in the matter of sexual vice.” (Wilson Knight, 1971: 91)
The first sense we have of a regimented, legislative hierarchy is an onomastic one; the names of the Duke and Angelo clearly represent a symbolic lineage: Vincentio being a derivative of the Italian for victor, the conqueror or the Lord and Angelo being, more obviously, reflective of the angel or the saintly messenger. As Lascelles (1953) points out, Angelo’s character is anything but angelic , but this misses some of the Catholic symbolism of the play that views the notion of angels, as does Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica (1972), as existing within a clearly defined hierarchy, above the corporeal, bodily realm of humanity (in the play, the citizen’s of Vienna) but below the ruling word of God (in the play, the figure of the Duke).
Angelo and the Duke, then, are not so much symbolic of an angel and God as representative of their places within a triadic hierarchy; a hierarchy that permeates the very structure of the play: God, the angels and humanity, for instance, or God, the temporal authorities and the populace or even the Duke, the deputy and the masses. These triads are based primarily on the notion of power and moral legislature.
This sense, of a clearly structured moral hierarchy is reflected from the play’s very opening, as Angelo’s obsequious entrance clearly debases his own social position in favour of the Duke’s:
“Duke: Look where he comes.
Enter Angelo
Angelo: Always obedient to your graces will,
I come to know your pleasure.”
(Act I, Scene I)
The social order that is explored in the rest of the play is introduced in this first Act, as Angelo, literally becomes the ‘temporal authority’ – the word of the Duke in Vienna and the three strata of the Catholic faith are firmly concretised in the mind of the audience or reader: God, the angels and humanity. The Duke, symbolically dons the robes of a Catholic Friar further compounding the sense of his place as a figure of moral authority and a symbol of ultimate law. In his conversation with Friar Thomas in Act I, Scene III he explains that his actions are concerned with re-establishing the traditional moral order that has become “more mock’d than fear’d” (Act I, Scene III), the Duke exists here as a symbol of a paternal authority who has lost control of that which he rules, as he himself says:
“Duke: I do fear, too dreadful:
Sith ‘twas my fault to give thw people scope,
‘Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them
For what I bid them do: for we bid this be done,
When evil deeds have their permissive pass
And not the punishment.”
(Act, I, Scene III)
The moral authority displayed here, is not the vengeful Old Testament God and the Law not one reflective of Judaic commandment but is instead evocative of the God of the New Testament, Christianity and Catholicism, who displays more human traits such as regret, culpability and melancholy.
The Duke’s authority permeates the fabric of the play, as he not only guides and directs the actions of those around him, by suggesting the subterfuge of Mariana and Isabella for instance or in concocting the plan for the presentation of Claudio’s head to Angelo but, at the play’s conclusion it is the Duke who acts as judge, jury and executioner, deciding who is guilty and who is innocent and meting out punishment and favours, as Brown (1991) details:
“On one level, consequently, Shakespeare makes his duke into a tribute to divine kingship, of which James was an adamant proponent. Many critics have read the Duke in such terms, viewing him in almost allegorical dimensions as a god figure in his omniscience and omnipotence.” (Brown, 1996: 16)
The figure of the Duke, then, as sexual authority, is one of idealised morality; of ethical imperatives devoid of praxis and the paradoxes of everyday life. In Act III, Scene I, for instance the Duke discusses Isabella’s position:
“Duke: 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 complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair.” (Act III, Scene, I)
This speech exemplifies the abstract ethical reasoning of the Duke and typifies his position as the apex of the hierarchy of sexual authority. His logic is one of binary good and evil, beauty and godliness. This is in stark contrast to the authority of Angelo who represents an altogether more paradoxical, complex set of ethical imperatives.
As Stacy Magedanz (2004) asserts, Angelo’s role can be seen to be representative of a more public, civil sexual authority; one that seeks to alter public behaviour through a series of legislative measures. Although founded, perhaps, on the same ethical principles as the Duke’s, Angelo’s actions constantly collide with the everyday reality of human practical experience, greed, selfishness and paradox. Isabella’s situation, for instance, that was seen in purely binary terms by the Duke reveals itself to be fraught with real life paradox and contradiction: if she agrees to sexual union with Angelo she loses her virginity and honor, if she does not she loses her brother.
If the Duke is symbolic of the abstract reasoning of a God or a King, Angelo could be seen to be symbolic of the practical law making of the temporal authorities or the deputy, as he himself hints at in the beginning of Act II:
“Angelo: 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.”
(Act II, Scene, I)
Here Angelo articulates the fragile position of the temporal authorities: the ‘scarecrow law’ of the Duke, the abstract notions of Kantian categorical imperatives and set moral positions have to be abandoned in favour of laws and legislation that shifts and turns with the will and behaviour of the people. This makes Angelo’s sexual authority within the play a far more complex and contradictory notion than the Duke’s; his blackmailing of Isabella, for instance, is in sharp contrast with his public face of ethical upstanding – on the one hand he asserts that “’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus/Another thing to fall.” (Act II, Scene I) and on the other he is as a lustful and as lascivious as any of the other characters, a clear indication of his own culpability as a law maker.
The character of Angelo could be seen as a hypocritical, corrupt magistrate , however it could also be read as the struggle to keep order when faced with the decidedly paradoxical and unordered corporeal world, a world that is driven by bodily desire and that refuses to acquiesce to the abstracted ideals of religious law. The Duke’s words at the end of play regarding the prisoner Barnardine sit uncomfortably with the notion of real justice in a real world:
“Duke: 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 squarest they life accordingly. Thou’rt condemn’d:
But for those earthly faults, I quit them all;
And pray thee take this mercy to provide
For better times to come.”
(Act V, Scene I)
The Duke pardons Barnardine and, perhaps, exposes the degree to which his law, the idealised law of God is exactly the kind of scarecrow law that Angelo speaks of; the audience is left in no doubt that Barnardine is unrepentant, his position is exactly one the of birds of prey that sit upon the law rather than being scared away by it.
Angelo, then, attempts the impossible in the play: to uphold a set of laws and moral practices that simply cannot function in the world of real politick until finally, the temporal authority is removed and order is restored through the deus ex machina of the Duke. In the closing scenes, the Duke reasserts the simplicity of abstract morality by pardoning those that he sees as being good and punishing those that he sees as being evil and this extends, of course, to forcing Lucio to marry a prostitute, a notion that, within the binary oppositions of the play’s finale is worse than death:
“Lucio: I beseech your highness, do not marry me
to a whore. Your highness said even now, I made you a duke:
good my lord, do not recompense me in making me a cuckold…
Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.”
(Act V, Scene I)
As Brown (1996) suggests, Measure for Measure has been seen as both a satire and a defence of the court of James I; it both accuses and excuses, on the one hand highlighting the inevitable corruption of earthly legal systems and, on the other, depicting the impossible situation a law maker finds themselves in, trying to appease all sides of an ethical debate whilst always having to appear (at least) impartial. The rule of God, of the over riding ethical imperative (symbolised, of course, in the figure of the Duke) needs no such sense; Shakespeare seems to suggest that the higher up the authoritative hierarchy one climbs, the easier it is to make laws and to legislate for sexual behaviour.
In this, the play can be seen to be as much about the structures of Renaissance society as the prevailing sexual morality; this is the deeper significance of the relationship of the Duke and Angelo that was hinted at in the initial hypothesis of this paper: as David Stevenson (1971) details, the meaning of Measure for Measure arises, not from the “unconscious involvement in the emotions and the destinies of the individuals” (Stevenson, 1971: 213) but from the balancing of the characters and the subtle tensions and oppositions that are both upheld and transgressed at various moments throughout the narrative. Angelo and the Duke’s binary relationship is only one of many in the play but it is the one that provides much of the philosophical meaning and structure and, ultimately, a great deal of the dramatic tension.
Much has been written of Shakespeare’s Catholicism (Hillman, 2002; Shell, 1999; Beauregard, 1997 etc) and this motif can certainly be isolated within the text of Measure for Measure: the Duke is, at once, a symbol of God and His relationship to His minions (whether they are angels or temporal authorities) and of an idealised King in the style of James I and his relationship to his deputies and sheriffs. However, it perhaps, best to view the play as an examination of the translation of idealised moral and sexual ethics into a world that rejects such rigidity – Angelo is both mocked for his inconstancy and excused for the impossibility of his position – a notion that finds its ultimate correlative in the conclusion that sees him both lambasted and pardoned.
The triadic structures that run throughout the play provide a constant motif that point to the deeper significance of the relationship between the Duke and Angelo; these two characters could be viewed as not so much personae in their own right, or even symbols, but as positions of power within a hierarchy of desire and law. The Duke, equitable with God, the categorical imperative and the idealised King, draws up abstract laws that seeks to reflect philosophical ideals and foundational polarities; Angelo exists as the subaltern, the deputy and the second in command who has to translate these notions into workable, pragmatic public laws and the citizens of Vienna are the masses, the populace and the wider field of humanity who are caught within the desires of their masters.
References
- Aquinas, T (1972), Summa Theologica, London: William Benton.
- Beauregard, D (1997), ‘New Light on Shakespeare’s Catholicism’, published in Renascene: Essays on Values in Literature, Vol. 49, pp. 23-41.
- Brown, C (1996), ‘Duke Vincentio of Measure for Measure and King James I of England: ‘the poorest princes in Christendom’, published in CLIO, Vol. 26, pp. 15-35
- Foley McCandless, D (1997), Gender Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
- Hillman, R (2002), Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France, London: Palgrave.
- Johnson, S (1968), ‘Note to the Plays: Measure for Measure’, published in Johnson: Poetry and Prose, London: Rupert Hart Davies, pp.533-538.
- Lascelles, M (1953), Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, London: Athalone Press.
- Magedanz, S (2004), ‘Public Justice and Private Mercy in Measure for Measure’, published in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, pp. 21-34.
- Schanzer, E (1965), The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, London: Schocken Books.
- Shakespeare, W (1985), Measure for Measure, published in The Comedies, London: Aurora, pp. 67-91.
- Shell, A (1999), Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Stevenson, D (1971), ‘Design and Structure in Measure for Measure’, published in Stead, C.K (ed), Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, London: Macmillan, pp.213-232.
- Waters Bennett, J (1966), Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment, New York: Columbia University Press.
- Wilson Knight, G (1971), ‘Measure for Measure and the Gospels’, published in Stead, C.K (ed), Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, London: Macmillan.
Further Reading
- Barnaby, A and Wry, J (1998), ‘Authorized Versions: Measure for Measure and the Politics of Biblical Translation’, published in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 51, pp.12-32
- Hawkes, T (1992), Meaning by Shakespeare, London: Routledge.
- Hunter, G.K (1997), English Drama 1586-1642, London: Clarendon Press.
- Meander, W (1954), Courtship in Shakespeare: Its Relation to the Tradition of Courtly Love, London: Kinds Crown Court.
- Vickers, B (ed) (1995), William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 4, London: Heritage.
- Wells, S (ed) (1997), Shakespeare in the Theatre, London: Clarendon Press.
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