Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition)

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

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FOR

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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'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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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[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

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[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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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)

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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