Mary Ann Leone, 2006
I
have begun,
And now I give my sensual race the rein (2.4: 158-9).
To the casual reader of Measure for Measure, the plot may seem to revolve around sexual conduct in Renaissance England and the legal consequences thereof. Nineteenth century critics, however, believed Shakespeare’s play to be a “study of mercy and forgiveness, rather than of justice and legal equity” (Lanzen 383).
In the early 1800s critics of the play focused more on thematic and the psychological developments rather than passing judgment on the morals of the characters. In his “Lectures on Dramatic Literature,”August Wilhelm Schlegel [German translator of Shakespeare] wrote, “The piece takes improperly its name from the punishment: the sense of the whole is properly the triumph of mercy over strict justice, no man being himself so secure from errors as to be entitled to deal it out amongst his equals” (Howe 5: 281).
Two contemporaries of Schlegel, Ulrici and Gervinus, elaborate on this concept. Ulrici, who defines Measure for Measure as “a perfect comedy,” states that the play highlights the failure of human justice and the triumph of Christian mercy, “that all of humanity exists in sin and that only through the grace of God can we hope to achieve a truly virtuous and moral life” (Lanzen, 383). Gervinus notes character deficiencies. He declares the Duke and Angelo to be polar opposites in their leadership abilities, the former due to laxity and the latter because of his dogged determination to mete out justice with unbecoming zeal (Lanzen 383).
Another early nineteenth century critic William Hazlitt describes the play “as full of genius,” but adds that “our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions.” He dismisses Angelo, who “seems to have a much greater passion for hypocrisy than for his mistress,” and decries Isabella’s “rigid chastity.” Only Claudio deserves our sympathy, “and yet he is placed in circumstances of distress which almost preclude the wish for his deliverance,” Hazlitt laments. He calls Shakespeare’s alienation of audience sympathy a ”principle of repugnance” (Howe 4: 345-6).
Mid-century critics included Charles Knight, H. N. Hudson, and Frederick S. Boas. Knight sees Measure for Measure as a caveat against ineffectual government and society contaminated by a “corrupt state of manners” (Lanzen 384).
Hudson joined Knight in his criticism of what they perceived as Shakespeare’s lopsided treatment of justice and mercy at its finish. Hudson also considered the playwright’s personal life and also the chaotic times in which he lived, proposing that at the time Shakespeare penned this play, he had become “fascinated by the appalling mystery of evil that haunts our fallen nature” (Lanzen 384).
Boas, who coined the phrase, “problem-plays,” proposed that Shakespeare’s departure from lighter fare to a more complex and perhaps more pessimistic view of the world was a direct result of the fate suffered by two of his friends. In 1601 (three years before the opening performance of Measure for Measure), the Earl of Essex was executed, and Lord Southampton was inprisoned, both due to allegations of their involvement in treasonous plots against Queen Elizabeth (Lanzen 384).
In 1874 Walter Pater revisits the problems presented in Measure for Measure and describes the setting of the play in his book, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style:
It brings before us a group of persons, attractive, full of desire, vessels of thegenial, seed-bearing powers of nature, a gaudy existence flowering out over theold court and city of Vienna, a spectacle of the fulness and pride of life. Thenwhat shall there be on this side of it—the spectators’ side…? What philosophy, what sort of equity? (173-4).
Pater writes that Shakespeare transcends earlier incarnations of the play, citing specifically Cinthio’s historical sketch that Whetstone (another 17th century writer) used in Promos and Cassandra, “in which the mere energy of southern passion has everything its own way” (Pater 172).
Pater claims that Shakespeare’s work “rises, full of solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty” in poetry that is often a challenge for the audience or reader (Pater 173).
“Measure for Measure, ” writes Pater, “by the quality of these higher designs, woven by his strange magic on a texture of poorer quality” allows the audience to grasp “Shakespeare’s reason…[and] his power of moral interpretation” (Pater 173).
Pater explains that in this play, Shakespeare brilliantly retains “traces of the old ‘morality’ that give it a peculiar ethical interest…Here the very intricacy and subtlety of the moral world itself,…the difficulty of just judgment…are the lessons conveyed” (Pater, 182).
The resolution of this problem, Pater continues, is through an understanding that “poetic justice,…true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love. It is for this finer justice…that the people in Measure for Measure cry out as they pass before us…so in its ethics it is an epitome of Shakespeare’s moral judgments” (Pater 183).
In fact, Pater states that by Shakespeare’s “infusing a lavish colour and a profound significance into [Measure for Measure]…that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgments” (Pater 170-1)
John Morely writes in Studies in Literature that “perhaps the crude and incessant application of a narrow moral standard, thoroughly misunderstood, is one of the intellectual dangers of our time” (339). He conjectures that the average admirer of Shakespeare most likely does not classify him as a moralist. “But [he claims] one great creative poet probably exerts a nobler, deeper, more permanent ethical influence than a dozen generations of professed moral teachers” (268).
In the Complete Works of William Hazlitt, the author discusses his perception of the playwright’s ethics as they appear in his works:
Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality…is madeof antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all itsshapes, degrees, depressions and elevations. The object of the pedantic moralist is to find out the bad in everything; his was to show that ‘there is some soul of goodness in things evil’…In one sense, Shakespear was no moralist at all; in another, he was the greatest of all moralists” ( 4:346-7).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge shares none of the discourse on the questions of morality that his contemporaries wrestled with and goes so far as to say it is the “only painful part of [Shakespeare’s] genuine works” (Hawkes 249). He writes that justice is not served in the end, that Isabella is “unamiable,” and Claudio “detestable” (Hawkes 250).
As can be seen by this sampling of reviews of Measure for Measure in the nineteenth century, there is no one viewpoint that can be taken as the true interpretation of Shakespeare’s play about justice and mercy. Was this play inconclusive, unsatisfactory, even odious in its troublesome look at society? Or does Shakespeare offer to the perceptive observer a fresher, deeper perspective of complex issues that can take one to a higher plane of existence?
Ultimately, it is the burden and joy of each reader to ponder the moral implications presented by the most revered playwright of our time. Toward this end, one might do well to heed the rather startling words offered by Coleridge in the first of his series of lectures on Shakespeare at the Royal Institution:
Reviews are generally pernicious, because…they teach people rather to judge than to consider, to decide than to reflect: thus they encourage superficiality, and induce the thoughtless and the idle to adopt sentiments conveyed under the authoritative We, and not, by the working and subsequent clearing of their own minds (Rhys 390).
There is much to ponder for the serious reader and observer of human nature, as seen through the beauty and complexity of Shakespeare’s words:
‘Tis very pregnant:
The jewel that we find we stoop and take it,
Because we see it; but what we do not see
We tread upon, and never think of it (2.1: 23-6).
Works Cited
Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. New York: Norton, 1997.
Hazlitt, William. Table-Talk: Original Essays on Men and Manners. London: Cassell, 1909.
Howe, P.P. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Vol. 4. London: Dent, 1930.
Howe, P.P. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Vol. 5. London: Dent, 1930.
Lanzen, Laurie Harris, and Mark W. Scott, eds. Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from The Criticism of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry from the First Published Appraisals to Current Evaluations. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1980.
Morley, John. Studies in Literature. New York: MacMillan, 1907.
Pater, Walter. Appreciations with an Essay on Style. London: MacMillan, 1911.
Rhys, Ernest, ed. Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare. London: Dent, 1919.