The title of this play is derived from Matthew 7: 1–2:
1) Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2) For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
The title suggests that the play deals with justice and punishment and it is believed that Shakespeare wrote it in 1604, the same year as Othello and a year before King Lear. It is hard to classify Measure for Measure since it is neither a comedy nor a tragedy. It is of psychoanalytic interest because it deals with the need for and the disappointment in the harshness of the superego, as well as the development of the relationship of Isabella and Angelo, who are both in search of a stricter superego. We find ourselves in a situation that recalls the time when progressive education was introduced. Angelo introduces the problem with an original metaphor.
| ANGELO: | We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch and not their terror. (Measure for Measure, II.i.1–4) |
Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, is in agreement.
| VINCENTIO: | Now, as fond fathers Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use—in time the rod More mocked than feared—so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead, And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose, The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum. (I.iii.24–32) |
At the opening of the play Duke Vincentio, the ruler of Vienna, decides on a temporary abdication. He will leave Vienna in the hands of his deputy Angelo, known for being much stricter than the duke. The theme of abdication has a long history in Shakespeare's work, recalling King Lear, Richard II, and Prospero in The Tempest. In this play, however, Vincentio does not leave his kingdom but remains there disguised as a friar in order to see what will happen under Angelo's stricter rule.
At this point we encounter Shakespeare's irony: the supposedly corrupt Vienna can find no worse a criminal than a man who impregnated his fiancée before, rather than after, their wedding.
After being arrested Claudio meets his friend Lucio and requests that he ask his sister to intervene on his behalf with the new ruler.
| CLAUDIO: | I prithee, Lucio, do me this kind service: This day my sister should the cloister enter And there receive her approbation. Acquaint her with the danger of my state, Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends To the strict deputy: bid herself assay him. I have great hope in that; for in her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade. (I.ii.157–167) |
The speech is sufficiently enigmatic that one does not know whether Claudio anticipates the price Isabella will be asked to pay to win his pardon. Much depends on how we interpret “make friends/to the strict deputy”. Is he sending his sister to plead for him or to seduce Angelo into pardoning him?
When we first meet Isabella in Act I, scene four, she is visiting a nunnery she plans to join. The following exchange takes place between Isabella and the nun Francesca.
| ISABELLA: | And have you nuns no farther privileges? |
| FRANCISCA: | Are not these large enough? |
| ISABELLA: | Yes, truly; I speak not as desiring more, But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare. (I.iv.1–5) |
Isabella, mirroring the duke, is not asking for more freedom but more restrictions as a pre-condition for her joining the nunnery. Subtly, Shakespeare shows us that the duke, Angelo, and Isabella have in common a need and search for a harsher superego.
The second scene of Act II, where Isabella visits Angelo and pleads with him to save her brother, shows us Shakespeare the dramatist as a great psychologist. Isabella herself is as harsh as Angelo and in basic sympathy with the law that punishes extramarital sex by death. When she pleads with Angelo for the life of her brother she is really in sympathy with the death penalty and betrays her inner conflict. She starts the interview by confessing her dilemma and her plea for her brother's life is ambivalent.
| ISABELLA: | There is a vice that most I do abhor, And most desire should meet the blow of justice; For which I would not plead, but that I must, For which I must not plead, but that I am At war ‘twixt will and will not. |
| ANGELO: | Well; the matter? |
| ISABELLA: | I have a brother is condemned to die. (II.ii.30–35) |
Angelo has no difficulty refusing her request for Claudio's pardon.
Isabella is defeated, ready to leave, and in sympathy with the man who will execute her brother. What we have witnessed is an encounter between a man and a woman who both believe in a strict morality, with the woman surrendering to the man. Isabella persists only because Lucio, Claudio's friend who persuaded Isabella to plead for her brother's life, is fully aware how much in conflict she is and how ineffective her pleading is and urges her to continue her suit.
| LUCIO | |
| (ASIDE TO ISABELLA): | Give't not o'er so: to him again, entreat him, Kneel down before him, hang upon his gown. You are too cold. If you should need a pin, You could not with more tame a tongue desire it. (II.ii.44–47) |
Lucio is successful and Isabella resumes her pleading. She is now markedly more effective when she praises the virtue of marriage. Skillfully she introduces the distinction between the law and Angelo's power to alter Claudio's sentence. Angelo says he will not pardon Claudio, to which Isabella replies, “But can you if you would?” (II.ii.52). Angelo's claims that there is no distinction between the two “Look what I will not, that I cannot do” (II.ii.53). The relationship between the two has radically changed; Isabella is on the offensive.
| ISABELLA: | If he had been as you, and you as he, You would have slipt like him, but he like you Would not have been so stern. (II.ii.65–67) |
At one point Angelo is almost ready to yield.
| ANGELO: | I will bethink me. Come again tomorrow. |
| ISABELLA: | Hark how I'll bribe you—good my lord, turn back. |
| ANGELO: | How? Bribe me? |
| ISABELLA: | Ay, with such gifts that heaven shall share with you. (II.ii.149–152) |
We are now in a position to make a psychoanalytic construction. The phrase of “I'll bribe you” is akin to a slip of the tongue; Isabella is hinting at a sexual reward. The hint is not lost on Angelo. Isabella has to extricate herself from this embarrassing admission; she has no way out and has to say that prayer is a form of bribery.
Angelo, feeling the power of her seduction, tells her, “Pray you be gone” (II.ii.67). Once Isabella leaves, Angelo is shaken and confused.
| ANGELO: | Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary And pitch our evils there? Oh, fie, fie, fie, What dost thou or what art thou, Angelo? Dost thou desire her foully for those things That make her good? Oh, let her brother live: Thieves for their robbery have authority When judges steal themselves. What, do I love her That I desire to hear her speak again And feast upon her eyes? What is't I dream on? O cunning enemy that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous Is that temptation that doth goad us on To sin in loving virtue. Never could the strumpet With all her double vigour, art and nature, Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid Subdues me quite. Ever till now, When men were fond, I smiled, and wondered how. (II.ii.172–191) |
Since Angelo has such a harsh superego, what interests him first is who is to blame, the tempter or the tempted. He has forgotten that it was Isabella who used the term “I'll bribe you” and accuses himself of “desire to raze the sanctuary”. In psychoanalytic language, he realises that his sexuality was aroused by an aggressive wish to destroy Isabella's “sanctuary”. We know from Richard III that the question of who is guilty, the tempter or the tempted, interested Shakespeare greatly.
Angelo exonerates Isabella and takes all the blame himself, and next wonders if “modesty may more betray our sense / Than woman's lightness?” (II.ii.173–174). In the last two lines he interprets his attraction as derived not from the sexual but from the aggressive drive and condemns himself: “Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary / And pitch our evils there? Oh, fie, fie, fie” (II.ii.175–176). What Angelo understands, and Shakespeare himself must have known to give Angelo this insight, is that sexual attraction need not always be motivated by love. It can also be an expression of aggressive wishes.
If Angelo were a psychoanalytic patient one would grant that he has insight into his desires and feelings but the insight is under the domination of a severe superego. When insight and condemnation appear together the insight will not bring about any change for the better but rather exhaust itself in condemnation.
Another interpretation must also be considered. The technique Isabella used was emphasising the similarities between Claudio and Angelo, with Claudio being less harsh. Angelo's unconscious responds to the comparison, but how is he to sin like Claudio? Since Isabella is advocating leniency and since she also hinted at bribery, Angelo believes she should yield to him. If she suggests that like her brother he too could slip, then with whom should this slip take place? Obviously with Isabella herself.
Measure for Measure contains a further insight that we can call psychoanalytic in its structure. We are in Act III, scene one. Isabella is visiting her brother in jail.
| ISABELLA: | If I would yield him my virginity, Thou might'st be freed! |
| CLAUDIO: | Oh, heavens, it cannot be! |
| ISABELLA: | Yes, he would give't thee, from this rank offence: So to offend him still. This night's the time That I should do what I abhor to name, Or else thou diest to-morrow. |
| CLAUDIO: | Thou shalt not do't. |
| ISABELLA: | Oh, were it but my life I'd throw it down for your deliverance As frankly as a pin. |
| CLAUDIO: | Thanks, dear Isabel. |
| ISABELLA: | Be ready, Claudio, for your death tomorrow. (III.i.97–106) |
A few lines later Claudio weakens.
| CLAUDIO: | Death is a fearful thing. |
| ISABELLA: | And shamèd life a hateful. |
| CLAUDIO: | Ay, but to die and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice, To be imprisoned in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world, or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling; ‘tis too horrible. The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death. (III.i.116–132) |
Shakespeare has given to Claudio the same fear of what may come after death that he had earlier given to Hamlet. This fear is a denial of death. Those who burn in hell, strictly speaking, are not dead, for they suffer the pain associated with being burnt alive.
| CLAUDIO: | Sweet sister, let me live. What sin you do to save a brother's life, Nature dispenses with the deed so far That it becomes a virtue. |
| ISABELLA: | Oh, you beast! Oh faithless coward, oh dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Is't not a kind of incest, to take life From thine own sister's shame? (III.i.133–140) |
Logically there is no connection between sex to save a brother's life and committing incest with him but Shakespeare gave Isabella the capacity to surmise the logic of the unconscious.
Shakespeare had a striking capacity to make his actors express the kind of thinking that included the unconscious but he never allowed these insights to be effective or influence the action. One is reminded of the Chinese, who invented gunpowder but used it only for firecrackers.
What Angelo plans to do to Isabella is truly villainous. If his plan had succeeded, within twenty-four hours Isabella's brother would have been executed and her virginity, which she esteems so highly, sacrificed in vain.
Angelo and Isabella are very similar to one another. They are both excessively moral, strict, and rigid, with little capacity for sensual pleasure. Angelo's attack on Isabella's chastity may have been an attack on his own rigidity as well, and the attraction was based on the unconscious realisation that she mirrored him. The very same mirroring will also attract the duke to Isabella.
At the very end of the play the duke proposes marriage to Isabella, but his proposal is probably the briefest and least romantic proposal ever recorded, and Isabella's response is not even given. It is evident that Shakespeare wanted to finish the play and marrying the duke was a way to conclude it. The duke and Isabella share a yearning for a stricter world.
Mariana enters and confesses that she had a sexual encounter with Angelo in Isabella's “imagined person” (V.i.209). Shakespeare has followed a fallacy popular in Western literature: that in the dark a man cannot know with whom he is having sexual intercourse. It is Isabella, at Mariana's request, who pleads for Angelo's pardon.
| VINCENTIO: | He dies for Claudio's death. |
| ISABELLA: | (kneeling) Most bounteous sir, Look if it please you on this man condemned As if my brother lived. I partly think A due sincerity governed his deeds, Till he did look on me. Since it is so, Let him not die. My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died. For Angelo, His act did not o'ertake his bad intent, And must be buried but as an intent That perish'd by the way. Thoughts are no subjects, Intents but merely thoughts. (V.i.436–447) |
Why is Isabella pleading to save Angelo's life? Does she feel guilty because she aroused sexual wishes in him? Or has she fallen in love with him while pleading for her brother? Could this be a return of what Shakespeare read in his sources: that Isabella and Angelo got married? The fact that she says, “Till he did look on me” suggests that she accepted Angelo's argument that the tempter is as guilty as the tempted. The line “His act did not o'ertake his bad intent” refers to that fact that he did not actually have sexual relations with her and therefore does not deserve to die.
The lesson Shakespeare may have wanted us to draw from this play may be that no one, including Isabella and Angelo, is immune to temptation; therefore, no one is entitled to judge others because, like them, they may be tempted. Saving a brother's life does not justify the loss of chastity.
We are astonished to discover that Isabella pleads to the duke for Angelo even when she still believes he killed her brother. We are left to wonder why. Is she so harsh that she feels her brother deserved to be killed? Is she secretly in love with Angelo? The lines “His act did not o'ertake his bad intent, / And must be buried but as an intent” is an important psychological statement but it is wasted in this situation. It so happens that psychoanalysis has found that the power of the superego to punish the person is significantly based on blurring this line of difference between “act” and “intent”. In psychoanalytic terms to commit adultery in one's heart is not the same as committing it in actuality.
We know that Shakespeare was himself guilty of the “crime” of Claudio: impregnating his future wife before their marriage. What we did not know until we read Measure for Measure is how guilty Shakespeare felt, at least unconsciously. In subsequent plays, notably in The Tempest, the father makes sure that the future son-in-law waits until the marriage ceremony has taken place before the relationship is consummated.
The other striking feature of the play is that it is a comedy without gaiety. Eros is not triumphant. True, the duke and Isabella plan to get married but they are so inhibited as individuals that one cannot imagine them in love, or capable of pleasure, or enjoying each other.
The place of death in the play
Although Measure for Measure was not written as a tragedy the role death plays in it is nearly as important as it is in Hamlet.
The duke's gives Claudio the following advice about his impending death:
| CLAUDIO: | Be absolute for death: either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences That dost this habitation where thou keepest Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun And yet runn'st toward him still. (III.i.5–13) |
The prisoner Barnardine represents a very different attitude towards death; the provost describes him as:
| PROVOST: | A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep: careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality and desperately mortal. (IV.ii.125–128) … We have very oft awaked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it. It hath not moved him at all. (IV.ii.132–141) |
When the warrant to be beheaded comes, Barnardine has been drinking all night and says, “I will not consent to die this day, that's certain” (IV.iii.47–48). The line is comic because we do not usually think of an execution as asking permission of the condemned.
Claudio, who expresses fully the fear of death, represents the third attitude towards death. The three attitudes support the idea that we have already derived from Hamlet: that Shakespeare was very much preoccupied with death and the fear of what comes after death.
Angelo represents a fourth attitude: he welcomes death.
| ANGELO: | 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. (V.i.467–470) |
There is dignity in Angelo's response. When he sentences himself to death because of his transgressions he once more rises in our esteem, so that as an audience we no longer demand as strongly that he be punished. Angelo is the opposite of Claudio. Shakespeare must have sensed something of Freud's death instinct for he makes Angelo “crave death”. In psychoanalytic language we would say that both Angelo's superego and ego have accepted that he deserves death and therefore there is no fear of death. This dignity suggests that Shakespeare had a deeper sympathy for this man than the audience is likely to have. It suggests that Shakespeare may have been more identified with Angelo than we would have otherwise assumed. We understand what we had difficulty comprehending earlier: that Angelo represents Shakespeare's guilt.