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The inward springs: Measure for Measure II, ii, 162–87

Goethe has ingeniously compared Shakespeare’s characters to watches with crystalline plates and cases which, while they point out the hours as correctly as other watches, enable us at the same time to perceive the inward springs whereby all this is accomplished.

(Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature)

Goethe’s comparison suggests that Shakespeare dramatizes the dynamics of the inner life; he portrays a character’s inner self as process. Auden remarks that ‘the difference between Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies is not that the characters suffer in the one and not in the other, but that in comedy the suffering leads to self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, love, and in tragedy it leads in the opposite direction into self-blindness, defiance, hatred’.¹ It is the process of those changes in his comic protagonists which we will be analyzing, using Measure for Measure as our example.

Consider the following soliloquy from Measure for Measure which dramatizes Angelo’s recognition of his desire for the novice Isabella:²

From thee: even from thy virtue!
What’s this? What’s this? Is this her fault, or mine?
The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most, ha?
Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I	165
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman’s lightness? Having waste ground enough,	170
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? O fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou? or what art thou, Angelo?
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good? O, let her brother live!	175
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,	180
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	185
Subdues me quite. Ever till now
When men were fond, I smil’d and wonder’d how.3
	(II, ii, 162–87)

The opposition between speaker and hearer or T and ‘you’, the most common feature of dialogue, is manifest in this soliloquy in the semantic pattern characteristic of self-address. Angelo begins by using the first person, but in lines 173–5, he shifts to the second person pronoun ‘thou’ and poses himself a series of questions. This alternation between the first and second person pronouns in reference to the same antecedent, here Angelo, characterizes soliloquies which attempt to represent mental life. Interrogatives abound in this speech, but they are exclamatory, not performative; rather than requests for information, they are rhetorical questions which communicate a sense of urgency and emotional tension. But as questions they also posit a speaker and hearer. Angelo himself assumes both roles in a dialogue of the mind in which his chiding interrogation of self suggests the gnomic utterances of conscience or authority.

If we look carefully at the series of rhetorical questions which begins in line 168, we find that the first person T has become plural. To whom, we ask, does ‘our’ in line 169 refer? Characteristically in Shakespeare the first person plural used by the head of state is a royal ‘we’, the we’ of public acts and proclamations. But Angelo is certainly not talking here about public business, nor does he use any but a genuine ‘we’ in the scenes preceding this speech (I, i, 61, 82; II, i, 17). The question at lines 168–70 seems to exclude women from the group to which ‘our’ and later ‘we’ refer. The first person plural apparently constitutes a generic statement or utterance about men in general, of whom Angelo is one. We are still witnessing a dialogue with self, but self as part of a larger category: men who feel desire and seek sexual gratification – for Angelo at least, men in general. The speech represents both Angelo in self-address and Angelo creating an audience larger than himself, an audience of common men.⁴ This movement from the personal to the social has powerful effect, for it unites Angelo for the first time in the play with common humanity. Shakespeare has been at pains earlier to show us that Angelo considers himself anomalous; this locution testifies to his discovery of his humanity. And it is one of the often noted ironies of the play that this discovery leads him to make his foul proposition to Isabella.

The first person plural also implies a reader complicit with such universalizing rhetoric. As audience we are led by these pronouns, and by the strictly generic statement later in the speech, ‘Thieves for their robbery have authority,/When judges steal themselves’, to accept the moral judgments which Angelo makes and the ethical standard which he here represents. The effect of these rhetorical questions and the first person plural pronouns is to communicate Angelo’s feelings and to generate sympathy in the audience by setting those feelings in a larger context of masculine temptation and human frailty.⁵

The most emphatic instance of self-address falls in the exact center of the soliloquy: ‘What dost thou? or what art thou, Angelo?’ The repeated questions posed to the self, with only a change in the verb, emphasize the meaning of the line. In the first half, Angelo asks himself simply what he is doing. He questions his own actions and feelings. The shift to the copula turns the question into an existential one, for in the second halfline Angelo questions not simply his behavior, but his very being. The juxtaposition of the two interrogatives suggests the struggle in his mind between man as rational agent and man as instinctual beast. The exclamatory ‘O’ and subjunctive with imperative force which follow in line 175 emphasize the I/you opposition, for Angelo is beseeching himself on Claudio’s behalf. Here where the grammar most emphatically resembles dialogue, its semantics are most like the interior monologue in attempting to enact psychic process.⁶

Angelo’s soliloquy also manifests other features of dialogue. Demonstrative pronouns, temporal markers and verb tenses connect this speech to its context, the preceding interview with Isabella in which she asks mercy for her brother Claudio. The very first lines presuppose Isabella’s preceding words, ‘Save your honour’, for in order to understand Angelo’s ‘From thee: even from thy virtue!’ we must remember Isabella’s words of valediction. In line 163, the repeated pronoun ‘this’ refers emphatically to the previous scene, to Angelo’s ‘breeding sense’ and his continuing response to Isabella after her departure. As audience or reader, we must supply the antecedent, and in doing so, we situate the speech in its larger context in the play. We also find such orienting locutions later in the contrasted past and present of ‘never… once’ and ‘ever… til now’. These elements serve to locate the soliloquy in time and with reference to the specific situation of Angelo’s past reputation as an ascetic and his newly discovered passion for Isabella.

The third aspect of dialogue is also its most complex. Semantic reversals occur on the boundaries of individual replies and have their linguistic correlatives in lexical oppositions, logical jumps and other phenomena which sometimes make an audience perceive associative rather than logical movement and structure. Referential instability of pronouns is an obvious form of semantic reversal: without any clear change of antecedent, we have second person pronouns referring first to Isabella, then to Angelo himself, and later to the ‘cunning enemy’, Satan. In the course of the speech, Angelo is himself the referent of first person singular and plural as well as second person pronouns. Such solecisms, in Renaissance rhetorical theory, enallage, emphasize the expressive or emotive function of this soliloquy. The series of antitheses: tempter/tempted, violet/carrion, modesty/lightness, waste ground/sanctuary, foully/good, thieves/judges, cunning enemy/saint, strumpet/ maid, men/I are logical oppostions which suggest the positive and negative poles of conflict and judgment in Angelo’s mind and contribute to our sense of dialogic structure. But they are also evaluative, and their hyperbolic character serves to underscore their affective function.

Though careful attention to the sequence of developing ideas in the soliloquy reveals a logical framework for communicating rising emotion, Shakespeare creates the illusion of psychic process by subordinating strictly logical links between lexical units and exploiting instead associative links based on metaphor. The first line, motivated as I noted earlier by Isabella’s ‘Save your honour’, which Angelo takes in quite a different sense from Isabella’s intended formula of parting, initiates this associative movement. Angelo’s shift via metaphor from temptation to corruption in lines 165–8 is communicated by a comparison of self to carrion and the description of its effect on a violet in the sun. Because of the sun’s traditional association with God and reason, it is paradoxical that its beneficent rays corrupt. This paradox suggests to Angelo another related idea: if carrion corrupts the flower of the summer season, can it be, he wonders, that modesty rather than woman’s lightness inspires lust? And as first Empson and later Lever pointed out, season is not only the time of year, summer, but also seasoning in food which acts as a preservative.⁷

Sense in line 169, which continues the pun on sense as sexual desire and sense as thought from the preceding interview, signals the double and opposed meanings of words and actions. Not only does the pun link the speech to its context by recalling Angelo’s play on sense earlier in II, ii (‘She speaks, and ’tis such sense/That my sense breeds with it.’ 142–3), but it also exemplifies by its ambiguity the alternating semantic contexts characteristic of dialogue. Nor does logic motivate the following metaphor in which man’s lust and its enactment is compared generally to military action, and topically to the immediate historical past of Tudor England in which Catholic property was desecrated.

Metaphor functions both as a mode of organization and as a means of projecting elsewhere beyond Angelo’s immediate situation. The metaphorical language with its references to concrete reality – violet, carrion, season, waste ground_y sanctuary – is not mimetic. It does not describe the external perceived reality these words denote so much as an internal state or imagined relation not justified by logic or reason; they are correlatives which communicate lust and its effects. In his discussion of metaphor and poetic language, the Prague linguist Jan Mukařovský suggests that ‘we require of [a linguistic expression] something which is alien to the very essence and purpose of language, namely, that a sensorily perceptible linguistic symbol, the vehicle of linguistic meaning, become the vehicle of psychic meaning.’⁸ We interpret these comparisons in terms of inexpressible psychic meaning rather than according to their concrete referential function. Angelo’s metaphors are not so much speaking pictures as conveyors of his emotional state, his sense of corruption, violence and chaos. The desire he expresses, the repetition of phrases (lines 163, 164, 172, 173) and words (desire, lines 171, 174, 178); the use of such connotatively powerful words as corrupt, sanctu ary, enemy, saint; the series of strong caesuras, several marked additionally by adversatives, and finally the aposiopetic interjection ‘ha’ all serve to emphasize the intensity of Angelo’s mental turmoil.

Angelo’s avowal of desire in line 174 reminds him of his fraternity with Claudio: ‘O, let her brother live!’, he cries. What follows is a generic statement about thieves and judges which demonstrates the breakdown of difference which Angelo’s desire for Isabella causes: by analogy Claudio is justified in his fornication with Juliet by Angelo’s lust for Isabella. This generalization, with its implied comparison to Claudio, also makes ironic reference to Angelo’s earlier self-judgment, ‘When I that censure him do so offend,/Let mine own judgement pattern out my death,/And nothing come in partial’ (II, i, 29–31). Angelo then jumps to speculation about his feelings: ‘do I love her’. The shift from the implied analogy with Claudio to Angelo’s question about love perhaps suggests a growing sympathy for Claudio and Juliet completely absent from Angelo’s earlier speech and action.

Shakespeare also avoids narrative verb tenses in the first person which could create a distancing reportorial dimension in Angelo’s speech. Instead the soliloquy depends on the generalizing present (sins, line 164, do, does, corrupt, lines 167–8, have, steal, lines 176–7, the verbs in lines 180 ff.). Tense changes in the speech signal the development of ideas already remarked upon, for example the shift from present to the optative ‘may’ in lines 168–9, or the repetition of ‘dost’ in lines 173–4, which links the two sentences rhetorically, but without any necessary logical connection. The oscillation between past and present, real and potential, specific and general is a distinctive mark of the freely associative language of interior monologue or self-address, both here and in other Shakespearean soliloquies.

The organization of Angelo’s soliloquy as dialogue creates the dramatic illusion of a mind divided and persuades the audience of Angelo’s inner conflict. His world has heretofore been organized by strictly differentiated and hierarchical judgments of self and world: woman’s lightness, not modesty, generates lust; thieves, not judges, steal; desire of the good should be good desire. In his interchange with Isabella, Angelo discovers that such polar oppositions are false. Her virtue stimulates his lust, and that recognition stimulates his anxiety over discovering he is not different, but like other men. Shakespeare’s careful presentation of Angelo’s response to his discovery shows him to be a man of strong feelings and desires, quite different from the man ‘whose blood/Is very snow-broth’ described earlier by Lucio. This speech then is designed to present Angelo’s mental life and persuade us emotionally of his recognition, struggle and judgment of his conflicting feelings.⁹

Though contemporary linguistics provides a vocabulary for analyzing Angelo’s soliloquy and recognizing its affinities with dialogue, the student of literature inevitably asks how such strategies for representing mental life became available to an Elizabethan dramatist. One possibility immediately presents itself. Perhaps dialogue is actually a feature of mental life which Shakespeare transcribes from his own experience. But to argue so harks back to the old praise of Shakespeare’s natural learning, for even if the dialogue of mental life is actually a phenomenon we can perceive by attending to our own process of thinking and reflection, Shakespeare must still be particularly adept and talented at rendering this experience in words. We find ourselves back where we started, not with an account of how Shakespeare carefully created the quality of an inner life in his characters, but with another question-begging claim for his natural ability to do so.

Instead, we might ask if this rhetoric of character derives from the educational training in rhetoric and the literary examples taught in the Elizabethan grammar school.¹⁰ During the Renaissance, schoolboys and aspiring rhetoricians were required to interpret and enact fictitious situations both from outside, or narratively, and dramatically by speaking or writing in character. Rhetorical treatises and handbooks repeatedly emphasized the importance of what Aristotle in his discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric called actualization (ένεργια), putting things before the eyes of the audience through created fictions. The handbooks themselves provided exercises to train the young student of rhetoric in the making of fictions. Perhaps the most popular in the Renaissance and the most widely used in England was the fourth-century grammarian Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, a series of exercises each accompanied by a model theme.¹¹ Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata was translated into Latin ten times between 1507 and 1680 and printed one hundred and fourteen times, the greatest number of printings appearing between 1580 and 1630. In the eighteenth century, Saintsbury described Aphthonius as ‘one of the most craftsmanlike crambooks that ever deserved the encomium of the epithet and the discredit of the noun’.

A look at the exercises themselves provides us with a clearer picture of what the Elizabethan student of rhetoric actually learned and practiced. The exercises are varied and arranged so as to increase in complexity, from simple paraphrase (fabula) to more complex forms of argumentation in which all the possible arguments on both sides of a question (in utramque partem) were marshalled to debate such topics as ‘should a man marry?’. Most important for a young playwright, perhaps, was the exercise of impersonation or ethopoeia. Aphthonius divides this exercise into three categories, ethopoeia proper, in which the young scholar was required to speak from the point of view of a well-known historical or legendary figure; eidolopoeia, in which the student speaks in the person of someone dead; and prosopopoeia, in which the writer creates a wholly fictitious character. Aphthonius recognized the dramatic quality of these exercises, for he recommends Menander as the foremost exemplar of the form. His model for the figure consists of three invented first person monologues spoken by Niobe from the perspectives of present, past and future.

An essential technique in the creation of such characterizations was the imagined dialogue, an exercise the young scholars practiced in letter writing before moving on to the progymnasmata. Erasmus, whose works on education had enormous influence in the Elizabethan grammar school, recommends in his De Conscribendis Epistolis letters like Ovid’s Heroides to aid the student in imitating what particular persons might say in specific situations. The student learned to project himself into strange circumstances, to observe the decorum of person, audience and subject matter, and most importantly, to represent the psychology and mind of the imagined personage by attempting to respond to an imagined interlocutor. Character was created through dialogue both in legendary examples and in the examples Erasmus recommended from history and scripture. The descriptions of the exercises in impersonation which Erasmus and Aphthonius recommend and which were taught in Renaissance schools help to account for the tribute paid to Shakespeare by Pope, Hazlitt, Schlegel and others who praise Shakespeare’s ability to put himself in the place of his characters, to imagine how they might think and feel in particular circumstances: in brief, to impersonate.

Aristotle defined rhetoric not as the art of persuasion, as did the sophists, but as the ‘faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever’ (Rhetoric, I, ii, 1). It is not concerned therefore with the true, but with the probable, and its function is to deal with things uncertain, things for which we have no systematic rules. By creating fictions before the eyes of his audience, the rhetorician could persuade us of what could not be demonstrated. Rhetoric is the province of judicial and legislative debate, and inevitably of poetry, for both law and poetry are concerned with illusion, with mimesis. By creating in the mind of the auditor the verisimilar, the life-like rather than the real, the jurist convinces his audience. In later Latin works on rhetoric, the early anonymous Ad Herennium, Cicero’s several works on rhetoric and oratory, and Quintilian’s Institution this relationship between law and poetry is more fully developed.

All of these works draw their examples from literature. Cicero remarks upon the resemblance between the academic method of debate (controversia and suasoria) and the dialogues of tragedy and comedy (De Natura Deorum, 3.72–3). Quintilian recommends Menander and Euripides to the aspiring rhetorician (Institutio 10.1.69). He uses the Orestes to exemplify the way in which an argument or case depends on circumstances as the jurist presents them and on the effect of discourse. Though no general case can be made for matricide, a defense can be made for a specific person, Orestes, because in killing his mother he avenged his father. The use of the Orestes as an illustration, as well as the many other literary examples used by Cicero and others, imply that classical and Renaissance readers were familiar with fiction as a recognized means of analyzing questions of justice.¹² In fact, not only Quintilian, but the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Inventione and the derivative Rhetores Latini Minores take the majority of their examples from epic, drama and the fictional exercises of the suasoria and controversia. Literary fictions allowed for greater qualification through the manipulation of circumstances, and literary apologists of the Renaissance, most notably Sidney, take up this argument in the defense of poetry.

Most of the treatises and handbooks recommend three standard questions for organizing any controversy or debate: sitne, whether or not a given act was committed or situation obtains; quid sit, the definition of the act once admitted; and quale sit, the character or quality of the act once admitted and defined. Once the facts of a case are determined, the rhetorician must discover its qualitates by means of place logic, the categories of situation and kind, the how-and-in-what-state- of-mind the act was performed.¹³ Cicero recognized the effectiveness of created fictions, what he called personae and sermones, in helping the audience see how something took place. Characters and speeches are always more convincing than mere statement or exposition, or the commonplaces of argument, for they foreground the colores or qualitates, those particulars which give the audience or reader a more complex view of character and incident than pure description can provide. In his discussion of law and Renaissance theories of art, Kantorowicz suggests that fiction was ‘something artfully “created” by the art of the jurist; it was an achievement to his credit because fiction made manifest certain legal consequences which had been hidden before or which by nature did not exist’.¹⁴

In drama as in law the analysis and synthesis of qualities through speeches and episodes lead the audience to acquiesce emotionally to the plot of the play.¹⁵ We must discover not only the place, time and occasion a given act was performed, not only who performed it, but how and in what state of mind. As Cicero admits in De Partitione Oratoria:, 42–3, actions done because of emotional or mental disturbance cannot be defended in court, but they can be defended on the basis of qualitative issues in open debate, or we might add, on the public stage. And the greater the specificity with which the circumstances of a case or the mind of a character are investigated, the more the audience is implicated in motives and choices, questions of qualitas.¹⁶

Measure for Measure has often been likened to a judicial debate.¹⁷ Immediately preceding Angelo’s soliloquy, he and Isabella rigorously debate the relative claims of justice and mercy; indeed the entire play has sometimes been interpreted as a debate between justice and mercy. More recently, Joel Altman’s work on Tudor drama in relation to rhetorical practice suggests that the ambivalence and multiplicity of perspectives characteristic of Renaissance English drama may be a product of a particular feature of rhetorical training, the practice of arguing in utramque partem, on both sides of the question.¹⁸ Though Measure for Measure might be usefully approached as a philosophical quaestio which debates the opposing merits of justice and mercy, most readers would agree that character, rather than idea or abstraction, arrests the reader’s or spectator’s attention. Our response to the play’s ambivalence derives as much from our responses to character as from logical arguments for any side. We do not question Isabella’s refusal to give up her virginity, but her callous manner of doing so; we judge Angelo’s behavior more by the quality of his mind as he discovers his desire than on the basis of his opinions or even his acts. Our response to the play is determined by the quality and circumstances of just and unjust, merciful and unmerciful, persons and acts.

By organizing Angelo’s soliloquy as dialogue, Shakespeare represents the qualitas of his character’s mind and thereby engages us more forcefully in Angelo’s motives and choices for action. For the rhetorician, dialogue was a means of bringing out the latent issues in a larger issue by juxtaposing antithetical points of view. By contrasting the demands of Angelo’s conscience with those of his desire, Shakespeare helps his audience to see more clearly Angelo’s nature and his responsibility for his actions. We are led to admit that under certain circumstances, given other qualities, the tempter might indeed sin more than the tempted, and in III, i, as we listen to Isabella’s shrill and vituperative repudiation of her brother’s all too human desire to live, we find Isabella cast in Angelo’s uncharitable role.

Interpretation depends on the occasion of utterance and its function in the larger dramatic organization of the play, not on psychological analysis. A typology of consciousness is only credible and significant if considered in relation to the larger structure of the comic plot. We need then to ask if we can discover by looking carefully at Measure for Measure an intersection of plot with this rhetoric of character which would help to explain the apparent contradiction between lifelikeness in characterization and conventional plots which has so long troubled critics of Shakespearean comedy.