Comic plot conventions in Measure for Measure
Angelo’s soliloquy occurs at that moment in Measure for Measure when his identity as judge or ‘angel’ is jeopardized by his desire for Isabella. Throughout Shakespeare’s comic practice, we will find that this rhetoric of character or inner debate occurs at predictable moments in his comic plots of mistaken identity, and this conjunction of a rhetoric of consciousness with the mistaken identity plot produces in part our sense of complex character. It is important to observe, however, that this perception of the lifelike does not come from any necessary relation to reality, but only because such rhetoric generates an illusion of reality, what the French call l’effet de réel.1 It is unimportant whether self-address is really a structure of mental life or psychic process, or whether people actually question their identities, or have identities at all; the point is that the validity of conventions is a function of our belief in them.2
Recent work on the realistic and naturalistic novels of the nineteenth century has demonstrated that conventions determine our perception of characters as realistic.3 So also with the dramatic characters we call lifelike. Our perception of them as realistic is as determined by conventions as the mistaken identity plots in which they occur; in such plots, when a character questions his identity, or is mistaken for someone else, his suffering or confusion is represented through the rhetoric of consciousness. We perceive characters who use this rhetoric of self-address at those moments preceding the discovery in a mistaken identity plot as lifelike. In Measure for Measure, Angelo’s disguise is a disguise of the mind rather than the body, but by juxtaposing Angelo’s psychological predicament with the disguise plot of the Duke from romance, Shakespeare exploits both the psychological and external or physical dimensions of mistaken identity. The brief discussion of Measure for Measure which follows does not pretend to pass by the many shoals and reefs which endanger the critic’s voyage through the play. Recent work on this comedy, both articles and several book-length studies, steers a fuller course through its dangerous waters.4 I will endeavor to show only how Measure for Measure demonstrates particular features of Shakespeare’s method of comic characterization.
If convention is a contract between artist and audience, as many have observed, we need to ask what are the binding rules or features of that contract.5 What, for example, are the signals dramatists provide to make us read or perceive a particular dramatic convention in a particular way? What signals does Shakespeare provide to develop mistaken identity as a theme in Measure for Measure instead of simply a device for motivating plot?
In the Duke’s first lines, he speaks of Angelo’s assumption of his authority as a role. By applying the language of physical disguise and mistaken identity to the substitution of Angelo for the Duke, Shakespeare indicates to his audience the psychological dimension of the exchange. The Duke asks Escalus, ‘What figure of us, think you, he will bear?’. Angelo is ‘lent’ his terror and ‘dress’t in his love. The Duke exhorts Angelo to use his virtues, makes allusion to the biblical parables of wasted virtue or skill, the candlestick, the talents and the line from Matthew, ‘the tree is known by its fruit’.6 The Duke calls upon Angelo to exercise his virtues in the world, and this need for practiced virtue is emphasized by the juxtaposition in the first scene of the Duke’s descriptions of Escalus and Angelo. Escalus is virtuous and wise, but his virtue, unlike Angelo’s, is proved:
The nature of our people,
Our city’s institutions, and the terms
For common justice, y’are as pregnant in
As art and practice hath enriched any
That we remember.
(I, i, 9–13)
The Duke’s exhortations to Angelo, however, declare that his virtue remains to be tested, and his words to his proxy strike the first note of the play’s recurring theme of measure for measure:
nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.
(I, i, 36–40)
The problem of measure for measure is, of course, endlessly debated: should Angelo receive what he has attempted to dispense? Can man who is by nature sinful judge a fellow creature?
Shakespeare extends the language of substitution and role-playing in this speech: to Angelo the Duke speaks of his ‘part in him’ and exhorts him ‘In our remove, be thou at full ourself’.7 In exhorting him to practice his virtue, the Duke says ‘Spirits are not finely touch’d/But to fine issues’. Touch’d means to test gold or metal to assure its purity and to stamp or imprint the metal to indicate it has been so tested. Angelo continues the coining image; he is the metal, the Duke’s role as judge the face or imprint stamped upon him. Though these lines are in part at least a conventional disclaimer, it is finally true that Angelo’s mettle is tested.8 His formal request becomes a test he has not imagined, and his method of exercising justice indicates that initially he has no doubt of his ability to judge. The Duke’s response is simple and to the point: ‘No more evasion.’ Angelo will no longer be allowed to evade the responsibilities of his virtue. The language of disguise and role-playing Shakespeare uses throughout this scene signals the double nature of mistaken identity.
Critics have found the Duke’s actions, his substitution of Angelo for himself in this first act, inconsistent with the later avowal of his purpose to test Angelo (I, iii). They suggest that the Duke’s knowledge of his proxy’s dishonorable treatment of Mariana and the suspicions he voices to the friar in I, iii make his decision to entrust power to Angelo and his praise in the opening scene a serious textual problem.9 Even this first scene, however, implies the Duke’s later revealed purpose to test Angelo. The very biblical echoes noted above are also ambiguous. As Muir points out, the story from St Mark of the woman who had an issue of blood and who touched Jesus’ garment so that she knew the Virtue that went out of him’ influences the phrasing of the Duke’s speech.10 Though in this passage ‘issues’ is positive, these lines echo the violence and questionable virtue of the biblical allusion and therefore prefigure the later action.
In the next scene we learn Claudio has been condemned to death for fornication. He gives several reasons for the harshness of Angelo’s judgment, reasons which also suggest the discrepancy between Angelo’s assumed role of judge and his true self, between his psychological disguise and his inner nature. In speculating whether it may be the newness of Angelo’s position or his desire to establish authority which makes the Duke’s deputy judge him harshly, Claudio uses the Renaissance commonplace that the ‘body public be/A horse whereon the governor doth ride’ (I, ii, 148–9). This Platonic metaphor is often used not only in political contexts, but as a figure for the difficulty of self-government. Later in the play when Angelo finds it impossible to govern his passion, he uses the figure to refer to himself. Claudio is uncertain ‘Whether the tyranny be in his place,/Or in his eminence that fills it up’. Are Angelo’s actions determined by his official position or by his inflated sense of his own eminence? Claudio claims that Angelo ‘for a name/Now puts the drowsy and neglected act/Freshly on me: ’tis surely for a name’ (I, ii, 158–60). Angelo is making a name for himself, as Claudio’s repetition makes clear. We in the audience, warned in the first scene that Angelo is being tested, here share Claudio’s tentative understanding of the deputy’s motives for action.
The scene which follows between the Duke and the friar establishes the traditional disguise plot of romance which governs our response to the play and makes manifest what heretofore has only been suggested obliquely by metaphor and allusion: there is a discrepancy between Angelo’s identity as judge and his true nature. The Duke has imposed his office on Angelo, ‘Who may in th’ambush of my name strike home’ (I, iii, 41). Ambush is always a negative word in Shakespearean usage which means ‘to lurk’ or ‘to wait in hiding’ Though Angelo will exercise justice protected by the Duke’s name, his name or role will also ‘ambush’ Angelo, as his final lines imply: ‘Hence shall we see/if power change purpose, what our seemers be.’ In the first scene we understand that the Duke requires Angelo to exercise his virtue; in the next we have Claudio speculating on the reason for Angelo’s harsh judgment; here the Duke reveals outright his purpose to test the angelic virtue Angelo’s name suggests.
Act II, ii establishes the central structural and thematic irony of the play. Angelo has said to Escalus in justification of Claudio’s condemnation, ‘When I that censure him do so offend,/Let mine own judgement pattern out my death’ (II, i, 29–30). Angelo will, in fact, so offend, and in her interview with Angelo, Isabella repeats this theme. Angelo believes himself immune, safe from the sin committed by Claudio; Isabella recognizes his inflated self confidence:
But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d –
His glassy essence – like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
(II, ii, 118–24)
The imagery of clothing in these lines continues the language of role-playing: power is a disguise man puts on which hides his ‘glassy essence’, his pure self, the center of his being which is transparent because there is no farther to look, no hidden recess. Lever glosses this line as ‘most ignorant of his own spiritual entity’ and quotes J. V. Cunningham who, from other Shakespearen usage, interprets man’s essence as his ‘intellectual soul, which is an image of God, and hence glassy for it mirrors God’.11 For Angelo the power represented by the Duke’s role prevents self-knowledge as truly as the mistaken identities involving twins, lost children and love potions prevent understanding in the early comedies. The activity Isabella associates with this misunderstanding of self is acting a part: man is like an angry ape, aping God’s judgment before heaven, playing fantastic tricks. Her lines are another version of Jaques’ ‘all the world’s a stage’, but more painful and accusing. They reduce man’s play-acting to that of a beast by calling attention not simply to his absurdity as a man, as Jaques does, but to the grotesque posturing of his bestial nature. Isabella‘s comparison of stern judge to gnarled oak split by heaven’s ‘sharp and sulphurous bolt’ is a Renaissance commonplace for justice and mercy. Her progression from ‘giant’ (line 109), to ‘great man’ (line 111), to ‘petty officer’ (line 113), to ‘man’ (line 118), to ‘angry ape’ (line 121) signals the degeneration of those who mimic God’s justice rather than his mercy.
In her next long speech, Isabella moves from the impersonal man to the personal: ‘Go to your bosom,/Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know/ That’s like my brother’s fault’ (II, ii, 137–9). Ironically, as his soliloquy demonstrates, Angelo heeds her words and discovers his own desire: ‘She speaks, and ’tis such sense/That my sense breeds with it’ (II, ii, 142–3). The pun on sense here is doubly appropriate: words seem as surely as do men, and it is this kind of word-play which characterizes their second meeting, creating its ironies and cross-purposes.12 Angelo believes he controls completely his human feeling and passion; the Duke’s authority encourages him to live out this identity and he finds it wanting. His confidence in his immunity to temptation makes recognizing his human feeling for Isabella so difficult, and the soliloquy which ends the scene represents that struggle.13
In terms of its larger function in the play the soliloquy reveals what till now has only been prophecy and foreshadowing: Angelo, who has condemned Claudio to death for a natural sexual lapse, will then repeat the lapse, compound his crime and be judged for it. And it is worth remembering that Shakespeare has the Duke arrange with great nicety that Angelo’s sexual activity duplicate that for which he condemned Claudio.
In his soliloquy at II, iv, Angelo makes explicit for the first time this troubling realization of the difference between inner and outer: Angelo’s lust for Isabella awakens not only his desire for sensual experience, but also his pride. He recognizes that his position as judge and his ‘gravity’ (II, iv, 9) are external attributes: they are a ‘case’ and ‘habit’ (line 13). He addresses his ‘place’ and ‘form’ in the second person, as if they were independent. These lines end with the most precise paradox describing Angelo yet, that paradox which focuses on the irony of his name, the ‘good angel on the devil’s horn’ (II, iv, 16). In this speech Angelo admits his human propensity for sin. His repression of desire finds release, and like Plato’s horse, it cannot be restrained. His words ‘now I give my sensual race the rein’ (line 159) echo Claudio’s language describing Angelo’s actions in I, iii.
The metaphor of disguise which extends our understanding of mistaken identity in the play is continued in the second meeting between Angelo and Isabella; she vehemently attacks his seeming while he tries to make her understand his ‘sense’. Angelo means for his words to have one construction, but Isabella understands them in another: the meaning of language is determined by the auditor as surely as by the speaker, by the total speech act, and irony is created by the failure of one aspect of that act, the hearer’s inability to understand Angelo’s proposition. Words wear disguises as surely as do men; language and identity are relative, dependent at least in part on the world outside as well as the self within.
Shakespeare further complicates the psychological disguise plot of Measure for Measure by the series of substitutions or doublings he works out in the play. Angelo’s reciprocal relation to the Duke is established through the action itself, but also by the metaphor of imprinting in the first scene, and by the repeated references to Angelo as his deputy; his relationship to Claudio is established by his desire for Isabella, but he is also linked to Isabella herself throughout the play.14 As Angelo’s lines at II, ii suggest, Isabella is like him, a kind of double: ‘O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,/With saints dost bait thy hook!’ Nor is this the first link Shakespeare makes between Isabella and Angelo. In her first scene she asks of the nun ‘a more strict restraint’ (I, iv, 4), words which inevitably recall the Duke’s description of Angelo in the immediately preceding scene, ‘A man of stricture and firm abstinence’. L. C. Knights has pointed out that ‘the unfamiliarity of the world stricture ensures that its derivation from stringere, to bind together or strain, shall contribute to the meaning of the line’, but he fails to remark the adjectival form used by Isabella in the immediately following scene.15 Both Angelo and Isabella self-consciously abstain from contact with the opposite sex; both seek restraint and repress the demands of sexual difference and desire. And it is exactly their doubleness, their seeming lack of difference, which makes Angelo desire Isabella, as he admits in his soliloquy.
In IV, iv, when Angelo learns that the Duke is returning by way of a royal progress, his language reflects the play’s controlling metaphor of disguise: the Duke’s deed ‘unshapes’ him, both literally by taking away his power and identity as judge, and figuratively by disturbing his mind with remorse. In the final act, there is not one discovery, but three. The Duke is revealed, and his discovery, like that of the virgo or of the existence of twins, puts the action to rights. Angelo is exposed; he confesses to his crimes in religious language (‘confession’, ‘grace’, ‘power divine’, ‘passes’) which Shakespeare uses to mark the movement from sin to repentance characteristic of the romances with which this play is so often linked. Finally, Isabella herself discovers the true mercy for which she argued in her earlier interview with Angelo. Having undergone a figurative ‘repair i’ the dark’ in facing the public shame of accusing Angelo, at Mariana’s behest Isabella refuses the Duke’s call for vengeance and instead begs for Angelo’s life. In doing so she transcends the reciprocal violence of vengeance Claudio’s supposed death initiates and which Angelo’s death would continue. The title of the play and the series of equivalences which it sets up and insists upon are not borne out in the final act. Instead, difference is re-established by the return of hierarchy in the person of the Duke and by Isabella’s merciful and ritual pleading on Angelo’s behalf.16
This brief discussion of the play suggests some of the ways Shakespeare creates complex comic characters within the confines of a mistaken identity plot. Soliloquies and monologic fragments which manifest a rhetoric of consciousness occur at predictable moments in comic plots of mistaken identity when a character’s identity is questioned and he finds himself adrift, cut loose from his normal bearings and without a guide. This rhetoric represents a divided mind through particular features which the audience perceives as signs of psychological complexity and realism. The movement, from ignorance through confusion to discovery, of the typical mistaken identity plot, when joined to this rhetoric of consciousness, creates the illusion of development and change which we identify with Shakespeare’s greatness as a dramatist. In Measure for Measure, the language of disguise and role-playing signals the psychological resonance of its mistaken identity plot of complex substitutions and exchanges.
Convention may be defined as a regularity of behavior produced by a system of expectations.17 By such a definition, two conventions of comic plots are the mental error or mistaken identity which creates the dramatic conflict, and the anagnorisis or discovery which Aristotle tells us in the Poetics every good plot requires. Mistaken identity is of two sorts: first, errors caused by ignorance or by the deliberate concealment of some fact (the identity of Oedipus’ parents, the origins of the Antipholi in The Comedy of Errors, or Don John’s duping of Claudio in Much Ado); and secondly, psychological errors caused by the mistakes a character makes about himself, his judgment or his inner nature (Lear’s rejection of Cordelia or Angelo’s identity as ‘angel’). Comic dramatists often combine these two types of error: ignorance of a simple fact provokes a character to action which makes him recognize his true nature and the mistakes he has made about it. This recognition or discovery leads, in turn, to comic enlightenment or the exposure of folly.18
In any given plot, misapprehension or mistaken identity always produces a system of expectations which can only be satisfied by discovery, the transition from ignorance to knowledge which necessarily involves a reversal of fortune. Mistaken identity is a convention of comedy in so far as the repeated act of viewing plays makes the audience expect that plots will behave in a certain way, for no matter how we arrange the various possibilities a mistake or error offers, we must always have the discovery in order to resolve a given plot. Discovery, we might say, is the comic convention par excellence.
Shakespeare learned the conventions he uses for constructing comic plots and realistic characters from his rhetorical training in the Elizabethan grammar school. But even a brief look at the sources of that training suggests that Renaissance educators and students inherited both their tools and their literary examples from the ancients. We need to turn then to the earliest practitioners of comedy themselves to discover Shakespeare’s dramatic precedents for presenting character.