On 19 March 1603, new style, all the London theatres were closed by order of the Privy Council; the Queen was dying and the nation awaited the eclipse of the mortal moon. She died on 24 March and before the mourning was over and the new king installed ominous signs of plague appeared and a virulent visitation began in April and continued throughout that year and into the next. The theatres remained closed, except possibly for a short period in late April and early May. Shakespeare, like most other rich men who were able, would certainly have left London and probably found himself with unwonted leisure to concentrate on the completion of Othello and the contemplation of its successor. On 19 May King James bestowed the title of ‘King’s Men’ on the hitherto Chamberlain’s Company and made a gift of £30 to the company for ‘mayntenance and releife, being prohibited to present any playes publiquelie in or neere London by reason of the plague’.1 The money was probably not important, for the King’s Men were in the best position of the playing troupes to survive a long layoff, and in any case the company did some touring in the provinces during the London closure.2 Much more important was the prestige brought by the seal of James’s approval.
James’s interest in the theatre may have been somewhat intermittent, but in these early years in England he (and even more his Queen) seem to have been enthusiastic playgoers. Elizabeth I had enjoyed watching plays, but there is a notable increase in Court appearances by players in the early years of James’s reign and in addition large sums of money were spent staging Court masques.3 In spite of remaining, throughout his life, a ‘regal Calvinist’,4 James saw in the theatre both usefulness and legitimate entertainment. In Basilikon Doron he defends the stage, without irony, as a harmless pastime:
For I cannot see what greater superstition can be in making playes and lawfull games in Maie, and good cheere at Christmas, then in eating fish in Lent, and upon Fridayes, the Papists as well using the one as the other: so that alwayes the Sabboths be kept holy, and no unlawfull pastime be used: And as this forme of contenting the peoples mindes, hath beene used in all well governed Republicks: so will it make you to performe in your government that olde good sentence, Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci.5
The importance of James’s interest in the theatre cannot be overstressed, because coming as it did when the London stage had reached an unprecedented height of sophistication, it provided a climate in which the vigorous growth could continue and develop. The development, it is true, in this time of royal encouragement, continued the tendency towards a more elitist theatre and this in the long run turned out to contain the seeds of decay as well as the immediate promise of more fruit.
Given the new King’s interest in the theatre, it is not surprising to find the playwrights competing for his attention. The play Shakespeare began work on, probably sometime in the year of the King’s accession, was Measure for Measure. This play shows unmistakable evidence of a concern to interest (and flatter) the King, both by reflecting his ideas (notably as expressed in his book on the conduct of a king, Basilikon Doron)6 and by representing his monarch in an idealized manner on stage in the character of Duke Vincentio. Duke Vincentio is not a portrait of James I. No playwright in his right mind would have the temerity to attempt such a thing, even if the censorship would have allowed it (which it wouldn’t), but he provides a sufficiently close reflection of James’s views and attitudes to make the representation clear and flattering.7 Like Macbeth, Measure for Measure is an exercise in delicate sycophancy, which no doubt succeeded in confirming James’s approval of the Chamberlain’s Men and Shakespeare’s ultimate triumph over his rivals. The demise of the boys’ companies in particular turned out not to be far off.
Shakespeare’s triumph at this time is now clear to us, but was probably not so obvious to him. Accordingly Measure for Measure shows as much concern with current theatrical developments as the previous plays. Even if the play was written in the first instance for Court performance Shakespeare would want to transfer it to the Globe as soon as possible. By the time of the closure of the playhouses it was becoming clear that a different kind of comedy was coming into vogue, a comedy of moral disillusionment that was (after the reopening) to lead to that outburst of comedies of London life of which Thomas Middleton was the most successful exponent. As usual Ben Jonson quickly got on the bandwagon, converting the Italian setting of Every Man in his Humour to the new taste and adding a new prologue in the name of fashionable ‘realismo’. This use of comedy to record the seamier side of the here and now was not fully under way in 1603, although already early in that year George Chapman (always the innovator) had put a play about a current London scandal on the boards in the lost play the Old Joiner of Aldgate, while Middleton’s early play, the Family of Love, also touching on aspects of contemporary life, may date from around the same time. The difficulty of dating these early London plays exactly makes it impossible to chart the precise way the comedy of disillusionment developed. By 1603, however, the older romantic comedy, in which Shakespeare had excelled, had clearly given way to a comedy where the more sordid activities of low life were displayed. Perhaps we ought to refer to a revival of satiric comedy, for examples of comic realism, such as A Knack to Know a Knave (c. 1592) and A Knack to Know an Honest Man (c. 1594), both using the device of the disguised traveller to expose vice, provide some link between the new Jacobean satire and the satire of the old morality plays. In the latter play, for instance, the joint hero, Sempronio, disguises himself as ‘Penitent Experience’ (compare Middleton’s Penitent Brothel) to become the agent of justice. Dekker’s Blurt, Master Constable can be taken as an early example of the new fashion; written for Paul’s Boys in 1602 it is set in Venice and combines a romantic element with a great deal of seedy comedy, much of which centres on a brothel. Similarly Middleton’s Phoenix (1603/4), another Paul’s play set in Italy, gives a jaundiced view of a world of corruption that, like Dekker’s play, is more English than Italian. Phoenix is particularly interesting in using the device of the ruler-in-disguise; for Prince Phoenix, son of the reigning Duke of Ferrara, has the role of satirical observer as he moves about the Dukedom incognito. This same device, central to Measure for Measure, is found in Marston’s Malcontent which also probably dates from 1603, in this case just before the closing of the theatres in March. Shakespeare certainly knew this play well, for it was transferred from Blackfriars, for which it was written, to the Globe, probably after the reopening in 1604.
Marston’s play is worth looking at in some detail, not just as a possible influence on Measure for Measure, but as an example of the current fashion in comedy as Shakespeare began work on his play. Like Blurt and Phoenix, it is set in Italy, but concerns itself exclusively with Court life (Blackfriars was much patronized by courtiers). ‘Courtly’, however, means something quite different here from the idealized courtly world of earlier Shakespearean comedy, for the atmosphere is one of sordid intrigue and sexual aberration. Malcontent marks a new trend in Marston’s work. Compared to the early comedies written for Paul’s Boys, the play is coherently plotted, indeed its structural ingenuity is one of the more remarkable things about it. For in it Marston solves a structural problem that Jonson had found insuperable in his ‘comicall satyre’ up to this time: how to integrate the satirical commentator into the main action. Marston achieves this by having his hero, Altofronto, assume the role of the malcontent, Malevole, as his means of disguise. Altofronto thus becomes both the disaffected satiric commentator and the intrigue hero. Because the inchoate structures of his earlier comedies were themselves symbols of Marston’s theme of the essential incoherence of human life, such a radical change in plotting marks an equally radical change in theme. Accordingly, Malcontent abandons the Christian pessimism of the earlier plays for a more orthodox (and banal) statement of the earthly triumph of virtue. There are still times, however, when the Duke (in his role as Malevole) can strike the earlier lugubrious note:
Think this: this earth is the only grave and Golgotha wherein all things that live must rot; ’tis but the draught wherein the heavenly bodies discharge their corruption; the very muck hill on which the sublunary orbs cast their excrements. Man is the slime of this dung pit…
(IV, v, 107–11)8
It is difficult to give this grim view of man much weight here, not only because it is presented as a deliberate affectation, adopted by Altofronto as part of his disguise, but also because it is not ultimately borne out by the pattern of the play’s events. Malcontent is essentially a romance, in which the forces of virtue, headed by Altofronto-Malevole and including the loyal courtier Celso and the saintly Maria, Altofronto’s wife, triumph over the evil Mendoza and the usurping Duke, Pietro. The evil reign of Duke Pietro is characterized by the political manoeuvrings of the base Mendoza and pervaded by the sexual immorality represented by the adulterous Aurelia, Pietro’s wife, and the bawd Maquerelle, who sets the seedy tone of the court.
Malcontent, in its combination of decadent atmosphere and chocolate box morality, is a kind of sentimental re-run of the earlier Senecan tragedy Antonio’s Revenge, which also tells of a usurping duke (who, more interestingly, is also a psychopath) and a disguised revenger. In the earlier play the atmosphere of violent perversion is a suitable expression of a sin-laden view of the world. In Malcontent the sinfulness is largely a dramatic device, an aunt-sally, for virtue to overthrow, and the atmosphere of corruption is generated as much by the satiric commentary of the hero and the gratuitous decadence of Maquerelle as by any compelling vision ‘of what men were, and are…what men must be’ (as the prologue to Antonio’s Revenge puts it). Marston’s retreat into sentimentality in Malcontent is an unfortunate result of Jonson’s demand for overt moralizing—the play is dedicated to Jonson in fulsome terms and must be seen as the capitulatory and belated finale of the theatre war. No one, however, can deny the technical skill with which Marston handles both plot and structure of the play and its success won for it a transfer to the Globe, a little lightened by Webster (not the most jocund of dramatists) for the popular stage.
Middleton’s Phoenix is technically a much less accomplished play than Malcontent, lacking the latter play’s structural ingenuity and intensity of atmosphere. But in many ways it is closer to Measure for Measure, and in one respect—the use of the device of the ruler-in-disguise to reflect King James’s ideas and compliment the new King—it is so remarkably like Measure for Measure in its aims that it is difficult to believe that the two playwrights were not aware of each other’s intentions. Almost certainly the two plays were being written about the same time, for there is convincing evidence that Phoenix was written from late 1603 to early 1604 and its most likely first date of performance was February 1604.9 The first quarto (1607) says on its title page that the play was ‘presented before his Maiestie’ and the most likely date of that presentation was 20 February 1604.10 This may mean, therefore, that Middleton’s play was first performed earlier than Measure for Measure, whose first performance may have been the Court performance recorded for 26 December 1604. It is possible that Phoenix prompted Shakespeare’s play, but it is not impossible that the two playwrights had hit on the same idea independently, the ruler-in-disguise in Malcontent suggesting to both that this would be an excellent formula to present before a king known to favour hole-in-corner methods. Both playwrights, along with anybody who was anybody,11 had been reading their Basilikon Doron and there they would read James’s advice to his son, Prince Henry:
delite to haunt your Session, and spie carefully their proceedings; taking good heede, if any briberie may be tried among them, which cannot over severely be punished…let it be your owne craft, to take a sharp account of every man in his office.12
The King observed his own advice at the trial of the Jesuit, Father Henry Garnet, during which James was present behind a screen.13 Measure for Measure seemingly alludes to another occasion whan James and Queen Anne attempted to appear incognito at the Royal Exchange on 15 March 1604.14
The structure of Phoenix is loose, harking back to earlier ‘realist’ plays like the Knack plays. It consists of a string of satirical episodes that are connected principally by the presence of Prince Phoenix as observer, intervener and (at times) agent provocateur. Prince Phoenix has been advised by his father, the reigning duke of Ferrara, to travel abroad to gain experience of the world. Knowing that his father is seriously ill and might die while he is away, Phoenix decides to remain at home amongst his future subjects, disguising himself to ‘spie carefully their proceedings’ (to repeat James I’s words). Each encounter with the citizenry (who are unashamedly English and only nominally Ferrarese) illustrates some aspect of the disorder in the land caused (as in Measure for Measure) by the over-indulgence of a too merciful Duke:
Forty-five years I’ve gently ruled this dukedom;
Pray heaven it be no fault,
For there’s as much disease, though not to th’eye,
In too much pity as in tyranny.
(I, i, 7–10)
Here, as in Measure for Measure, the theme of the need to balance justice with mercy echoes James, who in Basilikon Doron recommends to his son the need to strike the right balance, at the same time confessing a tendency in himself towards excessive clemency:
mixe Iustice with Mercie, punishing or sparing, as ye shall finde the crime to have bene wilfully or rashly committed, and according to the bypast behaviour of the committer. For if otherwise ye kyth your clemencie at the first, the offences would soone come to such heapes, and the contempt of you grow so great, that when ye would fall to punish, the number of them to be punished, would exceed the innocent…. But in this, my over-deare bought experience may serve you for a sufficient lesson: For I confesse, where I thought (by being gracious at the beginning) to win all mens hearts to a loving and willing obedience, I by the contrary found, the disorder of the countrie, and the losse of my thankes to be all my reward.15
The Dukes of both Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s plays show a similarly disarming ingenuousness, though while Shakespeare boldly associates the laxity with the character who most closely resembles King James, the Duke of Vienna himself, Middleton more timidly (and less appropriately, considering a subject of the satire is flattery, touched on by the play at V, i, 181 and by Basilikon Doron)16 associates the laxity with the dying Duke, whose forty-five year reign (as has been pointed out)17 alludes to the length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. In Phoenix King James is flatteringly represented in the young Prince Phoenix, whose name was frequently used as an honorific of James Stuart.18 Prince Phoenix represents a more naïve, less subtle version of the good ruler than Shakespeare’s Duke Vincentio. He is made to expound the doctrine of balanced judgement, without his father’s confession, in commenting on the corrupt Justice Falso’s undue severity:
So, sir, extremes set off all actions thus;
Either too tame or else too tyrannous.
(III, i, 198–9)
which recalls Basilikon Doron’s apothegm nam in medio stat virtus.19 Fortunately for Middleton, James’s son, Prince Henry, was still too young to be mistaken for Prince Phoenix; adulation of Prince Henry’s ‘perfection’ later caused his father stirrings of jealousy.
The various satirical episodes of Phoenix are interwoven with considerable complexity, and are chosen principally to illustrate themes of special interest to King James. The only one of these episodes directly related to the framing device of Phoenix’s departure and return to the Court concerns the evil Proditor, the machiavel of the play. Proditor (‘traitor’) has all the qualities of Marston’s Mendoza, though Middleton fails to develop his role as the central threat to order. Early in the play we find him failing to seduce the chaste Castiza and contemplating the assassination of Prince Phoenix, but his principal role comes towards the end of the play in his plotting to accuse Phoenix before the Duke of planning to assassinate his own father and assume power. Phoenix, in disguise, receives this information in advance of the attempt by pretending to ally himself with the villain, and has no difficulty in exposing Proditor before his father in the last scene of the play. The suggestion has been made that Proditor is intended as a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh,20 but the character is so obviously a stereotype of the stage machiavel that it is not easy to detect much individuality in it.
Middleton is more at home with such grimly comic sketches as that of the Sea-Captain, who, having committed the solecism of marriage, is in the process of selling his wife so that he can accuse her of adultery and obtain a divorce. Other successful satirical portraits are those of Tangle, the corrupt lawyer, who comes to the Captain’s aid, of the corrupt magistrate Falso and of the Jeweller’s Wife, who steals from her husband to keep her impecunious lover in funds. The scarcely related episodes that centre on these characters provide Middleton with the kind of sardonic comment on man’s rapacity and lustfulness that becomes the hallmark of the later satirical comedies.
The episodes of the Sea-Captain are presented in the first two acts and focus on two themes of particular concern to James: the sacredness of marriage and the practical problem of discouraging privateering on the high seas. The theme of matrimony is broached through the Captain’s disillusionment with his recent marriage to Castiza:
What lustful passion came aboard of me that I should marry; was I drunk? Yet that cannot altogether hold, for it was four o’clock i’th’morning; had it been five, I would ha’ sworn it…. Oh, that a captain should live to be married! Nay, I that have been such a gallant salt-thief should yet live to be married. What a fortunate elder brother is he, whose father being a rammish plowman, himself a perfumed gentleman spending the laboring reek from his father’s nostrils in tobacco, the sweat of his father’s body in monthly physic for his pretty, queasy harlot: he sows apace i’th’country; the tailor o’ertakes him i’th’city; so that oftentimes before the corn comes to earing, ’tis up to the ears in high collars, and so at every harvest the reapers take pains for the mercers: ha! why this is stirring happiness indeed. Would my father had held a plow so, and fed upon squeez’d curds and onions, that I might have bath’d in sensuality! But he was too ruttish himself to let me thrive under him; consumed me before he got me; and that makes me so wretched now to be shackled with a wife, and not greatly rich, neither.
(I, ii, 40–3, 51–67)
Here is one of Middleton’s favourite themes, the cupidity of man that drives him perpetually in cycles of getting and spending (in both the economic and sexual senses of the words) and it is expressed with the characteristic gusto that has all the vitality of real life. The ability to present satire in vividly realistic terms was one of Middleton’s major contributions to Jacobean drama. It is not difficult to credit Brooks’s argument that the Captain is a portrait of Middleton’s own sea-captain stepfather, Thomas Harvey.21 Here the fictional sea-captain sees marriage as a trap sprung by a combination of a man’s lustfulness and cupidity, and his only escape is to go to sea. In consort with the lawyer Tangle he hits on the idea of selling his wife to Proditor, so combining profit with freedom.
The ubiquitous Phoenix gets wind of the Captain’s blatant attempt to pervert the marriage laws and with the help of Castiza’s son, Fidelio (reflecting Middleton’s role in the dispute with Harvey) exposes the fraud and passes the 500 crowns of the bride price to the bride herself, while the captain is sent packing. The sacredness of marriage is asserted in a homily in which Phoenix both praises ‘honourable matrimony’ and attacks those who would undermine it:
Reverend and honorable matrimony,
Mother of lawful sweets, unshamed mornings,
Dangerless pleasures, thou that mak’st the bed
Both pleasant and legitimately fruitful;
Without thee,
All the whole world were soiled bastardy.
Thou art the only and the greatest form
That put’st a difference between our desires
And the disordered appetites of beasts,
Making their mates those that stand next their lusts.
(II, ii, 161–70)
This kind of explicitness is alien to Middleton’s satiric method and is abandoned in the later comedies, in which the audience is required to realize for itself the positive implications of the satire. Such a radical departure from the Middletonian norm is usually explained by pointing out that this is an early work, though Family of Love generally eschews such explicitness. It is much more likely that in Phoenix Middleton wants to draw his audience’s attention to themes that will emphasize the play’s Jamesean affiliations. For King James had gone out of his way to advise his son at some length on the solemnity of marriage in Basilikon Doron, urging on Prince Henry the sacredness of the institution, the importance of marital chastity and the horror of bastardy:
First of all consider, that Manage is the greatest earthly felicitie or miserie, that can come to a man, according as it pleaseth God to bless or curse the same. Since then without the blessing of God, yee cannot looke for a happie successe in Manage, yee must bee carefull both in your preparation for it, and in the choice and usage of your wife, to procure the same. By your preparation, I meane, that yee must keepe your bodie cleane and unpolluted, till yee give it to your wife, whomto onely it belongeth…. When yee are Maried, keepe inviolably your promise made to God in your Mariage; which standeth all in doing one thing, and abstayning from another: to treat her in all things as your wife, and the halfe of your selfe; and to make your body (which then is no more yours, but properly hers) common with none other. I trust I need not to insist here to disswade you from the filthy vice of adulterie: remember onely what solemne promise yee make to God at your Mariage…22
It is characteristic of James that he includes in his solemn admonitions such risqué jokes as the punning on the ‘doing of one thing’, a bawdy use of the verb ‘do’ that the Captain echoes when he asks ‘when I’m abroad, what can I do at home?’ (I, ii, 45–6).23 The King’s delight in strange combinations of the sublime and the ridiculous, and especially combining raucous bawdy with moral admonition is mentioned by David Mathew in his biography of James I. Remarking on the close relationship between the King and Bishop John Williams towards the end of the King’s life, Mathew comments that Williams ‘understood the king’s wit, both the simplicity and the strain of bawdy’.24
The Captain is finally dispensed with at the end of the second scene of Act 2, when Prince Phoenix, having witnessed the Captain’s attempt to sell his wife, reveals his true identity, after the thoroughly Jamesean aside ‘Who scourgeth sin, let him do’t dreadfully’ (II, ii, 262). James liked nothing better than to ‘scourge sin dreadfully’ as on the occasion of his journey from Scotland at the beginning of his English reign, when at Newark he ordered the summary execution of a cutpurse who had been caught while travelling with the royal party.25 There was often, too, a theatrical, even grotesque, side to this dreadful justice, as on the occasion when James ordered a last-minute stay of execution for three of those condemned for the so-called ‘Main’ plot as they stood on the scaffold. David Stevenson quotes a passage from the contemporary chronicle of Sir Richard Baker describing this occasion:
this was the course that the king held in showing mercy. After the death of the three before named he signed three other warrants for the execution of the late Lord Cobham, the Lord Grey and Sir Griffin Markeham, on a certain day then following; but before that day came he privately framed another warrant, written with his own hand to the Sheriffe…by which he countermanded the former Warrants: and that there might be no notice taken of it: he sent it by Mr John Gybbe…one utterly unknown to all the company, appointing him to deliver it so, that it might not take effect, till after their severall confessions, and at the very point of their Execution, which was accordingly performed; At which time, it was a wonderful thing to see how the Delinquents falling on their knees, lamented their misdoings, and most of all how they extolled the kings unspeakable mercy.26
‘Unspeakable’ (in a more modern sense) seems the right epithet for so fantastical a king of dark corners. Shakespeare, too, shows himself thoroughly aware of the theatrical side of his Sovereign’s sense of justice in the similarly elaborate and grotesque deceptions that Duke Vincentio plays first on Claudio and then (even more grotesquely) on the drunken Barnadine. Middleton’s sea-captain is dismissed to immediate exile at sea, where his venom ‘may do least harm’ (II, ii, 316). He has offended not only in his irreverent attitude towards marriage and chastity, but in his profession of privateer at a time when James was making an attempt to stamp out the practice.27
Equally acceptable to Middleton’s royal audience would have been the emphasis the play gives to the importance of law and in its satire on legal corruption. The importance of the King’s role in upholding justice is (inevitably) a central theme of Basilikon Doron, as it is in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. James is concerned both with the role of king as law-giver and with the more abstract principles of justice in Basilikon Doron; and while Middleton is more concerned with legality in Phoenix, Shakespeare’s play makes the discussion of the nature of justice a central issue. In the second part of Basilikon Doron James advises his son on the responsibilities of the king as law-maker in distinguishing between the good king and the tyrant. The good king concerns himself with ‘the making and execution of good Lawes’, whereas the tyrant perverts the law ‘to serve only for his unrulie private affections’.28 He goes on to warn his son to beware of allowing the law to be manipulated for private ends. Middleton’s interest in law is evident, especially in the early plays (one of which, Michaelmas Term, gets its title from the law schools). This interest may be as much to do with Middleton’s own experience with the tangled dispute with Thomas Harvey as with the legal interests of the Paul’s audience. In Phoenix Middleton is principally concerned to satirize legal corruption and this satire revolves around the figures of the madly litigious Tangle, whom the Captain consults on the disposing of his wife, and the more macabre figure of the corrupt justice of the peace, Falso. Tangle is essentially a ‘humours’ character in the Jonsonian manner, a man preoccupied with his one obsession of litigation, who is driven completely mad when he loses two of his lawsuits and who is only finally purged of his complaint by having all his law terms bled out of him. The other character, Falso, is a more typical Middletonian rogue. Brooks suggests that the name may combine syllables from the names of Falstaff and Justice Shallow,29 but while there is something of Falstaff’s swagger about him, he is essentially a darker, more sinister figure. He is very much the corrupt magistrate and his function in the law satire is emphasized in a scene with Tangle in which they fire legal jargon at one another in a duelling parody (II, iii, 141–256). Falso, however, is no harmless fool; he connives with his own servants in robbing travellers and when Phoenix and Fidelio bring one of them (Furtivo) before him, he pretends to commit him (without acknowledging that he knows him) only to release him later. The examination of Furtivo is vintage Middleton in its ironic exploitation of multiple levels of perception. Phoenix and Fidelio, believing (as Phoenix says) that Falso is ‘a maintainer of equal causes’, take Falso’s somewhat eccentric interrogation of the prisoner at its face value, while we in the audience have already heard Falso interviewing two of the servants who took part in the robbery, to whom he boasts of his own days as a highway thief:
I ha’ seen the day I could have told money out of other men’s purses—mass, so I can do now—nor will I keep that fellow about me that dares not bid a man stand: for as long as drunkenness is a vice, stand is a virtue.
(III, i, 50–4)
Middleton exploits this duplicity by having Furtivo’s two companions in crime present (as Falso’s servants) during the interrogation, adding their knowledgeable asides to Falso’s. In the last act of the play Falso’s duplicity is revealed before the Duke (V, i, 127–55). There is, however, a much more sinister side to Falso that removes him altogether from the ranks of such amiable rogues as Falstaff. For Falso has a wealthy niece, of whom he is the guardian. To get hold of her money he proposes an incestuous relationship with her that will bind her to him. That it is the money rather than the sexual pleasure that he is interested in, however, is suggested by his contentment when she declares her wish to leave his household and her money rather than suffer his conduct. Falso’s character anticipates the archrogue Sir Bounteous Progress in A Mad World, My Masters, but whereas Sir Bounteous’s sinfulness is symbolic of the mad world of sin that humanity is heir to, Falso remains essentially confined to a narrower role of satiric portrait of the corrupt magistrate. Middleton’s characteristic linking of sex and money finds its fullest expression in the episodes concerning Falso’s daughter, who steals from her husband to pay her lover and who calls her lover ‘Pleasure’, while with equal allegorical frankness he refers to her as ‘Revenue’. Middleton’s characteristic allegorical tendencies rarely reveal themselves quite so openly.
As with the satire on the abuse of marriage, the satire on law in Phoenix is complemented by panegyric, in this case on legality, again spoken by Prince Phoenix and again making explicit the moral affinities between the play’s hero and the published views of King James. The panegyric is sparked off by Tangle’s confession that he finances his own lawsuits by giving false legal advice to others (I, iv, 165) and in getting free legal representation by directing others to his own lawyer (I, iv, 179–80). Prince Phoenix responds by lamenting the corruption of the law and then in highly emblematic fashion describes its origins in the sacred authority of the King as chief magistrate:
Admired Law,
Thy upper parts must need be sacred, pure,
And incorruptible; they’re grave and wise;
’Tis but the dross beneath ’em, and the clouds
That get between thy glory and their praise
That make the visible and foul eclipse…
(I, iv, 201–6)
This (as Brooks notes)30 is flattering to the King, who saw himself (and was seen) as the highest source of justice in the land. It is a particularly interesting passage (if dramatically jejune) because it reveals that essentially symbolic habit of Middleton’s mind, that gets so skilfully re-interpreted in naturalistic terms in the major comedies. Brooks, incidentally, illustrates close parallels to this speech in other works of Middleton. Phoenix points the way to Middleton’s brilliant surface realism in his later plays, more especially in its lively portraits of the Captain and Falso. The dazzling irony of later comedies, where the nefarious work of this mad world goes on against an undercurrent of subtle allusions to the standards of the next, is only fitfully achieved in this play—most notably in the scene where Falso interrogates Furtivo, or in the splendidly grotesque irony of Falso’s meditation on the terms of his brother’s will:
Well, he was too honest to live, and that made him die so soon. Now, I beshrew my heart, I am glad he’s in heaven; he’s left all his cares and troubles with me, and that great vexation of telling of money; yet I hope he had so much grace to turn his white money into gold…
(I, vi, 79–84)
There is not, unfortunately, very much of such virtuosity. Middleton, in this play, prefers a heavy-handed explicitness to assert his orthodoxy before his Prince; but it holds out the promise of a brilliance that Middleton was later to redeem in such good measure.
Measure for Measure achieves its compliment to King James in not dissimilar ways, but with very different emphasis. Shakespeare, too, chooses the fashionable mode of naturalistic comedy, but his play eschews satire, except incidentally, and takes as central from Basilikon Doron, not the civil issues chosen by Middleton (though these are involved), but the moral and religious themes to which he rightly judged King James gave priority. Darryl Gless, in his book on Shakespeare’s play, has pointed to the importance of the religious themes in Basilikon Doron and their influence on Measure for Measure.31 The first of the three sections of James’s work is devoted to the Christian basis of good government and takes as its theme ‘A Kings Christian Duetie Towards God’.32 James prided himself (to the confusion of his bishops) on his knowledge of theological matters and indeed saw himself as having an essentially religious role as God’s anointed. It is highly appropriate that his surrogate is given a priestly role in Measure for Measure, albeit popish. Accordingly the play is more about salvation than legal judgement and the biblical text to which its title alludes (the Sermon on the Mount) is interpreted primarily as offering spiritual rather than political guidance. In this, Shakespeare’s next public play, King Lear, is its complement, for Lear demonstrates the vanity of a world built on the sands of pagan assumptions.
The idea for the plot of the play probably came initially from Shakespeare’s reading of Giraldi’s Hecatommithi, already used for Othello. The story is the fifth novella of the eighth decade, a decade that is dedicated to the exploration of ingratitude—a theme Shakespeare largely ignores for Measure for Measure but the impact of which is merely postponed. His next two plays, Timon and King Lear, explore this theme; the latter at the profoundest levels. In the dedication of the eighth decade to Lucio Paganucci, the secretary to the Duke of Ferrara, Giraldi also makes it clear that this group of novelle will deal with government, and particularly the corrupt magistrate, for as he explains to Paganucci, ‘there is nothing that shows more clearly what men are than those who find themselves either by luck or merit magistrates (magistrati)…sometimes fate raises to the magistry (a magistrato) a soul who is unworthy of that honour’.33 Several of the stories accordingly go on to illustrate this theme of the unjust magistrate, including the story Shakespeare chooses for Measure for Measure. The fifth novella is told by one of the women of the party, Fulvia, who in her introduction to the tale says she is going to tell a story concerning the ingratitude of an unjust minister named Juriste, who was appointed by the Emperor Massimiano. Juriste betrays his trust in the same way as Angelo in Measure for Measure. He offers to save the life of a young man accused of rape (Vico) if Vico’s sister (Epitia) agrees to sleep with him; when she does so Juriste betrays his promise and has Vico beheaded. Epitia appeals to the Emperor and Juriste is arrested: he is forced to marry Epitia and is to be beheaded, but is saved by the earnest pleading of Epitia to spare him. In this story (says Fulvia) she will illustrate not only the monstrous sin of Juriste’s ingratitude, but also how the goodness of a woman redeems a wicked man. This latter theme is of particular importance because Fulvia is deliberately answering the previous two novelle, which have both illustrated the wicked ingratitude of women. Of the three interwoven themes of Fulvia’s story: ingratitude, woman’s kindness and the unjust magistrate, Shakespeare chooses to concentrate on the single issue of the magistrate’s abuse of power, which he uses to illustrate the wider theme at the centre of the play: the Calvinistic theme of the inevitability of human sinfulness.
Reading Giraldi’s novelle must have reminded Shakespeare of an old play published some twenty-five years or more before, George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra. The plot of this two-part play is in many ways similar to the Giraldi story, showing how a corrupt ruler (Promos) treacherously goes back on a promise to free a young man (Andrugio) accused of fornication, after Promos has persuaded Andrugio’s sister (Cassandra) to sleep with him. Like Juriste and Angelo, Promos orders the execution of the young fornicator. But unlike the Giraldi story the young man is not executed; in Promos and Cassandra a compassionate jailor has a dead man’s head substituted for Andrugio’s and the young man is allowed to escape, eventually to be reunited with his sister. Like Epitia, Cassandra appeals to the supreme ruler for justice and Promos is brought to judgement, made to marry the woman whose chastity he violated and is saved from death by his wife’s earnest plea for clemency. Both versions emphasize at the end the importance of clemency as well as strictness in a king. At the beginning of the sixth novella in Hecatommithi Giraldi remarks that he could not judge which pleased the ladies listening to the story more, ‘the justice or the clemency of Massimiano’:
Here the most mature said that Clemency is a most worthy companion to Royal Justice, because it moderates punishments and thus one reads that it is very appropriate for princes. For it induces a certain temperance in their minds that makes them benevolent towards their subjects and they concluded that Massimiano was shown worthy of empire in both Justice and in Clemency.34
No better subject could be chosen to set before the King at Whitehall who confessed (as we have seen) to indulgence as a ruler and clearly secretly prided himself on it.
Promos and Cassandra did not only suggest such modifications to Giraldi’s story as the substitution of the dead man’s head and the happy outcome (a modification to the ending that, incidentally, Giraldi had himself made when he converted his novella into the play of Epitia towards the end of his life). More important than these details of the plotting is the influence the old play had on Shakespeare’s dramatic method. For Promos and Cassandra is one of those early examples of unromantic comedy concerned with the exposition of low life as well as corruption in high places. Whetstone’s abilities as a dramatist are severely limited, or perhaps (more fairly) we ought to say that in 1578, when the play was published, there had not developed those extraordinarily supple dramatic techniques that in barely twenty years transformed the art of the theatre from college exercise or crude entertainment to the most sophisticated dramatic vehicle the theatre has ever known. For all its prosaic woodenness, however, Promos and Cassandra provided Shakespeare with a dramatic formula that suited the new fashion for unromantic comedy.
In the first part of Promos and Cassandra Whetstone alternates between the story of the unjust magistrate and scenes which show the effect of Promos’s new legal severity on the lower orders. The low-life scenes centre on the prostitute and bawd Lamia and her largely successful attempts to subvert the new order by corrupting Promos’s chief executive, Phallax. Phallax’s cynicism makes him an easy target and contrasts with his master’s puritanical austerity and agonized sense of guilt when he finds himself infatuated with Cassandra. The contrast between the two men is potentially an interesting one, but is presented in too facile a way to allow it much force. Whetstone’s moral didacticism leads him to present Promos as a moral example, rather than as an individual struggling with his conscience (an approach that partly survives in Shakespeare’s treatment of Angelo). We hear of Promos’s agony over his deception of Cassandra, when he orders Andrugio to be executed, not directly through soliloquy (though soliloquy over-abounds in the play) but in a mocking speech addressed directly to the audience by Phallax in a reductive language that provides a complete barrier to the audience’s sympathies:
I marvell much what worketh so my Lord Promos’ unrest.
He fares as if a thousand Devils were gnawing in his brest:
There is sure some worme of griefe, that doth his conscience nip,
For since Andrugio lost his head he hath hung downe the lippe.
(V, i, 1–4)35
This satiric caricature of Promos deliberately dehumanizes, so that—in the true manner of the morality tradition—the doctrinal message rings out clear by keeping emotional interest in the character at a minimum. It is interesting that Shakespeare adopts a mixed mode for his play, retaining some of this symbolic use of character, most notably in the role of the Duke, while in other cases he involves the audience’s emotions empathically by infusing the characters with an intense individuality.
There is no better example of this latter than in the great scene between Isabella and her brother, where Claudio is pleading with her to save his life. Whetstone has a similar scene, which he treats as a debate between brother and sister, presenting opposing views of the moral dilemma. In effect it is a debate between Charity and Chastity:
| Andrugio | Nay Cassandra, if thou thy selfe submyt, |
| To save my life, to Promos fleashly wyll, | |
| Justice wyll say thou dost no cryme commit: | |
| For in forst faultes is no intent of yll. | |
| Cassandra | How so th’intent is construed in offence, |
| The Proverbe saies, that tenne good turnes lye dead, | |
| And one yll deede, tenne tymes beyonde pretence, | |
| By envious tongues report abrode doth spread. | |
| Andrugio so my fame shall vallewed bee, | |
| Dispite wyll blase my crime, but not the cause… |
(Part I, III, iv, 34–43)
There is no danger here of the audience wishing to take sides, because there are no personalities to identify with, we simply have a rehearsal of the moral issues involved. Shakespeare transforms this debate into an intensely personal conflict of wills between a young man desperately fearful of death and a young woman equally tormented by the prospect of losing her sexual honour and breaking her novitiate vows, without losing sight either of the obligations of their relationship or the moral dilemma that confronts them:
(III, i, 96–120)36
and Claudio goes on to give that terrifying, pagan picture of the afterlife in which all man’s hatred and fear of death seems to be summed up.
The yawning gap between Whetstone and Shakespeare here is not merely the gap between minor talent and supreme mastery, it is a wholly different way of treating the theatre. In place of Whetstone’s intellectual debate, here we have the complex and contradictory movements of two perplexed minds trying to come to terms with an unresolvable dilemma. Claudio’s first response—he is a decent man with a moral conscience not unlike his sister’s—is to reject the idea of his sister’s sacrifice of her virginity. But as the dialogue continues, the more pressing reality of a death unsupported by Christian conviction crowds in on him and he shifts ground. The debate is as much in himself as with his sister. For a morality drama all this would cloud the issue—and indeed no very clear resolution emerges from the dialogue; but that does not mean that Shakespeare has here abandoned concern with the doctrinal themes that inform the play. As we shall see, the dialogue has precise doctrinal implications; but now Shakespeare is uniting his power of creating personality with an equally secure use of characters as symbol. For the first time, perhaps, in the canon, Shakespeare is fusing with total success the affective and the symbolic and anticipating the more sustained triumph of this fusion in Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. One of the weaknesses of Measure for Measure is that this achievement is not wholly sustained throughout the play. Isabella’s austere, if erroneous, dignity, for example, becomes compromised and distorted beyond the audience’s reasonable tolerance at the level of personality by the requirements of the play’s (and the King’s) doctrine that the catholic ‘superstition’ of vowed celibacy should be repudiated. At the level of real psychology the exchange of sleeping partners (where Isabella’s behaviour is not so very dissimilar from that of a high-class bawd) and the Anglican triumph of sex-in-marriage at the end lack complete credibility. In All’s Well that Ends Well the bedroom substitution of Helena for Diana escapes censure because the primary mode of the play does not ask for psychological realism. Shakespeare fails to pull it off a second time because the later play more insistently asks us to respond to the characters as people. The effect of the doctrinal imperative in human terms in Measure for Measure is that Isabella is left at the end, a little incongruously, holding hands with a Duke who is himself more convincing as personification than as personality.
Although the superb scene between Isabella and Claudio is wholly convincing in psychological and affective terms, it none the less asserts very accurately the doctrinal distinction James I makes in Basilikon Doron between two types of spiritual blindness, two opposing states of error he describes as the ‘two diseases…Leaprosie, and Superstition; the former is the mother of Atheisme, the other of Heresies’. In these terms Claudio is clearly a spiritual leper, however venial his sin might appear in modern eyes (or most Jacobean eyes come to that). James describes the ‘leprous conscience’ as one that has lost the acute awareness of sin that is necessary to keep us humble before God (the analogy alludes to the fact that leprosy deprives the extremities of the body of all sense of feeling):
By a leprouse conscience, I meane a cauterized conscience, as Paul calleth it, being become senseless of sinne, through sleeping in a carelesse securitie as King Davids was after his murther and adulterie, ever til he was wakened by the Prophet Nathans similitude.37
Claudio, like David in his adultery with Bathsheba, has shown himself blind to his own sinfulness, and he too is similarly sexually intemperate. The intense love of life Claudio shows in this scene and his fear of death are specifically singled out as characteristic of the moral leper:
And therefore, I would not have you pray with the Papists, to be preserved from suddaine death, but that God would give you grace so to live, as ye may every houre of your life be ready for death: so shall ye attaine to the vertue of trew fortitude, never being afraid for the horrour of death, come when he list.38
This is the message Duke Vincentio conveys to Claudio in those splendid lines on the vanity of the world at the beginning of the scene (III, i, 5ff). It is a lesson that Claudio, in his impetuosity, says he understands, only to find his new resolution collapsing at the first temptation:
To sue to live, I find I seek to die,
And seeking death, find life. Let it come on.
(III, i, 42–3)
The collapse of this short-lived calm is a sign both of his youthful intemperance and that he does not know himself. In contrast, the Duke is said (by Escalus) to be ‘A gentleman of all temperance’ (III, ii, 231) and one who ‘above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself’ (III, ii, 226–7). Both temperance and self-knowledge are singled out by James for special commendation:
Temperance, Queene of all the rest within you…that first commaunding your selfe, shall as a Queene, command all the affections and passions of your minde…39
In the passage on the ‘leprous conscience’ James exhorts his son to analyse his conscience and learn to know himself as he really is:
let not your selfe be smoothed over with that flattering ϕλαντια, which is overkindly a sicknesse to all mankind: but censure your selfe as sharply, as if ye were your owne enemie: For if ye iudge your selfe, ye shall not be iudged, as the Apostle saith…40
It is no coincidence that when Claudio’s Christian resolution does break down, his vision of the afterlife is not that of the Christian, but of the ‘atheist’ (that is, in seventeenth-century terms, the non-Christian), for as James has warned us, the leprous conscience…is the mother of atheisme’:
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 bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d 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.
(III, i, 117–27)
The splendid imagery of these lines asks us—as we willingly do—to engage ourselves in Claudio’s vision of the horrors of death. His response is surely the natural response. Shakespeare would have read the novella in the Hecatommithi that follows the story of Epitia, about a handsome young man from Corfu who feigns apostasy for fear of death ‘which as you all know is the most terrible of all things’.41 Claudio’s speech is itself apostasy from a Christian (and specifically from a Protestant) point of view. Even Claudio himself recognizes this in admitting that his vision of the howling souls is heretical (‘lawless’) and dubious. He presents no consistent view of the afterlife (hence the difficulty modern commentators have had in interpreting it). Death is seen at first as mere negation, the cold dead body rotting in the ground; in contrast to the warmth and movement of this life, becoming a lump of clay. Claudio’s sensuality revolts against the death of all sensation, but the alternatives he conjures up are no more reassuring, the pagan vision of the once delighted spirit (which is surely the significance of ‘delighted’ here)42 now bathed in fire, imprisoned in ice or, like Lucretian atoms, blown about in the winds. Even these horrors may not be as bad as the unknown world of death that thought conjures up. Clearly this is no Christian response to death and its very incoherence and eclecticism stresses what is most terrifying about death to the pagan, the uncertainty of what death may bring. This is exactly the kind of ‘atheism’ that results from the spiritual sloth of the ‘leprous conscience’, that failure constantly to keep in mind our soul’s health and our need of God’s grace. To avoid this sinful state of mind we must meditate on death and on our unfitness to meet God’s judgement:
As for a preservative against this Leaprosie, remember ever once in the foure and twentie houres, either in the night, or when yee are at greatest quiet, to call your selfe to account of all your last dayes actions, either wherein ye have committed things yee should not, or omitted the things ye should doe, either in your Christian or Kingly calling…. Remember therefore in all your actions, of the great account that yee are one day to make: in all the dayes of your life, ever learning to die, and living every day as it were your last.43
Much has been written concerning the veniality of Claudio’s sin and its similarity to the ‘sin’ Angelo is led into with Mariana by the Duke and the saintly Isabella. But Shakespeare requires us to distinguish between the crime which Claudio commits and for which he is justly condemned to die and the sin of being attached to the things of this world, which has been evinced both by his sexual intemperance and his fear of death.
In his failure to be ‘resolute for death’, Claudio demonstrates the perilous state of his soul. The key scriptural passage for both Basilikon Doron and the play is the first epistle of St John, 2:15–17 (I quote the Geneva version as one with which Shakespeare would be familiar, even if James himself disapproved of it):44
Love not the worlde, nether the things that are in the worlde. If any man love the worlde, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the worlde (as the luste of the flesh, the luste of the eyes, and the pride of life) is not of the Father, but is of the worlde. And the worlde passeth awaye, and the luste therof: but he that fulfilleth the wil of God, abideth ever.
Claudio sins in the lust of the flesh as he himself confesses in admitting that his plight arises from a surfeit of ‘liberty’ (I, ii, 117), but equally his state of mind shows him guilty of ‘pride of life’ in being too concerned with this life and not enough with the next. It is not the sleeping with Juliet before the completing of the marriage ceremony that matters so much in itself (in terms of sin as opposed to law) but the state of mind that is evinced when he is called to account legally for his behaviour, which confirms him as someone perilously fond of the things of this world. And just as Claudio is made to face up to his spiritual peril, by being made by the Duke to confront the death he fears, so Angelo by sleeping (as he thinks) with Isabella is made to confront his own spiritual turpitude in the revelation that he has committed a worse crime than that for which he has condemned Claudio. In both cases the Duke ‘like power divine’, leads the sinner to an understanding of his sinfulness, that ‘right knowledge and fear of God’ which, James tells his son, is the beginning of wisdom.45
The similarities between Angelo’s spiritual condition and Claudio’s help to emphasize that we are all guilty in the eyes of God. Indeed the play demonstrates this thesis in presenting each of the three main characters, Angelo, Claudio and Isabella, with a test of their virtue. In each case the initiate proves to be lacking in temperance and self-knowledge. All three show a pride that blinds them to the essential sinfulness of their own humanity. Angelo admits, in soliloquy, to the ‘pride’ he has taken in the image of sobriety he has cultivated:
The state whereon I studied
Is, like a good thing being often read,
Grown sere and tedious; yea, my gravity,
Wherein—let no man hear me—I take pride,
Could I with boot change for an idle plume
Which the air beats for vain.
(II, iv, 7–12)
Angelo understands his own hypocrisy—he has, he says ‘heaven in my mouth…and in my heart the strong and swelling evil/Of my conception’ (II, iv, 4–6), where ‘conception’, incidentally, means ‘the fact of being conceived’46 as well as ‘thought’ and refers to original sin. He would hide his pride of life (defined in the Geneva gloss as ‘ambition’) from men, but fails to consider the more important relationship to God, paying, as he himself admits, mere lip-service to his religious duties. Here again then, is that ‘pride of life’ that ignores the central truth of human existence, that each of us is ‘death’s fool’, as the Duke reminds Claudio. As with Claudio, this pride in life comes to express itself in sexual infatuation—in lust of the flesh. Ironically, Angelo, in his pride, comes to reject all comparison with Claudio in discussing the case with Escalus: ‘When I that censure him do so offend,/Let mine own judgement pattern out my death’ (II, i, 29–30). Isabella, with her spiritual hypersensitivity, understands that we are all alike subject to sin:
If he had been as you, and you as he,
You would have slipp’d like him…
(II, ii, 64–5)
and that only God’s grace saves us from damnation: ‘He that might the vantage best have took/Found out the remedy’ (II, ii, 74–5). All this, of course, assumes an audience capable of making some nice theological distinctions. The finer points would not have been lost on the royal audience of December 1604, because they originate in James’s own Calvinistic preoccupations with reprobation and conscience.
Just as Claudio illustrates James’s view of one kind of spiritual malaise, the man who is insufficiently alive to his own state of sin, so Isabella illustrates the error James describes as the ‘disease’ of ‘superstition’.47 And just as Claudio’s sin leads to ‘atheisme’, so Isabella’s leads to ‘heresies’. James defines superstition as ‘when one restraines himselfe to any other rule in the service of God, then is warranted by the word, the only trew square of Gods service’.48 Here James is entering into the field of sectarian controversy, for his definition is based on the Protestant insistence that (to quote the sixth of the Thirty-Nine Articles):
Holy scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.
James is particularly insistent on this in Basilikon Doron:
Remember also, that by the right knowledge, and feare of God…ye shall know all things necessarie for the discharge of your duetie, both as a Christian, and as a King; seeing in him, as in a mirrour, the course of all earthly things, whereof hee is the spring and onely moover. Now, the onely way to bring you to this knowledge, is diligently to reade his word, and earnestly to pray for the right understanding thereof. Search the Scriptures, sayth Christ, for they beare testimonie of me: (John 5, 39) and, the whole Scripture, saith Paul, is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable to teach, to convince, to correct, and to instruct in righteousnesse; that the man of God may be absolute, being made perfite unto all good workes. (2 Tim. 3, 16–17)49
He returns to this priority of Scripture in elaborating his definition of ‘superstition’:
And for keeping your conscience sound from that sicknesse of superstition, yee must neither lay the safetie of your conscience upon the credit of your owne conceits, nor yet of other mens humors, how great doctors of Divinitie that ever they be; but yee must onely ground it upon the expresse Scripture: for conscience not grounded upon sure knowledge, is either an ignorant fantasie, or an arrogant vanitie. Beware therefore in this case with two extremities: the one, to beleeve with the Papists, the Churches authority, better then your owne knowledge; the other, to leane with the Anabaptists, to your owne conceits and dreamed revelations.50
Isabella, as a convent novice, is the victim of the ‘arrogant vanity’ of sworn celibacy, assumed through trusting the Catholic Church’s authority rather than Scripture. Shakespeare emphasizes her ‘superstition’ in having her desire ‘restraints…in the service of God’ not warranted by Scripture, on the first occasion that we meet her:
| Isabella | And have you nuns no farther privileges? |
| Nun | Are not these large enough? |
| Isabella | Yes, truly; I speak not as desiring more, |
| But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisters stood, the votarists of Saint Clare. |
(I, iv, 1–5)
All of this to the Anglican James (and we must presume, to Shakespeare) was a heresy of Popish superstition and we need not be surprised that Measure for Measure was the one play the English Jesuits of Valladolid excised from their copy of the second folio.51 Darryl Gless points out that the chief Protestant objection to the cloistered life was that it was spiritually self-indulgent, and quotes—among a host of Protestant authorities—the reference in Venus and Adonis to ‘self-loving nuns’.52 Gless also quotes Basilikon Doron to demonstrate that James was explicitly concerned to argue against the ‘cloistered virtue’ fostered by monasticism:
For it is not ynough that ye have and retaine (as prisoners) within your selfe never so many good qualities and vertues, except ye employ them, and set them on worke, for the weale of them that are committed to your charge: Virtutis enim laus omnis in actione consistit.53
The Duke shares these views; for one of the reasons he gives for wanting Angelo to take over the reins of government, is so that Angelo’s private virtues may be more publicly manifested:
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not.
(I, i, 32–5)
Isabella is also ‘self-loving’ in her response to Claudio’s appeal to her to save his life. ‘Self-love’, James points out in his comment on ???a?t?a ‘is overkindly a sicknesse to all mankind’;54 it is the antithesis of charity, the love of our fellow-beings. Isabella’s uncharity shows not only in her refusal to consider sacrificing herself for her brother, but in her increasingly hysterical response to his pleading, which reaches its height in the accusation that Claudio is an habitual lecher, with a suggestion in the imagery that he is nothing better than a male prostitute:
Thy sin’s not accidental, but a trade;
Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd;
’Tis best thou diest quickly.
(III, i, 148–50)
This is an uncharitable traversty of Claudio’s ‘true contract’ with Julietta and it is left to the ‘gracious’ Duke (acting as the channel of God’s grace) to find a way to ‘redeem your brother from the angry law’ (III, i, 200–1). Isabella’s conduct here is also in marked contrast with the ‘reformed’ Isabella of Act V, when (on her knees) she pleads for Angelo’s life with the argument that ‘A due sincerity govern’d his deeds’ (V, i, 444) when he ordered Claudio’s execution. Here Isabella has come to understand the ‘protestant’ emphasis that the fact must defer to the inner state of mind.
To see Isabella’s role in this light is not to defend Claudio’s appeal, for he, as we saw, is equally guilty of sin. Isabella’s position is illogical, for she is ‘superstitiously’ defining sin in terms of effect rather than cause, committing the ‘popish’ error of substituting spiritual appearance for spiritual reality:
Better it were a brother died at once,
Than that a sister, by redeeming him,
Should die for ever.
(II, iv, 106–8)
Angelo points to Isabella’s inconsistency here, for she has just been arguing that Angelo should moderate his absolute standards of justice to take into account that human frailty that Christ atoned for: ‘How would you be/If He, which is the top of judgement, should/But judge you as you are?’ (II, ii, 75–7). Indeed she misunderstands Angelo’s paradoxical suggestion that the ‘sin’ of saving Claudio might be an act of charity, by agreeing to take on the burden of that sin:
| Angelo | I—now the voice of the recorded law— |
| Pronounce a sentence on your brother’s life: | |
| Might there not be a charity in sin To save this brother’s life? | |
| Isabella | Please you to do’t, |
| I’ll take it as a peril to my soul; | |
| It is no sin at all, but charity. |
(II, iv, 61–6)
Isabella believes Angelo to be offering to bend the law to save Claudio, which she is quite willing to accept as a charitable ‘sin’, and so shows herself fully able to distinguish between fact and intent. When she realizes that the subject at issue is not bending Angelo’s principles but her own, she appeals to that letter of the law that she had earlier repudiated, as Angelo is swift to point out:
| Isabella | lawful mercy |
| Is nothing kin to foul redemption. | |
| Angelo | You seem’d of late to make the law a tyrant… |
(II, iv, 112–4)
Shakespeare had earlier shown the ambivalence of Isabella’s position in her ambiguous reply to Angelo’s first suggestion that she should give her virginity for Claudio’s life:
Sir, believe this:
I had rather give my body than my soul.
(II, iv, 55–6)
The thread that leads out of this labyrinth of paradox, of sin that is charity, redemption that is damnation, is to be found in the sectarian conflict between the Protestant stress on the soul’s relation to God and the ‘papist’ stress (as Protestants understood it) on outward forms. Isabella in these terms is in error in confusing spiritual form with spiritual substance: the ‘body’ she would preserve in its virginity, with the ‘soul’ of her charity towards her brother. Angelo (speaking ‘scripture’) defines the problem with clarity even while he himself fails to benefit from the wisdom:
O place, O form,
How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit,
Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls
To thy false seeming!
(II, iv, 12–15)
Angelo’s is very much a case like St Paul’s: ‘I alowe not that which I do: for what I wolde, that do I not’ (Romans 7:15). Isabella is no fool, but one of those ‘wiser souls’ tied to ‘false-seeming’. She too has to be saved from her spiritual error through suffering the consequences of Claudio’s supposed death. She must be brought to a more charitable viewpoint, marked first by her willingness to help Mariana to a husband and finally by abandoning the false idol of virginity in her acceptance of the Duke’s hand in marriage. The Duke recognizes Isabella’s essential goodness at the same time as he recognizes her ‘superstitious’ confusion between form and substance:
The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good. The goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair…
(III, i, 179–83)
Here the force of ‘shall’ (must) makes the Duke’s utterance one of admonition rather than statement, for he is reminding her that what gives the body beauty is the grace of God, that makes it an expression of spiritual truth. It is not anything we do, but what God gives us, that makes us virtuous. It was a Protestant complaint that there were Pelagian tendencies in Rome’s teaching. Isabella’s journey from ‘superstitious ignorance’ to spiritual understanding, is, suitably, not to be expressed so much in doctrine as in the actual processes of living. In the course of the play she moves away from vain ‘forms’ towards active witness. Having to participate in the deception of Angelo as an accessory to a deed similar to that for which Claudio has been condemned to die, is a step away from the rigidity of ‘popish’ forms towards an active participation in good works. It is therefore highly suitable that her act of charity towards Mariana should take a similar form to that of her brother’s sinful act; Isabella is learning to tell form from substance. And because ultimately the ‘arrogant vanity’ of ‘popish’ forms is a kind of pride, Isabella must experience public humiliation before arriving at spiritual truth. Calvin had insisted in the Institutes that Christian wisdom must be founded on humility55 and Isabella is duly humbled at the end of the play when the Duke pretends to disbelieve her accusations against Angelo and sends her to prison. By now, however, Isabella has learnt not to trust in outward forms and leaves it to God to reveal in His good time the truth of her accusation:
And this is all?
Then, O you blessed ministers above,
Keep me in patience, and with ripen’d time
Unfold the evil which is here wrapt up
In countenance!
(V, i, 117–21)
When she returns it is in the same spirit of patience that Juliet has evinced early in the play in accepting the punishment for her transgression. Isabella asks pardon of the Duke (V, i, 384) and accepts patiently the supposed death of her brother (V, i, 397). Finally she is able to join Mariana on her knees (the emblem of humility on the Jacobean stage) to plead for Angelo’s life. Even now, however, Isabella’s habitual preference for outer forms over inner truths shows her not yet totally wedded to the Duke’s spirituality:
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.
(V, i, 448–51)
The Duke (understandably) rejects this appeal until Angelo has expressed true penitence (473) and Claudio can be revealed. Measure for Measure has as often been interpreted as allegory as in terms of realistic comedy. It is not quite either (or both), and this, in spite of its superb strengths, is where its weakness lies. Shakespeare has chosen a mode of realistic comedy then coming back into fashion, that allows him to present his theological theme in terms of real people in a particular dilemma, a mode congenial to Shakespeare because of his unique powers of affective characterization. But these very powers presented an old temptation we have met before and that here again Shakespeare does not entirely resist; a temptation to humanize his characters in ways that tend to distort his theme. This happens in two ways in Measure for Measure: first it encourages an emotional response in the audience that identifies us too closely with particular characters (in this case Claudio and Isabella most obviously, but also to a lesser extent Lucio) and so clouds their thematic function, and second it creates unwanted incongruities between those characters that can be treated realistically and those (notably the Duke) whose function is predominantly thematic and the mode of whose presentation is predominantly allegorical. It is interesting to compare Shakespeare’s dramaturgical handling of these problems in this play with Middleton’s in Phoenix and the slightly later comedies, where he chooses a similar mixed mode. Middleton’s ironic distancing, in his earlier comedies at least, avoids arousing his audience’s emotions. In Phoenix an amusing character like the Sea-Captain, presented with considerable realistic detail, as we saw, and possibly portrayed from life, functions as an ironic specimen in the catalogue of aberrant types. It is typical of Middleton’s technique that he does not give his Sea-Captain a personal name; we are not to get too close to him as a personality. The pervading ironic tone prevents close emotional contact with the audience, even with such sympathetic characters as Fidelio and the long-suffering wife. Prince Phoenix himself fits well into this scheme of detached observation by being the detached observer, the directing lens through which the audience is made to focus its attention. Of course Middleton can avoid the temptations to which Shakespeare partly succumbs because his talent is so much narrower. Middleton’s language mostly lacks that amazing Shakespearean resonance that can conjure up the deepest emotions in a few lines. Middleton’s very limitations of language and characterization aid him in achieving consistency, while the wealth of Shakespeare’s genius tempts him towards inconsistency of mode. It is not that mixed modes are necessarily unsatisfactory, for the morality tradition had encouraged such combinations, but even when Middleton introduces (rarely for him) a wholly allegorical figure, as in the introduction of the succuba to A Mad World, My Masters, the transition between realism and surrealism is easily effected because the distinction is kept clear and the imaginative response required precisely signalled. In Measure for Measure, on the contrary, the Duke’s allegorical presence as ‘judicious ruler’ and ‘power divine’ runs over into human participant in the affective action. His role as father confessor to the distraught Claudio, for instance, at the beginning of Act III, conjures up strong feelings of sympathy for Duke Vincentio as the helper of the hero in distress. Claudio’s emotional appeal to us as a young man about to die on a technical point of law is so strong that it attracts towards it all those figures who participate in the drama, making the Duke as sympathetic to us for his good intentions as Angelo is found repellent for causing the dilemma. Yet the Duke’s actions also create emotional distress; for the audience knows that he has the power to end the misery when he wishes and there is—at the affective level—a kind of cruel perversity in the Duke’s refusal to do so. Allegorically, of course, the Duke’s behaviour is perfectly justified, not only as the spiritual guide, who must chastise and cause to suffer in order to be kind, but as the idealized image of King James judiciously weighing mercy with justice. The Duke’s character uncomfortably and, at bottom, unsuccessfully, straddles two dramaturgical modes without achieving the necessary synthesis of symbol and symbolized. It has thus been possible for criticism to run the whole gamut of response to the Duke from seeing him as Christ figure (Wilson Knight)56 to condemning him outright in Lucio’s terms as a ‘fantastical duke of dark corners’.57
The Duke has not been alone in inspiring opposing responses in different critics; indeed all the major characters seem to have generated opposing views, not in isolated cases but repeatedly. Isabella is particularly subject to these contrasting interpretations that also, inevitably, reflect differences in estimating her brother. To Una Ellis-Fermor, for instance, Isabella is a ‘divided mind…unaware of its own division’, an unpleasant combination of hypocrisy and sexual frigidity in an unpleasant play;58 at the other extreme some nineteenth-century responses (like that of Mrs Anna Jameson) see her as an exemplar of ‘moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity’.59 These differences are partly to be explained by the value the critic places on virginal purity, but the controversy stems more from Shakespeare’s mode of presentation than from what is presented. If it were a question (as E.M.Pope argues)60 of adjusting ourselves to the high price of virginity in Jacobean England, we could make the necessary allowance, as we do for many other examples on the Jacobean stage where chastity is being given rather more value than most twentieth-century readers are inclined to give it. The problem here is to adjust this observation to the affective impact of the drama itself. Isabella’s palpable distress at both her brother’s plight and the preservation of her solemn vows, as she understands them, is too real and too strong to allow the kind of theoretical detachment needed to fulfil whatever estimate is assigned to her (whether as the equivalent of Angelo in frigidity and hypocrisy or as ‘a thing enskied and sainted’). Shakespeare’s tendency to fill out his allegorical forms ends by arousing vivid emotions but obscuring thematic issues. Take, for example, that extraordinary passage in the second interview between Isabella and Angelo, where he is struggling to make clear to her what he is demanding to save her brother’s life, by putting the sacrifice of her virginity to her as a hypothetical question. Her response is to reject such a suggestion out of hand, but in curious terms that seem to demand levels of interpretation that undercut the literal meaning:
were I under the terms of death,
Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield
My body up to shame.
(II, iv, 100–4)
Not surprisingly commentators have found these lines charged with sexual meaning (the Arden editor quotes Kenneth Muir and comments on the imagery, ‘its occurrence here is psychologically revealing’). Certainly, if these were the words of a real person one would suspect a strong libido desperately seeking its freedom. Isabella’s thematic role in the play is not in itself incompatible with this impression of strong latent sexuality, for her spiritual progress will require her to recognize her sexuality as God-given and to be used (like Helena’s in All’s Well) for God’s purposes. Yet the imagery itself, which links sexuality with cruelty and death, is disturbingly emphatic, suggesting sexual malaise (which is surely not appropriate to any plausible interpretation of the ‘good’ Isabella) rather than theological miscalculation. In these lines the audience has every right to link Isabella’s sexual frustration with the uncontrollable pressure that causes Angelo to say: ‘And now I give my sensual race the rein’ (II, iv, 159). To link Isabella and Angelo in this way, however, is to distort the theme of the play quite seriously, for it confuses the distinction between Angelo’s wilful depravity and Isabella’s quite different state of mistaken, but honest, piety. Shakespeare has succumbed to his old temptation of enriching the real psychology of his character at the cost of thematic confusion. It is not all that surprising, then, that some critics see Isabella as Angelo’s alter ego, while others see her as his antithesis.
The differences over Claudio are not as acute as this, because there is no essential discrepancy between his personality and his thematic role. There is not much doubt that Shakespeare wants us to regard him as sinful—he himself admits his error and no one denies it. That his sentence is unduly harsh is not only the usual critical reaction, but also the Duke’s, and therefore the play’s. Disagreement chiefly arises over his ‘unmanliness’ in pressing, in the face of death, for his sister’s sacrifice of her virginity. Our response to this will naturally depend on our own ideological response to the heroic, but thematically the play makes it clear that such a fervent attachment to life is un-Christian, and to accept this point of view tends to heighten the tragic dilemma of a young man whose healthy appetites conflict with the moral laws of his society.
If there is any conflict of interpretation here it stems from the general presentation of human exuberance in the play rather than from Claudio’s own particular case. Law and order must triumph in a play addressing the kingly fount of law and order, but Shakespeare’s natural sympathy for humanity as it is rather than as it ought to be leads to some feelings of uncertainty. The rogues, pimps and whores that people the play’s underworld are not so easily to be put down as the laws of Vienna require (which may, of course be a point that Shakespeare is consciously or unconsciously making). Clearly Viennese society suffers from sexual malaise, but it also exhibits a perky resilience that arouses almost as much admiration as condemnation. This is most obviously the case in Shakespeare’s portrait of Lucio, who, as slanderer of the Duke, must eventually be repudiated (James is particularly severe on the traducer of princes in Basilikon Doron). Yet his kindly sympathy for Isabella and his friend Claudio, and even his own sexual exuberance, make it difficult to accept the thematic judgement entirely. The Middletonian solution of having Lucio marry the prostitute he has used and who has borne his child (just though it is in all equity) is less easy to accept in practice without the habitual Middletonian ironic detachment. Lucio, too, is a somewhat contradictory character, especially if we are to believe Mistress Overdone’s accusation that he combines sexual irresponsibility with acting as police informer (III, ii, 192–7); but the overall impression is surely one of irrepressible liveliness, of Shakespeare enjoying his cakes, ale and ginger. This general uncertainty about where our sympathies are meant to centre is further compounded by the attitude of the Provost, whose humanity makes the tortuous clemency of the Duke look like cruelty. It is the Provost who describes Claudio as ‘a young man/More fit to do another such offence,/Than die for this’ (II, iii, 13–15)—a sentiment that seems closer to Lucio’s attitudes than to the Duke’s. One suspects some conflict between Shakespeare’s head and Shakespeare’s heart running through the play. It is noticeable that the most Middletonian of all Shakespeare’s characters in Measure for Measure runs the least risk of engaging our sympathy. The splendid grotsque of Barnadine, who is too busy recovering from a hangover to be willing to agree to his own execution, catches that sardonic spirit that is at the heart of Middleton’s comic vision.
Shakespeare lacked the narrow Calvinistic vision of either Middleton or his Sovereign, and in attempting to revive the old comedy of satiric realism to meet the new fashions, he found himself diverted from the confined thematic paths he chose in this play, by his customary humanity. The result in Measure for Measure is a splendid but flawed play, where the complex analysis of sin and judgement does not fully integrate with the picture of humanity it presents. It is not accidental that it is in the attitude to sexuality in particular that this discrepancy is most obvious. Both Claudio’s and Lucio’s sins are essentially that they are more warm-blooded than their author’s monarch and his surrogate in the play, the Duke Vincentio. Shakespeare finds it impossible to repress his preference for human warmth over kingly righteousness.