The Lenten Politics of Measure for Measure

At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, withdraws from the city for undisclosed reasons and leaves his full “terror” in the hands of a deputy, Angelo, assisted by the older, wiser Escalus. We quickly learn the duke’s departure was a ruse. He returns to the city disguised as a friar and manages much of the action of the play. As he confesses to Friar Thomas when he assumes his mendicant disguise, he’s been lax in enforcing the law, and the city has descended into chaos, with sex and alcohol as its primary commercial products. Rather than cracking down himself, the duke lets Angelo play Bad Cop. 

Just as importantly, the duke is suspicious of Angelo. He’s “precise” and “scarce confesses / That his blood flows,” but the duke wonders whether his reputation for rectitude is more than skin-deep. There’s one way to find out “what our seemers be”: Dress him in authority and see if “power change purpose.” Power is privilege. Power is also, always, a test.

As it turns out, Angelo more “seems” than “is.” He closes the brothels and arrests sexual criminals under long-unused statutes, making an example of Claudio, who’s sentenced to death for getting his fiancé Juliet pregnant. When Claudio’s sister Isabella, a novice nun, pleads with Angelo, she inadvertently awakens his cloistered sexual desire. He proposes a deal: If Isabella yields the treasure of her body to Angelo, he’ll reverse his sentence against Claudio. Isabella vehemently refuses, and when her brother asks her to take the deal, she denounces him with equal vehemence: “Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd: / ‘Tis best thou diest quickly.” 

Early on, Shakespeare sets the drama in an overtly theological context. Men drinking in a brothel joke about pirates and soldiers editing inconvenient commandments from the Decalogue. In the first scene, the duke reminds Angelo that virtue should shine like a torch; hidden virtues are none. Literary scholar Darryl Gless hears an echo of Jesus’s “New Law,” summarized in the Sermon on the Mount: Jesus’s disciples are the “light of the world” who must let their light shine, rather than hiding it under a bushel (Matt. 5:14–15). That allusion sets up a complex thematic matrix for the rest of the play. Characters and action oscillate between cloistered or disguised goodness and public goodness. But Jesus’s words cut more deeply, because some displayed virtue is, like Angelo’s, no more than display. Men dressed in authority do public good to gain public favor, not to lead men to praise of God (Matt. 5:16). If private virtue is nothing without public good, it’s equally true that public good is hollowed out by private vice. 

Angelo’s sin is pride in his self-restraint and his public reputation. It’s a dangerous attitude for a ruler. In her appeal to Angelo, Isabella offers a penetrating piece of political theory:

Man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.

When man wears the finery of power, he forgets he’s fragile as glass. A glass is also a mirror, and in this sense a glassy essence, paradoxically, has its essence in the thing reflected and not in itself. Such is human authority, always a “glass” reflecting or distorting the image of divine Authority. Instead of mirroring heaven, proud men leap around the stage like apes, unaware that they will soon be broken in pieces.

The Sermon on the Mount provides the play’s title (Matt. 7:1–4). “Measure for measure” suggests the equivalency of the Mosaic law. That is, in part, what Jesus has in mind: Beware, because you will be judged by the same measure you use to judge. Taken by itself, the principle would paralyze judgment. Who would ever be willing to pick up a stone? But Jesus isn’t proposing an impossible standard. He is commanding his disciples to remove the log from their own eyes, so they will see clearly to remove the speck from their brothers’. Angelo fails the test. He punishes Claudio, while committing a more heinous sin himself. Power brings out the predator from behind the Angel-ic mask.

The disguised duke is the political counterpoint to Angelo. Angelo enforces the law with Mosaic strictness, but the duke’s adherence to the New Law mingles mercy with justice and guides the play toward its happy conclusion. Halfway through, Vienna is sliding toward disaster: Claudio will be beheaded, Angelo’s corruption will go undetected, Isabella will preserve her chastity at the cost of her brother’s life. This being a comedy, the duke arrests the tragic trajectory, and, through a series of virtuous deceptions, orchestrates a triple (or quadruple) marriage. The deepest difference between the two rulers isn’t a matter of law but of personal virtue. Angelo and the duke both play at a masquerade, but the duke’s disguise only makes visible his internal disposition, as one who is poor in spirit. He rules redemptively because, as Escalus says, he “knows himself.” The friar-duke does justice because he rules in a Lenten spirit of humility, in full awareness of his own glassy essence.