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Portrait of Measure for Measure

Shakespeare · Comedies

Measure for Measure

c. 1603–04

Comedy (a 'problem play') — from Cinthio's Hecatommithi and George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra

A duke leaves his city in the hands of a deputy famous for severity, then stays on in disguise as a friar to watch what happens. The deputy revives a dead-letter law and condemns a young man to death for getting his fiancée pregnant; when the man's sister, a novice nun, pleads for his life, the deputy offers to spare him in exchange for her virginity. Classed as a comedy but usually called a problem play, it ends in a mass of pardons and a proposal the heroine never answers.

How to spot them

  • ▸Vienna, with the brothels of the suburbs ordered to be pulled down
  • ▸A ruler leaves and returns disguised as a friar to spy on his own deputy
  • ▸A novice nun is told her brother will live if she sleeps with the judge
  • ▸A bed trick substitutes a jilted fiancée for the woman the judge expects
  • ▸A title taken from the Sermon on the Mount, on the measure you give being measured to you

Scenes, characters & lines

'Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall'

Escalus, on the arbitrariness of the law being enforced around him

'Ay, but to die, and go we know not where'

Claudio in prison, begging his sister to save him at any price

A strict deputy demands a novice's virginity as the price of her brother's life

Angelo to Isabella, who answers 'More than our brother is our chastity'

A woman abandoned at a moated grange takes another's place in the dark

Mariana of St Luke's, jilted when her dowry was lost at sea, substituted for Isabella

A condemned drunkard simply refuses to be executed that morning

Barnardine, reprieved by the convenient death of the pirate Ragozine, whose head is sent instead

'O, it is excellent / To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant'

Isabella pleading with the deputy in Act 2

A disguised ruler returns at the gates and hears the case against himself

The Duke, as himself again, staging the public trial that unmasks Angelo

Key ideas

  • The play sets justice against mercy and lets neither win cleanly: the pardons at the end are as arbitrary as the sentences
  • Isabella is given no line in reply to the Duke's marriage proposal, and what she does is one of the great directorial decisions in Shakespeare

Quick-fire facts

  • •Recorded as performed at court before James I on 26 December 1604
  • •First printed in the First Folio of 1623, where it stands among the comedies
  • •The title comes from Matthew 7:2, on judging and being judged
  • •The critic F. S. Boas grouped it with Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and All's Well That Ends Well as 'problem plays' in 1896
  • •The Duke is Vincentio; disguised, he calls himself Friar Lodowick
  • •The low-life characters include the bawd Mistress Overdone, the tapster Pompey, the executioner Abhorson and the slanderer Lucio
  • •It shares the 'bed trick' with All's Well That Ends Well
  • •Angelo's rejection of Mariana after her brother Frederick drowned with her dowry gives the Duke his remedy

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources