January 2024 Print

by Jonathan Wanner

The solution to Adam’s pride is Christ’s humility; the solution to man’s injustice is God’s mercy. This Augustinian dictum is the kind of chestnut you will find roasting in the blushing embers of Shakespeare’s oft-forgotten play, Measure for Measure. Peel back the story’s husk, and you will find both church and state within the kernel’s core. Only before he reveals the center, Shakespeare butters the surface with a question: To what extent can the state resolve the problem of mortal sin? Or, to use more cosmic terms, to what extent can man’s justice remedy the Fall? Shakespeare approaches an answer, as always, with a series of paradoxes that express truth through the riddling wordplay of contradictions. The play begins with the irony of lechery—a sin that kills the soul even while it, providentially, generates new life—only to end with yet another puzzling opposition: that mercy does not contradict justice, but fulfills it. To crack the riddle’s shell, let us cross our eyes at the play’s presentation of the Church versus the state.

Shakespeare first suggests that the prime duty of the state is to deter and punish mortal sins—not only by legislating just laws, but by actually enforcing them. To convey this, Shakespeare opens the stage to the Duke of Vienna, who bemoans his leniency toward the lustful: as much as his “strict statutes” and “biting laws” prohibit prostitution and fornication, he has let them “slip” for “fourteen years” (1.3.19, 21).^[1] The problem here is not that the Duke is too merciful, but that he is ironically not merciful enough; real mercy can only occur when a just punishment actually threatens the sinner. Thus, while we might mistake the Duke’s leniency for compassion, it is actually legal neglect. In him, “Mercy is not itself, that oft looks so,” and “Pardon is … the nurse of second woe” (2.1.280-281). The effect: libertines, like unbridled horses, run rampant throughout the land, mocking the government like a child who “beats” his “nurse” (1.3.19, 30). The very laws that ought to commit criminals to death are “themselves … dead,” and “Liberty,” like a prankster, “plucks Justice by the nose” (1.3.28-29).

To remedy this plight, the Duke plays a prank of his own: he pretends to travel to Poland so that his justice-craving deputy, Angelo, can enforce the law in his stead. Indeed, Lord Angelo’s proclivity for rigid justice seems, by all measures, the perfect counterweight to the Duke’s permissive licenses. As the deputy’s disembodied name implies, he is all reason and no compassion—a man of objective precision who “scarce confesses” that he has fleshly appetites (“That his blood flows”) (1.3.50-53). Governed by reason alone, he seems a remarkable exception to the Fall, for by all accounts he lacks concupiscence altogether. Unlike the hot-blooded adulterers of Vienna, Angelo’s lustless veins seem to flow with melted snow: “his blood,” Shakespeare jests, “is very snow broth” (1.4.57-58). Nor does the deputy fail to deliver “measure for measure.” He orders all brothels in Vienna’s “suburbs” to be “plucked down” and condemns a young gentleman, Claudio, to death for impregnating his fiancé, Juliet (1.2.88-89). Indeed, “Lord Angelo is severe,” but justice, as a prerequisite of mercy, “is needful” for the atonement of sin (2.1.279).

Claudio himself even admits that his death sentence is “just”: because he did not restrain his body’s sensual appetite, shackles must do so (1.2.115). Ironically, “too much liberty” (i.e. lust) has caused the “restraint” of his celibate imprisonment (1.2.116-117). Nor is his capital punishment too severe: as “deadly” lust “killed” his soul, so too his body deserves to follow suit. Claudio’s plight is, thus, paradoxical: the very act that is meant to produce new life is, for him, a spiritual death, and soon to be a bodily one. Nor is he “prepared for death,” as his bestial appetites still govern his will (2.2.85). The problem, in this case, is an optical one. Lust promises an illusion of satisfaction, but its excesses, ironically, always end with a scarcity of pleasure and health: as Shakespeare puts it, “Liberty / As surfeit [i.e. excess of food] is the father of much fast [i.e. scarcity of food]” and “every scope by…immoderate use / Turns to restraint” (1.2.117-120). In other words, a bathtub of ice cream may promise satisfaction, but the glutton who attempts the “surfeit” will, after many bouts of nausea, “fast” from ice cream for years to come, and not for pious reasons. Lust, too, is a trick of the eye. It promises insurmountable pleasures only to infect the body with disease and the soul with mortal sin. The carnal man is, for this reason, like a rat who, expecting to quench his thirst, drinks poison, only to thirst more than when he began:

Our natures do pursue,

Like rats that ravin down [i.e., prey upon] their proper bane [i.e., poison],

A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die. (1.2.120-122)

Like Shakespeare’s rat, lust always ends with death—the first death of the soul, and later the second death of Hell—and on this lethal account, the “weight” of Claudio’s mortal sin finds an analog both in the heaviness of his shackles and the heft of Juliet’s pregnancy. For “Authority,” both in Heaven and on earth, forces him to “pay down” for his “offence by weight” (1.2.112-113).

Yet, as much as Angelo works to atone for Vienna’s lechery, Shakespeare blatantly shows that the state’s justice is not, in itself, a satisfactory solution to the Fall. Indeed, Angelo can restrain and deter lust, but lacking God’s omniscience, he fails to uproot the worst sinners. Claudio’s licentious friend Lucio escapes Angelo’s notice altogether: an unfair outcome given the fact that Lucio, as a regular purchaser of prostitution’s “many diseases,” is vicious in his lust (1.2.42). Claudio is, at least, a wiser fool, as his incontinence makes him receptive to contrition. But then, the greatest fools often go unpunished, since those who have the most vices are most clever at harboring them. Shakespeare also notes the limitations of the state’s eternal capacities: Angelo can righteously destroy Claudio’s body, but he cannot re-create the life of grace within Claudio’s soul. As Vienna’s officials repeatedly confess, they have “no remedy” apart from justice to atone for Claudio’s fall (2.1.278, 282; 2.2.48). Yet, what the sinner needs more than bodily destruction is spiritual healing. To his fortune, Claudio indeed receives a more divine medicine—not from the superiority of the state, but from the lowliness of the Duke who, as an undercover operative, impersonates a Franciscan friar. Under this beggarly guise, he cleverly rids Claudio of his fear of death by ridding him of his appetite for life. Man, the Duke figuratively implies, should not fear death because his fallen state was never worth keeping: he suffers an ever-changing tide of natural forces beyond his control (“skyey influences”), his body inevitably corrodes into dust, his worldly possessions and pleasures are at best temporary, his life is “nurs’d” by the “baseness” of food and cloth derived from dirt and dunghills, and he suffers a multitude of insatiable desires (3.1.8-41). In a word, a fallen man will never make himself happy, since in seeking satisfaction, he finds only pain, and in seeking possessions, he finds only privations. Indeed, the fallen man dies not once, but a “thousand deaths” before his bones rest in the grave (3.1.39-40). For, in himself, he is nothing.

As despairing as this advice may sound, the honest recognition of what all fallen men justly deserve—nothing—is exactly the kind of knowledge that inspires Claudio to accept God’s mercy. What he needs, after all, is not to make himself happy—worldly satisfaction is the very illusion of lust—but to radically depend on God’s creative capacities to resurrect his soul’s salvific life. Just as Christ the Divine Physician heals wounds by receiving them himself, Claudio’s greatest strength is to become weak before God in reconciliation. For when the soul is alive in grace, then the justice of the body’s death is translated into the mercy of eternal life. As Claudio terms it, “To sue to live, I find I seek to die, / And seeking death, find life” (3.1.42-43). The state may weaken the prideful with temporal death, but only the Church (as seen in the Duke) strengthens the humble with eternal life.

Of course, even for rulers, the state’s subservience to the Church is joyful news: All states are governed by fallen men who, born with original sin, are themselves in need of God’s mercy, and not just once, but many times over. Even after baptism and contrition, they must suffer the just consequences of the Fall: concupiscence, bodily corruption, and the many natural and moral evils that surround, tempt, and afflict their righteousness. Angelo, on this account, cannot reverse Adam’s Fall himself, and he can never be so morally sound that he no longer needs a Divine Physician. In fact, the more self-reliant he is in the pursuit of justice, the less receptive he is to God’s merciful graces. His moral fall inevitably comes when, in a grand twist of events, Claudio’s sister, Isabella, intercedes for her brother. Attracted by her righteousness and rationality—the very virtues he prizes in himself—Angelo’s pride, more than Isabella’s carnal appearance, inflames him with lust. For, being perversely in love with the idea that she is as angelic as himself, he “desire[s] her foully for those things / That make her good” and “sin[s] in loving [her] virtue” (2.2.174-175, 183). With feverish fervor, he barters Claudio’s bodily life for Isabella’s spiritual death: he will spare her brother only if she “lay[s] down the treasures” of her “body” in sin (2.4.96). Hypocritically, Angelo “kills” Claudio “for faults of his own liking,” and he “weed[s]” Vienna of lust only to “let his grow!” (3.2.261, 263).

Isabella herself, however, is more angelic: if not in outward name, in inward will. For she refuses to commit her soul to eternal death to temporarily save Claudio’s bodily life. As she sees it,

Better it were a brother died at once,

Than that a sister, by redeeming him,

Should die for ever. (2.4.105-107)

Once more, Shakespeare enlists the Duke’s aid. If he can revive Claudio’s soul, surely he can translate Angelo’s injustice into mercy with wit and grace. Nor does he disappoint: for Angelo, he recalls, wrongfully abandoned Mariana, his fiancée with whom he had contracted a future vow of marriage. You can see where this is going: one swap in the dark later, and Angelo, thinking he is with Isabella, unwittingly consummates his nuptial vow with Mariana.^[2] All that remains is the Last Judgment. With blaring trumpets reminiscent of the Book of Revelation, the friar-king reveals himself, restores his authority, and “like power divine” administers justice and mercy simultaneously (4.5.9; 4.6.12; 5.1.367). Claudio, who was lately believed to be dead, is revealed to be alive. Out of justice, he must marry Juliet; Lucio must marry the prostitute he impregnated; and Angelo must marry Mariana. Out of mercy, the lives of all three men are pardoned.^[3] Fittingly, the play ends with the Duke offering his hand in marriage to Isabella: as both thrive in body and soul, it is a just match, and yet a merciful one too, as Isabella is well below the Duke’s honorary rank.

Of course, in the end, the Duke is not God. He did not create his subjects, so they do not owe him everything; he cannot replace corruption with existence; and he too suffers the effects of the Fall, if not Adam’s guilt. Yet, like unto God, the spared subjects owe the Duke their lives; as he has redeemed their bodies, we hope their dead souls will follow suit; and marriage, while it may not entirely eradicate lust, confines it and reorients it toward a fruitful multiplicity—one that is, itself, a merciful solution to death’s justice. Mercy, in a word, is, for Shakespeare, the solution to sin because it is the right kind of excess: the kind we can never have too much of, the kind that ends not in scarcity, but in medicinal bounty. To say it another way, the best kind of justice is mercy because the best kind of state is the Church.

Endnotes

^[1]All citations of the play are from the Arden Third Series: William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. J.W. Lever (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004).

^[2]Canon law in Shakespeare’s day presumed that a consummation of marriage implied a sponsalia de praesenti (present vow), rendering a sponsalia de futuro (future vow) a valid marriage.

^[3]Many websites on Google falsely claim that Lucio is whipped and hung to death, but the Duke clearly “Remit[s]” these “forfeits” (5.1.518). Nor is this outcome lenient: Marriage is, for Lucio, its own mortal punishment, since the restrictions of his vicious liberties is, according to him, commensurate to “death, Whipping, and hanging” (5.1.520-521).

TITLE IMAGE: Isabella pleading with Angelo for her brother’s life, Stephen Reid, 1909.