Morality in Measure for Measure

Shakespeare's play, Measure for Measure, focuses on human morality. The play also explores the question of what kind of sexual conduct is socially acceptable, and what is not. The play depicts various attitudes toward prostitution, promiscuity, and premarital sex. But it also suggests that human law and perhaps human morality is quite arbitrary and relative.

Measure for Measure considers the need for statutes and laws to govern sexual appetites and ensure domestic tranquillity. But it also focuses on the conflict between human actions and human moral values, especially as it is manifest in the issue of seeming and being. The Duke himself notes the difference between appearance and reality as he speaks about his deputy Angelo, who appears to be the perfect deputy and the disciplined (even puritanical) character. Noting Angelo’s character, the Duke also questions the integrity of his inner and outer worlds:

Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be.

Angelo ultimately proves to be a seemer, one whose statements of virtue and self-control do not match his behaviour. But to call him a hypocrite misses the mark: he is as surprised at his lust as anyone else, at least at its onset, and he questions his moral status at first. His virtue had always been quite real for him, and his slide into sin catches him off guard. When he finds himself lusting after Isabella, he exclaims with surprise,

What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Ha! Not she: nor doth she tempt: but it is I That, lying by the violet in the sun, Do as the carrion does, not as the flower, Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough, Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary And pitch our evils there? O, fie, fie, fie! What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo? Dost thou desire her foully for those things That make her good? O, let her brother live! Thieves for their robbery have authority When judges steal themselves. What, do I love her, That I desire to hear her speak again, And feast upon her eyes? What is't I dream on? O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous Is that temptation that doth goad us on To sin in loving virtue: never could the strumpet, With all her double vigour, art and nature, Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid Subdues me quite. Even till now, When men were fond, I smiled and wonder'd how.

Angelo finds in himself, then, a double nature: the first is the virtuous individual that would have carried on with propriety; the second, a carnal, lustful, power-hungry character who, though surprising to him, is nonetheless part of who he is. His awareness of this duality within is echoed in the change in his speech. Until the point at which he attempts to seduce Isabella, his language had been straightforward, carrying single meanings. But when he begins to pursue his appetites with Isabella, asides characterise his speech and double entendres enter his rhetoric:

In an aside Angelo plays on the double ...

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In an aside Angelo plays on the double meaning of pleasure

ISABELLA I am come to know your pleasure.

ANGELO That you might know it, would much better please me Than to demand what 'tis

And he speaks obliquely in seducing Isabella as he argues:

ANGELO Nay, I'll not warrant that; for I can speak Against the thing I say. Answer to this: 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.

ANGELO Pleased you to do't at peril of your soul, Were equal poise of sin and charity.

He also uses a sexual meaning with his metaphors:

ANGELO Ha! fie, these filthy vices! It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image In stamps that are forbid: 'tis all as easy Falsely to take away a life true made As to put metal in restrained means To make a false one.

His change in character is mirrored in the new doubleness of speech, and the double entendre reveals, at least to the audience if not to Isabella, Angelos inner corruption as it is figured in his lack of integrity, in the disparity between outer seeming and inner being.

While the inner corruption he discovers in himself might surprise Angelo, it would have been no surprise to the audience. Reformation theology which was influential at the time of Shakespeare reminded people that each person was tainted with evil; such was the doctrine of total depravity, the sense that every aspect of existence was affected by the effects of Adams first sin (original sin was the concept): not that everyone was as evil as possible, but rather that no one could claim to be totally virtuous. The doubleness of language that Angelo began to demonstrate, the moral struggle that he faced, was part of the very fabric of human nature, as St. Paul had written in Romans:

For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (New American, Romans 7:14-24)

That Angelo was liable to temptation and sin was not surprising, nor was the experience of his falling unusual (though by no means excusable). His pride, however, was quite unwarranted, and it was itself a major sin. Moreover, it made his especially vulnerable to temptation and sin.

Isabella, too, is not without her complexities and her problems. At the beginning of the play we find her desiring to enter a nunnery. The choice of a religious vocation seems to set her apart as another of the virtuous characters. Lucio, himself one of the more cynical characters in the play, is even taken with her purity: Having come to tell Isabella that her brother has been arrested for impregnating his lover Julietta, Lucio defends himself against Isabellas charge that he is mocking her:

I would not--though 'tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the lapwing and to jest, Tongue far from heart--play with all virgins so: I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted. By your renouncement an immortal spirit, And to be talk'd with in sincerity, As with a saint.

Even Lucio is taken with her seeming sincerity. But the audience has heard another aspect of her character that Lucio hasn’t. Speaking to one of the superiors at the nunnery, Isabella reveals a more suspect aspect of herself:

ISABELLA And have you nuns no farther privileges?

FRANCISCA Are not these large enough?

ISABELLA Yes, truly; I speak not as desiring more; But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare.

Isabella, consciously or unconsciously, presents herself as one whose inner life demands curbs and restraints. Whether she is conscious of this problem and she seems loath to admit it Isabella is expressing the need for some kind of restraint because her nature itself is liable to err. Her virtue, then, is lacking in some essential aspects. At best it is passive and defensive rather than active and aggressive. It is not enough to flee evil, that is (as one does, for example, by entering a convent); a good person must also promote the good.

How to deal with this inner corruption this total depravity is one of the major concerns of the Duke as well as the play. The role of the king was to inhibit evil and to promote virtue at least that was the orthodox position (though, to play on Hamlets statement, a position sometimes more honoured in the breach than the observance). So it is that the Duke has a problem to solve at the beginning of the play. The Duke had permitted the society to follow its natural course: he had allowed the laws to go unpunished for too long, permitting vice to flourish and good to wither:

We have strict statutes and most biting laws. The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds, Which for this nineteen years we have let slip; Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum.

Just as individuals experienced their own total depravity, so too did the body politic. The entire city of Vienna had become corrupted, naturally, because the Duke had failed to execute his office properly. Just as a garden will go to weed if not tended, the social fabric will tend to unravel without care. The Duke was responsible for such tending, but he had been lax, and now the entire city was paying the price. The Dukes solution, however, was just as impracticable as that of either Angelo or Isabella. He assumed that social restraint would be sufficient to remedy the situation, and to that end he established Angelo as his deputy, knowing that Angelo would be a strict enforcer of the laws:

I have on Angelo imposed the office; Who may, in the ambush of my name, strike home, And yet my nature never in the fight To do in slander.

Yet in his desire to restore decorum, the Duke also acts to avoid personal and political responsibility, just as Angelo would later attempt to deny personal accountability for his own actions. If there is a way to account for the frailty of human nature, legislation does not seem to be a sufficient solution, just as Isabella’s defensive flight had been ineffective.

Measure for Measure is problematic and satirical in its view of society and morality. The world of Vienna is a world of corruption. The Pompey subplot emphasises the rampant sexual corruption in the city and the ramifications of unenforced laws. But it also suggests that human laws and perhaps human morality are quite arbitrary and relative. Here is a world in which good and virtue are defined not by some objective standards but by what the traffic will bear.