Shakespeare's critique of Machiavellian force, fraud, and spectacle in Measure for Measure.

• Author: Planinc, Zdravko

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Measure for Measure is a very odd play. Shakespeare juxtaposes the brothels and the prison of Vienna to the court and the church, and there is much doubt about which comes off best in the comparison. The intricate plot of the play, in an inevitably too sketchy summary, is this: Duke Vincentio leaves Vienna suddenly, deputizing Angelo to govern in his absence. Angelo sentences a young fellow, Claudio, to be beheaded for lechery. Isabella, Claudio's sister, a religious novice, attempts to convince him otherwise. Somehow, Angelo finds himself proposing a deal to Isabella: Claudio's head for her maidenhead. She refuses. The Duke, who has been wandering about town disguised as a friar, learns of it and readily persuades Isabella to go through with the play's notorious bed trick: a midnight switch, maidenhead-for-maidenhead, Angelo's jilted fiancee, Mariana, disguised as Isabella, substituting for Isabella herself. Mariana does it; but Angelo, none the wiser, does not release Claudio. The Duke then switches heads--another prisoner's for Claudio's--and makes plans for a spectacular return to town. Angelo is brought to justice, in a manner of speaking. And what with one thing and another, the Duke proposes to Isabella. If the demands of the genre are met, the two of them join the celebrations of three other happy couples in a perfectly symmetrical comic ending. All in all, very odd. Dark matters are brought to light--things usually presented by Shakespeare in the tragedies--and yet, despite our impressions to the contrary, no one seems to do anything terribly wrong, and no one seems punished in the end. Except for Angelo, that is. Allan Bloom claims that he is the only one to suffer "punishment and humiliation" (Bloom 1993, 330).

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It is conventional to describe Measure for Measure as a "problem play," and to avoid the problem of its content by emphasizing the problem of its form. It begins as a tragedy, but half-way through it becomes a comedy. Northrop Frye, for one, considers this to be the most important question of the play. He writes: "Measure for Measure is not a play about the philosophy of government ... [or] the social problem of prostitution ... [but rather] about the relation of all such things to the structure of comedy" (Frye 1983, 24). Insofar as the play's cross-dressed genre can be made to yield a content, it is often read as a sophisticated Christian allegory in which each character has a symbolic function in a plot based on a medieval Morality play: Angelo is Lucifer, the fallen angel; the Duke is the Lord, mysteriously absent or present, as it suits him; Claudio and Isabella are all Christian souls, tormented by the devil, but redeemed in the end; and thus, like Christianity itself, the play moves from dreadful threats to happy results. More recently, scholars familiar with modern psychoanalytic theories have charted what they see as the play's darker undercurrents. Carolyn Brown's several Freudian analyses of Shakespeare's poetic imagery have uncovered hints of a homoerotic sexual relation between the Duke and Angelo, of a straight sexual attraction between the Duke and Isabella, and of masochistic beating fantasies in Isabella's ostensibly religious thoughts (Brown 1986; Brown 1994; Brown 1997). Searching deeper, David McCandless's Deleuzean reading finds that the punishments in the play have a sadopornographic quality, most clearly seen in the manner in which Angelo forces a series of feminized surrogates--Claudio, Isabella, and Mariana--to accept the status of his own mortified flesh; the man and two women, in other words, are to be understood collectively as a symbol of Angelo's genitals; and Angelo himself becomes the Duke's feminized surrogate, suffering a kind of public emasculation at the end of the play (McCandless 1997).

In production, the Christian allegorical reading has been forgotten as companies outdo one another in attempts to shock or scandalize already world-weary audiences. It is now common, for example, to have Angelo attempt to rape Isabella. And yet, these thoroughly modern stagings have far more in common with the Morality play than they would admit. Susan Griffin argues: "the metaphysics of Christianity and the metaphysics of pornography are the same" (Griffin 1981, 14). Angelo is always the worst of the lot, no matter whether he is a prude and a dupe, or evil incarnate, or a rapist; Isabella is always an innocent, no matter whether she is a frustrated naif or a saint; and the machinations of the Duke are largely overlooked, no matter whether he represents the Deus Absconditus or is only a fellow who enjoys creeping around town disguised as a monk.

In stark contrast, the contention is also made that the problems raised in Measure for Measure are the problems of political philosophy. The play has Shakespeare's most explicitly political beginning--the Duke's first words, "Of government, the properties to unfold ..." (1.1.3)--and it continues to study government right through to its concluding political spectacle. And yet it is seldom read as political philosophy. Perhaps this is because, in order to do so, one must resist its many intriguing distractions and focus one's attention on the Duke. Harry Jaffa and Allan Bloom are two political theorists who have attempted to match wits with him, with notable success. Jaffa finds that the Duke is a Platonic philosopher-king, like Prospero, whose political program is both the sublimation of "unbridled lechery and fornication" and the de-sublimation of religious celibacy into the everyday eroticism of family life (Jaffa 2000, 203-204; cf. Behnegar 2002, 168-169). For Jaffa, Isabella is a Pauline saint who becomes a Roman matron, the "very incarnation of the spirit of the family"; and her marriage to the Duke is the union of law and wisdom (Jaffa 2000, 205, 215, 224-225; cf. Lowenthal 1997, 253). Bloom is more suspicious than Jaffa, and less willing to celebrate the bourgeois virtues, but he nonetheless has a similar reading: the main problem in the play is the relation of nature and convention, sexuality and family. He corrects Jaffa by arguing that Shakespeare "combines a Machiavellian critique of the law and of those who use it with a classical ... love of justice." However, his hermeneutic of suspicion is directed more at the sex than the politics of the play (Bloom 1993, 341). Jaffa and Bloom disagree in their final assessments of whether the Duke is more a philosopher-king than a Cesare Borgia. What is similar about their interpretations, and unexpected, is how little they discuss politics after raising the right political questions. Like most other commentators, they concentrate on exploring the psychological complexities of the characters and the clever subtleties of the plot devices.

Jaffa and Bloom both mention that the Duke's political use of Angelo is similar to Cesare Borgia's use of Remirro de Orco, described by Machiavelli in Book VII of The Prince, but neither of them does much with the parallel. I think there is little doubt that Shakespeare modeled Duke Vincentio on Machiavelli's Borgia, the man whose more popular name was Duke Valentino. My reading of the play will attempt to uncover the full significance of the resemblance. (1) How good, or perhaps it is better to ask, how thorough a Machiavellian is the Duke? And is there a critique of his political effectiveness underlying the play's happy ending? I think that until the "old fantastical Duke of dark corners" (4.3.159) is brought entirely into the light, the profundity of Shakespeare's insight into the workings of Machiavellian politics will not be appreciated.

Shakespeare is as good a political philosopher as Plato. I do not make this claim because I think that Shakespeare read Plato and worked him into his plays. It is most likely he did not. Shakespeare and Plato simply have comparable understandings of human nature, in both its comic and tragic aspects. More specifically, Shakespeare saw the largely corrupt erotic undercurrents of politics in much the same way Plato did. Is there sadopornographic imagery in the poetry of Measure for Measure? There is; and it is neither amusement for the groundlings nor a symptom of the playwright's subconscious troubles. Shakespeare puts it in the play to show us just how nasty Machiavellian politics is. (2) And is there also religious imagery in the play? Should the Duke be read as God and Angelo as Lucifer? The Duke would like us to think so. A complete Machiavellian politics requires religious fraud just as much as the force of arms; and effective rule is both political and religious spectacle.

Shakespeare's plays, especially the tragedies and problem plays, are mirrors held up to the audience; and Measure for Measure is his most deliberately contrived. Its title is a first clue to its ingenuity. It refers to the Sermon on the Mount: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Matt. 7:1-2 [KJV]). The significance of the quote is internal to the drama: the Duke himself refers to the biblical passage while meting out justice in the play's concluding scene (5.1.414). However, by using the passage for the play's title, Shakespeare addresses his audience in a way that is uncomfortably similar to the Duke's meaning. He is not simply asking us to recognize our hypocrisy or to accept that human affairs are so complex that we must trust in an ineffable Providence or the benefits of democratic indifference; rather, he is challenging us to test our best ethical and political judgment in the relatively harmless setting of a theatre. By its nature, theatre is play with the distinction between appearance and reality. Shakespeare is particularly adept at compounding the confusion. Within the realm of appearances constituting a play, he often presents characters having their own difficulties seeing and...