Measure for Measure: Shakespeare’s great study of the nature of justice remains profound and relevant

This is a wonderful, if unsettling play, as the black humour of the brothel and prison scenes counterpoints the wrenching emotion of Isabella’s pleas to save her brother’s life

Dominic Dromgoole’s ‘Measure for Measure’ at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2015

Were we ever to be vouchsafed a British Bill of Rights, Shakespeare’s contribution would be a rule that mercy must season justice. His argument is most recognisably put in Portia’s mouth in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, but in Measure for Measure it infuses the whole play, as Isabella confronts “the demigod Authority” with her timeless refutation of the case for deterrent sentencing.

This is a wonderful, if unsettling play, as the black humour of the brothel and prison scenes (the moral hideousness of death row has never been better illustrated) counterpoints the wrenching emotion of Isabella’s pleas to save her brother’s life. These are addressed to Angelo, the man “dressed in a little brief authority”, whose Scalia-like interpretation of an old law against fornication requires Claudio’s death. But since power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, this moral paragon is soon offering her a sexual plea-bargain – her virginity, in exchange for remitting her brother’s sentence. Isabella, who is about to enter a nunnery, would lay down her life to save her brother, but refuses to surrender her chastity – a position that a modern audience may, like Claudio, feel to be somewhat illogical. However (as Tosca came to realise) you cannot trust a tyrant: will his promise of post-coital commutation be kept?

Meanwhile, sexual licence in the city is running riot: isn’t it time for the rule of law? Shakespeare, predating the realist school of jurisprudence, warns that this inevitably means the rule of lawyers. Only judges with an ingrained sense of mercy and proportionality can make sense of laws that set the moral bar too high – as English law did in Shakespeare’s time, and for several centuries afterwards.

In the course of this play, everybody errs. By its end, everyone needs mercy. Forgiveness is bestowed on everyone – on the tyrant and the bawd. Even the libeller, Lucio (an Elizabethan equivalent of a Daily Mail gossip columnist) escapes whipping. But why? Not because they have earned a pardon, or grovelled for it or received it from a soft-hearted Duke, but because mercy is part of justice. Isabella saves Angelo with a QC’s distinction between act and intention (more proof that Shakespeare studied law) but it is Mariana, Angelo’s old girlfriend, who provides the simplest explanation: “the best men are moulded out of faults”.

Measure for Measure is not an easy play to bring off: the plot at one point hinges on Boccaccio’s assumption that sex is always the same in the dark (so Angelo must believe he has ravished Isabella and not her substitute, his old girlfriend Mariana). But more important is the question of how to play the Duke – a deus ex machina who arrives prematurely at the start of the play – and serves as a puppetmaster whose actions create its characters’ moral dilemmas. The key may be in the bombshell ending, when, after declaring forgiveness for all, the Duke announces his own marriage to Isabella, who is left – by Shakespeare – speechless. Dreaming perhaps, of the convent she had been about to enter?

Could it be that the old reprobate Duke has orchestrated the whole play in order to get the city’s most captivating beauty out of the cloister and into his bed? That would certainly emphasise the point that the judge needs mercy as much as the criminal – the message in any event of a great drama about the measure of human fallibility.

Geoffrey Robertson QC is the author of ‘Crimes Against Humanity; The Struggle for Global Justice’ (Penguin)

Shakespeare at a glance: Measure for Measure

Meryl Streep in a 1977 production of the play

Plot

Claudio is arrested by Angelo, who has been left in charge of Vienna by its Duke (who dresses up as a monk). His offence is to have impregnated his beloved, Juliet; his likely punishment, beheading. Angelo offers to release him in exchange for the virtue of Claudio’s sister, the pious Isabella. Helped by the Duke, she tricks him into sleeping with Angelo’s old flame Mariana instead (without noticing).

More improbable events ensue. Finally, Isabella is told that Claudio is dead; the Duke returns as himself; Claudio comes back from the dead. At the end, the Duke claims Isabella as his wife; she appears not to object.

Themes

Sex, lies and hypocrisy; justice and mercy; mortality.

Background

Written around 1603; possibly revised, later, by Thomas Middleton. A 1979 BBC version, shot on videotape and starring Kate Nelligan, Tim Pigott-Smith and Kenneth Colley, is sometimes cited as a particularly faithful rendition.

Key characters

Claudio: well-meaning hero facing execution.

Angelo: cruel, hypocritical deputy to the Duke.

Isabella: Claudio’s chaste sister.

Top lines

* “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” Lucio on boldness, Act 1 Scene 4

* “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.” Excalus contemplates why bad things happen to good people, Act 2 Scene 1

* “Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it?” Angelo imprisons Claudio for engaging in premarital sex, Act 2 Scene 2

* “O, it is excellent To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.” Isabella bargains for her brother’s release, Act 2 Scene 2

* “The miserable have no other medicine but only hope.” The jailed Claudio longs to be free, Act 3 Scene 1

* “Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.” Isabella on honesty, Act 5 Scene 1

* “Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.” The Duke puts everything right, Act 5 Scene 1

Echoes

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Mariana” takes its influence from the play. The “How to recognise different parts of the body” episode of the comedy sketch show Monty Python’s Flying Circus includes an underwater recital of Measure for Measure. In the US comedy-drama Orange is the New Black, Suzanne quotes from the play to Piper.