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Measure for Measure

William Shakespeare · 1604

Measure for Measure

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Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

Measure for Measure is a Shakespeare play, written around 1603–04 and first printed in the 1623 First Folio, conventionally grouped among the ‘problem plays’ for its uneasy mixture of comic structure and dark moral matter. Vienna’s Duke Vincentio hands power to his deputy Angelo and withdraws in disguise; Angelo revives a lapsed law against fornication, condemns the young Claudio to death, and offers to spare him only if Claudio’s sister Isabella, a novice nun, will sleep with him. The plot turns on a ‘bed trick’ (Angelo’s spurned betrothed Mariana is substituted for Isabella) and closes with the Duke’s return, the exposure of Angelo, and a cluster of imposed marriages — including the Duke’s own unanswered proposal to Isabella. The play’s title, drawn from the Gospel injunction to judge as you would be judged, hangs over a work preoccupied with hypocrisy, mercy, coercion, and the gap between the principles people profess and the compromises by which they actually live.

In the wiki

  • Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English — Henry Oliver reads the play as a work of pragmatism and the sequel to The Merchant of Venice: where Portia’s mercy ‘droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven’, here mercy is strained, a contrivance of human government, and no character can stay consistent with their own stated principles — so an arbitrary law is imposed and everyone must make it work. He offers a ‘fertility-crisis’ reading (closing the brothels threatens the population the state needs), argues the Duke and Isabella marry because they mirror one another (justice and mercy, both willing to deceive in a good cause), and rejects a Girardian frame as ‘anti-Girardian’, the substitutions being pointedly not doubles. The episode’s centre is a line-by-line dispute with Tyler Cowen, books open, over whether Isabella’s Act 5 line ‘I did yield to him’ hints that she actually slept with Angelo — which Oliver walks the text to refuse.

See also