He certainly turned away from comedy in the next few years of his writing career. Strikingly, Isabella does not respond to the proposal. Does she fall into the duke’s arms with silent and submissive joy? Or look puzzled? Or aghast? Some productions of the play leave the ending open, with a kind of freeze-frame effect. It is not unknown—though without textual warrant—for Isabella to look the duke up and down, then turn away and march back to the sisterhood.

“THE OLD FANTASTICAL DUKE OF DARK CORNERS”

The puzzle over the ending is bound up with broader interpretative anxieties about the duke. He may be regarded as a God-like figure, benignly controlling the world of the play from behind the scenes. But is it healthy for a human to take on the role of divine providence? Angelo is a moral hypocrite, but it should not be forgotten that the origin of the word “hypocrite” is the Greek term for an actor. It is the duke who is the role player, the actor. Does he have the right to impersonate a friar and hear the confessions of Claudio and Mariana? “Confess” is another of the play’s key words, used in both its spiritual and judicial senses.

The part of Lucio is considerably bigger than that of Angelo. Where Angelo is a false-seeming angel crested with the devil’s horn, Lucio plays a seductive Lucifer to the duke’s God. To adapt what William Blake said of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare was a true poet and of the devil’s party without (perhaps) knowing it. Lucio speaks deep truths in light language: the extinction of sexual desire would require the gelding and spaying of all the youth of the city; the duke is in certain senses a creature of “dark corners.” It is almost the first law of the Shakespearean universe that the voice of the devil’s advocate should not be silenced. “I am a kind of burr,” says Lucio, “I shall stick.”

The first recorded performance of Measure for Measure took place on December 26, 1604, as part of the royal Christmas festivities. It was, then, one of the first plays written by Shakespeare for his new monarch. Within weeks of Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Shakespeare’s acting company had been renamed the King’s Men. Over the next ten years they played at court between a dozen and twenty times a year, far more often than any other company. Though the duke is by no means an allegorical representation of King James, the play reveals Shakespeare moving into territory that fascinated the king: a concern with slander and reputation, an anatomy of the secret springs of power as opposed to a public display of majesty in the style of Queen Elizabeth’s pageants and processions (“I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes”), a demonstration of the intricacies of theological and moral debate (one of James’s first acts on arriving in London was to convene a conference at Hampton Court in which he participated in the contentions of high and low churchmen over such matters as the estate of holy matrimony and the question of who could legitimately perform the Sacraments). The king would therefore have been the ideal spectator for such set pieces as the duke’s rhetorical mortification of Claudio (“Be absolute for death”). An acute ironist himself, he would have enjoyed the irony whereby Claudio is instantly persuaded by the duke’s richly rendered argument, only to change his position a few minutes later when his sister tells him of Angelo’s offer—at which point he voices a speech about the horrors of bodily decay and spiritual damnation that is the very antithesis of the duke’s argument against life.

Though the play is set in Vienna, the brothels in the “suburbs” or “liberties” of the city evoke the London in which it was performed, where theater and the sex trade stood side by side on the south bank of the Thames. The malapropisms of Constable Elbow, meanwhile, are in the vein of very English humor associated with Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor. At the same time, the play has the whiff of both sexual license and political intrigue that the Elizabethans and Jacobeans associated with Italy. The duke’s plan to get Angelo to do his dirty work for him could be read as a political strategy deriving from the pages of Machiavelli. There is a striking analogy with the strategy adopted by another duke, one of the Borgias, who is commended in the seventh chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli’s handbook on the art of ruthless and pragmatic statecraft:

When the duke occupied the Romagna he found it under the rule of weak masters, who rather plundered their subjects than ruled them, and gave them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the country was full of robbery, quarrels, and every kind of violence; and so, wishing to bring back peace and obedience to authority, he considered it necessary to give it a good governor. Thereupon he promoted Messer Ramiro d’Orco [de Lorqua], a swift and cruel man, to whom he gave the fullest power. This man in a short time restored peace and unity with the greatest success. Afterwards the duke considered that it was not advisable to confer such excessive authority, for he had no doubt but that he would become odious, so he set up a court of judgment in the country, under a most excellent president, wherein all cities had their advocates. And because he knew that the past severity had caused some hatred against himself, so, to clear himself in the minds of the people, and gain them entirely to himself, he desired to show that, if any cruelty had been practiced, it had not originated with him, but in the natural sternness of the minister. Under this pretence he took Ramiro, and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed.

The duke of Measure for Measure might be considered to have employed his deputy Angelo in a similar way, with the difference that, this being a comedy, he marries him off rather than executes him at the end of the play.

A drama is always a species of trial, in which actions, motives, and ideas are tested before the jury of an audience. The Duke of Vienna—like Duke Prospero of Milan in The Tempest—is a dramatist engaged upon a test. How is unbridled carnal license best restrained, in order to save society from the ravages of sexual disease and the burden of unwanted children? By extreme puritanism of the kind advocated by Angelo? This solution is tested and found severely wanting.