What does the duke offer in its place? In theory the answer is a middle road between justice and mercy, license and restraint. The technical term for this third way is “temperance,” a key virtue in classical ethics. The duke, says Escalus, is “A gentleman of all temperance.”

Temperance, however, depends on everyone behaving reasonably and obeying the rule of moderation. What Shakespeare recognizes—as the duke does not—is that people simply cannot be relied upon to show perpetual temperance. So it is that at the very center of the action we find the extraordinary bit-part of Barnardine, the man who announces that he will not be executed today, thank you very much, because he has a hangover. The whole of the duke’s plot nearly collapses because of him. It is only salvaged by the palpably improbable device of inventing the pirate Ragozine who just happens to look like Claudio and to die at the right moment. Barnardine, wrote the great nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt, “is a fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other characters of the play.”

SHAKESPEAREAN MORALITY

Hazlitt was unusual among critics of his time in admiring Measure for Measure. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers had severe reservations about the play. Dr. Samuel Johnson greatly admired some of its sentiments, for instance the duke’s speech to Claudio, readying him for death:

… Thou hast nor youth, nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep
Dreaming on both….

This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening. (Johnson’s 1765 edition of Shakespeare)

But Johnson was puzzled by the ending—“It is somewhat strange, that Isabel is not made to express either gratitude, wonder or joy at the sight of her brother … After the pardon of two murderers Lucio might be treated by the good Duke with less harshness; but perhaps the Poet intended to show, what is too often seen, that men easily forgive wrongs which are not committed against themselves”—and he felt that overall “the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labour than elegance. The plot is rather intricate than artful.”

At the end of the nineteenth century the impassioned poet and critic A. C. Swinburne took a very different view. He suggested that Measure for Measure had long been an unpopular play not because, as certain French commentators had suggested, the cant and hypocrisy of Angelo presented too raw a portrayal of “the huge national vice of England,” but because the failure to punish Angelo baffled the sense of natural justice. This, Swinburne noted, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reason for disliking the play: “The expression is absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored or even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck in the face” (Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, 1880). A deliberately outrageous and insulting play: what Shakespeare had done to expectations about justice in Measure for Measure is what Swinburne did to Victorian morality in his scandalously sexual Poems and Ballads of 1866. That is why Measure was one of the plays that he valued the most.

The changing fortunes of Measure for Measure coincided with the shift from Victorianism to aestheticism. Victorian Shakespeare was ushered in by Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler a generation before the young queen came to the throne. Measure for Measure was the one play that defeated their project to create a Family Shakespeare suitable for reading aloud in the home. They bowdlerized what they took to be obscenities out of all the other plays, but a sex-free Measure for Measure proved an impossibility: “the indecent expressions with which many of the scenes abound, are so interwoven with the story, that it is extremely difficult to separate the one from the other. Feeling my own inability to render this play sufficiently correct for family-reading, I have thought it advisable to print it (without presuming to alter a single word) from the published copy, as performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden” (prefatory note in The Family Shakespeare, 1818).

It was the aesthetes Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater who overturned the bowdlerian legacy in the 1870s—and they did so by making Measure for Measure into a central and characteristic, as opposed to a marginal and awkward, Shakespearean play. Walter Pater’s 1874 essay on the play was stylistically inspired by Swinburne’s criticism, but its original publication predated Swinburne’s specifically Shakespearean musings. The essay was reprinted as the centerpiece of Pater’s “art for art’s sake” manifesto Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889). Pater read the play in terms of the disruption of northern European puritanism by what he called “southern passion.” Richard Wagner had done something similar in Germany back in the 1830s: when turning the play into his early opera Das Liebesverbot (“the ban on love”) he had shifted the action to Palermo. Pater’s method of shifting the play southward was to link it to its Italian sources. But he also made extraordinary high claims. In Measure for Measure, says Pater, Shakespeare works out “a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgements.” The play is “hardly less indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare’s reason, of his power of moral interpretation.” No one hitherto, except perhaps, by implication, Richard Wagner, had seen the centrality of Measure for Measure to the mind of Shakespeare.

Pater argues that the play deals not with the problems of one exceptional individual, as Hamlet does, but with “the central paradox of human nature.” It brings before us “a group of persons, attractive, full of desire, vessels of the genial, seed-bearing powers of nature … but bound by the tyranny of nature and circumstance.” The characters are seen as embodiments of the force of life itself.