Central to the sense of fully lived life is a consciousness of the power of death: Pater sees Claudio’s “Ay, but to die … to lie in cold obstruction and to rot” as perhaps the most eloquent of all Shakespeare’s words. He finds the plea for life everywhere in the play, not least in Barnardine’s line “Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live.” Such is Shakespeare’s elemental sympathy that even the meanest characters “are capable of many friendships and of a true dignity in danger, giving each other a sympathetic, if transitory, regret—one sorry that another should be so foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack.” The need to seize the day is shown negatively in the way that “in their yearning for untainted enjoyment, [the characters] are really discounting their days.” Pater notes here that this sentiment inspired Tennyson’s great lyric poem on Mariana at the moated grange.

Pater ends his essay by returning to the idea that Measure for Measure offers in its ethics “an epitome of Shakespeare’s moral judgments.” He contrasts it with Whetstone’s original and the older type of morality play in which the drama exemplifies some rough and ready moral lesson. In Measure for Measure, as its title suggests, the ethical vision is shaped by the very structure of the play. This is in accordance with Pater’s key aesthetic principle: “that artistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled.” The morality of Measure for Measure is that of poetic, not political or theological justice. What the play teaches us is that human beings all have “mixed motives,” that our “real intents” are “improvised” by circumstance and that virtue and vice are often copresent in unexpected places:

The action of the play, like the action of life itself for the keener observer, develops in us the conception of this poetical justice, and the yearning to realize it, the true justice of which Angelo knows nothing, because it lies for the most part beyond the limits of any acknowledged law. The idea of justice involves the idea of rights … The recognition of his rights therefore … is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love.

For Pater, poetry is the highest form of sympathy. It is therefore the route to that true—and truly modern—form of justice that is built on the need to recognize all persons as they really are in their inmost nature. In interpreting Measure for Measure thus, Pater reads Shakespeare as a moralist ahead of his time, a playwright who profoundly anticipates a theory of justice more characteristic of the modern era than the early modern: “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others” (first principle in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971).

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Measure for Measure, however, exists only in a Folio text that is reasonably well printed. However, the surviving text may represent a theatrical adaptation postdating Shakespeare’s retirement, possibly overseen by Thomas Middleton. The extent of Middleton’s involvement is debated by scholars. There are a number of inconsistencies, puzzles, and textual anomalies. Why, for instance, does Juliet appear on stage in three scenes but only speak in one of them? Why is the duke unnamed in the play, but called Vincentio in the list of roles attached to it? Why are his remarks about how “might and greatness” or “place and greatness” cannot escape censure split into two very short soliloquies at different points in the action (3.2, where the sentiments are relevant, and 4.1, where they are not)? Why does Mariana’s song “Take, O, take those lips away” also appear, with an additional stanza, in John Fletcher’s play Rollo Duke of Normandy of The Bloody Brother (written between 1617 and 1620)? Some editors have considered the array of such problems to be little more than the result of minor tinkering with the script in the two decades between its first performance and publication in the Folio, while others have argued for wholesale revision on Middleton’s part. The Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007) actually prints a “genetic text” of the play by “William Shakespeare, adapted by Thomas Middleton,” with many passages printed in bold type to indicate possible authorship by Middleton, who is said to have changed the play’s location to Vienna, for political reasons, from an allegedly Italian setting in Shakespeare’s original (conjecturally Ferrara).

Shakespearean textual debates of this kind go in cycles: the Cambridge editor in the 1920s proposed an elaborate theory of revision; the Arden editor in the 1970s thought that the text was close to its Shakespearean original; the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Oxford editors have seen more Middleton than ever before. For the purpose of our edition, which is fidelity to the Folio, we print a modernized version of the 1623 text and leave speculation to others.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, one of which is Measure for Measure, so the list at the beginning of the play is adapted from that in the First Folio. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “The DUKE, unnamed in play, but ‘Vincentio’ in Folio list of roles”).

Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which Measure for Measure is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the city”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often with an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page. They are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Measure for Measure, the entire action is set in and around Vienna.

Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division was based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty.