The interest of Measure for Measure, therefore, is partly that of an old story told over again.  We measure with curiosity that variety of resources which has enabled Shakespeare to refashion the original material with a higher motive; adding to the intricacy of the piece, yet so modifying its structure as to give the whole almost the unity of a single scene; lending, by the light of a philosophy which dwells much on what is complex and subtle in our nature, a true human propriety to its strange and unexpected turns of feeling and character, to incidents so difficult as the fall of Angelo, and the subsequent reconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleads successfully for his life.  It was from Whetstone, a contemporary English writer, that Shakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio’s “rare history” of Promos and Cassandra, one of that numerous class of Italian stories, like Boccaccio’s Tancred of Salerno, in which the mere energy of southern passion has everything its own way, and which, though they may repel many a northern reader by a certain crudity in their colouring, seem to have been full of fascination for the Elizabethan age.  This story, as it appears in Whetstone’s endless comedy, is almost as rough as the roughest episode of actual criminal life.  But the play seems never to have been acted, and some time after its publication Whetstone himself turned the thing into a tale, included in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, where it still figures as a genuine piece, with touches of undesigned poetry, a quaint field-flower here and there of diction or sentiment, the whole strung up to an effective brevity, and with the fragrance of that admirable age of literature all about it.  Here, then, there is something of the original Italian colour:  in this narrative Shakespeare may well have caught the first glimpse of a composition with nobler proportions; and some artless sketch from his own hand, perhaps, putting together his first impressions, insinuated itself between Whetstone’s work and the play as we actually read it.  Out of these insignificant sources Shakespeare’s play rises, full of solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty, the new body of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry, escaping from the imperfect relics of the old story, yet not wholly transformed, and even as it stands but the preparation only, we might think, of a still more imposing design.  For once we have in it a real example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described as suggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hints only, brings into distinct shape the reader’s own half-developed imaginings.  Often the quality is attributed to writing merely vague and unrealised, but in Measure for Measure, quite certainly, Shakespeare has directed the attention of sympathetic readers along certain channels of meditation beyond the immediate scope of his work.

Measure for Measure, therefore, by the quality of these higher designs, woven by his strange magic on a texture of poorer quality, is hardly less indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare’s reason, of his power of moral interpretation.  It deals, not like Hamlet with the problems which beset one of exceptional temperament, but with mere human nature.  It brings before us a group of persons, attractive, full of desire, vessels of the genial, seed-bearing powers of nature, a gaudy existence flowering out over the old court and city of Vienna, a spectacle of the fulness and pride of life which to some may seem to touch the verge of wantonness.  Behind this group of people, behind their various action, Shakespeare inspires in us the sense of a strong tyranny of nature and circumstance.  Then what shall there be on this side of it — on our side, the spectators’ side, of this painted screen, with its puppets who are really glad or sorry all the time? what philosophy of life, what sort of equity?

Stimulated to read more carefully by Shakespeare’s own profounder touches, the reader will note the vivid reality, the subtle interchange of light and shade, the strongly contrasted characters of this group of persons, passing across the stage so quickly.  The slightest of them is at least not ill-natured:  the meanest of them can put forth a plea for existence — Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live! — they are never sure of themselves, even in the strong tower of a cold unimpressible nature:  they 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 foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack.”  Words which seem to exhaust man’s deepest sentiment concerning death and life are put on the lips of a gilded, witless youth; and the saintly Isabella feels fire creep along her, kindling her tongue to eloquence at the suggestion of shame.  In places the shadow deepens:  death intrudes itself on the scene, as among other things “a great disguiser,” blanching the features of youth and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its disgraceful associations.  As in Orcagna’s fresco at Pisa, it comes capriciously, giving many and long reprieves to Barnardine, who has been waiting for it nine years in prison, taking another thence by fever, another by mistake of judgment, embracing others in the midst of their music and song.  The little mirror of existence, which reflects to each for a moment the stage on which he plays, is broken at last by a capricious accident; while all alike, in their yearning for untasted enjoyment, are really discounting their days, grasping so hastily and accepting so inexactly the precious pieces.  The Duke’s quaint but excellent moralising at the beginning of the third act does but express, like the chorus of a Greek play, the spirit of the passing incidents.  To him in Shakespeare’s play, to a few here and there in the actual world, this strange practical paradox of our life, so unwise in its eager haste, reveals itself in all its clearness.

The Duke disguised as a friar, with his curious moralising on life and death, and Isabella in her first mood of renunciation, a thing “ensky’d and sainted,” come with the quiet of the cloister as a relief to this lust and pride of life:  like some grey monastic picture hung on the wall of a gaudy room, their presence cools the heated air of the piece.  For a moment we are within the placid conventual walls, whither they fancy at first that the Duke has come as a man crossed in love, with Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, calling each other by their homely, English names, or at the nunnery among the novices, with their little limited privileges, where

  If you speak you must not show your face,
  Or if you show your face you must not speak.

Not less precious for this relief in the general structure of the piece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, a creature wholly of Shakespeare’s invention, told, by way of interlude, in subdued prose.  The moated grange, with its dejected mistress, its long, listless, discontented days, where we hear only the voice of a boy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of the loveliest songs of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare’s school, is the pleasantest of many glimpses we get here of pleasant places — the field without the town, Angelo’s garden-house, the consecrated fountain.  Indirectly it has suggested two of the most perfect compositions among the poetry of our own generation.  Again it is a picture within a picture, but with fainter lines and a greyer atmosphere:  we have here the same passions, the same wrongs, the same continuance of affection, the same crying out upon death, as in the nearer and larger piece, though softened, and reduced to the mood of a more dreamy scene.

Greek tragedy in some of its noblest products has taken for its theme the love of a sister, a sentiment unimpassioned indeed, purifying by the very spectacle of its passionlessness, but capable of a fierce and almost animal strength if informed for a moment by pity and regret.  At first Isabella comes upon the scene as a tranquillising influence in it.  But Shakespeare, in the development of the action, brings quite different and unexpected qualities out of her.  It is his characteristic poetry to expose this cold, chastened personality, respected even by the worldly Lucio as “something ensky’d and sainted, and almost an immortal spirit,” to two sharp, shameful trials, and wring out of her a fiery, revealing eloquence.  Thrown into the terrible dilemma of the piece, called upon to sacrifice that cloistral whiteness to sisterly affection, become in a moment the ground of strong, contending passions, she develops a new character and shows herself suddenly of kindred with those strangely conceived women, like Webster’s Vittoria, who unite to a seductive sweetness something of a dangerous and tigerlike changefulness of feeling.  The swift, vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white spirit, and, stripped in a moment of all convention, she stands before us clear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties of the piece.  Cassandra, the original of Isabella in Whetstone’s tale, with the purpose of the Roman Lucretia in her mind, yields gracefully enough to the conditions of her brother’s safety; and to the lighter reader of Shakespeare there may seem something harshly conceived, or psychologically impossible even, in the suddenness of the change wrought in her, as Claudio welcomes for a moment the chance of life through her compliance with Angelo’s will, and he may have a sense here of flagging skill, as in words less finely handled than in the preceding scene.  The play, though still not without traces of nobler handiwork, sinks down, as we know, at last into almost homely comedy, and it might be supposed that just here the grander manner deserted it.  But the skill with which Isabella plays upon Claudio’s well-recognised sense of honour, and endeavours by means of that to insure him beforehand from the acceptance of life on baser terms, indicates no coming laxity of hand just in this place.  It was rather that there rose in Shakespeare’s conception, as there may for the reader, as there certainly would in any good acting of the part, something of that terror, the seeking for which is one of the notes of romanticism in Shakespeare and his circle.  The stream of ardent natural affection, poured as sudden hatred upon the youth condemned to die, adds an additional note of expression to the horror of the prison where so much of the scene takes place.  It is not here only that Shakespeare has conceived of such extreme anger and pity as putting a sort of genius into simple women, so that their “lips drop eloquence,” and their intuitions interpret that which is often too hard or fine for manlier reason; and it is Isabella with her grand imaginative diction, and that poetry laid upon the “prone and speechless dialect” there is in mere youth itself, who gives utterance to the equity, the finer judgments of the piece on men and things.

From behind this group with its subtle lights and shades, its poetry, its impressive contrasts, Shakespeare, as I said, conveys to us a strong sense of the tyranny of nature and circumstance over human action.  The most powerful expressions of this side of experience might be found here.  The bloodless, impassible temperament does but wait for its opportunity, for the almost accidental coherence of time with place, and place with wishing, to annul its long and patient discipline, and become in a moment the very opposite of that which under ordinary conditions it seemed to be, even to itself.  The mere resolute self-assertion of the blood brings to others special temptations, temptations which, as defects or over-growths, lie in the very qualities which make them otherwise imposing or attractive; the very advantage of men’s gifts of intellect or sentiment being dependent on a balance in their use so delicate that men hardly maintain it always.  Something also must be conceded to influences merely physical, to the complexion of the heavens, the skyey influences, shifting as the stars shift; as something also to the mere caprice of men exercised over each other in the dispensations of social or political order, to the chance which makes the life or death of Claudio dependent on Angelo’s will.

The many veins of thought which render the poetry of this play so weighty and impressive unite in the image of Claudio, a flowerlike young man, whom, prompted by a few hints from Shakespeare, the imagination easily clothes with all the bravery of youth, as he crosses the stage before us on his way to death, coming so hastily to the end of his pilgrimage.  Set in the horrible blackness of the prison, with its various forms of unsightly death, this flower seems the braver.  Fallen by “prompture of the blood,” the victim of a suddenly revived law against the common fault of youth like his, he finds his life forfeited as if by the chance of a lottery.  With that instinctive clinging to life, which breaks through the subtlest casuistries of monk or sage apologising for an early death, he welcomes for a moment the chance of life through his sister’s shame, though he revolts hardly less from the notion of perpetual imprisonment so repulsive to the buoyant energy of youth.  Familiarised, by the words alike of friends and the indifferent, to the thought of death, he becomes gentle and subdued indeed, yet more perhaps through pride than real resignation, and would go down to darkness at last hard and unblinded.  Called upon suddenly to encounter his fate, looking with keen and resolute profile straight before him, he gives utterance to some of the central truths of human feeling, the sincere, concentrated expression of the recoiling flesh.  Thoughts as profound and poetical as Hamlet’s arise in him; and but for the accidental arrest of sentence he would descend into the dust, a mere gilded, idle flower of youth indeed, but with what are perhaps the most eloquent of all Shakespeare’s words upon his lips.

As Shakespeare in Measure for Measure has refashioned, after a nobler pattern, materials already at hand, so that the relics of other men’s poetry are incorporated into his perfect work, so traces of the old “morality,” that early form of dramatic composition which had for its function the inculcating of some moral theme, survive in it also, and give it a peculiar ethical interest.  This ethical interest, though it can escape no attentive reader, yet, in accordance with that artistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled, is not to be wholly separated from the special circumstances, necessities, embarrassments, of these particular dramatic persons.  The old “moralities” exemplified most often some rough-and-ready lesson.  Here the very intricacy and subtlety of the moral world itself, the difficulty of seizing the true relations of so complex a material, the difficulty of just judgment, of judgment that shall not be unjust, are the lessons conveyed.  Even in Whetstone’s old story this peculiar vein of moralising comes to the surface:  even there, we notice the tendency to dwell on mixed motives, the contending issues of action, the presence of virtues and vices alike in unexpected places, on “the hard choice of two evils,” on the “imprisoning” of men’s “real intents.”  Measure for Measure is full of expressions drawn from a profound experience of these casuistries, and that ethical interest becomes predominant in it:  it is no longer Promos and Cassandra, but Measure for Measure, its new name expressly suggesting the subject of poetical justice.  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 realise 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.  But at bottom rights are equivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the recognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands, or our thoughts, 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.

  ’Tis very pregnant: 
  The jewel that we find we stoop and take it,
  Because we see it; but what we do not see
  We tread upon, and never think of it.

It is for this finer justice, a justice based on a more delicate appreciation of the true conditions of men and things, a true respect of persons in our estimate of actions, that the people in Measure for Measure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of this play is full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare’s poetry, so in its ethics it is an epitome of Shakespeare’s moral judgments.  They are the moral judgments of an observer, of one who sits as a spectator, and knows how the threads in the design before him hold together under the surface:  they are the judgments of the humourist also, who follows with a half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, the various ways of human disposition, and sees less distance than ordinary men between what are called respectively great and little things.  It is not always that poetry can be the exponent of morality; but it is this aspect of morals which it represents most naturally, for this true justice is dependent on just those finer appreciations which poetry cultivates in us the power of making, those peculiar valuations of action and its effect which poetry actually requires.

1874.