Measure For Measure Themes

Before this point play has been gaining moral and emotional force. Dramatic tension Suddenly the emotional temperature drops and blank verse replaced by prose. All discussion of philosophy is replaced by devious methods of providing a solution to the problems presented.

justice and mercy Balance

Texture shifts at the halfway point Act III scene I 151.

severity of crime and severity of legal and social response

Man-made law vs. God’ s moral law

Symmetry & Antithesis

Coinage and imprinting Sense - reason, awareness or sensuality, lust

Or you get back what you give.

law vs chastity; life vs death

Pregnancy - actual or metaphorical

Knowing - cognition or sexual intercourse. Whole drama plays on this double sense - action suggests that true cognition of people is provided by insights into their sexual natures and that such cognition is a source of power over those people.

Need for order vs. Christian commandments (love your enemies, turn the other cheek).

Symmetry

Claudio and Lucio Angelo and Claudio liberty and restraint

Images - interrelated all allow a degree of flexibility or ambiguity in referring to sexual or non-sexual matters.

justice and mercy Antithesis

man's justice vs. natural justice Old testament vs. New testament chastity and fornication

Duke substitutes his clothes for those of a friar (church authority)

Isabella’ s virginity demanded in exchange for Claudio’ s life Barnadine’ s head intended as substitute for Claudio’ s Mariana’ s virginity substituted for Isabella’ s Ragozine’ s head actually substituted for Claudio’ s

eternal life and earthly life

Measure For Measure

Angelo deputises for Duke

Deputies, substitutes and vicarious action

Elbow's malapropisms

Lucio threatened with severe treatment for slandering the Duke Barnadine, the murderer pardoned

Crime, Punishment & Justice. Proper Use of Power. Authority

marriage used as a punishment Lots of debate about the law Figure of Justice is silent apart from condemning Angelo Little improvement from earlier situation

Isabella asks Angelo to imagine himself like Claudio

Judging the judges

Being and seeming - appearance vs. reality. Sexual licence leads to disease and exploitation

Claudio & Juliet, Overdone & Pompey, Angelo & Isabella, Escalus & the Duke Play suggests that the moral worth of a character depends not so much on absence of vice of folly as on the ability of a character to recognise vice or folly in himself or herself and to be educable in the direction of mature virtue. (C Watts, M4M Penguin Master Series)

Sexuality

Education and Testing of various characters through harsh experience

Freedom and Restraint

Physical

Sexual repression leads to destructiveness and defilement brother / prison

Self-control Life and death

Measure For Measure.mmap - 06/04/2009 - Roger Knight

Angelo Isabella