The Common Pursuit (24 page)

No perplexity, then, should be caused by Claudio's taking conventional morality seriously; that he should do so is not in any way at odds with his being in love, or with the mutuality of the offence. And that he should be bitterly self-reproachful and self-condemnatory, and impute a heavier guilt to himself than anyone else (except Isabella and Angelo) imputes to him, is surely natural: he is not a libertine, true (though a pal of Lucio's); but, as he now sees the case, he has recklessly courted temptation, has succumbed to the uncontrollable appetite so engendered, and as a result brought death upon himself, and upon Juliet disgrace and misery. Every element of the figurative comparison will be found to be accounted for here, I think, and I can't see anything 'odd' or * inappropriate' about the bitterness and disgust.

Further, Knights's own point should be done justice to: *The emphasis has, too, an obvious dramatic function, for, by suggesting that the offence was indeed grave, it makes the penalty seem less fantastic; and in the theatre that is probably all one notices in the swift transition to more explicit exposition/ The complementary point I want to make is that nowhere else in the play is there anything to support Knights's diagnostic commentary. The * uncertainty of attitude' in Shakespeare's handling of Claudio, an uncertainty manifested in a 'dislocation or confusion of feeling', depends on those six lines for its demonstration: it can't be plausibly illustrated from any other producible passage of the text. And I don't think anyone could have passed from those lines to the

argument that adduces sonnet 129 and the passage from Cymbeline, and ends in references to Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, who was not importing into Measure for Measure something that wasn't put there by Shakespeare. The importation seems to me essentially that which is provided by what I have called the bad prepotent tradition. Taking advantage of the distraction caused by the problems that propose themselves if one doesn't accept what Measure for Measure does offer, that tradition naturally tends to smuggle its irrelevancies into the vacancies one has created. It must be plain that the references to Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida implicitly endorse the accepted classing of 'Measure for Measure with the * unpleasant', 'cynical' and 'pessimistic' 'problem* plays.

The strength of the parti pris becomes very strikingly apparent when we are told, of die Provost's sympathetic remark,

Alas! He hath but as offended in a dream,

that 'it seems to echo once more the sonnet on lust'. I am convinced it couldn't have seemed to do so to anyone who was not projecting on to the text what it gives him back. When the word 'dream', without any supporting context, can set up such repercussions, we have surely a clear case of possession by the idea or pre-determined bent. The intention of the Provost's remark is plain enough: he is merely saying that the offence (morals are morals, and we don't expect a Provost to say, or think, there has been no offence) can't be thought of as belonging to the world of real wrong-doing, where there is willed offending action that effects evil and is rightly held to accountability. The Provost, that is, voices a decent common-sense humanity.

Isabella takes a sterner moral line. But why this should give rise to perplexity or doubt about the attitude we ourselves are to take towards Claudio I can't see. Then I don't agree that she is not sufficiently 'placed'. Without necessarily judging that she is to be regarded with simple repulsion as an 'illustration of the frosty lack of sympathy of a self-regarding puritanism', we surely know that her attitude is not Shakespeare's, and is not meant to be ours. With the Duke it is different. His attitude, nothing could be plainer, is meant to be ours—his total attitude, which is the total attitude of the play. He, then, is something more complex than

Isabella; but need it conduce to a 'sense of strain and mental discomfort' when, speaking as a Friar, he shows himself * disposed to severity towards " the sin" of Claudio and Juliet'; or when, speaking both as a Friar and to Lucio, he says, *It is too general a vice, and severity must cure it' ? To impersonate a reverend friar, with the aim, essential to the plot, of being taken for a reverend friar, and talk otherwise about the given 'natural relation'—we might reasonably have found uncertainty of handling in that. As it is, die disguised Duke acts the part, so that the general confidence he wins, including Isabella's, is quite credible.

The criticism that the Duke's speech, * Reason thus with life . . . ', 'ignores the reality of emotion' was anticipated (as Knights, by mentioning in the same footnote Claudio's 'retort to the equally "reasonable" Isabella', reminds us) by Shakespeare himself. The duly noted superiority of Claudio's speech on death to the Duke's (on which at the same time, I think, Knights is too hard) is significant, and it is, not insignificantly, in the same scene. A further implicit criticism is conveyed through Barnardine, who is not, for all the appreciative commentary of the best authorities, a mere pleasing piece of self-indulgence on Shakespeare's part: of all the attitudes concretely lived in the play, the indifference to death displayed by him comes nearest to that preached by the Friar. Those illusions and unrealities which he dismisses, and which for most of us make living undeniably positive and real, have no hold on Barnardine; for Hm life is indeed an after-dinner's sleep, and he, in the wisdom of drink and insensibility, has no fear at all of death. And towards him we are left in no doubt about the attitude we are to take: 'Unfit to live or die', says the Duke, voicing the general contempt.

In fact, the whole context, the whole play, is an implicit criticism of that speech; the speech of which the Arden editor, identifying the Friar-Duke quite simply and directly with Shakespeare, says representatively, on the page now beneath my eye: 'There is a terrible and morbid pessimism in this powerful speech on " unhealthy-mindedness" that can have only escaped from a spirit in sore trouble.' Actually, no play in the whole canon is remoter from 'morbid pessimism' than Measure for Measure, or less properly to be associated in mood with Hamlet or Troilus and Cressida. For the attitude towards death (and life, of course) that

the Friar recommends is rejected not merely by Claudio, but by its total context in the play, the varied positive aspects of which it brings out—its significance being that it does so. In particular this significance appears when we consider the speech in relation to the assortment of attitudes towards death that the play dramatizes. Barnardine is an unambiguous figure. Claudio shrinks from death because, once he sees a chance of escape, life, in spite of all the Friar may have said, asserts itself, with all the force of healthy natural impulse, as undeniably real and poignantly desirable; and also because of eschatological terrors, the significance of which is positive, since they are co-relatives of established positive attitudes (the suggestion of Dante has often been noted). Isabella can exhibit a contempt of death because of the exaltation of her faith. Angelo begs for death when he stands condemned, not merely in the eyes of others, but in his own eyes, by the criteria upon which his self-approval has been based; when, it may fairly be said, his image of himself shattered, he has already lost his life.

The death-penalty of the Romantic comedy convention that Shakespeare starts from he puts to profoundly serious use. It is a necessary instrument in the experimental demonstration upon Angelo:

hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be.

The demonstration is of human nature, for Angelo is

man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured. His glassy essence ... [n, ii, 117]

Of the nature of the issue we are reminded explicitly again and again i

If he had been as you, and you as he,

You would have slipped like him ... [II, ii, 64]

How would you be

If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are ? O! think on that. [n, ii, 75]

Go to your bosom;

Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That's like my brother's fault; if it confess A natural guiltiness such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother's life. [II, ii, 136]

The generalized form in which the result of the experiment may be stated is, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged'—how close in this play Shakespeare is to the New Testament, Wilson Knight (whose essay in The Wheel of Fire gives the only adequate account of Measure for Measure I know) and R. W. Chambers (see Mans Unconquerable Mind) have recognized. But there is no need for us to create a perplexity for ourselves out of the further recognition that, even in the play of which this is the moral, Shakespeare conveys his belief that law, order, and formal justice are necessary. To talk in this connexion of the 'underlying dilemma* of the play is to suggest (in keeping with the general purpose of Knights's paper) that Shakespeare shows himself the victim of unresolved contradictions, of mental conflict or of uncertainty. But, surely, to believe that some organs and procedures of social discipline are essential to the maintenance of society needn't be incompatible with recognizing profound and salutary wisdom in 'Judge not, that ye be not judged', or with believing that it is our duty to keep ourselves alive to the human and personal actualities that underlie the 'impersonality' of justice. Complexity of attitude isn't necessarily conflict or contradiction; and, it may be added (perhaps the reminder will be found not unpardonable), some degree of complexity of attitude is involved in all social living. It is Shakespeare's great triumph in Measure for Measure to have achieved so inclusive and delicate a complexity, and to have shown us complexity distinguished from contradiction, conflict and uncertainty, with so sure and subtle a touch. The quality of the whole, in fact, answers to the promise of the poetic texture, to which Knights, in his preoccupation with a false trail, seems to me to have done so little justice.

To believe in the need for law and order is not to approve of any and every law; and about Shakespeare's attitude to the particular law in question there can be no doubt. We accept the law as a necessary datum, but that is not to say that we are required

to accept it in any abeyance of our critical faculties. On the contrary it is an obvious challenge to judgment, and its necessity is a matter of the total challenge it subserves to our deepest sense of responsibility and our most comprehensive and delicate powers of discrimination. We have come now, of course, to the treatment of sex in Measure for Measure, and I find myself obliged to insist once more that complexity of attitude needn't be ambiguity, or subtlety uncertainty.

The attitude towards Claudio we have dealt with. Isabella presents a subtler case, but not, I think, one that ought to leave us in any doubt. * What,' asks Knights, 'are we to think of Isabella ? Is she the embodiment of a chaste serenity, or is she, like Angelo, an illustration of the frosty lack of sympathy of a self-regarding puritanism' > But why assume that it must be * either or'—that she has to be merely the one or else merely the other ? It is true that, as Knights remarks, Measure for Measure bears a relation to the Morality; but the Shakespearean use of convention permits far subtler attitudes and valuations than the Morality does. On the one hand, Isabella is clearly not a simple occasion for our feelings of critical superiority. The respect paid her on her entry by the lewd and irreverent Lucio is significant, and she convincingly establishes a presence qualified to command such respect. Her showing in the consummate interviews with Angelo must command a measure of sympathy in us. It is she who speaks the supreme enunciation of the key-theme:

man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority ...

On the other hand, R. W. Chambers is certainly wrong in contending that we are to regard her with pure uncritical sympathy as representing an attitude endorsed by Shakespeare himself.

To begin with, we note that the momentary state of grace to which her influence lifts Lucio itself issues in what amounts to a criticism—a limiting and placing criticism:

Ludo: I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted: By your renouncement an immortal spirit, And to be talked with in sincerity, As with a saint.

Isab.: You do blaspheme the good in mocking me.

Lucio: Do not believe it. Fewness and truth, 'tis thus: Your brother and his lover have embrac'd: As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time That from the seedness the bare fallow brings To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.

P. iv, 34]

This is implicit criticism in the sense that the attitude it conveys, while endorsed dramatically by the exalted seriousness that is a tribute to Isabella, and poetically by the unmistakable power of the expression (it comes, we feel, from the centre), is something to which she, with her armoured virtue, can't attain. We note further that this advantage over her that Lucio has (for we feel it to be that, little as he has our sympathy in general) comes out again in its being he who has to incite Isabella to warmth and persistence in her intercession for Claudio. The effect of this is confirmed when, without demanding that Isabella should have yielded to Angelo's condition, we register her soliloquizing exit at the end of Act IV, Sc. ii; it is not credibly an accidental touch:

Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die: More than our brother is our chastity.

The cumulative effect is such that it would need a stronger argument that R. W. Chambers's to convince us that there oughtn't to be an element of the critical in the way we take Isabella's parting discharge upon Claudio:

&<*&• • Take my defiance:

Die, perish! Might but my bending down Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed, Til pray a thousand prayers for thy death, No word to save thee.

Claud.: Nay, hear me, IsabeL

***••' O! fie, fie, fie.

Thy sin's not accidental, but a trade.

Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd:

'Tis best that thou diest quickly.