Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Sex, death, and justice are the central concerns of Shakespeare’s
Measure
for Measure
. The Duke of Vienna has disguised himself as a friar so that he
can move freely among his subjects, leaving the severe Angelo as acting head
of state. Angelo begins to act upon the harsh laws that govern moral purity in
Vienna, which the Duke had left unregarded. Claudio, now sentenced to
death for having gotten his fiancйe, Julia, pregnant, waits in jail, hoping that
his religious sister Isabella’s attempt to plead for his pardon will succeed. In
Act III, Scene 1, the Friar-Duke is speaking with Claudio when Isabella
arrives to tell her brother of Angelo’s offer of mercy: if Isabella will consent
to sleep with Angelo, Claudio will be freed. Claudio, fearing death, begs her
to give up her virginity; Isabella, proud of her virtue and fearing eternal
punishment, urges him to die with honour. Their conflict, passionately
argued, throws the issues at stake into a sharper relief than any rhetorical
debate between Flesh and Spirit, and the straining of the brother-sister bond
between them makes the scene painful to watch; there appears to be no
possible solution. Only the intervention of the Duke prevents a total
estrangement of the pair, though his remedy—that Angelo’s abandoned wife
stand in for Isabella in the device of the bed-trick—is in itself morally
perplexing. In this, the scene mirrors the play as a whole: even once the Duke
has returned to government at the close of the play, and provided formal
resolution by uniting the various couples, the questions that have been raised
throughout Measure for Measure remain unanswered. What are the essential
differences between love and lust, sex and marriage? And which is it more
important to maintain: law or liberty, innocence or life?
Measure for Measure
(written about 1604 but not printed until the 1623
Folio) raises complex questions about sex, marriage, identity, and justice but
does not offer the comfort of easy solutions. Like the other problem plays, it
stretches the normal limits of the comic form. In the play the Duke of Vienna
sets out in disguise to test the virtue of his unruly subjects, and leaves a harsh
deputy, Angelo, in charge. Although the deputy reveals himself a hypocrite
and couples are successfully united at the end, the questions that the play
raises remain unanswered. At the very end Isabella remains silent at the
Duke’s proposal of marriage, leaving open the question of whether she is
overcome with joy or with horror, whether the proposal promises future
happiness or a mere recapitulation of Angelo’s earlier intimidations.
The play’s most likely source was Promos and Cassandra (1578), a two-