He makes her his proposal. She is appalled; she now sees, like Hamlet, what life can be, what undreamt-of horrors can happen, to what a pitch villainy can be carried, even on the judgment-seat:—
"O, 'tis the cunning livery of hell,
The damned'st body to invest and cover
In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio?—
If I would yield him my virginity,
Thou mightst be freed."
She cannot even denounce him, for, as he himself points out to her, no one will believe her; his stainless name, his strict life and high rank, will stifle the accusation if she dares to make it. Feeling himself safe, he is doubly audacious. Thus, when, at the conclusion of the play (v. 3), she lays her indictment before the reinstated Duke, Angelo says brazenly, "My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm." Then follows, as if in continuation of Isabella's just-quoted speech, the fiery protest springing from the poet's intensest conviction:—
"Make not impossible
That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible,
But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,
As Angelo."
(See [p. 241].)
But the protest has no immediate result. Isabella is, for the time being, sent to prison for slandering a man of unblemished honour. And the irony is kept up to the last. The Duke, in his character as a friar, has learnt bitter lessons; amongst others, that there is hardly enough honesty in the world to hold society together. But when he himself, in his disguise, relates what he has witnessed, his own faithful servants are on the point of sending him also to prison. In his rôle of Haroun-al-Raschid, he has seen and realised that law is made to serve as a screen for might. Thus he says—
"My business in this state
Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,
Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble
Till it o'er-run the stew: laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,
As much in mock as mark.
'Escal. Slander to the state! Away with him to prison."
As a play, Measure for Measure rests entirely on three scenes: the one in which Angelo is tempted by Isabella's beauty; that in which he makes the shameless, proposal that she shall give her honour in exchange for her brother's life; and, thirdly, that most dramatic one in which Claudio, after first hearing with fortitude and indignation what his sister has to tell him of Angelo's baseness, breaks down, and, like Kleist's Prince of Homburg two centuries later, begins meanly to beg for his life. Round these principal scenes are grouped the many excellent and vigorously realistic comic passages, treated in a spirit which afterwards revived in Hogarth and Thackeray; and other scenes designed solely to retard the dramatic wheel a little, which, therefore, jar upon us as conventional. It is, for example, an entirely unjustifiable experiment which the Duke tries on Isabella in the fourth act, when he falsely assures her that her brothers head has already been cut off and sent to Angelo. This is introduced solely for the sake of an effect at the end.
In this very unequally elaborated play, it is evident that Shakespeare cared only for the main point—the blow he was striking at hypocrisy. And it is probable that he here ventured as far as he by any means dared. It is a giant stride from the stingless satire on Puritanism in the character of Malvolio to this representation of a Puritan like Angelo. Probably for this very reason, Shakespeare has tried in every way to shield himself. The subject is treated entirely as a comedy. There is a threat of executing first Claudio, then the humorous scoundrel Barnardine, whose head is to be delivered instead of Claudio's; Barnardine is actually brought on the scene directly before execution, and the spectators sit in suspense; but all ends well at last, and the head of a man already dead is sent to Angelo. A noble maiden is threatened with dishonour; but another woman, Mariana, who was worthy of a better fate, keeps tryst with Angelo in her stead, and this danger is over. Finally, threats of retribution close round Angelo, the villain, himself; but after all he escapes unpunished, being merely obliged to marry the amiable girl whom he had at an earlier period deserted. In this way the play's terrible impeachment of hypocrisy is most carefully glozed over, and along with it the pessimism which animates the whole.
For it is remarkable how deeply pessimistic is the spirit of this play. When the Duke is exhorting Claudio (iii. I) not to fear his inevitable fate, he goes farther in his depreciation of human life than Hamlet himself when his mood is blackest:—