‘My half-supp’d sword, that frankly would have fed,
Pleas’d with this dainty bit, thus goes to bed.
[Sheathes his sword.
Come, tie his body to my horse’s tail;
Along the field I will the Trojan trail.’
Measure for Measure as a play is hateful to me, although there are passages in it as truly Shakespeare as anything to be found in all his works. The chief objection to it is that justice, to use Coleridge’s word, is ‘baffled.’ There are other objections almost as great. From beginning to end almost everybody is base, foolish, or uninteresting. The Duke’s temporary withdrawal is stupid and contemptible, considering that he is the governor of the state; the condemnation of Claudio is wildly unnatural; the substitution of Mariana loathsome; the treachery of Angelo in not reprieving Claudio inconceivable, notwithstanding what we already know of the deputy’s hypocrisy and villainy. The lowest depth of scoundrelism is reached when, face to face with Mariana and publicly at the city gate before the Duke and all the company assembled, he excuses himself from marrying her because
‘her reputation was disvalued
In levity.’
And yet he is let off scot-free, and Mariana marries him! Isabella’s apology,
‘I partly think,
A due sincerity govern’d his deeds,
Till he did look on me,’
might be sufficient for an outbreak of his lust but not for his lying, and Mariana’s is still worse:
‘Best men are moulded out of faults.’
Not out of such faults as Angelo’s are the best men moulded.
The punishment inflicted on the poor wretch Lucio is horrible.
Lucio. ‘I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore! . . . Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.
Duke. Slandering a prince deserves it.’