Shakespeare

Measure for Measure: The Flesh Made Word 349That I crave death more willingly than mercy:’Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.(V.i.474–77)These may well be the words of a man who, having failed to deny deathabsolutely, embraces with equal fervor the opposite extreme. If he cannot liveforever, he will die now, as if to retain some measure of control by willing theinstant of his demise. 10To see Angelo from the vantage of his own mortality is at once to call inquestion the abstract, formal, even disinterested character of hispronouncements on law and transgression. But it is also to see the genuinepathos of his situation, where nineteenth-century critics like William Hazlittcould only protest what they understood as his cold-blooded hypocrisy. There ismuch in Measure for Measure to suggest that Angelo does not simply experiencean abrupt change of heart and then go craftily to work to compass his evil will.For one thing, his steely control prior to the eruption of his passion for Isabellasuggests not so much stability as the presence of chaotic forces unacknowledgedby the conscious mind and kept forcefully at bay. There is a touch of desperationeven early on in his first interview with Isabella:Be you content, fair maid,It is the law, not I, condemn your brother.Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,It should be thus with him: he must die to-morrow.(II.ii.79–82)The preference for impersonal and hypothetical constructions is striking (“it is,”“it should be,” “he must”), here and throughout this same scene. 11 We have justheard Angelo say of Claudio, “He’s sentenced; ’tis too late” (line 55), and, “Yourbrother is a forfeit of the law” (line 71), locutions that suggest that Angelo is atleast struggling to think of himself as the mere conductor of an impersonalprocess, the operator of a machine that once set in motion will irrevocably pursueits destructive course.But no code of law is really a set of instructions from which we can simplyread off decisions and procedures. 12 Codified law requires interpretation—thatis why in Shakespeare’s time, as in ours, there were and are courts and judges.And to understand matters otherwise is badly to confuse the law with justiceitself, an unacceptable conflation that runs the risk of reducing all jurisprudenceto a process rather like following a recipe in a cookbook. 13 That Angelo lackspatience with the often difficult and even painful process of interpretation isamply evidenced in his delegation of the task of discovering what affront (if any)was actually offered Elbow’s wife: