‘The Devil’s Party’: Virtues and Vices in Measure for Measure

Summary

Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel.

(Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy)

Utter my thoughts? Why, say they are vile and false;

As where's that palace whereinto foul things

Sometimes intrude not? Who has that breast so pure

But some uncleanly apprehensions

Keep leets and law-days and in sessions sit

With meditations lawful?

(lago)

Writing about ‘the Integrity of Measure for Measure’ (Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975), pp. 89-106), Arthur C. Kirsch severely reprimands Dr Johnson, Coleridge, and numerous modern critics, including myself, for our failure to ‘take the play’s Christian ideas seriously’. We are guilty of a ‘fatal’ misunderstanding of the tragicomedy, because we have been either unable or unwilling to place ourselves ‘in the position of the play’s first audience’. According to Professor Kirsch, we show an absolutely unforgiving and specifically un-Christian refusal to accept the ending and pardon Angelo, whose libidinousness was miraculously transformed by the bed–trick. Indeed, in the course of his essay, Kirsch goes on to conclude that most of the problems which, over the centuries, have vexed so many commentators, can now be ‘explained’. All difficulties will be made comparatively ‘easy’ by an ‘apprehension of certain fundamental Scriptural texts’, and by Kirsch’s own scholarly consideration of how those texts ‘might have been understood and have affected Shakespeare’s contemporary audience’ (quotations are from pp. 89–91). Happily, however, this is simply not true.