The Unfolding of ‘Measure for Measure’

Summary

The ‘bed-trick’ in Measure for Measure has always caused embarrassment of one sort or another. ‘This thing of darkness’ must be acknowledged, but no critic has managed to assimilate the device fully into his view of the play or quite been able to come to terms with what has seemed to be an ‘incompatibility of the intrigues of comedy with the tone of what has gone before’. Schucking was offended by its employment: ‘It is astonishing to see with how little self-esteem [Shakespeare credits a woman] here’; so was Brander Matthews: ‘The artifice itself is unlovely, and it cannot be made acceptable’; and so was Quiller-Couch: ‘[Isabella] is all for saving her own soul . . . by turning . . . into a bare procuress.’ Apologists claim that in adding this detail to what he carried over from his source and using it to preserve the heroine’s chastity Shakespeare thereby made more gentle ‘one of the quite horrible situations of the [older] drama’ and prevented a forced marriage between Isabella and Angelo. W. W. Lawrence, going outside the play for a justification, asserts that Shakespeare’s audiences would have seen nothing wrong with this kind of marriage-device, and G. K. Hunter has adduced an example from real life.