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Measure for Measure and the Epistle to the Romans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Frank McCombie
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In the period in which Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, he was regularly investigating ways in which the drama might reflect and explore matters in doubt. In the Histories he had attempted to support certitudes upon which Man might depend, or at least find it useful or even necessary to depend; but after Henry V he was more interested in what was the experience of living with a philosophy or belief than in how it might be justified and made to work. Julius Caesar is a play of “isms”: stoicism, epicurism, absolutism, and so on; Hamlet, as a Renaissance scholar-prince, seeks a place to stand between the “isms” of chivalry and those of the new politics. In Measure for Measure, a morality play warping towards tragedy, it was the “isms” of practical Christianity which came under scrutiny.

Shakespeare’s working knowledge of the Bible has long been recognised, though he seems to have been more familiar with some books of the New Testament than with others. Matthew is more extensively quoted than the other three Evangelists together; Romans is more extensively quoted than even 1 and 2 Corinthians together. Romans was, of course, the great “Protestant” letter, and Shakespeare could be expected to know it more intimately than any other. Echoes of Romans, in terms of quotation, paraphrase, and shared terminology, are notably denser in Measure for Measure than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays. That this is not an accident, but rather evidence of a carefully planned investigation of Paul’s terminology and dialectic is what I am proposing in this paper. Whatever else he is doing, Shakespeare is testing out Romans.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 61 , Issue 721 , June 1980 , pp. 276 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Following E. K. Chambers Shakespeare: a Survey 1925, Penguin ed. 1964; pp 167-8. I read the Duke as an ironic presentation of God: so that Claudio (“the lame one”) is seen as Everyman, Lucio (Lucifer) as the Devil.

2 Biblical quotations are from The Newe Testament ... Englished by L. Tomson (Christopher Barker, 1590). Shakespeare, it is now commonly accepted, knew this version in the 1595 edition. He would almost certainly know the Genevan (1560) version to which Tomson in 1576 made very few alterations. He would also be familiar with Bishop’ version (1568-72), which is the one he would hear in Church. All three versions have been cross-checked in the preparation of this essay.

3 Quotations from Measure for Measure are from the Arden edition by J. W. Lever (1967, reprinted 1972).

4 Isabella was by this time regarded as a foreign and specifically Catholic form of Elizabeth, and was thus appropriate for one about to enter a Catholic convent Angelo was typical of Puritan love of Biblical and associated names; his icy purity and meanness make him typical of the popular projection of the Puritan. These was much contemporary discussion of the Catholic and Puritan “alternatives” in the period of Measure for Measure: much of it was merely bitter polemic, but some writers were seriously responsible, e.g. Oliver Ormerod, in The Picture of a Puritan (1605) and The Picture of a Papist (1606).

5 Shakespeare borrows a whole vocabulary of shame from Paul’s two lists, in the course of which he uses a significant number of words very rare in the rest of his plays.

6 In his rendering of 1.21, Tomson, following a surprise rendering in the Genevan, keeps this idea at bay: “... and their foolish heart was fill of darkenesse” The Bishops’ does not: “... and their foolish heart was blynded”. Nor does foe Authorised Version “ ... and their foolish heart was darkened”.

7 C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans 1932, p 176. All references to Dodd are to tills commentary.