"To sin in loving virtue": Angelo of Measure for Measure.(Critical essay)(Character overview)

Preserved in the papers of the Essex Records Office and related by Joel Samaha is the account of a dispute between Lord Morley and Mr. Leventhorpe over the parents of an illegitimate child. Backed by their liveried retainers, the two justices met on a moat side of Morley's Essex estate in 1578. Young and inexperienced in the law, Morley was descended from a long line of aristocrats and would soon assume his place as head of one of the most prominent Catholic families in the county. Leventhorpe, on the other hand, was a seasoned justice and a puritanical Protestant. Born with neither money nor title, he had achieved success by determination and hard work.

Morley's tenant, a man named Smith, had fathered the child by his maidservant and sent the woman to Ashwell, a parish in Leventhorpe's jurisdiction. Knowing that, under the poor laws, they might be forced to support the child if the parents did not, the townspeople quickly sent the woman back. Smith appealed to Morley for help, and the justice granted him a warrant to send the woman to Ashwell again. However, Mr. Leventhorpe refused to honor the warrant. He also rejected a private agreement Smith had made to support the child because the promise of payment had not been written, "as the statute doth appoint."

Morley was angry that spring morning. "Why what will you make of it since it was but between a single man and a single woman?" "Sin and wickedness ... deserve punishment and chastisement," Leventhorpe answered, "and according to law the offenders should be whipped." Morley then demanded to know by what law such cruelty should be exercised against two young people who had harmed no one. In answer, Leventhorpe revealed his convictions about respecting "the law of the prince and God's law upon which the prince's law is grounded. We also have the laws of the realm whereby to punish them, which refers it to the discretion of the judges and we think it good to whip them." Infuriated, Morley argued that such righteousness masked a policy of economic inequality espoused by judicial hypocrites: "Yeah, with like discretion you take up poor traveling men by reason that they be far from their county and friends are not able to bring back testimonial of their credit and behavior and therefore do send them back to the gaol. And there, forsooth, one of their ears bored through, who often times is more honest, a great deal than the justices who sent them thither." After threatening his fellow justice, Morley put matters squarely: Smith was his tenant; he was beyond Leventhorpe's jurisdiction. Leventhorpe shot back: "Let him keep his woman then out of our county and suffer him not to lay her great belly here to be a trouble and a charge ... for surely if he do he will be punished." (1)

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Samaha writes, men like Morley no longer held a prominent place in Essex law enforcement: "the real work was left to men of Leventhorpe's bent." (2) English Catholic, Roman Catholic, or uncommitted, most Essex Justices of the Peace had studied at Cambridge, with its "extreme puritan atmosphere," and this "strong educational training in obedience" may have contributed to their dedication to the rigorous application of law. Samaha goes on to say that the transfer of power over the law in Essex from the old nobility to new men indicates a growing trend that occurred in England as the country moved toward national incorporation. (3)

A similar transfer of power takes place in Measure for Measure when the Duke gives place to Angelo. The Duke is no Morley, but much about him speaks of the old nobility--his paternalism, his ostentatious displays of power, his private sense of justice, his expectations of deference from the community, and their automatic impulse to seek him out for protection. (4) The deputy, on the other hand, bears a striking resemblance to godly magistrates like Leventhorpe. Godly justices could be counted on to use their discretionary power to enforce personal conduct legislation as part of the government's continuing effort to impose a "reformation of manners," especially on the young and the poor. Over the decades, the reformation of manners occurred sporadically, with some towns and villages undergoing reform, while others did not. But the attempt to enforce personal conduct legislation was bound to meet with resistance at the local level. On one side of the conflict were those associated with the local alehouse, including "idle men" and "reprobates," as well as many ordinary villagers and teenaged children of propertied parents. On the other side were those "respectable sort" or "better sort" willing to see their poorer brethren harshly disciplined for their unthrifty vices. (5) Often at the center of such conflicts was a godly justice.

Usually characterized as a pharisaical puritan, pathological study, or patent villain, Angelo is typically described in terms like "vicious and hypocritical," "despicable," "tyrannical," "monstrous," "self-righteous and contemptuous of sinners." (6) But dismissing the deputy in such terms contributes to the division between respectable sort and reprobates that the play seems to argue against. If Angelo is to be singled out as the villain of the piece, what are we to call Lucio, who abandons his valid wife and their child, informs against his friends, and makes an occupation of slander? How are we to justify the conduct of Claudio who, fully aware of the suffering and humiliation of Juliet, begs his sister to endure virtual rape and lifelong shame so he might not die? And how are we to admire Isabella and the Duke? Not only are both willing to let Claudio die to protect their reputations, they exploit an already disgraced young woman for their own benefit, exposing her to the same possible fate Juliet endures. Unlike its primary source, George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1578), where the "vertuous" of Julio are clearly divided from the "lewde," Measure for Measure sabotages efforts to idealize some characters while damning others. In my view, neither respectable sorts nor reprobates can be absolved from blame without seriously distorting the play.

My purpose in this essay is not to exonerate Angelo, but to suggest that his conduct can be explained largely by the great "fever on goodness" afflicting many in Shakespeare's age--a fever caused primarily, perhaps, by the determination of the godly and respectable sorts to set themselves apart from reprobates. In his Calvinistic sense of sin and use of discretionary power, the deputy has much in common with the godly justice, but he is also close kin to the Duke and Isabella, who share an obsessive concern with reputation that was characteristic of Shakespeare's respectable contemporaries. Overthrowing the usual pattern of reform found in pamphlets and plays, the dramatist presents a man nearly damned by "virtue," but set on the path to redemption by vice. Through Angelo, Measure for Measure seems to question the genuineness of the virtue of the godly and respectable sorts, as well as the justice of punishing "sin" as crime and the wisdom of giving magistrates the power to do so.