"Severity must cure it": Sin, Morality, and Politics in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Abstract

When Angelo in Measure for Measure urges that adultery is punishable by death, he argues that murder and what he calls the false coining of a human life are equivalent sins and that both are mortal. Unlicensed sex and illegal killing are equally damnable. His female opposite, Isabella, as much an absolutist as he is, seems to agree but with an important qualification: “‘Tis set down so in heaven but not in earth” (2.4.50). Will Tilleczek sets out to interrogate the role of aesthetic Christian morality as that plays out in the political sphere in Shakespeare‘s most overt exploration of biblical themes. Through a detailed and perceptive analysis, he shows how much of the play is a working out of the ethical principles that Saint Paul articulates in his Epistle to the Romans and that Jesus expresses, somewhat more enigmatically, in the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. What Will demonstrates persuasively is that the absoluteness of Paul‘s injunction to “mortify the deeds of the body” (Rom. 8.13) is unworkable in the realm of human law and politics and that the alternative of Christian mercy, however humane, is no more effective from a political perspective. The attempt to translate Christian morality into political practice, he concludes, results either in the tyranny and cruelty of an Angelo or in the moral laxity which predominates at the opening of the play and to which the Duke apparently returns, no further ahead, at its close. Isabella, in other words, is probably right.                                   

Dr. John Baxter