From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 507-09.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
1603
Of this play, the light or comic part is very natural and pleasing, but the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labour than elegance. The plot is rather intricate than artful. The time of the action is indefinite; some time, we know not how much, must have elapsed between the recess of the duke and the imprisonment of Claudio; for he must have learned the story of Mariana in his disguise, or he delegated his power to a man already known to be corrupted. The unities of action and place are sufficiently preserved. -- JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1768, General Observations on Shakspeare's Plays.
The noble virtue, the true greatness and the feminine honour of Isabella, are every where conveyed through sentiments of responsive eloquence and the great and commanding justice of the Duke, who learns the temper of his subjects to govern them, and who chuses for a wife the most amiable of those subjects, are dressed in language no less consonant. -- DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1795, A Complete History of the Stage, vol. III, p. 314.
Yet, notwithstanding this agitating truthfulness, how tender and mild is the pervading tone of the picture! The piece takes improperly its name from punishment; the true significance of the whole is the triumph of mercy over strict justice, no man being himself so free from errors as to be entitled to deal it out to his equals. The most beautiful embellishment of the composition is the character of Isabella.... whose heavenly purity, amid the general corruption, is not stained with one unholy thought. In the humble robes of the novice she is a very angel of light. -- SCHLEGEL, AUGUSTUS WILLIAM, 1809, Dramatic Art and Literature.
This play, which is Shakspere's throughout, is to me the most painful -- say rather, the only painful -- part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the [hateful] -- the one being disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice -- (for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of ;) but it is likewise degrading to the character of woman. Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakspere in his errors only, have presented a still worse, because more loathsome and contradictory, instance of the same kind in the "Night-Walker," in the marriage of Alathe to Algripe. Of the counterbalancing beauties of "Measure for Measure," I need say nothing; for I have already remarked that the play is Shakspere's throughout. -- COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1818, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, ed. Ashe, p. 299.
Is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, the play in which Shakspeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power of his own mind the depths and intricacies of being, which he has searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him, his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could grasp in the clearest expression, and thus he loses something of dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. . . . I do not value the comic parts highly: Lucio's impudent profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than of natural ill disposition, is well represented; but Elbow is a very inferior repetition of Dogberry. In dramatic effect, "Measure for Measure" ranks high: the two scenes between Isabelle and Angelo, that between her and Claudio, those where the Duke appears in disguise, and the catastrophe in the fifth act, are admirably written end very interesting, except so far as the spectator's knowledge of the two stratagems which have deceived Angelo may prevent him from participating in the indignation at Isabella's imaginary wrong, which her lamentations would excite. HALLAM, HENRY, 1831-39, Introductions to the Literature of Europe, pt. iii, ch. vi, par. 40.
"Measure for Measure" exhibits more clearly than any other piece the profound skill of Shakspeare, in giving intellectual depth and dramatic life to his traditional materials. -- ULRICI, HERMANN, 1839, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art, p. 315.
No one of the high female characters of tragedy has been found more effective in representation than Isabella; while there is perhaps no composition of the same length in the language which has left more of its expressive phrases, its moral aphorisms, its brief sentences crowded with meaning, fixed in the general memory, and embodied by daily use in every form of popular eloquence, argument, and literature. -- VERPLANCK, GULIAN CROMMELIN, 1844-47, ed. The Illustrated Shakespeare.
In "Measure for Measure, " in contrast with the flawless execution of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare has spent his art in just enough modification of the scheme of the older play to make it exponent of this purpose, adapting its terrible essential incidents, so that Coleridge found it the only painful work among Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for the reader of to-day more than the usual number of difficult expressions; but infusing a lavish colour and a profound significance into it, so that under his touch certain select portions of it rise far above the level of all but his own best poetry, and working out of it a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgments. It remains a comedy, as indeed is congruous with the bland, half-humorous equity which informs the whole composition, sinking from the heights of sorrow and terror into the rough scheme of the earlier piece; yet it is hardly less full of what is really tragic in man's existence than if Claudio had indeed "stooped to death." Even the humorous concluding scenes have traits of special grace, retaining in less emphatic passages a stray line or word of power, as it seems so that we watch to the end for the traces where the nobler hand has glanced along, leaving its vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully, in the rising of the style. -- PATER, WALTER, 1874, Appreciations, p. 176.
Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch, every line, every incident, every syllable belongs to pure and simple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity: but ingenius evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a workman of very much lower school than the school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaborate machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as "the old fantastical duke of dark corners" as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of creative poetry. -- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, p. 203.
He treated the subject as be did, because the interests of the theatre demanded that the woof of comedy should be interwove with the severe and sombre warp of tragedy. But what a comedy! Dark, tragic, heavy as the poet's mood -- a tragi-comedy in which the unusually broad and realistic comic scenes, with their pictures of the dregs of society, cannot relieve the painfulness of the theme, or disguise the positively criminal nature of the action. One feels throughout, even in the comic episodes, that Shakespeare's burning wrath at the moral hypocrisy of self-righteousness underlies the whole structure like a volcano, which every moment shoots up its flames through the superficial form of comedy and the interludes of obligatory merriment. BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study vol. II, p. 71.
Even in that unequal melody, "Measure for Measure," the great scene between Isabel and Claudio so far transcends anything that English, anything that European, drama had had to show for nearly two thousand years, that in this special point of view it remains perhaps the most wonderful in Shakespeare. Marlowe has nothing like it, his greatest passages, psychologically speaking, are always monologues; he cannot even attempt the clash and play of soul with soul that is so miraculously given here. -- SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 323.
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