‘Measure for Measure’ [extract from Act 2, scene ii] by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder.
Merciful Heaven,                              5
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d -    10
His glassy essence - like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

Considering the Poem

This is not a stand-by-itself poem, of course, but a part of a play in which Isabella, who speaks these lines, is the subject of oppression and sexual threat from one of the plays ‘great’ men. It is written in blank (or, unrhymed) verse, the usual form Shakespeare uses for the sections of verse in his plays.

Shakespeare generally chooses not to address explicitly matters concerned with religious organisation, religious ideas, or contemporary religious practices and disputes. Perhaps, for a man writing popular entertainment in a turbulent period, this was a prudent decision. However, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer permeate Shakespeare’s language: in any well-edited version of the plays, the notes demonstrate the extent to which the words and phrases that the characters use arise from liturgical and biblical language that the playwright, like most 16th century people, must have known well. Henry VIII had put the Great Bible of 1539 in every church but the general view is that Shakespeare knew best the Geneva Bible of 1560; both were dependent on Tyndale’s translations. As you’d expect from the time he was making the plays, Christian morality informs them even when Christian morality and belief is not their main focus.

Measure for Measure (the title is a reference to Matthew [7, 1-2] or Luke [6, 37]) is unusual in the directness with which Christian themes are specifically investigated. The subjects are chastity, forgiveness, grace, justice and the central human failing of pride.

In the play, the driving force of the action is the pride of Angelo who demands that Isabella, a young novice nun, must, to save her brother from execution, submit sexually to him. Angelo has been left temporarily in charge of the state. In this extract, egged on by the amoral court-creature, Lucio, Isabella, though small and defenceless, attacks Angelo with an incendiary barrage of scorn for those who, like him, use authority to hurt others; she starts with the ‘pelting’ (insignificant) little official who strains ridiculously to copy the thunder of the classical deity, Jove (3). As Isabella’s imagination catches fire, the proud little officer is presented as a representative figure of ‘man, proud man’ (8) dressed in a bit of brief authority, like Angelo, and then, in a further fiery run of Isabella’s imaginative contempt, is transformed into the ‘angry ape’ who, in climbing and cavorting too high, only succeeds in displaying his under-parts to the crowd.

Set against these degenerate figures are the mercy of heaven (5) and the angels who, looking down in disbelief on man’s vanity, would die laughing had they a capacity for scorn (13-14).

In a few lines, Isabella takes us through our world, from apes to men to angels, and shows us that we are indeed lower than the angels – and that our shortcomings originate in pride. Although we have been told about the divine image, the “glassy essence” (11), somewhere in our nature, the sin of pride has faulted us.

Shakespeare here draws on each of his three great sources of ideas, stories and images, as he did in just about every scene he ever wrote: the classical culture of Greece and Rome, Christianity, and popular culture, present here in the figure of the performing ape. Entertainers with clinging, pole-climbing monkeys were a common road-side entertainment even up to the 1960s in London street markets like Petticoat Lane and Walthamstow High Street. Shakespeare would have seen earlier versions of these popular entertainments many times in the streets, fairs and markets of Elizabethan London and Stratford.