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The dissolution of goodness:Measure for Measure and classical ethics

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Abstract

This article argues that the Duke inMeasure for Measure undertakes an ethical experiment designed to show the superiority of classical—particularly—Aristotelian ethics over ‘puritan’ conceptions of morality. The sources of Shakespeare’s knowledge of classical ethics are investigated, and the interpretation is shown to dissolve many of the play’s central conundrums.

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References

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  4. All quotations fromMeasure for Measure are from Lever’s Arden Edition.

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  8. Isabella, of course, makes no verbal response to the Duke’s proposal, and exactly how she behaves is a matter for directorial decision. I have tried to steer a middle course between the ecstacy with which she reponds in some productions and the stony silence or look of horror with which she responds in others. Generally, the negative reaction—which has only been considered a possibility in the last fifteen years or so—strikes me as ingenious and topical rather than in accordance with the spirit of the play; I therefore prefer to stay with the traditional reading at this point.

  9. Stauffer,Shakespeare’s World of Images, p. 156. Quoted in Lever, Arden Edition, p. xci.

  10. Lever, Arden Edition, p. xci.

  11. Perhaps Sonnet 18, 1.2, ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate’, comes closest to Escalus’s concept of temperance, although the primary focus here, as in theTempest, is on the climate.

  12. All quotations from Aristotle are fromThe Ethics of Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thompson, with an Introduction and notes by Jonathan Barnes, revised with notes and appendices by Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976).

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  24. The relevant lines of Tranio’s speech (I,ii,25–45) are as follows: ‘I am .../Glad that you thus continue your resolve/To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy./Only, good master, while we do admire/This virtue and this moral discipline,/Let’s not be no Stoics nor no stocks, I pray,/Or so devote to Aristotle’s check/As Ovid is an outcast quite abjur’d (I,ii, 26–33).The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare’s earlier plays, being written in 1593–4, and this passage betrays a less sophisticated understanding of Aristotle than his later explorations inTroilus and Cressida andMeasure for Measure. In Tranio’s speech, morality is pictured as a matter of restraints (‘checks’) or eradicated feelings (‘stocks’), and Aristotle is portrayed as siding with the Stoics against the passion and sensuality of Ovid. It is part of the argument of this paper to show that, after (re)reading Aristotle forTroilus and Cressida, Shakespeare came to see that Aristotle and the Stoics donot share the same conception of morality, and that a proper understanding of Aristotle’ssophrosyne shows it to be quite compatible with intense feeling. Helen North states the correct view, and surely Shakespeare’s later view, succinctly:sophrosyne, she observes, is ‘the harmonious product of intense passion under perfect control’ (Sophrosyne, p. x), and that ‘[whereas] Aristotle required only that the appetites be moderated, the Stoics demanded that passion be extirpated’ (ibid., p. 215).

  25. Richards, ‘Troilus,’ pp. 198–213, and Medcalf, ‘Shakespeare on Beauty,’ pp. 122–5.

  26. Richards, ‘Troilus,’ pp. 122–5.

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  45. See Lever, Arden Edition, p. 67.

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  47. Hamlet’s fifth soliloquy (‘To be or not to be ... ’ [III,i,56–89]) also lacks any mention of sin. This is noted by William Kerrigan,Hamlet’s Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 97.

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  50. Robertson,Montaigne and Shakespeare, p. 95, quoting Montaigne, ‘An Apologie of Raimond Sebonde,’ trans. Florio, in: Morley, Book 2, ch. 12, p. 294 (=Everyman, vol. 2, p. 291).

  51. I would like to thank Professor Wolfgang Haase for drawing my attention to the relevance of this work. Part of this passage is quoted and discussed in Lever, Arden Edition, p. xlix, and also in Elizabeth Pope, “The Renaissance Background ofMeasure for Measure,”Shakespeare Survey 2 (1970), pp. 66–82, especially 73 ff.

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  52. Lever, Arden Edition, p. xlvii.

  53. See, for example, Donald Lloyd Stevenson, ‘The Historical Dimension inMeasure for Measure: The Role of James I in the Play,’ an appendix to id., Donald Lloyd Stevenson,The Achievement of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 134–66, and Richard Levin, ‘The King James Version ofMeasure for Measure,’ Clio 3 (1974), pp. 129–63.

  54. William Barlow,The Summe and Substance of the Conference ... at Hampton Court (1604), p. 84. Cited by David Lloyd Stevenson,ELH. A Journal of English Literary History 26 (1959), p. 200 and quoted in Lever, Arden Edition, p. xlvii.

  55. See the account in Lever, Arden Edition, p. l, of James’s late pardoning of several men condemned to hang in Winchester for their part in Raleigh’s conspiracy in the winter of 1603–4.

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  57. Lever, Arden Edition, pp. xlix-1.

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  61. I am using the phrases ‘puritan morality’ and ‘Christian morality’ as semi-technical terms to denote the kind of views held by Angelo and Isabella. I do not intend to imply that the presuppositions I isolate are either necessary or sufficient for a Christian conception of morality. Many Christians would, of course, regard what I call ‘puritan morality’ as a complete travesty of Christianity; they would wish to emphasize purity of heart, empathy, human responsiveness, etc.

  62. In this I follow Bernard A. O. Williams,Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985), p. 6, and Jonathan Barnes, ‘Introduction’ to Aristotle,Ethics, p. 31. My understanding of Greek ethics has been heavily influenced by both of these works. For the view that Greek—especially Homeric—notions of morality, action, responsibility etc. are utterly remote from ours, see the interpretations of Bruno Snell and others criticized in Williams’Shame and Necessity, Sather Classical Lectures 57 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially pp. 21–49. For an opinion which is more conservative than Williams’s, and argues that Greek notions of morality and virtue are more like our own, see Julia Annas,The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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  63. My reading of Aristotle has been particularly influenced by Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality,’ in: ead.,Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 54–105.

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  64. I take this distinction from Julia Annas,An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 153–69.

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  69. James VI and I,Basilicon Doron, pp. 43–44.

  70. Matthew Arnold, ‘Heinrich Heine,’ in: id. Matthew Arnold,Essays Literary and Critical, ed. G. K. Chesterton (London: Dent, 1919), p. 115.

  71. A great deal of English literature can be seen as mounting a campaign against abstract rulegoverned conceptions of morals on behalf of the good heart and educated emotions.Tom Jones is an obvious example, but the following sentence from George Eliot puts the matter succinctly: ‘There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.’Middlemarch, Ch. 61 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 619.

  72. Moulding on the the island of Lesbos was ogival, i.e., took the form of a double curve. This could not be measured with a rigid ruler, and consequently builders used a leaden ruler which could be bent to the shape of the object being measured.

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  82. It might be objected that, in my eagerness to demonstrate the non-Christian origins of the Duke’s morality, I overlook the occasion when Angelo says that the Duke‘...like power divine, / Hath looked upon my passes...’ (V,i,367). But this isAngelo’s interpretation of the Duke’s behaviour and he still views the Duke’s actions through the categories of the puritan worldview. He is the character whose conception of morality is most remote from temperance and self-knowledge, and, unlike Isabella (a less extreme case), he is only just beginning to arrive at a position where self-knowledge is possible. For an article which argues that Angelo’s fault is lack of self-knowledge rather than hypocrisy, see W. H. Durham, ‘What art thou, Angelo?’,University of California Publications in English VIII (2) (1951), p. 169.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of York, YO1 5DD, York, UK

    M. W. Rowe

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I would very much like to thank Marie McGinn, Stephen Wall, Ann Pasternak-Slater, Hermione Lee, A. W. Price, Alan Heaven and, above all, the editor of this journal, Wolfgang Haase, for suggestions which led to significant improvements in this paper. I would also like to record a debt to Ruth Nevo’s, ‘Measure for Measure: Mirror for Mirror,’Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988), pp. 107–22. Although she has nothing to say about classical ethics, her views of Angelo, Isabella and Escalus are similar to my own.

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Rowe, M.W. The dissolution of goodness:Measure for Measure and classical ethics. Int class trad 5, 20–46 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02701310

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