The Book of Books by Thomas Fulton;

Author:Thomas Fulton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Paradoxes of Biblical Legalism

A passing comment by Muriel Bradbrook offers unexpected insight into Measure for Measure’s relationship to late-medieval allegorical drama. According to Bradbrook, the play resembles “the late medieval Morality. It might be named The Contention between Justice and Mercy, or False Authority unmasked by Truth and Humility.”80 Bradbrook’s imagined titles pinpoint the play’s central homiletic concerns. But the play’s actual title more subtly reveals Shakespeare’s perspective on the relation of justice and mercy, as derived from biblical precepts and precedents. The irony in Shakespeare’s use of the biblical verse in its title is seldom fully appreciated. One reader who takes it into account is Harold Bloom, who offers another alternative title, “Shakespeare should have called the play Like for Like, but he chose not to forgo his hidden blasphemy of the Sermon of the Mount, just sufficiently veiled to escape his own regime’s frightening version of the law of the talion.”81 Although Shakespeare’s evident irony supports Bloom’s view of the playwright’s fundamental skepticism, it seems more probable that the blasphemy lies not with the playwright but with those he criticizes. The phrase “measure for measure,” though it echoes the so-called lex talionis (an eye for an eye) derives from the doctrine of mercy in the New Testament that sought, at least in its own representation, to supersede that law. The reciprocity intended in the New Testament phrase is of giving, rather than taking away: “Be ye therefore merciful, as your father also is merciful … condemn not and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. Give, and it shall be given unto you: a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over shall men give into your bosom: for with what measure ye mete, with the same shall men mete to you again” (Luke 6:36–38).

The phrase “measure for measure” was alive in a proverbial usage whose retaliatory sense may not always have been conscious of its irony.82 Shakespeare, however, deliberately evokes an ironic dissonance between the proverbial retaliatory sense and the biblical doctrine of mercy.83 Indeed, his use of the phrase “measure for measure” in his new Jacobean play seems a retrospective glance toward the biblical distortions of one of his earliest villains, Richard III, who would clothe his “naked villainy / With odd old ends, stol’n forth of Holy Writ” (Richard III, F 179; 1.3.335–336), and who, “with a piece of Scripture,” convinced the world that “God bids us do good for evil” (1.3.333–334). In 3 Henry VI, the very words “measure for measure” are used to confound, rather than support, the doctrine of mercy. “Revoke that doom of mercy,” says Richard ironically on the battlefield, a sword paused in an uncertain moment of clemency. “For ’tis Clifford,” and Clifford took the life of “our Princely Father.” Warwick agrees. Clifford’s life must be taken: in a literal exchange of head for head, “Measure for measure, must be answered” (F 157; 2.6.46, 55). As Richard boasts, “piece[s] of scripture” are used here

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