Creon and Angelo: A Parallel Study

Extract

There is a similarity in the critical treatment that has been accorded to the Antigone and to Measure for Measure. The parallelisms help to illustrate the way in which errors of emphasis in one direction lead to compensatory distortions in another; and the plays themselves, widely though they differ in many ways, cast some light the one on the other.

Both plays have a heroine more obviously than they have a hero. Antigone gives Sophocles' play its name, and Shakespeare's is commonly; thought of as primarily the story of Isabella, though the title lays stress on the abstract theme rather than on any of the characters, and though we may if we choose remember that the source-play was called Promos and Cassandra (i.e. Angelo and Isabella). Both heroines, moreover, more clearly ‘stand for’ specific moral values than is usual in drama— which, as R. W. Chambers has pointed out for Isabella, is not to say; that they are allegorical. The difficulty comes when we ask how far each play is the story of the heroine, and both have been adversely criticized because of unguarded answers to this question. It was perhaps easier with Measure for Measure. It was a ‘problem play’, and Shakespeare could not be expected to write a well-constructed comedy while he was ‘in the depths’ and ought to have realized that he was in his Tragic Period. In dealing with, but it has been thought that he took an unconscionably long time to learn that a play should be one and not two, and that the Ajax and the Antigone (and probably the Trachiniae) are specimens of what he did before he learnt it.