Measure for Measure and the Epistle to the Romans

Extract

In the period in which Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, he was regularly investigating ways in which the drama might reflect and explore matters in doubt. In the Histories he had attempted to support certitudes upon which Man might depend, or at least find it useful or even necessary to depend; but after Henry V he was more interested in what was the experience of living with a philosophy or belief than in how it might be justified and made to work. Julius Caesar is a play of “isms”: stoicism, epicurism, absolutism, and so on; Hamlet, as a Renaissance scholar-prince, seeks a place to stand between the “isms” of chivalry and those of the new politics. In Measure for Measure, a morality play warping towards tragedy, it was the “isms” of practical Christianity which came under scrutiny.

Shakespeare’s working knowledge of the Bible has long been recognised, though he seems to have been more familiar with some books of the New Testament than with others. Matthew is more extensively quoted than the other three Evangelists together; Romans is more extensively quoted than even 1 and 2 Corinthians together. Romans was, of course, the great “Protestant” letter, and Shakespeare could be expected to know it more intimately than any other. Echoes of Romans, in terms of quotation, paraphrase, and shared terminology, are notably denser in Measure for Measure than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays. That this is not an accident, but rather evidence of a carefully planned investigation of Paul’s terminology and dialectic is what I am proposing in this paper. Whatever else he is doing, Shakespeare is testing out Romans.