Seeing Mercy, Staging Mercy in Measure for Measure

Recent critical history interprets Measure’s Duke sceptically. His theatricality and questionable distribution of mercy seem to quash both justice and others’ freedom. Suspicion of Shakespeare’s character mirrors objections to the Reformers’ uncoupling of divine mercy from human merit in their flagship doctrine of justification by faith alone. Some critics contend for Shakespeare’s opposition to Protestantism by reading Measure’s authoritarian Duke as representative of this doctrine. In contrast, this chapter draws on a popular Renaissance trope – theatrum mundi – to frame its argument that the Reformers’ ideas about mercy, justice, law, and human agency (alluded to throughout Measure) critique the Duke. Shakespeare’s protagonist scripts actions for himself and others that provoke playgoers to question his interpretations of himself and suggest his disconcerting likeness to his egregious Deputy. Both are frail, yet self-justifying religious pride and hypocrisy (play-acting) so blind them that neither judge sees himself clearly. In consequence, neither can enact the genuine free mercy, reminiscent of the Reformers’ theology, that Isabella calls for and embodies. Even as Measure’s gestures to this unsettling doctrine prompts audiences to doubt its Duke, the play turns the tables to ask uncomfortable questions about modernity’s self-determining, self-justifying self.