By far the darkest of Shakespeare’s three “problem plays,” Measure for Measure offers its audience no solid ground on which to stand. Every scene drags us deeper into a world where even the acts of evil are surpassed by the growing notion that the cosmological order itself is corrupt.

The “problem” in “problem play” is usually taken to mean formal awkwardness—comedy that doesn’t quite cohere, endings that don’t quite satisfy. But in Measure for Measure, this problem in the play’s structure forces us into thinking about an analogous problem in the structure of reality, namely what is typically called “the problem of evil”: why do apparently-bad things happen in a world governed by a benevolent power? The play stages divine Providence in a form that makes Providence unbearable, then declines to tell us whether we’re seeing truth unveiled or truth travestied.

The more Shakespeare I read, the more I am impressed by his messiness, his unwillingness to resolve tensions or provide concrete answers, especially when the questions are profound. Along this dimension, Measure for Measure is a masterclass.

Bloom calls the dramatic triumph of the play its “simultaneous invocation and evasion of Christian belief and Christian morals” (Bloom, 359). Through Duke Vincentio—who motivates the action by vacating his throne, coercively plots the paths of every character, and ultimately adjudicates the play’s resolution—Shakespeare presents an unsettling image of God himself. The friar disguise, the omniscient scheming, the final-act judgment scene–the play practically shouts this parallel at us.

Yet, it refuses to tell us what to do with it. Is the Duke revealing what Providence always looked like beneath the mask of poetry? Or is he a parody of Providence, condemning human pretensions to divine authority?

The play constructs both readings and chooses neither. The problem is ours to hold. Let’s examine a few of its pieces.

The Unnecessary Experiment

The Duke is the sole efficient cause of the play’s suffering. This point is easy to miss amid the tangle of bed tricks and near-executions, but it merits repeating: none of this had to happen.

The Duke chooses the law. Of all the statutes gathering dust in Vienna, he selects the one governing sexual conduct—not theft, not murder, but the crime of sleeping with one’s betrothed before the wedding. He chooses Angelo as his deputy. The man’s reputation for severity is well known; the Duke explicitly wants to see what power will do to such a “seemer.” He chooses to disappear, abdicating his power. Rather than enforce the law himself, he vanishes into a friar’s habit to watch the catastrophe unfold.

“Hence shall we see,” the Duke says as he departs, “if power change purpose, what our seemers be” (Act I, Scene III, 53-54).

The line has the ring of a hypothesis. He is running an experiment. But experiments require purpose—some question being tested, some knowledge being sought. What is the Duke trying to learn? The play never tells us.

His stated reason for deputizing Angelo is transparently insufficient; nothing stops him from enforcing the law gradually, or supervising Angelo openly, or simply pardoning Claudio when things spiral. Instead, he hides. He watches. He lets Isabella beg for her brother’s life, lets Angelo make his monstrous proposition, lets the machinery grind forward—intervening only at the last moment, and only in ways that maximize the drama.

Jonathan Dollimore argued decades ago that what we’re watching isn’t Providence but surveillance—the Duke’s friar disguise granting him omniscience without accountability. He takes confessions, offers spiritual counsel, and all the while he’s engineering the very sins he hears about. Perfect knowledge deployed not for prevention but for spectatorship.

The God Who Manufactures Sin

The bed trick played on Angelo is the play’s moral nadir, and the Duke scripts it himself.

Walk through the logic: Angelo has demanded Isabella’s body in exchange for Claudio’s life. Isabella refuses—she would rather her brother die than surrender her chastity. The Duke, learning of this, proposes a solution: Mariana, Angelo’s abandoned fiancée, will take Isabella’s place in the dark. Angelo will believe he’s bedding Isabella; Mariana will consummate her old betrothal. Everyone… wins?

…Except nothing about this is necessary. The Duke could simply reveal himself and pardon Claudio. He could expose Angelo’s corruption. He–the supposed champion and enforcer of sexual virtue for all of Vienna–could do any number of things that do not involve orchestrating a sexual deception. Instead, he creates a scenario in which Angelo believes he is committing rape, while he (Angelo) is being violated. Meanwhile, Mariana is used as an instrument, and the entire arrangement is justified on grounds that collapse under scrutiny.

Despite the Duke’s justifications, there is no escaping the problem. As David Urban has pointed out: if sex with one’s betrothed is “no sin”—as the Duke claims when justifying Mariana’s substitution—then why is Claudio condemned to death for the identical act? Claudio and Juliet were betrothed. They slept together before the wedding. This is exactly what the Duke is now arranging for Mariana and Angelo. The law that began the whole catastrophe is the same law the Duke cheerfully violates to resolve it.

This isn’t Providence. It isn’t even competent plotting. It is a god who does not allow evil but happily scripts it—who creates sin rather than preventing it, then shows up at the end to dispense mercy for wounds he himself inflicted.

The Withheld Resurrection

The Duke lets Isabella believe her brother is dead.

Claudio survives—the Duke arranges for a substitute head to satisfy Angelo’s execution order. But rather than tell Isabella–rather than spare her the grief–the Duke waits. He lets her believe her brother has been killed. He watches her mourn.
Why?

The play offers no justification. The Duke’s mumbled explanation—”To make her heavenly comforts of despair, when it is least expected”(Act IV, Scene III, 114-115)—is worse than nothing. He is manufacturing her suffering so that the relief will be more dramatic. Her grief is theater for an audience of one.

Compare this to the biblical story of Job. Job’s suffering is profound—his children killed, his body ravaged, his friends turned into accusers. Readers are left to speculate, along with Job, as to the reason for such suffering. God, when He finally speaks from the whirlwind, at least speaks. And while thousands of years of interpretation have delivered no definitive justifications, Job gets an interlocutor, however terrifying.

Isabella gets no such dignity. Her anguish exists for the Duke’s viewing pleasure. He needs to watch her plead for Angelo’s life while thinking Claudio already lost. He needs the full dramatic arc: despair, forgiveness, revelation, reunion–not for her moral development, but for the sake of drama alone. That she suffers real grief in the service of his narrative is, apparently, an acceptable cost.

The Empty God

What does the Duke actually want?

The question hangs over the play’s final scene. He reveals himself, dispenses justice, pardons the guilty, unites the couples. And then–twice–he proposes marriage to Isabella, though I hesitate to even call them proposals. “Give me your hand and say you will be mine” (Act V, Scene I, 497) is a command, not a courtship.

And Isabella, who has spent the entire play in dazzling rhetorical flight, who argued with Angelo and pleaded with her brother and spoken some of the most memorable lines in Shakespeare, says nothing. The text gives her no response. The Duke speaks, and there is silence.

Productions have interpreted this silence in every conceivable way—joyful acceptance, horrified refusal, stunned incomprehension. What matters is that Shakespeare wrote the silence. He could have given Isabella a line of consent. He didn’t.

The apparatus of the final scene suggests not justice, not even malice, but vacancy. A god who creates suffering because he needs something to watch, someone to save, a story to be the hero of. Not sadism exactly—more like boredom, a cruelty born of emptiness rather than design.

The Interpretative Dilemma

So what do we, as readers, do with this? Bloom highlights the play’s “equivocal tonalities,” noting that “we can never be certain as to just how we ought to receive the play” (Bloom, 359). We are left with two choices.


One reading: the Duke accurately depicts Providence. The cruelty we see is the cruelty that was always there, and our discomfort watching him is the discomfort theodicy has always tried to paper over.

Job’s God, after all, accepts a wager with Satan that destroys an innocent man’s life. Job’s God answers desperate questions not with comfort but with a display of power: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). The whirlwind is sublime, yes, but it is also a non-answer—a reassertion of hierarchy in place of explanation.

If the Duke is true Providence, perhaps he reveals what the grandeur was always concealing: that we are all Isabella, subject to powerful and incomprehensible forces that are–at best–indifferent to our suffering and–at worst–amused by it.


Another reading: the Duke is a parody of Providence. His failures mark the distance between human authority and genuine divinity. His schemes are fumbled stage-managing—not omniscience but its clumsy imitation, not divine right but human presumption dressed in sacred clothes.

On this reading, the play critiques earthly pretensions to divine authority. The Duke is cold because he is a man playing god, and men who play god are always, invariably, inadequate. By this contrast, God’s own Providence is made more beautiful, more divine.

Both readings are fully supported by the text. Shakespeare constructs the dilemma with precision, gives us all the evidence we need for either conclusion, and then refuses to adjudicate. Instead, he abandons us to the questions, and we are forced to watch as our biases, wishes, and sympathies drag us in one direction, while our reason often pulls us elsewhere.

Conclusion

The angry god, whatever his terrors, at least has a design. His wrath is pointed toward something. His punishments gesture at a moral order being defended.

The empty god may be worse. His cruelties have no architecture. His manipulations serve no end beyond themselves.

Isabella stands silent before the Duke’s proposal. The play ends. We are given no answer. The silence is ours to fill.



Recommended for sure. Contraindicated for those who prefer clean resolutions and happy endings, but I could say the same for most of Shakespeare.

Rating: 9/10

Editing to add that you can catch a very excellent conversation on Measure for Measure between Tyler Cowen and Henry Oliver here. Lots of good takes not discussed in this post.

**This post is Part 13 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.**