SOURCE: Riefer, Marcia. “‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 2 (summer 1984): 157-69.

In the following essay, Riefer argues that Isabella highlights the negative impact of patriarchy on female characters in the play, and contends that her eventual subjugation to male authority is incompatible with the dramatic tradition of romantic comedy.

Isabella has recently been called Measure for Measure's “greatest problem.”¹ She has not always been taken so seriously. Coleridge dismissed her by saying simply that Isabella “of all Shakespeare's female characters, interests me the least.”² Criticism of her character has been cyclical and paradoxical, in part because critics have tended to focus on one implicit question: is she or is she not an exemplar of rectitude? On the one hand Isabella has been idealized as a paragon of feminine virtue; on the other hand she has been...