SOURCE: Bennett, Robert B. “Measure for Measure as Comic Romance.” In Romance and Reformation: The Erasmian Spirit of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, pp. 55-68. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Bennett maintains that unlike the utopian moral framework of Shakespeare's previous festive comedies, Measure for Measure is a comic romance that highlights the paradoxical qualities of human nature.

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Comedy designed in the spirit of Erasmian humanism assumes that restoration of order occurs because of the reordering powers of Nature itself when these are coupled with human gifts of the spirit that participate in the power of the mediating Logos. This spiritual element—as distinct, for example, from fortune and cleverness that rule in Roman comedy—is what I mean to signal by the term “romance.” It is a scholar's label, like “problem play” or “festive comedy,” that later times find useful to mark...