Whether from the nature of the subject, or the mode of treating it, or both, Measure for Measure is generally regarded as one of the least attractive, though most instructive, of Shakespeare’s plays.  Coleridge, in those fragments of his critical lectures which now form our best text-book of English criticism, says, “This play, which is Shakespeare’s throughout, is to me the most painful—­rather say the only painful—­part of his genuine works.”  From this language, sustained as it is by other high authorities, I probably should not dissent; but when, in his Table Talk, he says that “Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable,” I can by no means go along with him.

It would seem indeed as if undue fault had sometimes been found, not so much with the play itself as with some of the persons, from trying them by a moral standard which cannot be fairly applied to them, or from not duly weighing all the circumstances, feelings, and motives under which they are represented as acting.  Thus Ulrici speaks of Claudio as being guilty of seduction.  Which is surely wide of the mark; it being clear enough that, according to the usages then and there established, he was, as he considered himself to be, virtually married, though not admissible to all the rights of the married life.  Hence we have the Duke assuring Mariana that there would be no crime in her meeting with Angelo, because he was her “husband on a pre-contract.”  And it is well known that in ancient times the ceremony of betrothment conferred the marriage tie, though not the nuptials, so that the union of the parties was thenceforth firm in the eye of the law itself.  So again Hallam, speaking of Isabella:  “One is disposed to ask whether, if Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that her reproaches against her miserable brother, when he clings to life like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh.”  As to the first branch of this indictment, I might have ventured to ask the writer how his affection would have stood towards the heroine, if she had yielded to Angelo’s proposal.  As to the second branch, though I do indeed feel that Claudio were rather to be pitied than blamed, whatever course he had taken in so terrible an alternative, yet the conduct of his sister strikes me as every way creditable to her.  Her reproaches were indeed too harsh, if they sprang from want of love; but such is evidently not the case.  The truth is, she is in a very hard struggle between affection and principle:  she needs, and she hopes, to have the strain upon her womanly fortitude lightened by the manly fortitude of her brother; and her harshness of reproof discovers the natural workings of a tender and deep affection, in an agony of disappointment at being urged, by one for whom she would die, to an act which she shrinks from with noble horror, and justly considers worse than death.  So that we here have the keen anguish of conflicting feelings venting itself in a severity which, though unmerited, serves to disclose the more impressively her nobleness of character.