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Measure For Measure
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Act IAct Summaries & Analyses
Act I, Scene 1 Summary
Duke Vincentio of Vienna plans to leave the city and appoints Lord Angelo as his deputy, instructing him to govern in his absence. He leaves him with a faithful old man named Escalus to assist him. Vincentio praises Angelo for being an upstanding and virtuous man, while Angelo expresses doubts about his own abilities until he has been tested. Vincentio leaves in secret, not wanting the people to applaud him as he departs.
Act I, Scene 2 Summary
Lucio, a young gentleman from Vienna, talks with two of his soldier companions about how they pray for war in order to fund their livelihood, just as pirates must ignore the biblical commandment “thou shalt not steal’ because they need theft in order to survive. The soldiers discuss the sexually transmitted infections they may have acquired from sex workers and Lucio mocks how this behavior has impacted their bodies.
Mistress Overdone, a brothel owner, tells the men that their friend Claudio has been arrested and taken to prison because he impregnated a woman named Juliet. Lucio goes to learn the truth. Mistress Overdone speaks with the brothel’s bartender, Pompey, complaining that the new governor has ordered that all of the brothels outside of the city limits be torn down and that she will have no way to make money.
Meanwhile, at the prison, Lucio visits his friend Claudio. Claudio explains that he did get his fiancée Juliet pregnant, but that they were essentially already married and had only been waiting to hold the wedding until Juliet could raise the money for her dowry. He asks Lucio to go find his sister Isabella, who is about to enter a cloister of nuns, because she is a persuasive speaker who might be able to convince Angelo to release Claudio before he is executed.
Act I, Scene 3 Summary
Vincentio is staying at a local monastery with Friar Thomas while everyone in Vienna believes him to be travelling abroad. He explains to Friar Thomas that he needed to leave his position to Angelo for a while because for the past 19 years, he has not been enforcing the city’s moral laws. If he started to punish the lawbreakers himself, the people would perceive it as tyranny, and so he has appointed the strict and dispassionate Angelo to reform the city in his absence. Vincentio emphasizes that Angelo is known to be resistant to the temptations of the flesh.
Act I, Scene 4 Summary
Isabella is about to become a nun in the order of Saint Clare. She asks Francisca, another nun, about how strict the order’s rules are because she hopes they will be very strict. They hear Lucio calling out and Francisca reminds Isabella that once she swears her oath and becomes a nun, she will only be able to speak to men in the company of the prioress.
Lucio informs Isabella that her brother has been sent to prison and awaits execution for impregnating Juliet before their marriage. Isabella is a close friend of Juliet, but she does not see what she can do to help. Lucio tells her that Angelo is an unfeeling man, but that men often show more compassion when maidens weep and plead for mercy. Isabella agrees to go to Angelo to help her brother.
Act I Analysis
The opening act of Measure for Measure sets up both Angelo and Isabella as highly virtuous characters whose virtues will be tested. The play establishes the theme of Earthly and Divine Justice by indicating that both Angelo and Isabella appear to be exemplary Christians whose private lives are without fault. However, Duke Vincentio’s plan exposes how their personal qualities either falter or shine when combined with the duty to enact public justice.
As Vincentio prepares to leave Vienna in the hands of his deputy governor, Angelo, he suggests that being good and pious in one‘s own private life is useless unless it contributes to the public good. He compares virtue to the light of a torch, saying:
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not (I.1.39-42).
His statement implies that it is not enough to live a good life isolated from the rest of the world; a truly good person should help to elevate others toward goodness. This appears to be his plan for Angelo, a man whom he has deemed to be very well-behaved and honest. By placing him in a position of power, Vincentio hopes that he will spread his strict but virtuous behavior to the rest of the city of Vienna. He claims that Angelo “[s]tands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is more to bread than stone” (I.3.343-345), but elaborates that his purpose in putting Angelo in power is to discover “[i]f power change purpose, what our seemers be” (I.3.345). Vincentio’s entire scheme to leave the city to Angelo and observe it in disguise is thus reframed as an experiment. Vincentio means to determine if a man who appears to be living a personally virtuous life will share his virtue with the entire city or if power will corrupt him.
While Angelo does falter and lose his virtue due to the temptations of power, the first act of the play also sets up his counterpoint: Isabella. Like Angelo, Isabella is living an exemplary private life. She is a virgin and she hopes to join a nunnery so that she can live in a state of spiritual perfection and achieve salvation. However, the play hints that monastic life might not be the best place for such a virtuous woman. Isabella joining a nunnery would be like a torch whose light is hidden away from the world, unable to inspire anyone else toward salvation. Her brother, Claudio, hints at this to Lucio when he asks him to fetch Isabella so that she can plead for his life with Angelo:
Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends
To the strict deputy; bid herself assay him:
I have great hope in that; for in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect,
Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art
When she will play with reason and discourse,
And well she can persuade (I.2.273-279).
Claudio’s description of Isabella highlights her ability to speak intelligently and persuasively, moving men toward reason and goodness through her speech. This ability suggests that, unlike Angelo, Isabella does have the capacity to spread her private virtue to the rest of the public. She is not just pretending to be pious for the sake of upholding her reputation, and the plot of the play reveals that she passes the test when tempted to commit a sin in secret.
By juxtaposing the characters of Angelo and Isabella in the first act of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare sets up one of the central ideological conflicts—how to bring civic justice into better alignment with moral justice. Vincentio’s plan to test the virtues of his subjects displays the risks of enacting laws that attempt to correct immoral behavior when all humans are fallible. However, the play introduces some hope for humanity through Isabella, indicating that she is capable of both private and public goodness.
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By William Shakespeare
