Measure for Measure and Lucio

can make him not only entertaining but psychologically interesting, though just how this had best be done is not always clear. In the first two acts he is certainly not a fellow whose morals are to be admired, but he has strong redeeming traits. He can bandy bawdy jests in the fashionable style, but how far he is from being merely a Master Froth is shown by his ready and generous sympathy when his friend Claudio is in trouble, and by his clear-eyed assistance to Isabella in her hour of need. Shakespeare gives him (I. iv) some highly poetic lines to speak. He is fundamentally a gentleman; it is made very plain that though, as he says, it is his sin to seem hypocritical in his jesting with maids, there is none of this with Isabella, whom, as a novice in a nunnery, he holds "ensky'd and sainted . . . And to be talk'd with in sincerity, as with a saint." 1 There seems no reason to question this sincerity; Shakespeare does not emphasize such a point without a reason. In Isabella's struggles with Angelo, while urging her on, Lucio always treats her with perfect delicacy. But as soon as the Duke proposes the bed-trick, Lucio is very differently presented. He is, of course, no longer needed to assist Isabella; his function is now to provide amusement by badgering the pretended friar, and, as he does throughout the play, to furnish, by his eccentric behavior, a contrast to romantic comedy, as the Melancholy Jaques does in the Forest of Arden, though in a very different fashion. In the list of actors in the Folio, Lucio is called "a fantastique". He is much coarsened; his affair with Kate Keepdown is brought up; he has had a child by her, which he has disowned, and he has refused to marry her. He can even jest about the virtue of Isabella (V. i. 276 ff.). He repeatedly insults the disguised Duke, before he finally pulls off the cowl, and then has to be told not to sneak away. And at the end, in the midst of the general rejoicing, he has to marry "the rotten medlar". All this is distressing to those who have conceived a better idea of him, and it may also be distressing to moralists that, with all his faults, he wins the sympathy of an audience far more than does Vincentio, with all his virtues. In criticizing Measure for Measure it is of the highest importance to recognize that there are very striking differences in tone, poetic expression, and character-drawing between the two halves of the play. Most analyses start from