Measure for Measure: Shakespeare's play about a law against fornication

What is Measure for Measure about?

Measure for Measure is a five-act play, written around 1603 or 1604, in which a ruler hands his power to a deputy and finds that strict law in the wrong hands becomes a weapon ^[4]. Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, announces a journey to Poland and puts the city in the care of Angelo, a man known for his self-control. In fact the Duke stays in Vienna, disguised as a friar, to watch how his deputy governs ^[4].

Angelo's first act is to enforce an old statute against sex outside marriage. His first victim is Claudio, a young nobleman whose fiancée, Juliet, is visibly pregnant ^[1]. Claudio's sister Isabella, a novice about to enter the order of the Poor Clares, goes to plead for his life. Angelo, to his own horror, desires her, and offers to spare Claudio if she will sleep with him ^[1][4]. She refuses. The Duke, overhearing, devises a plan with her, and the rest of the play untangles the consequences.

The play was first printed in the First Folio of 1623, where it is listed among the comedies, and that text is the basis of every modern edition ^[1][2]. Its plot comes from older stories. Giraldi Cinthio's Italian collection Hecatommithi (1565) supplied the tale of Epitia, a tragedy in which the heroine sleeps with her brother's judge and the brother is executed anyway ^[3][4]. George Whetstone's play Promos and Cassandra (1578) reworked that story with comic scenes, and Shakespeare took much from it while making changes of his own, above all the 'bed trick' that keeps Isabella chaste and the figure of Mariana ^[3][6].

Although the setting is Vienna, Folger's editors note that the customs on stage, if not the laws, are those of England rather than Vienna's ^[2]. That matters for the subject of this site, because the play dramatises a question English readers knew well: what should the state do about sex before a wedding?

Timeline

1. 1565Giraldi Cinthio publishes Hecatommithi, which includes the tragic tale of Epitia, the ultimate source of the plot [3][4].
2. 1578George Whetstone's two-part play Promos and Cassandra adapts Cinthio and adds comic scenes [3][4].
3. 1603-04Shakespeare writes Measure for Measure under the new king, James I [3][4].
4. 26 Dec 1604First recorded performance, at James I's Christmas festivities at Whitehall [2][3].
5. 1623The First Folio prints the play, classed as a comedy; it is the only early text [1][4].
6. 1662Samuel Pepys sees William Davenant's rewrite, The Law Against Lovers, on 18 February [6].
7. 2018Josie Rourke directs the play at the Donmar Warehouse, with Jack Lowden and Hayley Atwell alternating the roles of Angelo and Isabella [6].
8. 2025The Royal Shakespeare Company stages a version directed by Emily Burns that drops the comic subplots [6].

What is Claudio's offence?

Claudio's offence is that he made Juliet pregnant before the two of them had completed the public steps of marriage, and the play treats that as a capital crime ^[1][4]. The facts come out early, in the first act, from the chatter of the low-life characters. Pompey, the servant of the bawd Mistress Overdone, reports that Claudio has been arrested 'for getting Madam Julietta with child', and that his head is to be cut off within three days ^[5].

Claudio himself tells a more complicated story. He says that he and Juliet had made a true contract, and that she is, in effect, already his wife. What they lacked was the outward formality: the public announcement and the ceremony. They had held back because her family still controlled a dowry, and they feared that publicity would put it at risk ^[5]. When the play opens, Juliet is close to giving birth, and the Provost who keeps the prison asks what is to be done with her as her time draws near ^[5].

The play never denies that Claudio and Juliet have had sex outside a completed marriage. It simply asks whether that act deserves the same treatment as a stranger's seduction or a brothel keeper's trade. Claudio is not a predator and Juliet is not a prostitute, and nearly every character, from the Provost to the magistrate Escalus, hesitates before the sentence ^[5]. The audience is invited to feel that Angelo's rigour has been aimed at the wrong target.

The play also offers two other couples who sit at various distances from the altar, and a brothel keeper. Angelo had been engaged to Mariana but abandoned her after her dowry was lost at sea. Lucio, a gossiping man-about-town, has fathered a child with Kate Keepdown and denies it. Mistress Overdone's trade fills the suburbs ^[2][4]. Between them, they show a city where sex, money and promises are tangled together, and where only Claudio is picked out for execution.

What law does Angelo enforce, and why?

Angelo enforces a statute that makes sex outside marriage punishable by death, and the play explains that it had simply been allowed to lapse ^[6]. In the first act the Duke tells Friar Thomas that Vienna has strict statutes and biting laws, which he has let slide for fourteen years ^[5]. The result, in his account, is a city where the law has lost its force.

Angelo's defence of his action is that the law has not been abolished, only neglected. In his words, it 'hath not been dead, though it hath slept' ^[5]. Elsewhere he insists that he must not make a scarecrow of the law, and that it is the law, not he, that condemns Claudio ^[5]. The speeches are the classic argument for strict legality: if judges only enforce laws they like, no law means anything. Against him stand Escalus, who urges a lighter hand, and Isabella, who argues that mercy belongs to the strong and that a judge who has himself been tempted should be slow to condemn ^[1][5].

Why does the Duke himself not apply the law? The play gives him a reason that is partly political and partly personal. He says he has been too lenient, and he wants someone else to do the unpopular work of tightening standards while he watches, so that he need not take the blame ^[4][5]. Some critics read this as an experiment, some as moral cowardice, and some link the Duke with James I; Folger's editors call such resemblances unsubstantiated, and point out that James never travelled in disguise ^[2].

How harsh was the law in Shakespeare's own country? The Folger's historical note says the Viennese law seems far harsher than English church law or custom of the period ^[2]. In England, sex outside marriage was mainly a matter for the church courts, which imposed penance rather than death (see the church courts in England). The Folger editors, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, add in passing that Parliament debated the death penalty for premarital sex in the early seventeenth century ^[7]. They name no bill or date, and this article has not been able to confirm the claim from parliamentary records, so it should be treated as the editors' statement alone. When the Commonwealth later passed an Act of 1650 against incest, adultery and fornication, fornication carried three months in prison rather than death, a contrast explored in the Adultery Act of 1650.

How does the play treat sexual morality and hypocrisy?

The play's answer is that moral severity and desire are closely linked, and that the man who punishes sex is not necessarily free from it. Angelo condemns Claudio at the start of the play and, within a few scenes, is asking Claudio's sister for the very thing he has sentenced her brother for ^[1][4]. His self-disgust is part of the drama, and Britannica calls the central themes mercy and justice, hypocrisy and self-control ^[4].

Isabella's position is just as hard. Her chastity is her religious vocation, and she refuses Angelo's bargain even when her brother begs her to give in. The Folger editors note that modern readers see her forced choice, between her virginity and her brother's life, as a drama about harassment and about a woman's right to control her own body ^[7]. Her refusal can be read as heroic or as cold, and productions differ on whether Claudio's panicked plea is understandable or shameful.

The comic subplot shows the other side of the city. Mistress Overdone, Pompey and Froth live off Vienna's sexual freedom and are the first people to feel Angelo's campaign, which begins with an order to pull down the brothels in the suburbs ^[4][6]. Lucio chatters about everyone and slanders the Duke. The play does not defend them as virtuous, but it does suggest that a city cannot be purified by one man's decree.

The ending is neither a triumph of strictness nor of leniency. The Duke reveals himself, and a series of substitutions, including a second trick in which the head of Ragozine, a pirate who has just died of fever in the prison, stands in for Claudio's, spares Claudio's life ^[4][6]. Angelo is ordered to marry Mariana, Lucio is made to marry Kate Keepdown, and Claudio is free to marry Juliet ^[4]. Almost every problem is solved by a wedding. The Duke then proposes to Isabella, and her answer is not scripted, so every director must decide it ^[4].

How did Jacobean audiences see betrothal and marriage?

Jacobean audiences lived in a world where 'being married' was a process with several stages rather than a single moment, and the play depends on that fact ^[2]. According to the Folger's historical note, a private promise to marry was followed by a public betrothal, called handfasting, usually before witnesses. Many couples considered themselves married from that point and began sexual relations ^[2].

The church, however, had a longer checklist. It looked for banns read on three Sundays, a church wedding, a formal bedding after the feast, and consummation. Because the process was so long, and dowries were negotiated along the way, the church tended to be lenient towards couples who began too early ^[2]. For a period, a person could be seen as single, as married, or as both, depending on who was asking ^[2].

Shakespeare makes use of each shade. Claudio and Juliet had a true contract but no banns, so they are 'not yet married' for the law that Angelo applies, although they are married in their own eyes ^[2][5]. Angelo and Mariana went further, with a date and a dowry agreed; the Duke calls Angelo her 'husband on a precontract' and says that sex between them is no sin ^[2]. That is why the bed trick can work as a legal remedy as well as a plot device, and on some readings it also validates Claudio and Juliet's union ^[6]. Lucio and Kate Keepdown reached only a private promise with no witnesses, which is why the Duke can still hold Lucio to it ^[2].

The legal ground shifted after Shakespeare's time. In 1753 Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act required a formal church ceremony in England and Wales, ending the grey zone that handfasting had occupied; the story is told in the Marriage Act of 1753. In Scotland the older rules lasted far longer, which is part of the history of Gretna Green. The play therefore preserves, in dramatic form, a stage of English marriage law that later lawmakers would close off.

Why is it called a 'problem play'?

Measure for Measure is called a 'problem play' because it mixes comic and tragic elements and refuses to give a settled moral ^[3][6]. The First Folio lists it as a comedy, and in the end there are weddings, but the plot passes through a death sentence, attempted coercion and a seduction by deception ^[1][6]. Britannica describes it as a 'dark' comedy, though it does not use the phrase 'problem play' itself ^[4]. The label comes from the scholar Frederick S. Boas, who in 1896 grouped it with All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, borrowing the term from the 'problem' drama of his own day ^[8]. The RSC notes that modern critics often use the label ^[3].

Interpretations divide along familiar lines. Readers who see the state as intrusive can read the Duke as a meddler who forces marriages on people. Readers who favour state enforcement of morals can read him as a legitimate guardian of standards ^[7]. Others focus on the encounter between Angelo and Isabella as a study of abuse of power. The Folger editors argue that modern responses show how a work formed in one culture can be remade by a later one ^[7].

This openness is why the play is useful for a neutral encyclopedia. It does not endorse Angelo's law, and it does not endorse the licence of the suburbs either. It sets out the costs of each position and leaves the audience to weigh them.

How is the play staged and read today?

Modern productions tend to emphasise one of the play's questions, and the choice of setting often signals which one ^[6]. In 1950 Peter Brook directed John Gielgud as Angelo at Stratford, and in 1962 the RSC cast Judi Dench as Isabella ^[6]. In 2018 Josie Rourke's Donmar Warehouse production had Jack Lowden and Hayley Atwell alternate the roles of Angelo and Isabella each night ^[6].

In 2025 the RSC, directed by Emily Burns, dropped the comic subplots to concentrate on the central conflict ^[6]. The Folger Theatre in Washington is staging a production directed by Psalmayene 24, set in the American South of the 1950s, from 22 September to 1 November 2026 ^[1]. Such choices show how readily the play moves between periods.

The play has also been rewritten. After the Restoration, William Davenant produced The Law Against Lovers, which added Benedick and Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing, and Samuel Pepys saw it on 18 February 1662 ^[6]. In 1699 Charles Gildon removed the low-life characters and most of the sexual material in Beauty the Best Advocate ^[6]. Later writers used the story too, from Tennyson's poem 'Mariana' (1830) to Pushkin's Angelo (1833) ^[6].

The questions Shakespeare raised about who is punished for sex outside marriage return in other periods of British life, as the Victorian double standard shows.

Frequently asked questions

Are Claudio and Juliet married in Measure for Measure?

Not fully, but they are betrothed by what the play calls a true contract. Claudio says Juliet is as good as his wife, but they never held the public ceremony or banns, and they kept the arrangement quiet because of her dowry ^[2][5]. Angelo treats them as unmarried, and that is the legal basis for the death sentence.

Does Claudio die in the play?

No. The disguised Duke arranges for the head of Ragozine, a pirate who has died of fever in the prison and resembles Claudio, to be sent to Angelo instead ^[6]. Claudio is later revealed alive and is allowed to marry Juliet ^[4].

What are Shakespeare's sources for the play?

The main sources are Giraldi Cinthio's tale of Epitia in Hecatommithi (1565) and George Whetstone's two-part play Promos and Cassandra (1578) ^[3][4]. Whetstone added the comic scenes that Shakespeare developed. Shakespeare's own additions include the bed trick and the character of Mariana ^[3][6].

What is the 'bed trick'?

It is a plot device in which one person secretly takes another's place in bed. Here Mariana, Angelo's former fiancée, takes Isabella's place so that Isabella stays chaste and Angelo is tied to Mariana ^[4][6]. On some readings of Jacobean law it also counts as the consummation of Angelo's precontract with Mariana ^[6].

Was there a real law like Angelo's in England?

Not as described in the play. The Folger's editors say the Viennese law appears far harsher than English church law or custom of the time, though in a separate essay they say that Parliament debated a death penalty for premarital sex in the early seventeenth century, without naming a bill ^[2][7]. Fornication was mainly dealt with by church courts, and the Commonwealth's Act of 1650 later set a prison term.

When was Measure for Measure first performed?

The first recorded performance took place on 26 December 1604, St Stephen's night, at the court of James I ^[2][3]. The Office of the Revels accounts record it. There is no evidence that the play was written specially for that occasion ^[2].

How is Measure for Measure staged today?

Directors usually pick a setting that makes the law and its enforcement feel immediate. Recent examples include the Donmar Warehouse in 2018, an RSC production in 2025 that cut the comic subplots, and a Folger Theatre version set in the 1950s American South in autumn 2026 ^[1][6]. Isabella's silence at the Duke's proposal is a choice every production has to make.