"Lord Have Mercy Upon Us": The King, the Pestilence, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Abstract

While King James might see himself in Shakespeare's "merciful" duke of Vienna and delight in his charades to test and teach his people, Measure for Measure, through its pervasive imagery of disease, displays a subtler and darker spectacle, a scene that only a monarch desiring more than flattery would see. Shakespeare lends to the pox of Vienna and to the duke's surrogate Angelo's reign of terror a pandemic quality familiar to him through his own experiences with pestilence. The tyrannies of disease and of Angelo's unmeasured applications of the law become the touchstones by which each character's moral and spiritual mettle is tested and the duke's reign is finally to be judged. Although Vincentio attempts to heal his dukedom, his inability to fully cleanse the city of spiritual contagion, in spite of his earnest efforts and partial successes, renders Measure for Measure an uneasy comedy and a dark mirror of James's new regime.