Measure for Measure: Look Closer. Don’t panic. It’s not as bad as it seems.
Measure for Measure is actually an example of protofeminism in Shakespeare’s work. What exactly does that mean? Protofeminism, or “Feminism-before-feminism-was-a-thing,” is all about context. In the 1600s, Shakespeare couldn’t have written outwardly strong, independent female characters. There were strict rules about a woman’s role both in society, in the family, and in the home. Even with Queen Elizabeth in power for much of Shakespeare’s life, a play with too plucky of a female character wouldn’t have made it past the government’s strict censorship.
So Shakespeare got creative: He nudged and pushed boundaries in subtler ways. For example, when an opinionated female character like Emilia or Beatrice speaks up, someone must call her shrewish or sharp-tongued, thus it can be played off as “nothing serious.” Shakespeare buried women’s strength and depth in subtext, clues, and often in what goes unsaid, but he certainly never missed it. I like to believe he watched the lives of his mother, sisters, wife, and daughters and saw what they went through in the world as members of the opposite sex.
In order to see just how progressive this play really is, we have to look at the source material. Shakespeare only created two original stories in all of his work. The rest, he took from plays and stories that already existed. In the case of Measure for Measure, he drew on Cinthio’s Hecatommithi and Geroge Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra. Shakespeare’s audience would’ve been familiar with these versions of the story so the changes in this retelling would have been obvious to them. The plot devices in Measure for Measure (such as the whole “sending severed body parts” thing) originated in these sources.
In both academically accepted source materials, the heroine is forced to give up her virtue to save her brother’s life, and she’s betrayed anyway. In Shakespeare’s version, he gives his heroine the choice: She is free to decide whether she will or not, and even her brother can’t tell her what to do.
By employing “the bed trick,” Shakespeare gives her a way out of the situation without dishonor. At the same time, she helps Mariana regain some of her power with Angelo. This is also important because a publicly broken engagement in those days would have ruined a woman’s prospects. Their society believed that if a man broke off their engagement, there must be something wrong with the woman.
Women couldn’t own property or a business, get an education, or inherit wealth except in special circumstances, so marriage was often their only means of survival. By refusing to marry her, Angelo would’ve doomed Mariana, likely to a life that he is condemning so strongly: A life as a prostitute.
Women in Shakespeare’s day didn’t usually get a choice. By today’s standards, of course, this is still a messy situation, but for an audience in the 1600s, this was radical. Women were considered property of a man, either a father or a husband, and very rarely afforded the opportunity to manage their own romantic affairs.
So while we can certainly cringe at the idea of “marriage as a punishment” in this plot by today’s standards, Shakespeare was actually rescuing all of these female characters from a life that many women had to endure after being abandoned by the men who once claimed to love them.
If we want to take protofeminism one step further in Measure, we have Mistress Overdone. While the other female characters are victims of the men’s promiscuity and general nonsense, Mistress Overdone is profiting and thriving off of it. She serves as an opposite to the supposedly strict moral characters who are making everyone else’s lives miserable with lies and deceit. Overdone, in spite of being involved in a questionable trade, is living honestly and raising the abandoned child of Lucio and Kate Keepdown. She is Shakespeare’s way of asking us to examine the person beyond their beliefs, lifestyle and station in life.