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Public justice and private mercy in Measure for Measure.

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As the only one of Shakespeare's plays to carry a biblical title, Measure for Measure draws on an explicitly Christian body of thought about law, mercy, justice, and the right exercise of authority. The pervasive influence of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) over Measure for Measure's action has led many critics to interpret the play as a straightforward Christian allegory where Mercy pleads before God in a grand Last Judgment. (1) Another group, perhaps in reaction, has found in the play a subversion of the expected outcomes of justice, or even a radical subversion of all authority. (2) During the Reformation, the Sermon on the Mount was also the subject of controversy. Radical reformers such as the Anabaptists concluded that the exhortation "judge not" obliged Christians to withdraw from the exercise of civil authority, including the magistracy. More moderate reformers, such as Martin Luther, tried to reconcile the public demands for order and justice with the Christian law of love, but did so only by dividing the public and the private into strictly separate realms. Against this background, Shakespeare lays out the action of Measure for Measure, in which a strictly moral Christian is placed in the office of magistrate and fails spectacularly in both roles. The clash of the public role and the private person in the proper exercise of justice clearly echoes contemporary debate over the meaning of the "judge not" passage.

Discussions of mercy and justice, the public and the private, must center on the biblical passage from which Shakespeare took the play's title, Matthew 7:1-2, part of the Sermon on the Mount: "Ivdge not, that ye be not iudged. For with what iudgement ye iudge, ye shal be iudged, and with what measure ye mette, it shal be measured to you againe."

The "judge not" passage posed especially thorny problems for Reformation exegetes, mainly because of the influence of radical Protestant sects such as the Anabaptists, who interpreted "judge not" and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount to mean that no Christian could rightly exercise authority over any other--a kind of Christian anarchy that placed the spiritual community of love and charity, rather than the authority of the state, as the primary creator of social order. Anabaptist doctrine on this point was hardly uniform, (3) despite the claims of its detractors, but some generalizations about it can be made. James M. Stayer has described the ultimate Anabaptist position as separatist nonresistance to the authority of the state. (4) Separatist nonresistance comprehends not only pacifism but also a refusal to participate in the coercive force embodied in state institutions such as the magistracy.

Essential to the formation of Anabaptist separatism was the Sermon on the Mount, which articulated Christ's New Law of love that had come to replace the Old Law of retributive justice. (5) The Schleitheim Confession of 1527 represents one of the earliest formal statements of Anabaptist belief. Article 6 of the Confession specifically addresses use of "the sword," representing the power of the state to enforce laws and punish wrongdoers, and whether Christians can serve as magistrates, the bearers of the symbolic sword. Article 6 asserts that the sword is "outside the perfection of Christ" and argues that, following the example of Christ, Christians should not pass sentence on others or serve as magistrates, since "the rule of the government is according to the flesh, that of the Christians according to the Spirit." (6)

The Anabaptists' position was seen by their contemporaries as a denial of the philosophical basis of government itself, in particular the role of the magistrate as the representative of governmental and ultimately divine authority. The Martyrs Mirror, a seventeenth-century Anabaptist martyrology, reprints a letter by one Jacques de Somaire, who observed the persecution of the Anabaptists in England under Elizabeth in the 1570s. He says that the Anabaptists "rejected all government and authority of magistrates and higher powers as ungodly and unchristian" (7) and that they "instigate the people to sedition and rebellion." (8)

The Anabaptist viewpoint on governmental authority contrasts sharply with that of more mainline Reformation thinkers. In one anti-Anabaptist tract, the author observes that the magistrate "hath the sworde from God ... that both the malefactours may be punysshed and the good and righteous liue surely among the wicked" and furthermore that such "power is the mynister of god." (9) Discussing the "judge not" passage, John Calvin says that the order "judge not" does not mean that Christians should not reprove and condemn sins, which is not only lawful but also absolutely necessary. To refuse to judge at all would be to question God's own position as lawgiver and judge. It is God's will, he says, that we pronounce God's proper judgments on men's deeds, but "wee must onely retaine that modesty, that he mey remaine the onely lawgiuer and iudge." (10) This is the viewpoint reflected in the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, a viewpoint repeated by James I in the Basilikon Doron and upheld as commonplace in contemporary discussions of government. (11) If the magistracy is a divine office, then the exercise of judgment becomes a sacred responsibility.

Thoughtful consideration of Christian duty required, however, a recognition of the imperfect person filling the divinely granted office. Luther tries to solve the dilemma of the "judge not" command by splitting secular and spiritual judgments. He observes that parents must judge in their households, as princes must in their kingdoms, and sometimes administer punishment to make people behave. But in the more private realm of "spiritual life and existence among Christians ... it is forbidden for one to judge and condemn another." (12) The fundamental irreconcilability of this split perspective persists throughout Luther's works (13) and is carried over into the thinking of other Renaissance exegetes.

Following Luther's example, the English reformer William Tyndale discusses justice, mercy, and secular authority in his explication of the Sermon on the Mount. (14) To justify the Christian's right and duty to carry out secular offices, Tyndale explains that every person lives in two states, or "regiments." The first and most important is the regiment of Christ established in the Gospels, in...

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