ABSTRACT
There is much to baffle and even bewilder a twentieth-century audience in Measure for Measure. Living, as most European audiences do, in societies where the law no longer terminates the lives of those who break it, and where adult sexual behaviour is a matter for the individual conscience, we find it hard to adjust to the play’s initial situation of a young man condemned to death for fornication. Nor can we feel at home with much that follows. There must, we uneasily speculate, be some ‘Jacobean’ explanation for the way the characters behave: for an apparently model secular ruler impersonating a friar and hearing confessions; for a girl refusing to give up her virginity when to do so would save her brother’s life; for one affianced couple to be virtually put to bed by the ‘good’ characters, while another affianced couple incurs the full penalty of the law against extra-marital sex.
