Comic plot conventions in Measure for Measure

Angelo’s soliloquy occurs at that moment in Measure for Measure when his identity as judge or ‘angel’ is jeopardized by his desire for Isabella. Throughout Shakespeare’s comic practice, we will find that this rhetoric of character or inner debate occurs at predictable moments in his comic plots of mistaken identity, and this conjunction of a rhetoric of consciousness with the mistaken identity plot produces in part our sense of complex character. It is important to observe, however, that this perception of the lifelike does not come from any necessary relation to reality, but only because such rhetoric generates an illusion of reality, what the French call l’effet de réel. ¹ It is unimportant whether self-address is really a structure of mental life or psychic process, or whether people actually question their identities, or have identities at all; the point is that the validity of conventions is a function of our belief in them. ²