"Measure for Measure": chiasmus, justice, and mercy.

1. Chiasmus, Antimetabole, Commutatio, Permutatio, Counterchange

Ye haue a figure which takes a couple of words to play with in a verse, and by making them to chaunge and shift one into others place they do very pretily exchange and shift the sence.

(Puttenham 208)

'tis true 'tis pity, And pity 'tis, 'tis true-a foolish figure.

(Hamlet 2.2.98-99)

Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern. Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz.

(2.2.33-34)

I "pretty" and my saying "apt"? Or I "apt" and my saying "pretty"?

(LLL 1.2.18-19)

The use serueth properlie to praise, dispraise, to distinguish, but most commonly to confute by the inuersion of the sentence.

(Peacham)

The goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness.

(MM 3.1.182-83)

That we were all as some would seem to be--Free from our faults, or faults from seeming free.

(3.1.293-94)

And let the subject see, to make them know

That outward courtesies would fain proclaim Favours that keep within.

(5.1.14-16)

Ignominy in ransom and free pardon
Are of two houses; lawful mercy
Is nothing kin to foul redemption.
           (2.4.112-14)

There is an enormous difference in mental travail between passing through the facile reversible chiasmus of pleonasm, virtual identity, or opposition and parsing the complex, conflicted, multiple relationships that chiasmus may demand. In 1589, Renaissance rhetorician George Puttenham (above) captures the figure's easy showiness in his claim that chiasmus can "very pretily exchange and shift the sence." In those three memorably familiar examples of chiasmus from Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare exemplifies its facile wittiness. Then, however, Henry Peacham complicates Puttenham's assessment when he includes among the uses of chiasmus "to distinguish, but most commonly to confute by the inuersion of the sentence." Peacham indicates the work that can be involved in processing chiasmus: its facile "exchange" and "shift" may require us to stop short for being "confuted" and then have to redefine the terms and rethink the relationships between them in inversion." It is Measure for Measure that, above, provides examples of chiasmus compelling us to stop, to puzzle over definitions and relationships, to focus on difficulties--not merely on the definitions, the omissions, the substitutions, but especially on the complex relationships suggested far beyond simple identity, opposition, and substitution involved in chiastic exchanges. Given these complications, we must ask, In what ways can this figure be used? In what ways did Shakespeare use the scheme? And what are the consequences? What can chiasmus do for fun, for memorable aphorism, for such complex thought as analyzing the relationship of justice to mercy?

The kind of linguistic-rhetorical study practiced by Sister Miriam Joseph in creating an anatomy and catalog (Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language) and by M. M. Mahood in examining the dramatic effects of punning (Shakespeare's Wordplay) is undergoing revival and revision both in Keir Elam's elaborated analyses of staged rhetoric in Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse. Language-Games in the Comedies and in Patricia Parker's dizzying interpretive intensifications and expansions of punning into cultural criticism in Shakespeare from the Margins. Language, Culture, Context. In contrast to Elam and Parker, I shall apply techniques such as theirs to a relatively overlooked but intriguing scheme in order to ask that critics, in their analyses and interpretations, pay heed to schemes in the ways we already consider tropes. (1) To this end, I first consider some of the ways chiasmus has been employed. Moving from simple to complex uses, from traditional to recent analyses with familiar illustrations, I shall foc us on analyses of examples in Shakespeare. In particular, not only shall I look at an application of the scheme as a reinforcement of justice in 2Henry IV but, finally, I shall examine how this so-called figure of words functions in Measure for Measure, a play in which Shakespeare extensively employs it and wherein it consistently demands that we focus on the complex, problematic difficulties in multiple relationships that have troubled critics for generations and that are supposed to be governed by the symbiosis between justice and mercy. To conclude, I shall suggest that the chiasmic formulation of those relationships in Measure for Measure means that our attempts to resolve them, which have proved to be unsatisfying, must necessarily remain unsatisfied. In short, chiasmus compels us to face their intractability.

2. Memorability, Reversibility, Opposition, Complexity

Polonius demonstrates how chiasmus can be used primarily for display, as when, artlessly, he proposes to seek "the cause of this effect--Or rather say "the cause of this defect,/ For this effect defective comes by cause./Thus it remains, and the remainder thus" (2.2.102-05). He dresses out his doubled chiasmus in the sententious, pointed, or curt style and various forms of correction and punning. Such witty display and joking likely provide the primary motive in Shakespeare's most extensive use of the figure. Just as Dr. Mardy Grothe, in Never Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You and her Web site (http://www.chiasmus.com/mailinglistarchives.html), features comedians and media pundits, so Shakespeare uses chiasmus most obviously for attractive comic wit. In her study, Sister Miriam Joseph (81) calls attention to Shakespeare's typical appreciation in the verbal sparring in Twelfth Night. There, when Cesario tries to correct Feste, Feste, a prolific purveyor of chiasmus, congratulates himself: "So thou mayst s ay the king lies by a beggar if a beggar dwell near him, or the church stands by thy tabor if thy tabor stand by the church.[...] A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit, how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward" (3.1.7-12). Likewise, Keir Elam (254) points to how, in Love's Labour's Lost, Mote expresses his exorbitant appreciation of his own witty usage of the figure in his repeating it: "These betray nice wenches that would be betrayed without these, and make them men of note--do you note, men" (3.1.17-19). Elam (256) also points to how Antipholus of Syracuse exhibits his clout and trickery in The Comedy of Errors when he parries Dromio of Syracuse's sarcastic thanks for a beating: "for this something that you gave me for nothing": "I'll make amends next, to give you nothing for something" (2.2.50-53).

Along with display, memorability proves a primary motive for chiasmus in forms ranging from aphorisms to advertisements. So Quintilian's popular aphorism: "I do not live to eat, but eat to live" (IX.iii.85). Or the New Testament's "For the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children" (2 Cor.12.14). Or, in advertising, "You can take Salem out of the country, but you can't take the country out of Salem." Or, in politics, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." It is aphoristic memorability that sister Miriam Joseph (81-82) particularly notes in Shakespeare's employing the figure, in, for instance, "Remember March, the ides of March, remember" (JC 4.2.70). It is also useful for summing up practical wisdom, as in the Duke's reply to Orlando's demand for food in As You Like It, "Your gentleness shall force/More than your force move us to gentleness" (2.7.101-02), or in summing up a situation, as, after his killin g Polonius, Hamlet says, "Heaven hath pleased it so/To punish me with this, and this with me,/ That I must be their scourge and minister" (3.4.157-59).

Few rhetoricians discuss or exemplify the simplest use of chiasmus-repetitive tautology or identity. An important exception is Jeanne Fahnestock, whose work provides a most useful historical account, analysis, application, and sourcebook regarding developments in rhetoric. In Rhetorical Figures in Science (122-55), Fahnestock analyzes the logic and argument of tautology and identity in her anatomy and history of antimetabole. Drawing on Aristotle more for his treatise on dialectic than for his rhetoric, Fahnestock describes the figure's argumentative force in its testing the convertibility of terms. She couples her description with modern treatises that emphasize how the principle of commutation proves identifying attributes and identity (131-35). In fact, she suggests, the formal structure of chiasmus encourages, at times even compels, analysis and measurement of the terms it inverts. Indeed, chiasmus serves, Fahnestock notes, as a figure that epitomizes such attention. While the witches' perverse identifica tion but accurate prediction that "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" opening Macbeth is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, since he does not usually employ reversibility to test identification there, such tests may be implicit in untangling some of his complex uses. But he does employ reversibility amply in comedies. The wordplay of the clowns in The Two Gentlemen of Verona offers an example. Lance describes to Speed how his staff "understands" him: "I'll but lean, and my staff under-stands me." "It stands under thee indeed." "Why, stand-under and under-stand is all one" (2.5.25-28). Frequently characters employ it for comic slights, as when Maria and Boyet of Love's Labour's Lost agree of Biron that "Not a word with him but a jest/And every jest but a word" (2.1.214-15). Shakespeare uses repetitive and pleonastic chiasmus as well to reinforce or to suggest the strength of belief. In Julius Caesar, Brutus, for example, entreats "Romans, countrymen, and lovers" to "Believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe" and, more elaborately with equivalent substitutions, he adjures, "Censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge" (3.2.14-17).

As in the prime examples from Quintilian, advertising, and JFK, the most frequent use of chiasmus forms an antithetical inversion rather than an identity of terms. Thus, Puttenham's frequently cited example, "We wish not peace to maintaine cruell warre, But we make warre to maintaine us in peace" (208), is one Alcibiades modifies to end Timon of Athens, there pledging to "Make war breed peace, make peace stint war." And, thus, Peacham's description of the prominent use of chiasmus as confutation and opposition, with his prime example, "Neither was the man created for the woman's sake, but the woman for the man's sake" (1 Cor. 11.9). Fahnestock observes that both rhetoricians were following the new Renaissance emphasis on the figure's usefulness (129-30). This focus on antithesis Ronald H. Carpenter stresses in analyzing the strictly delineated term antimetabole. Like Fahnestock (124-25), Carpenter suggests chiasmic antithesis can be potent in providing a memorable persuasive climax, as when Kennedy used it to cap a series of anticipatory antitheses ("Essential Schemes" 168; "Stylistic Redundancy" 66). Aphoristic reversal provides Sister Miriam Joseph (81) with one of her primary exhibits, Touchstone's imitating Socrates in As You Like It: "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool" (5.1.29-30). Such aphorisms bear repetition and variation. In his, Touchstone merely tightens an earlier version found in Love's Labour's Lost: "his ignorance were wise,/ Where now his knowledge must prove ignorance" (2.1.101-02). Common antithesis appears among the many chiasmic expressions Henry V employs to woo, or appropriate, Catherine, as in "I have no strength in measure-yet a reasonable measure in strength" (5.2.132-34).

Besides reversals by negation or contradiction, the figure may also contrast by degree and thereby take on greater shades of meaning. In The Taming of the Shrew's Induction, Sly jokes that he has "no more shoes than feet-nay, sometime more feet than shoes" (Ind.2.9-10). In Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato avers "How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping" (1.1.23-24). Even a doubting "if" may supply the chiasmic linkage, as in Maria's description of Longueville in Love's Labour's Lost: "The only soil of his fair virtue's gloss-/ If virtue's gloss will stain with any soil" (2.1.52-53). Thus chiasmus, like other schemes and tropes, may increase in complexity. Increased complexity issues from the kinds of problems that arise from circumstances countering both simple association or identification and straightforward opposition or reversal. Because it follows from the potentially multiple relationships between terms, chiasmus may test for both identificatory and oppositional relations in different fields, as, for instance, commutatio (see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 427-30) and antimetabole (see Group Mu, A General Rhetoric 124-26). Association to the degree of identification and outright opposition become the antithetical poles of a sizable interpretive spectrum.

That chiasmus forms multiple, complex relationships is one of three points with which Max Nanny opens "Chiasmus in Literature: Ornament or Function" (53). As Nanny suggests, chiasmus provides a quasi-spatial relationship even though it comes as a temporal relationship in language (51). So the name chiasmus was formed from the Greek X, a crossing over, as between "before" and "after" or between an image and its mirroring. Sometimes rhetoricians emphasize this crossing by placing the two terms on parallel lines and drawing arrows to form the X. The display can be particularly expressive when the "spaces" also refer to moral categories, as in the exchange between Biron and Longueville in Love's Labour's Lost:

How low soever the matter, I hope in God for high words.

A high hope for a low heaven. (1.1.189-90)

A moralizing chiasmus in Richard II compounds memorable temporal terms: "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" (5.5.49). Likewise, in Twelfth Night, Maria completes Sir Toby's chiasmus to predict the temporal consequences of Sir Andrew's prodigality: "Why he has three thousand ducats a year." "Ay, but he'll have but a year in all these ducats" (1.3.18-19). Such inversions appear particularly in Hamlet. After noting the closest of associations that can come about precipitously, "Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident," the Player King opines, "For 'tis a question left us yet to prove! Whether love lead fortune or else fortune love" (3.2.181, 184-85).

Another of Nanny's three fundamental points is that chiasmus takes on greater significance in an analytic language dependent on word order, such as English, than it does in a synthetic one dependent on paradigmatic conjugations and declensions. This feature links with chiasmus's potential for reversing cause and effect, a potential Fahnestock explains to be particularly useful in examining refutation and making corrections in logic and science (150-55). A notable literary example of the feature, one with political overtones, is provided by Sir John Denham's memorable and influential paired assertions opening Coopers Hill: Parnassus and Helicon "made not Poets, but the Poets those,! And as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court." Another instance of this employment of chiasmus occurs in Paradise Lost when Milton draws a moral by emphasizing how Satan's early scheme to produce evil out of good is reversed or corrected in Adam's late praise of God's encompassing production of good out of evil, Satan: "If the n his Providence! Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,/ Our labor must be to pervert that end,/ And out of good still to find means of evil" (1.162-65). Adam: "O goodness infinite, goodness immense!/ That all this good of evil shall produce,/ And evil turn to good" (12.469-7 1). Such a transfer of cause and effect appears punningly in The Merchant of Venice, when Portia, speaking of Antonio, tells Bassanio that "You should in all sense be much bound to him,/ For as I hear he was much bound for you" (5.1.135-36). The difference between cause and effect is telling for Desdemona in Othello: "Why I should fear I know not,/ Since guiltiness I know not, but yet I feel I fear" (5.2.40-41). And it is damning in Hamlet's disillusioned warning to Ophelia. In a chiasmus they form jointly, he has answered her "That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty" and she has questioned, "Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?" Then, in one he forms alone, he a nalyzes: "Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof' (3.1.109-15).

Such tests by inversion link chiasmus to the figure hysteron proteron, the preposterous, the "arsie versie," the reversal of what ought by some criterion to take precedence. Hysteron proteron, of course, is one of the primary figures on which Patricia Parker focused in a series of essays culminating in the chapter "Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events: From Late to Early Shakespeare." She exploited the resources of this figure to help loosen the bounds of Shakespearean interpretation when she focused on the marginal notes in which editors dispute uses of language and critics examine word play, when she interlinked definitions from multiple discourses and genres, and when she placed her endeavors within the dual frames of cultural studies and of socially and politically inflected materialist, feminist, and gay theories (20-55; see also her listing of important essays since the late 1970s: 280-81n.5). What Parker calls "initiating" or "capping" expressions sometimes take the form of chiasmus. One such expr ession appears in the multilingual puns on salutations and farewells, epilogues and prologues in Don Armado's ridicule of Costard in Love's Labour's Lost: "Doth the inconsiderate take salve for l'envoi, and the word l'envoi for a salve" (3.1.68-69). Another such expression, situated amidst Parker's questioning of origins and emphasizing an inversion of generations, is represented in The Taming of the Shrew: "Fathers commonly/Do get their children, but in this case of wooing! A child shall get a sire" (2.1.401-03).

There are yet more difficult formulations of chiasmus. As it happens, some deal with the very problem of verbal representation. For instance, in a memorable scene in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Lance strives to understand his household's weeping through an allegory representing one thing as another, himself as a dog: "I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. 0, the dog is me, and I am myself' (2.4.18-20). Likewise, a revered example comes from ancient rhetoricians who used chiasmus to focus on the problems and potential of the concept of ut pictura poesis. The formulation of "a poem should be a speaking picture; a picture should be a silent poem" has stimulated centuries of analysis of the multiple relations between visual and verbal communication, relations that viewers and readers instantaneously sense in this expression. Recently, Kenneth Burke has similarly employed chiasmus to stimulate thought. For example, in "you cannot have ideas without persons or persons without ideas" (qtd. in Fahnesto ckl4l), Burke evokes time-honored definitions of humans as speaking, abstracting, or representing animals.

Just as chiasmus can be so extended as to suggest allegory, it can also be contracted into gnomic aphorism that begets information or simply remains puzzling. In Shakespeare, because of its density or an auditor' slack of information, a gnomic chiasmus often introduces a longer passage explaining it. In The Comedy of Errors, for instance, Egean begins the extensive exposition of his life with the claim he was "wed! Unto a woman happy but for me,! And by me happy, had not our hap been bad" (1.1.36-38). Similarly, shortly after Gaunt responds to Richard II's "Should dying men flatter with those that live?" with "No, no, men living flatter those that die," he introduces his anatomy of Richard's failings with the observation that he is "Ill in myself to see, and in thee seeing ill" (2.1.88-89,94). Sometimes, despite emendation by editors, a chiasmus remains as enigmatic as this one in Love's Labour's Lost's: "For wisdom's sake--a word that all men love--/ Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men" (4.3.332-33 ). At yet other times, the difficulty of Shakespeare's chiastic figures comes not from our lack of information but from oxymora expressed densely in puns, inversions, and explanations, as in Romeo's puling Petrarchan lament over Rosaline, "O brawling love, O loving hate" (1.1.169) or in Claudio's expressing shame of Hero at the aborted wedding of Much Ado About Nothing: "But fare thee well, most foul, most fair, farewell/Thou pure impiety and impious purity" (4.1.101-02). Sometimes, however, amplification of a Shakespearean chiasmus may occur just for the humor or to expand on a theme. It is for humor, for instance, when Claudio explains a chiasmus formed jointly with Don John to tease Benedick. Don John asks, "Hath any man seen him at the barber's?" "No," replies Claudio, "but the barber's man hath been seen with him, and the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis balls." (3.2.36-39). But it is for theme or characterization that auditors puzzle out Hamlet's bitter pair of chiasmic explanations to Ophelia.

Finally, besides using gnomic density, Shakespeare may complicate chiasmus by substituting terms, using various forms of punning, and playing other word games. Love's Labour's Lost provides numerous examples, including puns that interchange parts of speech, as when Biron opens the courtiers' poetic professions of love by comparing his love for Rosalind to the deer hunt, "They have pitched a toil; I am toiling in a pitch" (4.3.2). A more straightforward example, one to which Sister Miriam Joseph (81) calls attention, occurs in The Merchant of Venice when Portia, making fun of a suitor, substitutes "worst" for "worse" and "beast" for "best": "When he is best he is a little worse than a man, and when he is worst he is little better than a beast" (1.2.73-75). Likewise, in Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick, simultaneously providing a summation and a transition to his peroration, employs a chiasmus punning on notions of "grace": "But till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace" (2.3.25-26). In Love's Labour's Lost, in a frequently cited example Keir Elam also repeats, when Don Armado declares "I love not to be crossed," Moth's response puns on and personifies the coin: "He speaks the mere contrary--crosses love not him" (1.2.31-33). In more complicated variations on the form, Shakespeare may substitute synonyms or antonyms, as when Juliet realizes on learning Romeo's identity that her "only love" is "Too early seen unknown, and known too late" (1.5.136). As Elam has noted, in that chiasmic tour de force Love's Labour's Lost, more elaborate still are metonymic substitutions (paunches to ribs, pates to wits) that Longueville complicates in further wordplay (on, for instance, "rich" and "bankrupt"): "Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits/Make rich the ribs but bankrupt quite the wits" (1.1.63-64; for dramatic uses of such figures, see Elam and Nanny). Similarly, in The Merchant of Venice, almost as elaborate are the substitutions occurring when Portia tells Nerissa, aphoristically, that "T he brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree" (1.2.15-17). While the substitutions in these examples are explicit, chiasmus may even work by an implicit substitution of a term. In King Lear, for instance, Edgar, in despair and disguised as Mad Tom just before the appearance of his blinded father, aphoristically affirms that he is better off ragged and aware of being scorned than he would be were he scorned unawares since flattered for his wardrobe's display of wealth and status: "Yet better thus, and known to be contemned/ Than still contemned and flattered" (4.1.1-2).

The potential complexity of chiasmus thus recommends it for the expression of problematic relationships such as that between Claudius and Gertrude or, more abstractly, that between concepts of justice and mercy. It is significant that in Hamlet the greatest concentration of chiasmus occurs when the Player King and Queen in The Mousetrap discuss whether she will wed after the death of her first husband. Their discussion is the test Hamlet considers "wormwood" for Gertrude. That discussion begins with the Player Queen's affirmation that "Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear:/ Where little fears grow great, great love grows there." Hers is capped with the Player King's challenge: "For 'tis a question left us yet to prove/ Whether love lead fortune or else fortune love" (3.2.154.1-2, 184-85). Similarly, in Paradise Lost, it seems significant that, by the account of Brian Vickers, who relies on J. B. Broadbent (153), the greatest concentration of chiasmus comes in Book III, since there Milton presents the discussion in heaven between the Father and Son who both exemplify and state the relationship in Christianity between law and love, God's justice and mercy. Shakespeare likewise employs chiasmus to express questions about justice and mercy. Toward the end of a memorable defense of the humanity of Jews no less than that of Christians, Shylock uses chiasmus to declare that vengeance is the rule of justice: "If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge" (3.1.57-59). Given these examples of how Milton and Shakespeare use chiasmus to explore the complexities of justice and mercy, there should be little surprise either that chiasmus becomes a dominant figure during two important moments in 2 Henry IV when the principle of what constitutes just rule is at stake or that the greatest concentration of chiasmus in Shakespeare appears when Measure for Measure presents the same, troubling issues that constitute one center of attention in The Merchant of Venice--the relation of law to clemency, of justice to mercy.

3. Justice: The Case of 2 Henry IV

For presentations of justice, chiasmus proves useful precisely because of its reversibility and a display conducive to measurement. In 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare employs it to focus on Hal's choosing between Falstaff and the Lord Chief Justice as his adoptive father on becoming Henry V. Here, chiasmus ultimately reinforces a principle of measured and balanced rule. The question whether Hal will be just, the prime virtue of a monarch, or willful, the mark of a tyrant, is pressed from the second scene and first confrontation of the two antagonists, when Falstaff threatens ominously. And it reaches its climax when the Lord Chief Justice is granted victory not in the play's infamous rejection scene, when Henry V commands the Lord Chief Justice to silence and discipline Falstaff, but rather as the second of a pair of scenes occurring somewhat earlier. In the earlier of the pair, Falstaff observes an old acquaintance, the country justice Shallow, accept his servant Davy's plea to exercise favoritism and subvert justic e by "countenancing" a known knave; then he schemes about how to exploit Shallow's injustice. In the later of the pair of scenes, Henry V announces his choice in a display that begins with a test of the Lord Chief Justice for sentencing Hal to prison for striking the Lord Chief Justice in his "very seat of judgement," and concludes with Henry's judgment: "You shall be as a father to my youth" (5.2.79-117).

Having watched Shallow and Davy, Falstaff analyzes the flagrant abuse of justice in a pair of chiastic expressions. As he contemplates telling a farce funny enough "to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter" through numerous court terms, Falstaff's chiastic expressions imitate wrongful elevating and leveling (5.1.67). Shallow's servants, "by observing him, do bear themselves like foolish justices; he, by conversing with them, is turned into a justice-like servingman" (5.1.56-58). The point of Falstaff's chiasmus is the inversion of status, for the justice unjustly considers himself above the law and wrongfully elevates his servants so they join him there. In the figure, Falstaff thus highlights a leveling of both judgment and status that overturns justice.

That point made, Falstaff goes on to compare master and servants to geese flocking together and transmitting diseases among themselves. Consequently, he continues, "If I had a suit to Master Shallow, I would humour his men with the imputation of being near their master; if to his men, I would curry with Master Shallow that no man could better command his servants" (5.1.60-64). Characteristically, in plotting to exploit Shallow and to entertain Hal, Falstaff turns the failure of justice into verbal commodity. But Falstaff's prospect of entertaining Hal as Henry V would exploit the very conditions Davy uses to exploit Justice Shallow: it levels the servant and the master by raising the servant to the status of the master and by raising them both above the law. So, later that evening, Falstaff feels confident in asserting, when he hears of the death of Henry IV, that "The laws of England are at my commandment" and so is the Lord Chief Justice (5.3.125-26). For Falstaff believes both that the "young King is sick" for him and that he is nearly even with the king above the law. The doubled chiasmus Falstaff employs in his analysis and his strategy lays bare the proposed interchange of inequitable roles and the discarded justice.

The scene Henry V stages for the Lord Chief Justice in view of his court turns that wrong to right. By means of doubling another chiasmus, it restores the order of justice by reversing the flow Falstaff perceived. Henry's decisive turn against Falstaff's inversion of justice comes after the new king's entry to the court of brothers and retainers apprehensive about his intentions. It provides the climax to a legal lesson. In that scene, the new monarch first argues his old personal case as prince against the Lord Chief Justice. Having once jailed Hal, the jurist rightly dreads forewarnings of the new king's grudge and the need to appease Falstaff. In his response to the king, the Lord Chief Justice features three approaches: first, recourse to a general impersonal principle in "The majesty and power of law and justice,/ The image of the King whom I presented" when Hal struck him (5.2.77-78); next, recourse to a specific precedent; and, third, recourse to a hypothetical case wherein the new king is to project a parallel circumstance with his son. Declaring him correct, Henry says that the Lord Chief Justice has weighed the case well and that he shall thereafter bear the insignia of his office, the balance and the sword. Then, in a chiasmus, Henry sums up his decision by quotation that gives justice the first and final place and the prince the intermediate role:

So shall I live to speak my father's words:
'Happy am I that have a man so bold
That dares do justice on my proper son,
And not less happy, having such a son
That would deliver up his greatness so
Into the hands of justice.'
                                  (5.2.106-11)

He restores order under the law with hierarchical reciprocity of status and duties that, in his first scene, Falstaff had flouted "in new silk and old sack" and that, during the scenes considering Shallow and Davy that flank this one, he dreams of flouting in the new regime. In his definitive emblematic chiasmus, Hal as Henry V immediately confirms his decision for justice and order:

   You did commit me,
For which I do commit into your hand
Th'unstained sword that you have used to bear.
                     (5.2.111-14)

Simultaneously, Henry V rights an ordered justice and a balanced chiasmus.

Still, judged by critics' dismay over the subsequent treatment of Falstaff by Henry V and the Lord Chief Justice and over Hal's reclamation as the son of the deeply disturbing Henry IV, justice does not come as easily as these scenes would make it seem. Nor do they when judged by the problems in the relation of justice to mercy posed by Measure for Measure.

4. The Case of Measure for Measure

Duke Vincentio's final remarks to Isabella create yet one more problem in yet one more of the chiasmic formulations of problems prevalent throughout Measure for Measure. Judged by critical consternation, "What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine" (5.1.530), spoken by a duke to a subject, a man to a woman, an elder to a junior, a machiavel to an innocent, sounds to many like "What's mine is mine, and what is yours is mine." This chiasmus is not rightly reversible because it is controverted by the situation when it is spoken. So, judged by even further critical consternation, is the always difficult relationship between justice and mercy, law and equity, the play's vexed central theme. Its critical expression comes, at the play's climactic moment, in the duke's pronouncement of judgment:

The very mercy of the law cries out
Most audible, even from his proper tongue,
'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death.'
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure:
Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.
then Angelo, thy fault's thus manifested,
Which though thou wouldst deny, denies thee vantage.
             (5.1.399-405)

The passage is stark in its pounding parallels of conduplicatio, repetition of the terms--death, haste, leisure, like, measure--that reassert their identity in equal exchange. Significantly, a capping chiasmus--"fault[. . .1 thou wouldst deny, denies thee vantage"--applies an indisputable principle of judgment.

Despite this decisiveness, repealed just afterwards, no critic has ever doubted that Measure for Measure creates problems--if not For his or her own allegory, then for the reception of those of others. Moreover, whatever the play's proclaimed genius, judgments have it that this comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, morality, problem play--or whatever-- presents a fable implausibly contrived, characters inconsistent or inconsistently perceived, language as knotty as poetic, a troubled if not discordant tone, radically multiple viewpoints, and a focus that shifts midplay (see Eceles and Wheeler). But the central theme of this play of chiasmic formulations ought to be clear. The rule of justice is clear: equal treatment, equal rewards and punishments, of subjects governed by the same liberties and prohibitions. Angelo proclaims: "When I that censure him do so offend,/Let mine own judgement pattern out my death,/ And nothing come in partial" (2.1.29-31). The principle of equity is equally clear: clement treatment, lesser punishment, whenever the strict application of law without regard to mitigating circumstances would result in an unfair penalty. As Isabella puts it: "ask your heart what it doth know/ That's like my brother's fault. If it confess/ A natural guiltiness, such as is his,/ Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue/ Against my brother's life" (2.2.140-43). But the relationship between justice and mercy, legality and equity, is vexed precisely because of intervening conditions.

The two starkest presentations of the issues, those of Marc Shell and Harriett Hawkins, render obvious the utility of a figure that exhibits for analysis the reversibility of the terms supposed identical or equivalent, the oppositions posited, and the exchanges proposed. In The End of Kinship, especially in the two chapters on "taliation," Shell provides the fullest discussion of the Judaco-Christian context of lex talionis requiring the measure of proposed legal, quasi-legal, licit and illicit exchanges of head for maidenhead, maidenhead for head, maidenhead for maidenhead, and head for head that Measure for Measure presents; he also analyzes many of the issues of the play's inextricable sexual, marital, and legal entanglements. In her Twayne New Critical Introduction to Measure for Measure, Hawkins gives the most problematic presentation of the enormous range of logically irreconcilable contradictions expressed between characters and even by single characters.

Unlike its role in 2 Henry IV, chiasmus in Measure for Measure does not resolve issues but instead troubles them. It works there in concord with other techniques, such as the insistently telling puns on "sense" as "good sense" versus "sensuality" ("'tis such sense/ That my sense breeds with it" thinks Angelo [2.2.144-45]) and gradations in between analyzed by William Empson, and such as the emerging metaphors from sexuality that leak into legality when Angelo defends strict enforcement of the edict against extramarital sex in order to block future sins from being "new conceived" and thus initiating their "progress to be hatched and born" (2.2.95-101). In Measure for Measure, chiasmus by way of inversion so lays bare the identity and association, opposition, and gradation in exchanges that we stop and measure the propositions at issue. What is more, its formulations so complicate the propositions by means of puns, substitutions, deletions, and extensions that they anatomize the complex multiple contentions ent ailed in judgments. For other domains, including the character of those judging and judged, the relative well-being of subjects and commonwealth, the moralities of sexuality and procreation, the use of subterfuge by rulers, and the distinctions between what seems and what is, inextricably impinge on the relationships between legality and equity.

In Measure for Measure, the characteristic role of Renaissance wit, assembling data by association, correspondence, or identification, appears forcefully formulated by chiasmus. That wit shows up as a joke about identification in the punning salutation between the malaprop constable Elbow and the Duke disguised as a friar: Elbow: "Bless you, good father friar." The Duke: "And you, good brother father" (3.1.268-69). Not insignificantly, this abrupt chiasmus comes in the middle of the third act. Set inside the prison, this act offers the play's highest concentration of chiasmus, a signal that it serves as a fulcrum of problems. Shortly after the exchange with Elbow, the Duke/Friar uses the figure to identify immorality and its consequences to Elbow's antagonist, the pimp Pompey: "If the devil have given thee proofs for sin,/ Thou wilt prove his" (3.1.285-86). Similarly the Provost employs the scheme to identify drunkenness, "Drunk many times a day, if not many days entirely drunk" (4.2.139). But chiasmus does m ore than define morality. According to the Duke/Friar, news becomes the repetitious evidence of society's instability: "This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news" (3.1.454-55). Definitions by chiasmus, as in this punning gnome, frequently complicate and trouble. The executioner Abhorson's cryptic claim that his occupation constitutes an honorable guild, a mystery, because "Every true man's apparel fits your thief' requires Pompey's chiastic explication: "If it be too little for your thief, your true man thinks it big enough. If it be too big for your thief, your thief thinks it little enough" (4.2.34-37). As both Lever and Eccles suggest, Pompey understands that hangmen who inherit the suits of victims as professional payment thereby fit with the guild of tailors and so constitute a craft, a mystery understandable in the double meaning of "big enough" in size and value.

Chiasmus defines Measure for Measure in ways that at the same time mysteriously trouble. Nowhere does chiasmus form identifications in ways more troubling than in characterizations, particularly those of Angelo, Duke Vincentio, and Isabella. In a mirroring chiasmus, Angelo opens his confession of a divided will after his fall and before his treacherous offer of Claudjo' s head for Isabella's maidenhead. While his prayer mouths oaths to God, his will focuses on his desires: "When I would pray and think, I think and pray/ To several subjects" (2.4.1-2). Likewise; during the central prison scene a pairing of chiasmi opens a bifurcated response to the Duke. First as Friar, confronting accusations of the Duke by his declared intimate Lucio, he stipulates the necessity of a favorable evaluation: "Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love" (3.1.388-89). Thus, praise of the Duke's dedication to the welfare of Vienna is compromised when his deputy Escalus, led on by the Duke/Friar's question, characterizes him as "Rather rejoicing to see another merry than merry at anything which professed to make him rejoice" (3.1.459-60).

Isabella is characterized in another pair of chiasmi, one by the Duke and another by herself during their prison conference. In one, the Duke/Friar employs a chiasmus so elliptical as to require his own elaboration--and, ever after, that of editors: "The goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body .of it ever fair" (3.1.182-84). His chiasmic dispraise of short-lived physical attraction given by nature sets up his praise of an integrity of soul granted Isabella and sustained by God. In the second, Isabella, responding to the request to help Angelo's betrothed Mariana play the bed trick, vows to maintain her soul's integrity in her actions: "I have spirit to do anything that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit" (3.1.20304). With its pun between the first and last "spirit," Isabella's variation of chiasmus defines her pure will in action. At the same time, however, it nominates her as the judge of the foulness or truth opposed through these middle terms. It is precisely the self-possession laid open here that, based on Isabella's faith in her own spiritual insights, can be lauded as integrity, deplored as willful self-ignorance, or questioned as fearful overcompensation--all of these conflicting views amply displayed in the variorum compilation of judgments of her. Moreover, beginning and ending with Isabella's "spirit," this chiasmic formulation compels our consideration of an affirmation of soul and will that in the conclusion she denies. For in asking forgiveness for Angelo, she pleads that "His act did not o'ertake his bad intent, And must be buried as a bad intent/That perished by the way" (5,1.44345).

In Measure for Measure, identifications and associations formed by chiasmus usually lead to problems. A chiasmic pairing that opens the next scene, where Mariana is listening to a boy sing, indicates how opposed motives and ends can arise from the same topic. Mariana describes her reaction to the music in another chiasmus formed with antonyms: "My mirth it much displeased, but pleased my woe" (4.1.13). The Duke/Friar, in a chiasmus, responds aphoristically: "music oft hath such a charm/To make bad good, and good provoke to harm" (4.1.14-15). A similar potential for treacherous motives and evil ends compels Angel's anguished chiasmus when he first enters into temptation: "O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,! With saints dost bait thy hook!" (2.2. 184-85).

In the Renaissance, judgment's evaluation of differences was inextricably linked to wit. Just so, in Measure for Measure, judgment appears in powerful chiasmic formulations that lay bare for analysis the commensurability of proposed substitutions or exchanges. Sometimes, as when there is mutuality, the exchange is commensurable. For instance, when Juliet confesses to the Duke/Friar in a chiasmus fulfilling his question of her, the chiasmus displays the mutual exchange: He: "Love you the man that wronged you?" She: "Yes, as I love the woman that wronged him" (2.3.26-27). Although he claims that Juliet's sin was greater, because the Duke/Friar recognizes the mutual offence, the chiasmic reversal of the parties corroborates the just balance to the degree of virtual identity, as in betrothal and marriage. Sometimes, however, the exchange is incommensurable. For example, Angelo expresses the dubious notion, based on an analogy to counterfeiting, that creating an illegitimate life is an offence commensurable to des troying a legitimate one. Although, in terms of authorization, in both acts humans wrongfully play God, Angelo expresses the premise in a variation on chiasmus so complex that it slows us so that when we think through the proposed exchange we see it falsifies the previous analogy for its very punning on "false": "'Tis all as easy/ Falsely to take away a life true made! As to put metal in restrained moulds,! To make a false one" (2.4.46-49).

Some of the play's earliest chiasmic formulations state precisely the difficulties that motivate both equity and a Christian precedent for equity. When Angelo and Escalus first discuss their commission, Escalus laments that Angelo, for the common offense of an extramarital taking of a maidenhead, harshly sentences Claudio to a beheading rather than to his marrying Juliet: "Well, heaven forgive him, and forgive us all!/ Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall" (2.1.3738). In his pairing, Escalus sums up the need for mercy, and its sanction: forgiveness must arise because, inexplicably as well as inevitably, virtue can Fail and evil succeed; good and ill are condemned without merciful intervention by God, and in imitation by a judge. This variation of chiasmus depends on the substitution of outside antonyms "rise"/"fall" and the inside ones "sin"/"virtue, antonyms that by inversion force us to examine a wrongful exchange that needs to be righted. Similarly, Isabella makes a parallel argument for Angelo's clem ency on her brother. In a doubled chiasmus, she focuses our attention on mercy by simultaneously presenting the golden rule--sympathetic identification and reflective reciprocity--and formally representing, with the exception of negating Angelo, that identification and exchange of terms: "If he had been as you and you as he,! You would have slipped like him, but he, like you,! Would not have been so stern" (2.2.66-68).

Where justice and mercy are concerned, the exchanges proposed arouse outright oppositions and create difficult problems for claims of identity or incommensurable value that are wrong. Among the most compelling wrongs is Angelo's vicious claim that accepting Isabella's sex in exchange for Claudio's life is identical to the virtue clemency. When Angelo tries to trap Isabella, she not only denies the equivalence between the loss of a nun's virginity and the loss of a man's life but also the very exchange. She denies the exchange in a chiasmus made of synonymous terms: "Ignominy in ransom and free pardon! Are of two different houses; lawful mercy/Is nothing kin to foul redemption" (2.4. 112-14). In another chiasmus, the Duke/Friar, anticipating the release of Claudio after the bedtrick, confirms her denial. So displaying and measuring differences as to discover both antithesis and Angelo's sin, this exchange would countenance the sinner for love of the sin rather than forgive the sinner despite the sin: "When vic e makes mercy, mercy's so extended! That for the fault's love is th'Qffender friended" (4.2.104-05).

In another set of proposed exchanges, the difficulty occurs because of the lack of assurance about the values claimed for the terms. Claudio's physical fears of an exchange based on the grace of life everlasting promised in Matthew 16:25 lead to his faltering and to an impasse. He affirms the paradox rightly as a chiasmus: "To sue to live, I find I seek to die,/And seeking death, find life" (3.1.42-43). But when he learns from Isabella that she can purchase his head with her maidenhead, his resolve on the exchange of death for life fails for his dread of physical death. In contrast, as she refuses to accept the exchange of her chastity for her brother's life, Isabella expresses twice over as chiasmus not only her unwavering integrity as both the novitiate nun and bride of Christ but also her belief in the promised paradox. In the first, simpler, chiasmus, one contemplating the damning pollution of compelled bribery after Angelo's attempt to trap her, she denies that the exchange of her everlasting soul is com mensurable with her brother's mortal physical life: "Then Isabel live chaste, and brother die:/ More than our brother is our chastity" (2.4.184-85). In a second, more complex variation of chiasmus, she claims that her potential son's illegitimate entry into life is no sacrifice equivalent to her brother's legally forfeited life. Instead, illegitimacy is far more: "I had rather my brother die by the law than my son should be unlawfully born" (3.1.189-90). Here, by laying out for examination the proposed double exchange and crossing the proposed internal exchange of lawful for unlawful, Isabella refuses to save her brother's legal forfeiture by her potential illegal bastard. Two lives in place of the loss of one might seem a good trade. But, since by weighing the crucial internal exchange she realizes that acceptance would destroy her son's integrity and her own, she finds the exchange wanting, incommensurable. In both of these chiastic replies Isabella affirms her faith in and pledges her soul to the Christian promise that Claudio doubts. But as with the Duke/Friar's immediately preceding chiasmus in praise of her lasting beauty in goodness and her own subsequent avowal of her integrity of spirit in action, these remain vulnerable to charges of egoism and inconsistency.

Compelling questions about the weighing and balancing of the antitheses and exchanges required by the interactions of law and equity appear in chiasmic forms through the fifth act, the second greatest concentration of the figure and the climactic trial scene in Measure for Measure. In a chiasmus varied in substitution and extended in image, the Duke, having left his seat of office to return disguised as the friar, once again bears witness to his disgust with the corruption of Vienna because laws that proscribe such corruption are ignored: "laws for all faults,/ But faults so countenanced that the strong statutes/ Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop" (5.1.313-15). His worry that the law has been "as much in mock as mark" recalls his questionable motive for first disappearing, his need for others to enforce the law in the face of his incapacity do so himself. In another chiasmus, doubts about the Duke's justice get reinforced during Lucio's protest near the end of the play: "Your highness said even now I made you a duke; good my lord, do not recompense me in making me a cuckold" (5.1.509-10). The question about the Duke's justice, the chief question of any ruler, appears as a chiasmus that directly balances the exchange and suggests that the Duke's subsequent punishment of Lucio for jesting slander is unfair.

By presenting associations and identities that lay open definitions and antitheses and commensurabilities that lay out exchanges, chiasmus focuses our attention on many problems adjudicating strict applications of law and grants of clemency in Measure for Measure. The figure further directs our attention to complex problems caused by the inevitable overlap among domains of concern that from about 1980 have dominated criticism. Since 1979 when Darryl Gless posited an overarching Christian allegory of sermon-on-the-mount charity, criticism has exhibited ever greater interest both in the sexual and gender issues addressed primarily in psychoanalytic criticism, ones of the sorts set in Richard P. Wheeler's Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn, and in the impact of social and political forces on personal morality addressed by Foucauldian analyses, of the kinds urged in Jonathan Dollimore's "Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure" and Richard Wilson's "Prince of D arkness: Foucault's Shakespeare." (2) In Measure for Measure, the social and political theme is initially signaled by chiasmic display of the play's insistence on inseparable public and personal motives. In the play's first chiasmus, the Duke tells Angelo that "Thyself and thy belongings/ Are not thine own so proper as to waste/ Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee" (1.1.29-31), adding the illuminating New Testament admonition not to hide your candle under a bushel (Matt. 5:14-16). During the crucial third act, the interlock of public and personal is enforced in one chiasmus and made problematic by another. In the first, amidst a cluster of three chiasmi, Elbow asserts that Angelo has selected the punishment of personal sexual deviance as the emblem of public reformation: "The deputy cannot abide a whoremaster. If he be a whoremonger and comes before him, he were as good go a mile on his errand" (3.1.290-91). But in a second chiasmus, one gnomic in its substitutions and commercial analogy, the Duke/Friar co nfesses that the paucity of personal honesty and loyalty threatens even partnerships and threatens much more social incorporation: "There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accursed" (3.1.451-54).

Historically, the State has enforced private sexual moralities so that sexual desires are transmitted as social ones and, even more, so that sexual inhibitions are regulated for the social good. The sexual liberation of the 1960s roused still greater interest in the contest over public governance and personal sexual practices and entangled perceptions of the relationships between them even more. Thus, since the 1960s, the enforcement of sexual morality in Measure for Measure has caused more critical concern than any other facet of the play. And here the figure chiasmus focuses the vexed issue by laying bare for examination its problems of identification and commensurability. Chiasmus introduces the very topic through banter about contracting socially transmitted diseases. "Do I speak feelingly now?" a gentleman asks Lucio, the waggish spokesman for licentiousness. "I think thou dost, and indeed with most painful feeling of thy speech," Lucio replies, completing the crossover (1.2.32-34). Both the public and t he private positions are sustained in lines already noticed. Whereas Juliet's affirmation of mutual love (2.3.26-27) is not quite acceptable to the Duke/Friar, Isabella's affirmation of the law's condemnation of Claudio and refusal of illegitimacy (3.1.189-90) wins his applause. But Isabella's stance may be accused of rigid and excessive communal regulation since she regards as too lenient the nunnery's rules regarding how votarists may meet and speak to men: they may meet them only in the prioress's presence and "Then if you speak, you must not show your face;/ Or if you show your face, you must not speak" (1.4.12-13). Exacerbated by the collective opinion of Lucio, Pompey, and the Provost that premarital coupling hardly violates the Viennese norm, more uneasiness arises over condemnation of a mutually generative betrothed couple than ever before. A paired chiasmus accentuates one outrageous inequity: whereas the Duke condones the bed trick, which seals an old betrothal but lacks mutual consent, he condemns the loving of Claudio and Juliet despite the mutuality of their relation. By the use of sexual puns and nameless imputations, Mariana acknowledges the disparity in the Duke's judgments when, gnomically, she testifies for and against Angelo in the climactic trial scene: "I have known my husband, yet my husband! Knows not that ever he knew me" (5.1.18485). Resolving the mystery by identifying Angelo as her husband, her chiasmic expression of the bed trick is tortuously enigmatic: Angelo "thinks he knows that he ne'er knew my body,/ But knows, he thinks, that he knows Isabel's" (5.1.198-99). Mariana's chiasmus demands more than linguistic and semiotic parsing; it demands as well a concomitant situational and social analysis.

Because the Duke, the principal guardian of justice and equity hearing the case, had arranged the bed trick, whether for public or private good, Mariana's statement also raises other questions. It calls into question a ruler's right or duty to go beyond legality and equity in manipulating subjects for the good of the state. That is, it makes us wonder whether to identify the Duke as a virtuous machiavellian governor to be admired, as in Basilikon Doron (Lever xlviii-l), or as a vicious machiavellian politician popular on stage. The hedged chiasmus affirming the Duke's central purpose as the happiness of his subjects (3.1.459-60) tends toward good governance. But in an earlier chiasmus, the Duke implicates himself in sleazy manipulation. Complicated by substitution of his "nature" for his "name," his statement asserts his purpose to employ an agent to regain by sneak attack the public order he had failed to maintain and, by the agent's taking the blame for the aggression, to permit him to preserve his own popu larity. He has "imposed the office" on Angelo, "Who may in th'ambush of my name strike home,/ And yet my nature never in the fight/T'allow in slander" (1.3.40-43).

In Measure for Measure, chiasmic expressions repeatedly display and invert one central difficulty so as to anatomize the relationship of judgment to mercy, legality to clemency, the play requires: distinguishing seeming from being, appearance from fact and value, among the myriads of competing associations, antitheses, and exchanges, and the overlaps of domain. In the first of these chiasmic expressions, Isabella characterizes Angelo's oath affirming his vicious proposal. The chiasmus is complicated, for her response inverts his implicit claim of upright moral character and positions the crucial "purpose" dually. Whereas his is to lend credence to his oath in the middle, hers is to devalue him in the conclusion: "Believe me, on mine honour,/ My words express my purpose." "Ha, little honour to be much believed,/ And most pernicious purpose! Seeming, seeming!" (2.4.14850) The same theme is sustained by the Duke/Friar during the central prison scene, for there he observes the discrepancy between Angelo's magistr acy and his personal behavior: "That we were all as some would seem to be-/Free from our faults, or faults from seeming free" (3.1.293-94). In the trial scene, the figures and themes of seeming/being, outer/inner, public/private reach a climax of concentration and complexity. There, the Duke creates a subterfuge entrapping Angelo as he takes his hand and claims that he does so to show the populace "That outward courtesies would fain proclaim favours that keep within" (5.1.16). Trying to preclude Isabella's charge, Angelo introduces the first half of a chiasmus that Isabella completes in rebuttal and attestation. He says: "And she will speak most bitterly and strange." She says: "Most strange, but yet most truly" (5.1.36-37). Isabella concludes this formal and thematic series with a pair of chiasmi. In the one, she is expansive in describing the angelic attributes that seem to belong to Angelo versus the treacherous caitiff or villain that in fact he is: "'Tis not impossible/ But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,/ May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,/ As Angelo; even so may Angelo,/ In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms,/ Be an arch-villain" (5.1.52-57). In the other, she is succinct in changing parts of speech. In a revealing anatomy of the sort that chiasmus itself compels, hers begs an interrogation to discover the truth she has just described: "let your reason serve/To make the truth appear where it seems hid,/ And hide the false seems true" (5.1.65-67).

In these last quotations, chiasmus calls for our scrutiny of the hypocrisy of Angelo, the point that gains more assent than any other in the play. But the figure's preponderance in Measure for Measure also compels a more powerful and general response. It does so because the passages about seeming and being remain constricted to the single subject from a single viewpoint. But chiasmic expressions continually imply that such a focus is not possible. For not only do they repeatedly cross us and exhibit for analysis multiple views and measures of manifold associations, antitheses, and tradeoffs, but they also interweave inextricable domains through myriad substitutions, omissions, and extensions. Indeed, it is through chiasmus that one may trace the history of scholarly scrutiny of impingements long acknowledged to be difficult in Measure for Measure (such as integrity/corruption or spiritual wit/physical will of character) and of those recently brought to attention (such as public manipulation and enforcement of private morality). The predominance of chiasmus in Measure for Measure thus seems to support Katharine Eisaman Maus's thesis that the play sets up and maintains simultaneously contradictory claims that human beings and our chief production, societies, are both fundamentally alike and radically different (172-77). But since chiasmus follows her primary view of inner versus outer less than her understanding of the play's compulsion of multitudinous interpretations, chiasmus aligns more closely with the thought of Patricia Parker. For the extraordinary proliferation of chiasmic expressions in the play does more than compel our attention to these irresolvable problems in Measure for Measure. It also encourages us to predict that chiasmic expressions will draw attention to other irresolvable problems in the play that criticism has yet to interrogate fully. Thus, instead of the openendedness Parker stresses, in Measure for Measure chiasmus requires us to focus, to stop and ponder the very intractability of problem s of justice and mercy in that crucial domain where proliferating entailments from other domains construct identities, oppositions, relationships, and exchanges.

The potency of chiasmus, as Peacham suggests, comes from how its confuting and inverting terms stops us and from how its syntactical display insists that we measure identity and association, opposition and relation. Thus ensuring that we estimate complexities and difficulties more than we judge consequences, this figure helps to configure Measure for Measure as a problem play both for formal, syntactic reasons and for a thematic reason, our understanding the vexatious links between justice and mercy. It seems reasonable, then, to claim for a working premise that rhetorical schemes may help us understand not only other Shakespeare plays but works by others as well. Thus, examination of chiasmus in Measure for Measure indicates that when we think about literature we need to consider the uses of schemes just as we consider the uses of tropes and images.

Notes

(1.) I follow the tradition that uses "figure" as the general term including both "tropes" such as metaphor that use a word to mean something beyond its customary meaning and "schemes" such as chiasmus that arrange words in patterns that call attention to themselves. But contrary to one common complementary pairing, I would not agree that schemes are merely "figures of sound" whereas tropes are "figures of thought": schemes also change meanings.

(2.) Wheeler's Critical Essays collects most of the influential articles from this era; these particularly include various historicisms. See especially Katharine Eisaman Maus, "Sexual Secrecy in Measure for Measure," in Inwardness, as well as the judicious and illuminating survey of problems and promises in her introduction to Measure for Measure in The Norton Shakespeare: 2021-27.

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Ira Clark ([e-mail]) is professor of English at the University of Florida. He has published essays on a wide variety of topics in early modern English poetry and drama. He is author of Christ Revealed. The History of the Neotypological Lyric in the English Renaissance; Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome; and The Moral Art of Philip Massinger.