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Starting with Raglan's suggestion that Falstaff may be a “holy fool” and with Auden's belief that he is a comic symbol of charity, this essay explores the medieval tradition of wise fool, and especially Falstaff's always canny use of biblical allusion. His various jests, if read in relation to the political action of the main plot, reveal him as characterizing England's time of day and parodying the unchristian behavior of Hotspur, Henry, and Hal. By the time he dies mumbling Psalm xxiii to an uncomprehending Nell Quickly, there have accumulated many hints that he is, in fact, a candle to his age, a professional Fool with the heart of a faithful Lazarus, and destined to join Mowbray in Abraham's bosom. The merriment for which readers have found him lovable amid his masquerades of vice has its mysterious basis in his covertly Christian understanding of England's neo-Roman Caesars.

About 1594 a young English poet, then in his twenty-first year, composed a satire on religion, described by Professor Grierson as “one of the earliest and most thoughtful appeals for toleration, for the candid scrutiny of religious differences, which was written perhaps in any country.” The satire directs its jibes at all men who choose their religion uncritically—whether they blindly turn to Rome or to the Church of England, whether to Geneva, to Atheism, or to religious relativism. The author advises, instead, a diligent searching out of the “right” and the “best” religion. The task, as he pictures it, is a difficult business, demanding of us that we inquire patiently and “doubt wisely”; for the Truth stands at the top of a steep and craggy hill, and only by a most careful circling of that hill can we reach the summit.

The title-page of Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1590) presents “two Tragicall Discourses” concerning a mighty monarch who “(for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was rearmed, The Scourge of God.” A dozen times in the play Tamburlaine calls our attention to his title; and the last syllables of his dying breath are devoted to announcing it. “Scourge of God,” however, is no mere phrase that happened to catch the playwright's fancy; it is a definitive concept which signifies a pattern of human behavior and of divine destiny.

In an age when thinking was emerging from the dominance of Christian dogma to become once again, as in Classical times, man-centered—when Pico was raising new hopes by his Oration on the Dignity of Man, and Calvin new anguish by his outcry over man's lost dignity—Shakespeare brought the mood of the times to a focus in Hamlet. The mood had two sides, as Theodore Spencer has argued: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. “To Pico and the earlier humanists,” he writes, “man belonged with the angels. But to Montaigne, and the satiric, melancholy, realistic writers of the 1590's he belonged with the beasts.” Which is truer of man, then: the dignity of an angel, or that of a beast? The conflict of appraisal is mirrored, Spencer contends, in the hero of Shakespeare's most famous play, providing that play one of the main reasons for its greatness.

A recent editor of Shakespeare describes Measure for Measure as “strange and puzzling,” “the despair of commentators.” No play, it would seem, has met with estimates more conflicting. Even common sense (in the person of Samuel Johnson) has voiced disapproval; and the insight of Coleridge, which so often probes deeper, has registered here a pained dislike. Complaints against either the play's subject, its plot, its hero, or its heroine have been heard from critics as eminent as Hazlitt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Sir Edmund Chambers. In opposition to the disparagers, however, there has appeared within the last century a strain of favorable criticism, lately almost enthusiastic. The rehabilitation may be said to have begun when certain Victorian commentators proclaimed Isabella a sweetly noble heroine, defying Mrs. Lennox's judgment of her as a “mere Vixen.” Yet these same Victorians disapproved the Duke; so that the recent and brilliant apology for the Duke by G. Wilson Knight, comparing the Duke's words and deeds with those of Jesus Christ, has come as a remarkable advance in the reappreciation of the play. At the same time W. W. Lawrence, by his study of medieval custom and analogue, has helped recommend the play's action and enhance its theatrical plausibility. Despite these defenses there are critics who continue to read Measure for Measure as a portrait of disillusionment,‘ negation, and the playwright's supposed cynicism. But two recent Annual Lectures before the British Academy take up boldly the opposite view. C. J. Sisson declares that “Far from being rotten, the play is sound to the core, and profoundly Christian in spirit”; and the late R. W. Chambers acclaims it as embodying a philosophy “more definitely Christian than that of The Tempest.” Appearing the same year as Professor Chambers’ spirited essay is C. J. Reimer's Marburg dissertation, in which we find repeated with emphasis Louis Albrecht's earlier high estimate of the play: it reveals, say these German scholars, the “Hauptzüge der Shakespeareschen Weltanschauung”—namely, a Christian faith not dogmatic or ecclesiastical but Biblical and evangelical. Finally, there has been in recent months a flurry of essays exploring the play's ethical nature. D. A. Traversi calls Measure for Measure “uncompromisingly moral”; F. R. Leavis finds in it a “fineness of ethical and poetic sensibility” which makes it “one of the very greatest of the plays”; and Miss M. C. Bradbrook offers the suggestion to regard it as “something resembling the medieval Morality.” Out of this welter of criticism one truth clearly emerges: that in this instance Shakespeare's work has abundantly justified its teasing title by becoming a “measure” for critics.