Measure for Measure

As if torn from current headlines, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is a complex, dark comedy about justice and mercy, corruption and virtue, chastity and sex. Claudio, a young nobleman, is condemned to die for impregnating his fiancée. This punishment is imposed by Angelo, a puritanical statesman who, in the absence of the Duke of Vienna, enforces the law with great severity. The Duke, disguised as a monk, looks on as Angelo’s career falls apart due to his own moral hypocrisy when he seeks to trade Claudio’s life for the virginity of his sister, Isabella. Considered to be one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” along with All’s Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure is thought to have been written between 1603 and 1604 with the first recorded performance in 1604. The play was first published in 1623 in the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognized as his.