51 pages • 1 hour read
Measure For Measure
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Act IVAct Summaries & Analyses
Act IV, Scene 1 Summary
Mariana is listening to a boy singing a song when Vincentio arrives in his disguise. Isabella enters and the three of them conspire about how they will trick Angelo into having sex with Mariana. Isabella reveals the secret route into Angelo‘s bedchamber that he showed her and they plan to have Mariana go there instead that night, using the darkness to disguise her identity. Both women agree to the plan and Isabella instructs Mariana to remind Angelo about his agreement to free her brother. Vincentio assures them that since Angelo agreed to marry Mariana, he is lawfully her husband despite the lack of a wedding ceremony, and therefore this is not a sin.
Act IV, Scene 2 Summary
At the prison, Pompey agrees to serve as assistant to the executioner, Abhorson, in exchange for avoiding his whipping. Pompey and Abhorson discuss the relative honesty of their professions—the bartender at a brothel and an execution—and Pompey decides that executioners are more penitent.
Vincentio returns to the prison and learns that Claudio is scheduled to be executed the next day. A note arrives from Angelo, but it is not a pardon. Rather, it confirms that Claudio should be executed alongside another prisoner called Barnardine in the afternoon and then his head should be sent to Angelo. Vincentio inquires about Barnardine and learns that he is a long-term prisoner who is a drunk and refuses to reform or listen to moral advice. Vincentio tells the provost to execute Barnardine first and send his head to Angelo instead of Claudio’s, using his ducal signet as proof of his authority. He warns the provost that Angelo is not aware that the Duke is returning, thinking him dead or possibly entering into a monastery.
Act IV, Scene 3 Summary
Pompey and Abhorson go to prepare Bernardine for his execution. However, the man is drunk and sleepy, making him unable and unwilling to repent. Vincentio worries that he is condemning a man to damnation since he will be executed without being spiritually prepared. However, the provost discovers that a pirate named Ragozine, also in the prison, has died already that morning of a fever and his face closely resembles Claudio’s. Relieved, Vincentio commands that his head be sent to Angelo instead of Bernardine’s.
Isabella arrives, expecting to find her brother pardoned, but Vincentio lies to her and claims that her brother has already been executed. She is furious and wishes to publicly confront Angelo, but Vincentio tells her to be patient because he has gotten word that the Duke is returning. He tells her to wait to make her accusation until she is in the presence of the Duke.
Lucio offers his condolences to Isabella, telling her that if the Duke had been in town, Claudio would have lived. He continues to accuse the Duke of being prone to vice, but Vincentio gets him to admit that he once impregnated a sex worker whom he then refused to marry.
Act IV, Scenes 4-6 Summary
Angelo and Escalus puzzle over Duke Vincentio’s letters, reading that he wishes them to meet with him publicly to transfer power and to put out a call that any who want to accuse someone of injustice to come petition the Duke on the city streets. Angelo worries about Isabella publicly denouncing him, but decides that his reputation will protect him.
Vincentio delivers letters via another friar called Peter that his attendants should meet him at the city gate with trumpets. Isabella and Mariana wait near the city gates. Isabella is confused about why she must wait to expose Angelo’s crime but Mariana advises her to listen to the friar.
Act IV Analysis
The fourth act of Measure for Measure portrays Vincentio’s scheme coming together as he saves Claudio from execution through subterfuge and then prepares to expose Angelo’s crime before the public. Through this plan, Shakespeare continues to criticize the flaws of civic justice by indicating how executing criminals does not lead to their salvation, raising the issue of Earthly and Divine Justice. By having the pimp and bartender Pompey apprenticed to the executioner Abhorsen, Shakespeare implicitly suggests that both trades damn men’s souls.
While Mariana and Isabella succeed in their bed trick upon Angelo, it does not save Claudio’s life as they had hoped. While Angelo had promised to spare Claudio if Isabella had sex with him, he sends a letter to the prison the next day ordering Claudio’s execution. His motivations are explained in a soliloquy where he expresses his worries:
that riotous youth, with dangerous sense,
Might in the times to come have ta’en revenge,
By so receiving a dishonour’d life
With ransom of such shame. Would yet he had lived! (IV.4.2337-2340).
This confirms that Angelo did not order Claudio’s execution out of any genuine sense of justice or legal necessity, but to save himself from further scandal if Claudio decided to take revenge later. The justice system becomes nothing more than a vehicle to silence those who might expose the corruption of the state.
Similarly, Pompey’s new employment in the prison suggests that the civic justice system is fundamentally similar to the brothel. When offered the chance to save himself from whipping by becoming the executioner’s apprentice, Pompey agrees, claiming, “I do find your hangman is / a more penitent trade than your bawd; he doth / oftener ask forgiveness” (IV.2.1933-1935). Pompey implicitly equates the role of a bawd and an executioner, suggesting that the only difference is that the executioners prays for forgiveness more. As an executioner literally kills men for the state, Pompey spiritually killed men’s souls when he tempted them into visiting a brothel. The civic justice system is therefore not aligned with Christian justice, as it has become functionally indistinguishable from a brothel.
Vincentio also discovers this unnerving problem with justice when he attempts to save Claudio’s life. While at first he suggests that a notorious criminal named Barnardine should be executed in Claudio’s place and his head should be sent to Angelo instead, he wavers after meeting Barnardine in the prison. Barnardine is drunk, seemingly unaware of his situation, and completely unrepentant. While that might suggest that he ought to be executed, Vincentio realizes that killing him would only serve to doom his soul, calling him, “A creature unprepared, unmeet for death; / And to transport him in the mind he is / Were damnable” (IV.3.2185-2187). The only solution comes in the form of an accident—another prisoner has coincidentally died of a fever on the same day that Claudio must die and they happen to look similar. Vincentio attributes this accident to God’s intervention, exclaiming, “O, ’tis an accident that heaven provides!” (IV.3.2196). Nevertheless, without divine intervention, Vincentio still has no way to solve the problem of execution as a form of civic justice—an issue that haunts the play’s final act as Vincentio prepares to enact justice upon Angelo.
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By William Shakespeare
