If you are able to read along you will also notice the punctuation and where each line ends. This soliloquy is written in verse, like a poem. Ask yourself:

• Are there lines or parts of the speech that stand out because of how they sound?
• If you wrote down all the line-ending words, what would you think the soliloquy was about? Does that feel right?

• Try applying these same strategies to all of Angelo’s speeches to reveal any changes in the character’s language and behaviour. How does his use of language change when he’s in public compared to when he is alone?
• Take a look at the rhythm of the iambic pentameter in his speeches. Read it out loud and beat out the syllables. When is it regular and when does he break rhythm? What can this suggest about Angelo’s state of mind?
• Keep a record of the images in Angelo’s language. Which images stand out particularly? Why might this be? Take note of any repeated themes in his imagery and if this gives any clues to what he’s thinking. Find out more by looking at the Analysing the Imagery section below.

• What are the key images that stand out for you in this speech? What visual pictures do they suggest in your mind and how does that help you imagine the mood of this moment in the play?
• Notice any repeated words or sounds in the speech. What effect do they have when spoken out loud?
• What do you notice about the verbs that the duke uses in this speech?
• Can you find examples of alliteration or assonance and how do you think these literary techniques affect the mood of the speech?

• The duke changes his language a lot to suit how he’s feeling and who he’s talking to. In Act 3 Scene 2, he speaks mostly in prose but, when left alone, switches to verse in a soliloquy in which he shares his deepest thoughts only with the audience. Ask yourself:
• What has happened to the duke in this scene that might have led to this change in his speech?
• Examine the rhythm of this soliloquy. How different is it to regular iambic pentameter and how might this affect the actor delivering it and the audience hearing it?
• What do you notice if you emphasise the last word of each line? What do you notice if you read just the first word of each line?
• Try applying these same strategies to the other speeches the duke has in the play. Consider how his language changes at different moments in the play and what this might reflect about how he feels at those moments.
• Take a look at the opening scene of the play and explore it in detail in our section, The Duke's Departure.

• Images of wearing or changing clothes are common in Measure for Measure. Early on, the duke disguises himself as a friar, passing his identity to Angelo who is now ‘dress’d him with our love’ (1:1). In Act 2 Scene 2, Isabella uses ‘proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority’ to warn Angelo that he is a small man taking advantage of borrowed power.
• Different textures of costumes and cloth are used to give scenes a different tone. Lucio is insulted on the streets in Act 1 Scene 2 by being compared to ‘French velvet’, a reference to the velvet patches used to cover the sores from a sexual disease. The tone gets more serious in Act 1 Scene 3 when Claudio says Angelo is using deadly laws that have ‘hung’ forgotten on the wall like ‘unscour’d armour’.
• There are many examples of people hiding or changing their appearance in the play. In Act 2 Scene 4, Angelo accuses Isabella of manipulating him in the same way that beautiful women wearing ‘black masks’ appear even more attractive. In his soliloquy at the start of Act 2 Scene 4, Angelo references his own name when he says that simply writing ‘good angel on the devil’s horn’ doesn’t change the devil’s character.

• Money and treasure are used in Measure for Measure to describe how people can be tempted and what their characters are worth. Isabella, for example, in Act 2 Scene 2, puts the true value of prayer above coins and ‘fond sicles of the tested gold’. In Act 2 Scene 4, Angelo compares the sin of creating a child outside of marriage to illegally forging coins, ‘In stamps that are forbid’.
• Shakespeare uses jewels and precious stones to create powerful, sometimes sensual images, such as when Angelo tells Isabella to ‘lay down the treasures’ of her body in Act 2 Scene 4 and Isabella declares she’d rather ‘wear’ the marks of whips ‘as rubies’ on her skin.
• How many examples of money and treasure imagery can you find in the play and what do they add to the drama when they are used?

• Shakespeare uses some powerful and often disturbing imagery from nature in Measure for Measure. In Act 1 Scene 3, Claudio describes human attraction to evil like ‘rats ravin down’ the poison that kills them. Later in Act 3 Scene 1, the duke compares Angelo’s false image to ‘idle spiders’ strings’ that trap the small sins of others but break under the weight of his own. Lucio makes Angelo even more monstrous in Act 3 Scene 2, when he claims a ‘sea-maid spawned him’ between ‘two stock-fishes’.
• In Act 1 Scene 3, Claudio describes the public as ‘A horse’ that Angelo is breaking in, letting them ‘straight feel the spur’. The duke admits in Act 1 Scene 2 that he has behaved like ‘an o’ergrown lion in a cave’ and neglected the laws of Vienna. In the same speech, the duke describes rules and laws as ‘needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds’. This image crops up again when the duke angrily criticises Angelo: ‘To weed my vice and let his grow!’ (3:1).
• Take a closer look at the extract from Act 2 Scene 2 below to explore how Isabella uses a range of imagery to influence Angelo. Why do you think Shakespeare uses this language at this point in the scene? Why is animal and nature imagery so important in the rest of the play?

• The theme of power is central to Measure for Measure. The plays explores all different types of power, how it can change people and how it can be abused. Some of the most striking examples of power come from the way women are physically controlled by their surroundings. The ‘dejected Mariana’ has shut herself away in a ‘moated grange’ (Duke, 3:1), a secluded retreat, showing her as a prisoner of Angelo’s cruelty. In Act 4 Scene 1, Isabella’s description of the place where Angelo wants to sleep with her, the ‘garden circummured with brick’ with its maze of locked spaces, reflects how he wants total power over her and how restricted her choices are as a woman. Even Juliet, heavily pregnant, spends the play in a jail cell.
• The abuse of power is a theme explored by the duke, who has made Vienna suffer by neglecting to use his own power correctly. He passes responsibility to Angelo to see ‘If power changes purpose’ (Duke, 1:4). Angelo spectacularly fails this test and his taste of power quickly reveals him as a ‘murderer’, ‘an adulterous thief’ and a ‘virgin-violator’ (Isabella, 5:1).
• The different powers of men and women are examined in the play. Angelo lets the people of Vienna ‘straight feel the spur’ (1:3), a cruel and violent way of taking control compared to the more subtle actions of ‘maidens’ who ‘weep and kneel’ and make ‘men give like gods’ (Lucio, 1:4).
• See how many references you can find in the play to power and control. Can these be split into categories of positive and negative power? In which situations is power used in a positive way and by whom? When is it negative?

• The entire plot of Measure for Measure relies on substitution and things or people swapping places. At the start of the play, the duke replaces himself with his deputy, Angelo - ‘In our remove be thou at full ourself’ - and swaps the restraints of public office for the freedom of a friar. Mariana’s virginity is substituted for Isabella’s in Angelo’s bed in the hope that ‘the doubleness of the benefit defends the deed’ (3:1), making the point that one woman is as good as another to men like Angelo, who doesn’t even notice.
• The double substitution of Claudio’s head adds some comedy to the play when Barnadine refuses to be executed, meaning another head needs to be found to replace it. On a more serious note, the duke orders in Act 5 Scene 1 that Angelo’s life be exchanged for Claudio’s ‘death for death’ and ‘measure still for measure.’
• Shakespeare uses the city of Vienna to stand in for Elizabethan London. At this time in history, Vienna was full of prostitutes and pimps and disease was common. In the London of Shakespeare’s time, buildings were being demolished to try and control the plague. This is echoed by Angelo’s ruling that ‘All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down’ (Pompey, 1:2) as the ‘suburbs’ were the places where the brothels were.
• What other examples of substitution or things being swapped or exchanged can you find? What do these particular themes add to the play?

• The nature of justice is very important in Measure for Measure and the connection between God and justice is mentioned often. In Act 1 Scene 3, Claudio describes Angelo’s justice as a ‘demigod Authority’ which, like God, can decide to punish ‘whom it will’ and ‘whom it will not’. Isabella asks Angelo in Act 2 Scene 2 how he’d feel if God, ‘which is the top of judgement’, judged him like he is judging Claudio.
• The fairness of justice is questioned a lot in the play. Escalus comments in Act 2 Scene 1 that ’Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall’ and even Angelo admits that justice is only as good as the men who use it when he asks Escalus ‘what knows the laws / That thieves do pass on thieves?’ (2:1). Justice can be used as a weapon but men can also use it to hide behind, like Angelo does in Act 2 Scene 2: ‘It is the law, not I, condemn your bother.’
• Shakespeare makes us question the authority of the law by introducing Elbow, an overworked constable, who speaks in malapropisms (mistakenly using one word in place of another similar sounding word, often with comic effects). In Act 2 Scene 1, Elbow calls his prisoners ‘two notorious benefactors’ instead of ‘malefactors’ (criminals) and calls Mistress Overdone’s brothel a ‘respected’ house instead of a ‘suspected’ one. Why do you think this is important to the play? What does it make us think about the law in Vienna and the duke’s role as governor?