Introduction

2My aim in this article is to bring additional arguments to this point. First, applying a surveillance grid to the plays helps inform Shakespeare’s analysis of the scopic regime of drama and of the power it grants the playwright. Second, the surveillance angle is an analytical instrument that induces a comprehensive perspective on Shakespeare’s mise en abyme patterns and on their role in establishing the plays’ reflexive trends. Indeed, the playwright often uses surveillance as an allegory of the interaction between watching entities and watched entities within theatrical space. A third complement to Treilhou-Balaudé’s approach regards the nature of the scenes or plays she places under the surveillance label. Academics often restrict the study of surveillance in Shakespeare’s plays to the numerous eavesdropping scenes they include. Nevertheless, scenes that have apparently little to do with surveillance often contain enlightening surveillance implications. Concerning Hamlet, for instance, a study of the dumb show and of the Mousetrap scene through the lens of surveillance may elicit a new angle on the power of the performance. The play within the play endows the Prince of Denmark with the power to expose a murderer and threaten a King. Through the embedded show, the stage metaphorically watches the audience. The producer of the inset exerts control over the spectators. A few cinematic productions have recently emphasised this dimension. Gregory Doran’s adaptation of Hamlet (2009) is one of them. So is Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011), which the director builds around the idea that the stage watches the groundlings in return. In Othello, to elaborate on another example Catherine Treilhou-Balaudé conjures up, the parodic eavesdropping moment of act 4 scene 1 dissociates hearing from seeing. The separation generates a perspective on the role of surveillance in constructing theatrical illusions. The heart of Iago’s manipulation consists in placing Othello in the position of overhearing conversations without being able to make out the matching dialogue. Thanks to this dissociation principle, Iago induces Othello to misinterpret what he has attended. Iago’s scheme reflects the turning of visual perceptions into what they are not that is the basis of successful theatrical enchantment.

3My main contention in this paper is that, in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s utilisation of surveillance patterns to anatomise drama reaches a more profound level than in Hamlet, Othello, or the other plays in which surveillance is directly involved. The playwright radicalises and synthesises the main analytical trends which surveillance generates. Surveillance thus becomes the nexus of the ethical, political and aesthetical aspects of Measure for Measure. To make this point, I will first relate the surveillance and disciplinary practices of Shakespeare’s time to some of the play’s prevalent thematic pairs: imprisonment and punishment, authority and the prerogatives of the ruler, divine rule and secular law. I will then show the character of the Duke stands as a polymorphous vehicle of surveillance. His status is characterised by hyper-vision and over-information, but also by a propensity to act as a stage producer to exert control over his subjects. I will finally advance that the play’s surveillance components participate in Shakespeare’s refining of the theatrum mundi cliché, and in his questioning of drama’s right to capture, imitate or re-create reality.

A surveillance experiment

4According to Harold Skulsky, Measure for Measure “offers several tests” in the efficiency of early modern forms of punishment (Skulsky, 98). The play deals with the mechanisms of control prevailing in the age. This is confirmed by Jonathan Dollimore, who notes that the play “gives the marginalised a voice, one which may confront authority directly but which more often speaks of and partially reveals the strategies of power which summon it into visibility” (Dollimore, 84). One of this article’s main ideas is that because of its comprehensive surveillance span, the play dramatises the imminent switch from one dominant conception of power to the next. Those perspectives on control are respectively embodied by Vincentio and Angelo.

5To compare forms of rulership, Shakespeare introduces an experimental protocol. The steps Vincentio takes to correct his mistakes as a ruler, for instance, evince his subtle understanding of command. By putting Angelo in office, the Duke does not merely act on the observation that his ruling strategies have become useless. Placing Angelo in a position of power also places him under the critical gaze of the “millions of false eyes” stuck upon rulers the Duke mentions at 4.1.60-61. A privileged spectator of Angelo’s control strategies, the Duke initiates a test. Its aim is to assess the efficiency and legitimacy of the methods he has not been able to use, which Angelo personifies. By setting the stage for this experiment in governance, however, the Duke also becomes an object of study himself. His scheme consists of deriving a superior form of power from his status as unknown, but constant, observer. This strategy also becomes a ruling technique. It is offered for the spectators to evaluate with the other disciplinary methods Measure for Measure focuses on.

[…] the enrolled penalties
Which have, like unscour’d armour, hung by th’wall
So long, that nineteen zodiacs have gone round,
And none of them been worn (1.2.155-58)

9This form of command, however, suffers a crisis. Act one questions the efficacy of deterrent sentences by staging what Skulsky calls “the obsolescence of fear” (Skulsky, 98). The Duke blames himself for his past leniency in act 1 scene 3, admitting: “’Twas my fault to give the people scope” (1.3.35). Such self-criticism sounds like an admission of his faults. It leads to the exposure of laws that are not followed by effect. Angelo embodies this second viewpoint on authority. First of all, Angelo’s perspective on visibility connects eye perception with evidence. In act 1 scene 2, Claudio explains Angelo punishes him because his union with Juliet lacks “outward order” (1.2.138). Though their marriage is effective, it is not visibly so. From Angelo’s point of view, this discrepancy is a projection of disorder. The fact Juliet’s pregnancy, unlike her matrimony, is “writ” “with character too gross” (1.2.144) on her makes the fault more serious. The lovers have failed to create the appearance of legitimacy that would have cancelled the signs that Juliet has all too visibly erred before marriage. A strict observation system, designed to ensure the law be observed, is the base of Angelo’s authoritarian state.

11Angelo’s surveillance system, however, should not be reduced to spying techniques. His pattern of visual control consists of staging the execution of the sentence consequent to the law rather than the law itself. Measure for Measure abounds in explicit descriptions of the exemplary character of punishment. Lucio provides one in act 1 scene 4, when he states that the aim of Claudio’s sentence is “to make him an example” (1.4.68). Angelo’s decision concerning Claudio reflects the instruments of control of the pre-Enlightenment era, and more specifically what Foucault calls “the spectacle of the scaffold”. With this phrase, he describes the need for power to seek “a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations” (Foucault, 57). Angelo thinks that leaders declaring themselves happy with the deterring quality of the law run the risk of losing their authority. He fears the ruler’s power will abate if citizens get used to the visual presence of the rod without ever having to fear its concrete effects. When he levels another criticism at the Duke’s rulership, his condemnation sounds like an advocation of the medieval method of command Foucault describes. In act one scene two, Claudio expresses his surprise at the unusual way Angelo has organised his punishment.

Claudio Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to th’world?
Bear me to prison, where I am committed.
Provost I do it not in evil disposition,
But from Lord Angelo by special charge. (1.2.108-111)

12By immediately organising ‘ritual displays’ of the law’s consequences, the substitute expresses the exception he takes to the Duke’s strategies. Angelo’s perspective on authority, therefore, is in keeping with the control patterns Foucault ascribes to the pre-panoptic age. Indeed, before the panoptic era, the link between hyper-vision and power was not established.

13Finally, the play introduces a third angle on visual power, which refers to a much more elaborate type of surveillance. It consists in the Duke’s amendment of his former behaviour. This evolution results from the constant surveillance he exerts on the other characters for most of the play, thanks to which he learns about innovative power techniques.

Studying the ethical stakes of vision and surveillance in the early modern age

15The question of divine surveillance and of its place in protestant doctrine is the object of constant references throughout Measure for Measure. The play underlines that God occupies the uppermost position in a hierarchy of watchers extending from the divine to the base. It also reflects an evolution in societies that turns divine surveillance into a merely human prerogative. Angelo’s trajectory in the play illustrates this development. In the first scene of the first act, the Duke praises Angelo as a man with nothing to hide. As such, Vincentio can entrust him with the task of gazing on the citizens of Vienna to judge them. Like Hamlet, Angelo “know[s] not seems” (1.2.76). Nevertheless, his confidence that what he shows expresses what he is soon turns into a matter of conscience. This trait expresses the character’s superiority as a staunch Puritan. In his answer to the Duke’s words in act 1 scene 1, Angelo immediately asks for “some more test” of his “metal” (1.1.48). This reply suggests that only divine judgement can disclose what spiritual and concrete matter Angelo is made of. Besides, he wishes to sport this spotlessness to the world as undeniable evidence of valour. To take up the words in which James D. Fleming describes the Protestant theory of conscience, Angelo “submit[s] to the surveillance […] by socially opening [his] secret mind – making it everybody else’s place” (Fleming, 73).

16In his study, Fleming also describes an alternative perspective on conscience, which derives the right to secrecy from the notion of divine surveillance:

17As I have discussed, not even the most tutoristic casuistry denies individual inwardness. On the contrary, it guarantees such inwardness, precisely by way of exposing the mind to divine surveillance. Conscience is exactly and only what renders the created mind secret from all other created minds. Yet God’s indwelling eye, and only God’s indwelling eye, is what makes mind mind, and conscience conscience. The theory of conscience, in other words, predicates social secrecy (which it provides) on spiritual exposure (which it demands). (Fleming, 72)

18In the play, the character of Isabella exemplifies this view. The beginning of act one scene four introduces her wish to retire from the world to join the order of St Clare, one with the reputation for strictness. A clear surveillance logic underpins her decision. As Francisca reminds her of, Isabella has chosen to preserve her looks from the eyes of men to keep them for those of God. In Francisca’s line, the possibility of Isabella’s interaction with men is limited to either the visual or the oral, which implies that she may only have full sensual communication with the divine. Besides, inter-human contact is restricted by the chaperoning presence of the prioress, who seems to relay divine supervision down below:

When you have vow’d, you must not speak with men
But in the presence of the prioress;
Then, if you speak, you must not show your face;
Or if you show your face, you must not speak. (1.4.10-13)

19It is important to notice that Measure for Measure shatters both Isabella and Angelo in their respective creeds. Isabella’s encounter with Angelo eventually leads her to follow the Duke, despite her initial choice of a spiritual marriage with God. Angelo’s path is more tortuous than Isabella’s. However, it also ends in a broken bond with God’s observant gaze. In her first conversation with Angelo in act two, scene two, Isabella uses a clever argument against Angelo. She reminds the Puritan in him that his power to judge is nothing compared to God’s:

How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? (2.2.75-7).

20Were Angelo exactly the Puritan he wants to show he is, this argument would win Isabella’s case. For the Duke, however, Angelo cultivates the appearance of austerity but hides lechery underneath. His reaction to Isabella’s presence exposes this feature. As Max Weber and Sam Whimster have explained, the pressure of divine surveillance induces Puritans to “exercise the strongest possible control over [their] behaviour” (Weber and Whimster, 16). In the circumstances the play describes, this is how Angelo should behave. Instead of that, he soon yields to temptation, and gives up self-exploration in order to embrace deceit. In act two, scene two, for instance, Angelo urges Isabella to come back the next day. A likely reason for delaying the encounter is the presence of the Provost, whom Angelo summoned to witness his good behaviour with the future nun. Angelo, however, decides to make advances to Isabella. The witness, originally a token of the ruler’s transparency, thus becomes an obstacle preventing Angelo from giving way to his darkest impulses. His desire to meet with Isabella in private elicits his lightning switch from well-advertised self-exploration to secret and concealment, thanks to which he keeps his shameful actions unknown.

21To save appearances, however, Angelo opens his troubled mind for the spectators to peek at. He does so in soliloquies about his qualms that sound like confessions. Through those speeches, Angelo offers himself to the spectators’ judgement, and drama perverts the confessional exercise. The Duke is at the origin of this change. His initial plan is a surveillance strategy. Vincentio wants to keep Angelo under watch once he is in power in order to expose his true self, but also to disclose the limitations of his governing strategies. As he unravels his plan, it gradually appears that the Duke substitutes himself to the divine with his probing of Angelo’s conscience. The Duke’s scheme works, yet it does not provoke the return to religious order. In act five, scene one, upon realising that he has been the victim of a trick, Angelo declares: “I perceive your Grace, like power divine,/ Hath looked upon my passes” (5.1.367-68). For Angelo, his trial is a perversion of divine judgement. To judge him, Vincentio usurped God’s place and scrutinised his soul, as the words “grace”, “passes” and “confession” underline. Meanwhile, Vincentio also aped God by becoming the ubiquitous observer of all the characters’ actions. Because it foregrounds divine watching, the play’s conclusion makes it necessary to look back at its plot and reassess the share of the Duke’s surveillance strategies in its ethical and aesthetical stakes.

Hyper-vision and over-information

22The Duke provokes and maintains the alternation of secrecy and exposure that characterises the play’s structure. In the first scene, his speech pairs the antithetic lexical fields of disclosure and concealment. The verb “to unfold”, for instance, appears twice in the scene, each time to suggest the object of revelation may be a mere appearance. To qualify his presentation of Angelo, the Duke also refers to elucidation:

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not. (1.1.32-5)

From liminal spectatorship to stage production

24The Duke experiments panopticism by placing himself in the position of watching a whole society from top to bottom. Nevertheless, even in the prison scenes, which necessarily evoke the repressive power of Bentham’s prison house to contemporary audiences, Vincentio’s visual aegis helps him save rather than punish his subjects. Besides, by endorsing the panoptic role of the one watching the many, the Duke discovers the power that lies in synopticism, a term coined by Thomas Mathiesen to describe inverted patterns in which mass audiences focus on a small group of individuals (Mathiesen, 99). For Gareth Palmer, within a synopticon, “we, the many, are witness to the crimes of the few thus reversing the symmetry of the gaze” (Palmer, 97). In the play, the Duke generates a synoptic pattern by placing Angelo under “millions of false eyes”: those of the Viennese citizens, but also those of the spectators. In his confession to the audience of act two, scene two, Angelo even behaves as if he were aware that the audience’s attention is focused on him. He treats the synoptic configuration as an opportunity to present himself as the victim of devilish temptation and therefore to alleviate the severity of his sin in the eyes of the spectators. As the play unravels, Angelo is more and more intensely submitted to this pattern, of which the final act is an archetypal instance.

25Simultaneously, observing Angelo’s predicament leads the Duke to overcome his own loathing of stage visibility. The play includes numerous moments in which Vincentio derives his privileged information status from the ability to watch the action, as if from the audience. He thus manipulates the spectators by deciding what they are to watch and therefore what they are to know. His intervention during the conversation between Claudio and Isabella in act three, scene one is a case in point. The Duke enters the stage at the most appropriate moment, which suggests he took his cue from the characters before interfering. His entering of the fray coincides with a change in his course of action. Halfway through the play, Vincentio switches from surveillance to stage direction.

26Complementarily, the Duke gradually realises that visibility will restore his abated might. The strong insistence on visual evidence that pervades act four, scene two illustrates this alteration. After line 120, Vincentio, still disguised as a friar, has the Provost read a letter sent by Angelo. The document bears Angelo’s official signature, and states that his orders must be “duly performed” (4.2.121). The conversation then switches to the case of Barnardine, whose guilt has been confirmed by “undoubtful proof” (4.2.135). That it is now “apparent” (4.2.136) justifies the Duke’s decision to have Barnardine executed instead of Claudio. This debatable move, he promises, will become understandable when he supplies a “manifested effect” (4.2.159). Finally, at the end of the scene, he crushes all remaining misgivings in the characters surrounding him by displaying “the hand and seal of the Duke” (4.2.191), in the belief that those visual signs of power will lead them to obey.

27The Duke’s plan in act three, scene one is an important stage in his evolution. To protect Isabella while simultaneously preserving order, the Duke resorts to the substituted bedmate trick. For practical reasons, the encounter between Angelo and Mariana is to happen in the dark and in silence. This specific atmosphere has a metaphorical quality. Indeed, darkness will keep the visual proof of the union from the other characters’ eyes. The Duke thus preserves the revelation that an “old contracting” (3.2.275) has been performed for act five. Besides, as Isabella’s comment reveals, the intercourse that solves the plot remains a matter of imagination: “The image of it gives me content already, and I trust it will grow to a most prosperous perfection” (3.1.260-61). The image of the act remains unseen and in the dark. On the contrary, the Duke “produces” the resulting return to marital order in his final display of power.

28Act one, scene two also illustrates the manipulative power of showing. Claudio expresses his confidence that the “prone and speechless dialect” of his sister will move Angelo. Lucio builds his strategy on this remark. In act two, scene two, he directs Isabella in real time so that she obtains Angelo’s favours, and clarifies his plan in numerous asides. By directing Angelo’s gaze on Isabella, Lucio conducts a display of beauty that successfully achieves its manipulative effect. Angelo falls in love with Isabella, but with unexpected consequences. Besides, with the oxymoron “speechless dialect”, Claudio points to the rhetorical power of placing the right images at the right moment under someone’s eyes to alter their decision-making. The Duke gradually turns this principle into a full-scale method. A mere actress in Lucio’s hands, Isabella only briefly regains control over her destiny before becoming a puppet in the Duke’s show, as her admission in act four, scene three, shows: “I am directed by you” (4.3.136).

29The Duke’s addition of stage-producing qualities alongside his surveillance practices is a notable evolution from his disciplining pattern at the beginning of the play. By watching over other characters, the Duke does not only discover the power of surveillance. He also experiences the power of showing. Vincentio then organises performances to manipulate the characters. He first diverts the spectators’ eyes from himself to Angelo, to expose him as the villain of the piece and correlatively to present himself as the best possible ruler. He then structures his return so all eyes focus on him.

30Vincentio thus turns from liminal spectator, watching the events of the play as if from among the groundlings, to liminal director, acting from the areas bordering the stage to organise his final return to the proscenium. The surveillance schemes in which he engages lead to the play within the play of act five. Measure for Measure thus generates its theatrum mundi perspective by incorporating surveillance ingredients that combine power with watching and with showing. As a result, the surveillance component adds further complexity to the mise en abyme patterns Shakespeare experiments in other plays.

Aesthetical and metaphysical issues: refining the theatrum mundi cliché

32The characters constantly express the feeling that they are under supervision. This emphasis leads to another semantic ambiguity, which concerns watching. Repeating that the characters are being watched, in the diegetic meaning of the word, is a way of reminding the extradiegetic spectators that they contribute to the play’s surveillance atmosphere, simply by watching the show (Banu, 15-16). The device to which Shakespeare resorts in other works generates aesthetic distance and makes the play appear as a play rather than as reality. In Measure for Measure, however, surveillance creates distanciation in an innovative way. The surveillance backbone of the play does not only liken the spectator’s perception to spying on the characters. The nuance comes from the fact the Duke, while organising the various diegetic surveillance trends featured in the play, is simultaneously subjected to the spectators’ gaze. Vincentio invents tricks to put on a show of order and attempt to get closer to the divine. As he does so, the spectators realise that their superior watching position is also more than human in kind. While the Duke fashions a whole word in miniature according to his designs, the spectators are in the privileged position of watching his creative scheme.

33Consequently, Measure for Measure puts theatrical craftsmanship under surveillance. A specific use of the theatrical vocabulary reinforces this investigative purpose. The text often presents people as “characters”, and their actions as “performances”. This use of polysemy characterises the entire canon, in which it conveys that the world depicted on stage is nothing but drama. The same technique serves a slightly different purpose in Measure for Measure. In a society where visual evidence is so precious, reducing visual illusions to figments is a way of questioning the benefits of surveillance. If the world is indeed a stage, on which everything is appearance, true visual evidence does not exist. The Duke’s surveillance techniques give apparent objectivity to the visual proof he deems so important. In act five, he acts on this belief. In the end, however, the spectators know he has created nothing real, because they have followed his manoeuvring throughout. By placing the theatrical spectacle under surveillance, the play thus shows the scopic regime of drama creates a mere semblance of objectivity. Hence Shakespeare offers an objective view of theatre. In the dramatic regime, giving the spectators something to see is sufficient to make it exist. The Duke’s assertion that virtues are nonexistent if no one perceives them at 1.1.32-33 underlines this notion. So does Angelo’s allegory of act two, scene one:

The jewel that we find, we stoop and take’t
Because we see it; but what we do not see,
We tread upon, and never think of it. (2.1.24-26)

34Consequently, Measure for Measure ascribes creative power to the gaze of the spectators rather than merely to the artist’s stroke. This modification has important consequences on Shakespeare’s study of the ethical stakes of artistic creation. Like many early modern artists, Shakespeare was aware that his dramatic practice induced him to create a believable world, and thereby to ape God’s creation. In Measure for Measure, however, the act of aping God is less a creative action than the adoption of a specific perspective. The play insists on the importance of the creative gaze in the theatrical process. As Harold C. Goddard has shown, Vincentio acts as a surveillant god throughout the play (Goddard, 58). This perspective suggests that man’s Promethean fault lies in replicating God’s total surveillance, rather than just in imitating God’s creative actions.

35Isabella epitomises this standpoint. Her status as a nun to be makes her the most likely character to advocate that the faithful should preserve the hierarchy between the human and the superhuman. Her first attempt in this direction occurs during her encounter with Angelo in act 2, scene 2. It consists of a violent tirade against his stealing of a power he should not wield:

                                     Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet,
For every pelting petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder.
Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured – 
His glassy essence – like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal. (2.2.111-24)

36To put man in his right place below the divine, Isabella first creates an image of usurpation that is consistent with the play’s take on substitution. She places man in a heavenly location from which he can throw down thunderbolts on mere mortals. Complementarily, this high up position endows man with the ability to see everything, and therefore to punish even minor offences. In the second part of Isabella’s speech, this unreasonable use of divine surveillance goes back under the thoughtful supervision of heaven. This reversal sends man back down from the position of ubiquitous watcher to that of humble watched entity. This change of status leads to Isabella’s conclusion about man’s “glassy essence” as an “angry ape”. At the end of the speech, the traditional fault of aping God significantly involves vision. Man’s pride does not only induce him to think he can imitate the gods by interfering with their creation or by indulging in the creation of illusions himself. It also consists of deluding himself that he is in the position of watching everything. Isabella accuses man of using this superior status to direct the moves of fellow human beings. Meanwhile, he forgets that he is a mere actor on the world’s stage, and that angels mock his overweening temper. In keeping with this criticism, the reference to glass combines the ideas of reflection and transparency. It means not only that man is a mere image, but also that he is wrong to think he has total clarity of vision.

37In act two, scene four, Isabella elaborates on this vision of pride. She applies it to women, declaring they are as frail “as the glasses where they view themselves, / Which are as easy broke as they make forms” (2.4.124-25), and adds that “men their creation mar/ In profiting by them” (2.4.126-27). Women foolishly consider their reflection in the mirror as stable and enduring. They are frail for being unable to tell the true essence of being from illusory images. Such confidence in their appearance makes them a perfect receptacle for male pride to exert itself. Isabella translates the manipulation of men by women into visual terms. In her view, men impose an image upon women to make them their possessions. Through Isabella, the play once again describes the scope of man’s actions in scopic terms. By finally accepting to be “directed” by the Duke, Isabella proves the applicability of her vision of pride. Her decision, however, also casts an ambiguous light on the Duke’s behaviour throughout the play.

39For this reason, the Duke is on an equal footing with Prospero in The Tempest. Both characters allow Shakespeare to explore the possibly forbidden sides of artistic practice. With Prospero, the wizard, Shakespeare focuses on nearly magic creative actions leading the main character to exert authority over an island that is a world in miniature. Through the Duke, who renews his power thanks to a combination of observation and stage direction skills, the part of dramatic creation that consists of warping the gaze receives specific attention. At the same time, Measure for Measure compares two kinds of surveillance, the Duke’s and God’s. Vincentio’s surveillance endows him with the ability to create a distorted vision of reality at the scale of his own microcosm, i.e. Viennese society. Divine surveillance, on the contrary, is the only kind of vision that gives the power to judge and rule. The Tempest evokes the presence of a greater creator above. Similarly, Measure for Measure reminds its spectators that the authority the Duke derives from his ubiquity is a pale equivalent of the surveillance which God effects on men and women. The title of the play confirms the presence of this moralising quality. It evokes the Old Testament, and the watchful eye of a wrathful God hanging over human beings, ready to punish them for their faults. Even though the Duke is the one who uses the phrase, divine judgement also applies to him, with all the more strength for his propensity to imitate God’s watching. In act five, scene one, the apparently anecdotal revelation that he has “confess’d” Mariana (5.1.524), and therefore probed her soul, emphasises the Duke’s overreaching. By dressing up as a friar, Vincentio committed the sin he had exposed in Angelo. He thought ostensible religiosity would endow him with the divine right to scan the conscience of his citizens. The play conclusively underlines that the Duke did not so much usurp the divine power to create illusions as another brand of Promethean might, endowing him with the ability to see more than mere human beings should.

Conclusion