The relative disfavour in which the play of _Measure for Measure_ has
doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simply
explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully and
plausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicial
authority in France or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured
cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too much a
prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England. This
comment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisive and
direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question.
The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this
play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee
among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the
Puritan Angelo is exposed: it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished.
In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage
"the strong indignant claim of justice" is "baffled." The expression is
absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored or
even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word
directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck
in the face.
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