John Heminges and Henry Condell listed Measure for Measure as a comedy in the 1623 folio, a categorization whose insufficiency was addressed by F. S. Boas in 1896. Boas reclassified the play as a “problem” play and a problem play it has remained, though different critics identify the problem in often diametrically opposed features of the play; its ending in marriages appears perfunctory; its use of the Deus ex machina seems contrived; the characters in the play hardly seem likeable or sympathetic. Indeed, audiences want Angelo to be held accountable, and audiences shake their heads in dismay at the excessive value Isabella places on her own virginity. Audiences gape in wonderment at Barnardine’s successful refusal to allow his own death sentence to be executed. Skeptics distrust the Duke’s bend-don’t-break approach to governing, and some audiences want justice for some, mercy for others. This play is a problem; worse yet, it was intended to be.

In general, this paper explores several often neglected components of the play, in particular, the figure of the slanderer, Lucio. Lucio, by most accounts, is ignorant of the Duke’s disguise, and uses licentia, frankness of speech, unwittingly; he bashes the Duke presumably behind his back. By elucidating the dark corners hiding in Lucio’s language, however, this paper proposes some atypical claims about just what Lucio knows. Specifically, I argue that Lucio, in fact, does recognize the Duke through his disguise as Friar Lodowick, and that he perceives the Duke’s “trick” from the very beginning of the play. Lucio’s frankness of speech, as irrational and hyperbolic as it is, is the outward and discursive counterpart to the “mad fantastical trick” of the Duke’s hidden plan and subsequent disguise (3.2.92). Lucio then claims that he was speaking according to the “trick,” but the trick was instigated by the Duke, himself, when he dons the friar’s cowl and begins to roam Vienna in order to dupe his subjects. By rendering Lucio as a complicit performer in the Duke’s subterfuge, this reading makes clear just what the play’s problems really are: what the play is really suggesting about justice, mercy, and about the nature of kingship. In Shakespeare’s period, of course, the risk Lucio runs in openly slandering his ruler is not inconsequential.