the hidden solar energy allegory in Measure for Measure

1. “Will’t not off?”: Will Steps Out from
the Shadows of Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure is the Shakespearean play that is closest to a spy story. Duke
Vincentio appears in disguise throughout the play and actually spies on people, including
Angelo, among others; Mariana, a sort of secret agent working under orders from Duke
Vincentio, engages in sex while pretending to be someone else; Isabella deceives Angelo by
telling him she will have sex with him; Angelo lies to many people. The audience is never
fooled by the deceptions, though many characters are.
In such a story of espionage, deception and ruses, it is so appropriate that
underneath the obvious drama, there is a secret allegorical play occurring. Like the secret
allegorical plays in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Julius
Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra
and The Merchant of Venice, the secret play in Measure for Measure also concerns the
sun and coal.
The Secret Allegorical Play
With an allegory, it is always most interesting to see who “plays” who. First, and
most importantly, is Duke Vincentio, who is the allegorical depiction of Shakespeare

2. himself, and could be no one else. First, of course, the Duke is a great stager of events: he
leaves Angelo ‘in charge’, (disguised as Friar Lodowick) he organizes the secret ruse
Isabella and Mariana carry out together to trick Angelo into sleeping with Mariana;
(disguised as Friar Lodowick) he makes sure no prisoners are executed; (disguised as
Friar Lodowick) he asks Isabella to appear at the city gates to greet the Duke; and then
as the Duke again, he appears to take sides with Angelo at first when Isabella makes her
accusations. In fact, as Friar Lodowick, he even warns Isabella that “if peradventure he
speak against me on the adverse side, I should not think it strange” (IV.vi.5-69. In other
words, he coaches characters to deliver certain lines and notifies them in advance how
those lines would be received in order to reassure them.
Lucio, a character who is close to being the ‘wise fool’ of the play (such characters
usually divulge truths) describes Vincentio as “the old Fantastical Duke of dark corners”
(IV.iv.157), so we can guess that Vincentio is good at ruses, plots, secretive games,
imaginative tricks, and so forth. We know that Shakespeare created many plays with
secret Hermetical allegories buried in them, so the “old Fantastical Duke of dark corners”
epithet could equally apply to him.
It is also Lucio who pulls off the Duke’s “friar’s hood’ and unmasks him, divulging the
truth of the Duke’s secret identity---and also hinting, with a brilliant pun, that there is

3. still another secret identity still unmasked. “Show your knave’s visage, with a pox to you!
Show your sheep-biting face, and be hanged an hour! Will’t not off?” (V.i.355) ‘Will’ is, of
course, the nickname of William Shakespeare. The ‘fool’ is a character whose lineage can
be traced far back to pagan seasonal rituals and pre-Christian festivities; in addition
“Lucio” means ‘light’, underscoring his bond with the sun and therefore also underscoring
his authority, so it is only Lucio who is allowed to divulge this deep, ‘fantastical’ truth
about the real persona cloaked behind Duke Vincentio. In addition, the name ‘Vincentio’
means “conqueror” (from the Latin vincere: to conquer) and we do know that William
Shakespeare once referred to himself as “William the Conqueror”.1 William Shakespeare
did see his plays as cultural weapons in the fight against coal and fossil fuels and he saw
himself as a secret fighter involved in this cause (a cause spanning many centuries), so in
this way the name “Vincentio” is also apt.
Moreover, Vincentio gives a speech describing his attitude towards his subjects where
he uses an extended theater metaphor (with lots of phrases that could be used to describe
the theater) to characterize himself as a “man of discretion”:
1 Legend tells us that a woman fell in love with Burbage when she saw him play
Richard III and begged him to come to her chambers that night under the name of
King Richard. But Shakespeare overheard the proposition and, as a joke, left the
theatre early to take Burbage's place. Shakespeare was "at his game ere Burbage
came. Then, message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare
caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III" (Rowse,
A. L. Shakespeare the Man. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. p.130). retrieved on
3/17/2017 http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/richardburbage.html

4. I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes;
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it….(I.i.67-72)
Shakespeare uses this theater metaphor to playfully hint at his real persona as a
playwright.
A similar extended play on words occurs later in Act 5, when Duke Vincentio delivers
a speech, heavy in sarcasm, where he uses imagery belonging to the world of writing and
literature:
O, your desert speaks loud, and I should wrong it
To lock it in the wards of covert bosom,
When it deserves with characters of brass
A forted residence ‘gainst the tooth of time
And razure of oblivion. (V.i.9-13)
Vincentio addresses this speech to Angelo, and of course Vincentio (as well as the
audience) knows that what Angelo deserves (i.e. his “desert”) is probably death (since
Angelo has broken his word to Isabella and has also sentenced Claudio to die for having
premarital sex, when Angelo himself has also had premarital sex). However, Angelo at
this point in the play has no idea that Vincentio knows about the deal he made with
Isabella nor does Angelo know that Vincentio knows that Angelo reneged on the deal and
ordered Claudio to be executed even after Isabella seemingly went through with the plan

5. to deflower her. Thus when Angelo hears the phrase “O your desert speaks loud” he is no
doubt able to misinterpret it as a positive exclamation of praise. Vincentio’s phrase “When
it deserves with characters of brass/ A forted residence ‘gainst the tooth of time/ And
razure of oblivion” clearly points to something written (“characters of brass”) that will be
long lasting and permanent such as an artwork or a piece of classic literature (for
example, this play). So while Angelo thinks he understands this speech, he actually
completely misunderstands it: Vincentio means that Angelo’s cruel duplicity is singularly
worthy of fame.
Shakespeare may be hinting that he has also duplicitously written some “characters
of brass” which seem to say one thing but contain a totally different meaning underneath.
Isabella
Who is Isabella in the secret allegory? Isabella’s secret identity is also revealed by
Lucio, whose association, through foolery, with the sun makes him reliable and
trustworthy. Meeting her for the first time, Lucio says to her:
I hold you as a thing enskied, and sainted,
By your renouncement an immortal spirit,
And to be talk’d with in sincerity,
As a saint. (I.iv.34-37)
Isabella is in training to becoming a Christian nun (she has not yet taken her vows)
when the play begins. Her association with holiness and the divine is, however, not at all

6. Christian in the secret allegorical play, where she is, like Juliet, Olivia and Desdemona,
more of a nature goddess associated with the sun, the earth, and the universe in general.
The word “enskied” (containing the word “sky”) in Lucio’s speech above hints at her true
identity. She gets heavily associated with the word “heaven” (it is a word constantly
aimed at her or spoken by her), especially in Act II, scene ii (the scene where she first
pleads with Angelo to spare her brother’s life), where it occurs 10 times. The word
“heaven” can be read on the surface as a religious or Christian word, but it can also be a
reference to the sky or to a delightful place or state.
A Hermetic reading of this play must use the pantheistic ideas of Giordano Bruno, a
central, though cloaked figure in Shakespeare’s plays2. “Bruno’s own universe was also
animated in all its parts, but it was infinite in space and eternal in time. He reclaimed it
as the habitat of an infinite but no longer fully Christian or even transcendental God.”
(Hilary Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno, p. 310) Bruno argued for a pantheistic
approach to religion: “There are clearly pantheistic tendencies behind Bruno’s concept of
an infinite homogenous universe, which tends to identify with the divinity itself” (Hilary
Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno, p. 309). So in Measure for Measure, the word “heaven”,
as it is associated with Isabella in the underlying secret allegorical play, means the
2 See my presentation delivered at the Shakespeare 450 conference in Paris in April
2014. “Stand and Unfold Yourself”: Prince Hamlet Unmasked.

7. divinity of the actual sky and cosmic space, the stars, the moon, the clouds, rain, the sun,
and all the rest of nature. It does not mean the Christian heaven, which was a space, the
seat of the Christian deity, beyond the ‘spheres’ which was made out of the so-called “fifth
element” or “quintessence”. (Bruno argued that the universe was all one, homogenous,
and that there was no quintessence).
Isabella also gives a speech which covertly hints at sun worship because the sun as
an image (actually, the sun-rise) is placed near the image of people praying:
Not with fond sickles of tested gold,
Or stones, whose rate are either rich or poor
As fancy values them; but with true prayers,
That shall be up at heaven, and enter there
Ere sun-rise, prayers from preserved souls,
From fasting maids….. (II.ii.149-154)
In the surface action of the pay, Isabella is in danger of “defilement” by Angelo, who
is using blackmail to force her to have sex with him in return for clemency for Claudio,
her brother. But under the surface of the surface play, Isabella, the beautiful and sacred
nature around us, faces quite another threat from the character who is depicted by
Angelo.
Angelo
Who is Angelo in the secret allegorical play? Angelo is obviously significant if he is
important enough for Vincentio to spy on. Angelo is almost certainly the all the people

8. ever engaged in western capitalism (including those of us engaged in it today). It is fuel
that drives economic growth and concomitant population growth; economic growth
beyond a certain limited level was only possible with coal. By 1603, the year that Queen
Elizabeth I died, coal had surpassed wood as England’s most common fuel, making
England the first, though not the last, country to leave the sun economy.3 Shakespeare
seems to have utterly disapproved of the pollution and brutal economic changes that coal
brought and all of his secret plays in his comedies, tragedies and romances (I have not yet
looked at the histories but one day I will) target coal and extol the sun. He seems to have
seen the pollution of coal as a violation of the divinity of nature and seen human’s main
responsibility to work together to maintain a clean, beautiful and harmonious
environment.
I can cite many places in Shakespeare’s works to prove this idea, but Sonnet 10
would be a really clear and short example:
For shame! deny that thou bear'st love to any,
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lovest is most evident;
For thou art so possess'd with murderous hate
That 'gainst thyself thou stick'st not to conspire.
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Whichto repair should be thy chief desire.
3 Barbara Freese Coal: A Human History. Penguin Books, 2004. page 34

9. O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:
Make thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
The line “seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate” echoes Hamlet’s sad and famous
description of the sky as “the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapors” (II.ii.302-306). Both are cloaked allusions to coal smoke.4
The person to whom the narrator speaks, the ‘fair young man’, is mankind. Now he is
“unprovident” and “seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate”, which is a signal, as in
Hamlet for producing coal smoke (which blackens the sky). Polluting and defiling the
earth is a horrible thing in Shakespeare’s eyes, which he likes to being “possess’d with
murderous hate” and also an act against humanity in general (“That 'gainst thyself thou
stick'st not to conspire”). The narrator reminds the fair young man that living an
environmentally-friendly life (that is seeking to “repair” the beauteous roof that is the sky)
should be “thy chief desire”. And the poet wants to see mankind reformed: “O, change thy
thought, that I may change my mind!” so that in this case the “make thee another self”
4 For a full discussion of the coal/sun dichotomy in Hamlet please see my academic
article “"Stand and Unfold Yourself" : Prince Hamlet Unmasked” in 筑波大学地域研究,
35 号、2014. Pages 79-99.
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/120005555561

10. (technically a rhetorical procreation message in the conceit) actually signals more the idea
of changing humanity’s thinking and becoming more environmentally conscious.
The name “Angelo” is heavily ironic since it means “Angel”, someone perfect, though
Angelo is far from perfect. He is described as “precise”, a term “often applied to Puritans”
(The Riverside Shakespeare, footnote, page 555) so obviously Shakespeare could have
been commenting on Puritans.
However, the name “Angelo” could have one more meaning: it is interesting, and I
think very significant, that Giordano Bruno was imprisoned in Rome in a place called
Castel Sant’Angelo. Measure for Measure contains many scenes set in a prison with a
condemned man (who really had done nothing wrong, as Giordano Bruno had also done
nothing wrong but come up with theories that violated some Church dogma) at the center.
In all likelihood, Angelo sums up many wrong attitudes: especially Puritanical and
hypocritical attitudes towards sex, and the false and cruel carrying out of justice (hence
his name, similar to the prison where Giordano Bruno spent nine years before he was
executed on February 17, 1600).
Mariana
Duke Vincentio’s stratagem to protect Isabella (that is, to bring about positive change

11. in the environmental consciousness of people) and save Claudio requires one more
character: Mariana. She also has an underlying, or hidden role in the secret allegorical
anti-coal play. Mariana is first seen not heard: Mariana and a boy enter in the opening of
Act IV and the boy is singing, while Mariana is silent.
Mariana shortly thereafter says to Vincentio: “I…well could wish you had not found
me here so musical” (IV.i.11). She also says to him “I am always bound to you”, while the
Duke then tells her that Isabella “hath a story ready for your ear”. The associations of
Mariana with music, with being “bound” (bound can be ‘in one’s debt’ but it can also
mean, ‘bound physically like a book’), and with the notion of ‘story’ do point to the
possibility that Mariana is Shakespeare’s works. She functions as a sort of secret agent.
While disguised as someone else, she sleeps with Angelo, so this act of sexual intercourse
symbolizes another act: the act of people engaging with Shakespeare’s works as they
read, perform, watch, and study them. It is a close and intimate relationship between
people and Shakespeare’s works. But, then in what sense have people perhaps been
“fooled” by this relationship (as Angelo was “fooled” by Mariana)?
This parallel “fooling” of the Shakespeare-consuming public occurs because the
relationship is a commercial one, relying on markets, money, consumption and the profit
motive. People may assume their relationship consuming Shakespeare is satisfying and

12. fine (what other way to consume Shakespeare after all?) but at heart, Shakespeare wants
to shoot an arrow through the heart of capitalism, fossil fuels, money, and so forth (or
rather, he wants to call attention to the long-term poor prospects of these things since
they are not based on the sun and the planet is basically powered only by the sun in the
long run---unless the fusion energy developers can successfully prevail; it is probable that
Shakespeare never envisioned fusion energy.)
One of the very shrewdest comments ever written about Shakespeare, therefore,
links his authority with the element of the market economy:
….I intend to reopen the possibility that Shakespeare is the common
possession of Western modernity and a definitive expression of its
experience. Such a claim, which in the not very distant past would have
seemed altogether self-evident, is likely to strike many contemporary
readers as controversial and even inflammatory. The argument I hope to
advance is not, however, that Shakespeare is a hypostatized body of
reliable social wisdom and moral certainty or that his works ought to
have the function of secular scripture. Shakespeare is a common
possession, though not unambiguously a common good. In my view,
Shakespeare’s authority is linked to the capacity of his works to represent
the complexity of social time and value in the successor cultures of early
modern England. One of the crucial features common to these successor
cultures is the way individuals and institutions must constantly adapt to
the exigencies of a market economy. Our extended historical dialogue
with Shakespeare’s works has been one of the most important ways to
articulate values more durable than those which circulate in current
markets. (Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare, p. xii)
This “extended historical dialogue with Shakespeare’s works” is exactly who and
what “Mariana” represents in the secret allegorical play. (The “market economy” is fossil

13. fuels, or rather, it could not exist without them.) It was George Orwell who famously
wrote “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself”, and in a sense,
we have succeeded brilliantly at this mission as regards Shakespeare. This is why the
allegorical figure representing these works is a secret agent.
The secret allegorical play in Measure for Measure, like the secret allegorical plays in
the other Shakespeare plays, foresees a time when this secret can’t be hidden anymore.
In other words, fossil fuels would recede from economic importance and viability---and the
“current markets” would go “uncurrent” and the “values” they “circulate” would reveal
themselves to be less than “durable”. It may be decades or centuries away, (and it may not
even happen if the developers of fusion prevail), but nevertheless, Shakespeare uses this
future moment (it seems to have inspired him) again and again in his plays to extreme
dramatic effect: Othello realizing what a mistake he has made in killing his wife, Romeo
approaching the comatose Juliet in her tomb, Macbeth facing his end with cold, hard
resolution to never give up, Hamlet dying (as the secret is gone—i.e. Claudius (coal) is
dead, the need for Hamlet’s jester-like antics and strategies to resist him also
disappears), and so forth.
This ‘future moment’ in Measure for Measure occurs when Mariana enters in a veil
and accuses Angelo of having sex with her, then she unveils herself and he realizes that

14. he has been tricked. Angelo still denies his crime, but then, minutes later, Lucio, the
truth-teller, pulls Friar Lodowick’s hood off and reveals that the friar is also the Duke.
Instantly, Angelo realizes that the game is up and that he cannot dissemble any further.
Shakespeare envisions some sort of revision of our view of Shakespeare.
Perhaps, already, such a revision is occurring. The late Yves Bonnefoy, the celebrated
art historian, scholar of religions, and a famous translator of Shakespeare into French,
once identified a mysterious entity which he called “un probleme occidental” (“a problem
of the west”) that lies at the heart of Shakespeare.5 He did not elaborate on what this
“problem occidental” was but it must be something rather fundamental, going far, far
back in time, and since Shakespeare relied so much on Giordano Bruno for ideas and
inspiration, and since Bruno was executed by the Catholic Church in 1600 for these same
ideas, I would guess that the “probleme occidentale” is something like the mythical
landscape underlying the mythic thinking of the west, which does tend to see a “fallen”
material world as our home (Planet Earth); in a sense it is a space not worth saving or
protecting because it is, by definition, not sacred. (Hence we see the sad fact that there is
now more plastic than fish in our oceans and the water protectors seeking to save
5 Yves Bonnefoy, in his Plenary Address at the Shakespeare 450 conference on
Shakespeare sponsored by the Societe Francaise Shakespeare in Paris on April 21,
2014. (I was in the audience and heard the comment live, and I can understand French,
having studied it for 8 years).

15. precious and sacred resources on Earth are ignored as oil pipelines are built instead).
Bruno was executed for suggesting that the beautiful cosmos, the Earth, the sun, the
stars, is all sacred, all one, and all part of the divine.
“Vaporous night” vs the sun
In Act IV, scene 1, as the Duke visits Mariana in her “moated grange” (a space of
separation) he tells her “I shall attend your leisure, but make haste/ The vaporous night
approaches” (IV.1.56-7). So often in Shakespeare, vapors or gall or rheumatic fogs are
symbols for coal smoke (it is an unhealthy substance) and “night” is also used to indicate
coal smoke, which is very black and blocks out the sky. Also, of course, night is the
opposite of day, and day is associated with the sun.
The sun is only mentioned three times in this play. The first instance, which I have
covered above, is when Isabella refers to the sun-rise. A few lines later, Isabella exits and
Angelo, alone, agonizes about his lustful feelings for her:
Angelo: What’s this? What’s this? Is this her fault, or mine?
The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most, ha?
Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flow’r….(II.ii.165-6)
To Angelo, the sun is not a beautiful thing that fits with prayers, instead it is a driver
of the rot of a dead animal or a driver of plant growth. Here, in a nutshell, is the purely
scientific view of the earth, without any sacred elements ascribed to nature at all.

16. The third and final use of the word “sun” occurs much later in Act IV, when the Duke
has granted mercy to Barnardine (though they were hoping to use his head to fool Angelo
into thinking that Claudio really had been executed, as commanded by Angelo; yet, the
Duke absolutely cannot allow Bernadine to be executed as Bernadine shows that he is not
prepared for death; the merciful and kind stance of the Duke is thus made clear):
Duke: Let this be done:
Put them in secret holds, both Bernadine and Claudio.
Ere twice the sun hath made his journal greeting
To yond generation, you shall find your safety manifested. (IV.iii.87-90)
First we saw Isabella’s linkage of the sun to prayers and holiness, then we saw
Angelo’s scientific view of the sun as a driver of natural processes. Finally, and fittingly,
the Duke weighs in with his use of the word “sun”. What do his lines show? First, he sees
the sun as something that lights up the whole earth and whose light will “greet” “yond
generation” (the people who are “yonder”, i.e. on the other side of the world). The sun is a
huge cosmic force which structures time and space for us, all of us, whether we are in the
“west” or the “east”. He links the sun with “safety manifested”---people may be able to
find security and safety if they turn to the sun, renewable energy, nature, etc. And also,
he may be hinting, with the word “secret” so close to the word “sun” that the sun is
something involving a secret.
“Escalus”

17. First lines in Shakespeare’s plays are always important and revealing. From
“Gregory, on my word, we won’t carry coals” to “Who’s there?......Nay, answer me, stand
and unfold yourself” (and so many more), the first one or two lines pithily summarize the
theme of the play. So Measure for Measure has a mysterious opening line: “Escalus”, and
what are we to make of it?
This is no doubt a cloaked reference to the Greek writer of tragedies, Aeschylus. (The
Escalus in Measure for Measure is described as “an ancient lord” and is a wise, reflective
sort of person.) Aeschylus’ most famous work is the trilogy The Oresteia. Like Measure for
Measure, The Oresteia features the “return” of a character (to Argos) to exact revenge for
a crime, rather like the Duke Vincentio “returns” to Vienna to punish Angelo for a crime.
Interestingly, in The Oresteia, it is Apollo, the god of the sun, who orders Orestes to
punish Clytaemnestra:
In the second play of Aeschylus' The Oresteia, many years after the murder
of Agamemnon, his son, Orestes returns to Argos with his cousin Pylades to
exact vengeance on Clytaemnestra, as an order from Apollo, for killing
Agamemnon. (from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oresteia)
I am quite sure that Shakespeare knew enough of The Oresteia to manage to
refer to it. There are a lot of debates about how much Greek Shakespeare really knew,
but finding someone in London in the early 1600s who knew it wouldn’t have been

18. difficult for someone as well read and connected and wealthy as he was. There is also a
good chance that he could have read it himself.