"Severity must cure it": Sin, Morality, and Politics in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Angelo in Measure for Measure urges that adultery is punishable by death, he argues that murder and what he calls the false coining of a human life are equivalent sins and that both are mortal. Unlicensed sex and illegal killing are equally damnable. His female opposite, Isabella, as much an absolutist as he is, seems to agree but with an important qualification: “‘Tis set down so in heaven but not in earth” (2.4.50). Will Tilleczek sets out to interrogate the role of aesthetic Christian morality as that plays out in the political sphere in Shakespeare’s most overt exploration of biblical themes. Through a detailed and perceptive analysis, he shows how much of the play is a working out of the ethical principles that Saint Paul articulates in his Epistle to the Romans and that Jesus expresses, somewhat more enigmatically, in the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. What Will demonstrates persuasively is that the absoluteness of Paul’s injunction to “mortify the deeds of the body” (Rom. 8.13) is unworkable in the realm of human law and politics and that the alternative of Christian mercy, however humane, is no more effective from a political perspective. The attempt to translate Christian morality into political practice, he concludes, results either in the tyranny and cruelty of an Angelo or in the moral laxity which predominates at the opening of the play and to which the Duke apparently returns, no further ahead, at its close. Isabella, in other words, is probably right. Dr. John Baxter
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".