Explainer

Creed

Theatre

20 April 2023

7 min read

How Shakespeare seasoned justice with mercy

As Shakespeare’s birthday approaches, Anthony Baker explores how the playwright let two ancient enemies fight it out on stage – justice and mercy.

Anthony Baker

Anthony is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

A line illustration of a theatrical play scene showing a crowd waiting on standing and sitting judges to make a decision

A scene from Measure for Measure, The Spirit of the Plays of Shakspeare (sic), Howard (1828-33).

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In order to act with mercy toward someone, must I forgo a sense of justice? If I decide to act justly, have I decided to leave mercy behind? These are questions of philosophers and theologians. They also provide some of the thickest philosophical and theological ponderings of William Shakespeare.

A studied contemplation of mercy and justice does not, of course, originate with the Elizabethan playwright. For as long as humans have pondered how to order their civic spaces, they have puzzled over the demands of each. Around 500 B.C.E, Rabbi Yehudah is recorded as having said that God spends three hours a day on a throne of justice before getting up and crossing over to a throne of mercy, on which he spends an equal length of each day. 200 years later, when Plato devoted his most famous dialogue to the question of justice, he gave only the slightest nod to mercy, acknowledging that the just ruler would need a reputation for generosity.

Though many of Shakespeare's plays notice the interaction, or lack of interaction, of these two qualities (The Tempest and nearly all of the history plays, for instance), he penned two for what seems to me the explicit purpose of letting these two ancient enemies fight it out on stage. I'll focus on one of these and return briefly below to the other.

Justice Unbound

The first, Measure for Measure, takes its title from a line from Jesus' sermon on the mount. This is a signature move of the Bard, to take a religiously charged line, doctrine, or even person, and make theater out of them. While some have argued that this was all he was doing with religion or theology, I have suggested that he is doing more. He is mining the depths of faith language to see if he can find gems that we might be missing if we only pay attention to the identity politics of Reformation era England. "Grace is grace despite of all controversy," one character in this play says. That could be the tagline for Shakespeare's theological interventions.

We see Shakespeare having some of his typical fun with religion in Measure for Measure. The Duke of Vienna gives away his power in order to go abroad, as he claims, for a piece of international politics. In fact, he sneaks back into the city immediately, now disguised as a friar (a member of a religious order like the Franciscans). He tells the friar who lends him the robes that he is doing this because he has made an irresponsible practice of letting the city's "strict laws and biting statues slip." He has, that is to say, been more of a merciful father than a just ruler. He doesn't want to unbind this "tied-up justice" himself, since he fears this would cause his people to question his integrity. ("But you've always been so merciful before now!") So, he contrives a plan to deputize one of the nobles, Lord Angelo, to be the hammer of justice in his stead. He also hints that there are other reasons for his disguise. I'll come back to that bit of foreshadowing.

Angelo immediately finds an episode in need of his firm hand. A gentleman named Claudio has got his girlfriend, Julietta, pregnant. There are in fact circumstances that seem worth considering: the two are engaged and are only waiting for her to receive her dowry - arranged before they go to church. But Angelo will not hear of clemency. He is severe, one noble remarks. This is as it should be, a wise old Lord responds. "Mercy is not mercy that oft looks so," he says, perhaps angling gently at a critique of the Duke's mode of operation.

Justice only deals with what it can see, in other words. We pick up a jewel on the ground only when it catches the light; buried or soiled, we walk right past it or even trample it.

Merciless Secrets

At this point in the play we have our two adversarial qualities in neat, separate containers. One container, called The Duke, is only merciful. But this container must be removed from the state so the other, called Angelo, can display its contents of merciless justice.

But, as this is Shakespeare, things quickly begin to get messy. Angelo turns out to be hiding secrets. The old Lord, having hinted that the Duke is over-merciful, now suggests that Angelo is being a bit hard on Claudio. He cautiously suggests that, had time and place given opportunity, Angelo himself might have come to the wrong side of the law. Angelo's response says more, perhaps, than he means to:

"What's open made to justice,/ That justice seizes."

Justice only deals with what it can see, in other words. We pick up a jewel on the ground only when it catches the light; buried or soiled, we walk right past it or even trample it.

This is our first hint of Shakespeare's subversion of the polarized containers. Listening to Antonio's speech, we've begun to wonder if, lacking the slightest trace of mercy, justice doesn't in fact begin to look a little unfair.

And then we see Angelo acting on his theory. Claudio's sister comes to him to beg for her brother's life. Angelo is quickly captivated by her beauty, and soon offers her a deal. If she will meet him for sex in the garden—secretly of course, so that the crime cannot be "unjust"— he will let Claudio free.

This offer obviously shows the rot in his theory of justice, as he is forming a contract, a just bond, around blackmail and rape. But it also ruins mercy, since his proposed pardon of Claudio is not merciful at all, but simply the meeting one end of a "just" bargain.

The Kiss

Our neat containers have nearly dissolved around their contents. "Mercy is not mercy that oft looks so," but justice is not justice that only looks so. Justice as merciless as Angelo's turns out to be unjust, in the same way that mercy without justice turns up bereft of mercy. This is why the Duke left, and it's why Angelo fails as his deputy.

But the Duke has returned, and now we begin to see what his secret purposes are. He goes to visit Claudio for confession and counsel, and also goes to Claudio's sister for comfort and advice. Here is one of the delightful places where Shakespeare plays with religious stereotypes. The "controversy" of grace that I mentioned above, is for Shakespeare's audience an all-too familiar one, over whether God saves us through our works, and so through a contractual justice, or through grace, which is to say through an act of unearned mercy. The Catholic Church was generally (though not often accurately) associated with the former, the Protestants with the latter. But here it's a Catholic friar (or at least a disguised one!) who enters as the personified mercy.

The Duke/friar devises a plan, and it nearly goes as awry as the more famous friar's plan in Romeo and Juliet. Which is to say that our comedy nearly becomes a tragedy. I won't give away the ending, if you've forgotten or never made it through. But I'll offer a hint: the Duke, on his return, is no longer an embodiment of unjust mercy as he was before. Now he sees clearly that true mercy is just, and true justice is mercy. The two must kiss, as the Psalm puts it. His clever idea for a resolution is all about allowing mercy and justice to exchange a kiss.

When Mercy Seasons Justice

The more familiar play in which Shakespeare lets us watch the battle of justice and mercy is The Merchant of Venice. Here we find the story of maybe the strangest contract made since the dawn of commerce: if a merchant defaults on his loan, the moneylender will claim an entitlement to "a pound of flesh." Is this mutually agreed-upon contract unjust, or simply merciless?

The religious fun is rampant in this play as well. The lender is a Jew and the merchant is a Christian. But the Jew's strict call for commercial exactitude gets tempered by his excessive love for his daughter, and the Christian's supposed reputation for grace is in fact an excuse to practice favoritism. Eventually we have on stage such a confusion of religious stereotypes that someone asks which character is which.

Well, the poor merchant can't pay, as we knew already at the moment he made the foolish contract. And so, Portia, this play's mercy persona, comes—also in disguise—from the fairytale land of Belmont with a clever trick to save her beloved merchant. While her solution involves a highly questionable interpretation of the law, she manages to persuade the ruling authority.

As Portia is making her case, she offers one of the most explicitly theological speeches in all of Shakespeare's works. Earth's rulers might think they are most godlike when they enact the law with authority, she says. But "mercy is above this sceptered sway." In fact, mercy is "an attribute of God himself." She concludes, much as the Duke concludes, that "earthly power doth then show likest God's/ When mercy seasons justice."

In plays like these we see displayed one of his most enduring gifts to us: the ability to play with the familiar and make it strange and new.

Shakespeare, had he indeed been "for all time" as a contemporary put it, would be celebrating his own 459th birthday this week. In plays like these we see displayed one of his most enduring gifts to us: the ability to play with the familiar and make it strange and new. He gives us philosophical and religious figures and themes, and then just as we assume we know who and what they are, he surprises us by showing what sort of dish you can make if you but swirl the ingredients.

Our best efforts at justice, whether of the personal or political sort, must be seasoned by mercy. Our acts of mercy, if not ultimately just acts, will turn out to be merciless. Would we have noticed this if no one had had let it happen on stage in front of us?

Explainer

Creed

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin

10 July 2023

7 min read

Sin: explained

From rottweilers to North African bishops, Graham Tomlin kicks off the Seven Deadly Sins series with an introduction to the unpopular idea of ‘sin’.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Illustration generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney.

A little while ago I went for a health check. They took a blood test, weighed me on the scales, poked me around a bit. Soon afterwards, I got a printout of my general health. It told me that my blood pressure and liver function was pretty good, but I ought to watch my cholesterol, my calcium levels could be a bit higher, and my folate result was not great (whatever that is).

It told me a lot about my physical health. What it didn’t tell me was anything useful about my spiritual and moral wellbeing. I began to wonder where I could get a spiritual health check? Is there a way of telling whether I am in danger of diseases that might affect my soul rather than my body?

As it happens, the Christian church has long had a spiritual health check - a kind of ticklist for spiritual and mental wellbeing – it’s called the Seven Deadly Sins. And over the next few weeks, here on Seen & Unseen, we’ll be running a series on it – think of it as a chance to check out your own spiritual wellbeing.

Of course, the word ‘Sin’ has a chequered past. Peccatio, Pèche, Sünde, Sin – whatever language it came in, it was once a terrifying word – a word that struck fear into the heart of almost every European. It had the same kind of emotional effect as words like ‘Nazi’, or ‘cancer’ do for us today. It was something you wanted to avoid at all costs, something dreadful and dangerous.

Now, it has changed from a rottweiler into a poodle. ‘Sin’ has been calmed down, domesticated, neutered. The word is now usually spoken with a smirk, or a heavy dose of irony. Describing something as ‘sinful’ usually means you think it is naughty but nice, or even seductive. We get perfumes called ‘My Sin’, or even a bakery called ‘Sinful Cakes’. Po-faced people who denounce something as ‘sinful’ seem to just want to stop other people enjoying themselves.

They waged a constant, subtle and undermining war against the inner self – they were the deadly enemy of the soul.

Yet there were reasons why the word ‘sin’ had such a ghastly aura about it in the past. Sin was not harmless transgression of some random moral code invented by repressed and frustrated medieval clerics. For our ancestors, ‘sin’ described a pattern of life that was quite simply destructive. Each of the seven deadly sins were a sign of spiritual poor health just like a raised PSI count might be a sign of prostate cancer, high blood pressure a sign of the risk of a heart attack and so on. Sins like greed, anger, lust and pride could destroy families, friendships, happiness, peace of mind, innocence, love, security, nature, and most importantly, our bond to our Creator. They wrenched us out of our proper place in the world, which is why it’s worth knowing whether you’re suffering from them or not.

A passage in the Bible talks of “sinful desires, which wage war against the soul.” That captures it well. These impulses or patterns of behaviour were not just arbitrarily wrong, but self-destructive. They waged a constant, subtle and undermining war against the inner self – they were the deadly enemy of the soul. Sin was a like a virus that got into everything, so that although life carried on, it never quite worked in the way you felt it ought to. Life always had that grit in the oyster, the nagging soreness of a shoe that doesn’t fit, the reminder of a dark secret that wouldn’t go away.

In many people’s minds, ‘sin’ means simply ‘breaking the rules or the law’. The difficulty with this idea is that it fails to get to the heart of the issue. An insistence on rules alone is often a sign of a shrivelled, arid moral vision. It’s what makes disapproving busybodies and prudes. Laws exist to protect things that are more important than laws, like human lives, families, marriages, reputations, communities and peace. They are not ends in themselves. Rules and laws are vital for the protection of goodness, but do not itself go to the heart of goodness – they simply try to ensure its survival.

Life would be simple if things that were bad for us were ugly and things good for us were beautiful.

One traditional way of thinking about sin was to classify it into types. Our ancestors were shrewd enough to know they needed to know their enemy. The idea of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ emerged from the early centuries of the Church as a neat way of remembering the some of the chief ways in which this deadly pattern of behaviour manifested itself.

A glance through the traditional list of the seven deadly sins raises an obvious issue for anyone with any sense of contemporary life and morals: these are not the ones we’d identify as the chief causes of evil in our world. If anything, our culture tends to admire these qualities, not avoid them. Lust is a sign of a healthy sexual appetite, Pride a perfectly valid pleasure in our own achievements, and Greed an essential motor for the economy. Lust, envy and gluttony sell porn websites, cars and food, so naturally there are powerful forces dedicated to encouraging these habits to grow as rampant as possible in our souls and societies.

Of course, our forebears were not all as innocent as we might think. Of course they didn’t all detest sin because it has always carried a very real and powerful attraction. And unless we grasp this, we will never understand it. Life would be simple if things that were bad for us were ugly and things good for us were beautiful. But life isn’t like that. As the great St Augustine said of his own younger tendency to steal just for the sake of it: “It was foul, and I loved it”.

The great works that have dealt with sin in the past had a simple aim, to uncover the ugliness of sin, and unmask the veneer of attractiveness that it wears. Dante’s great Divine Comedy did it by showing what these patterns of behaviour led to. It showed how each received its fitting punishment in a vision of such elegant symmetry that it seemed so obvious. In Dante’s imaginary hell, the angry are condemned to fight each other for eternity; the slothful or indolent are condemned to running constantly and breathlessly; gluttons are made to lie in mud, exposed to constant rain and hail just like pigs, and end up eating rats, toads and snakes, as a parody of their excessive greed.

Illustration by Jennifer Strange Keller

Yet strangely, each sin always has at its heart something good. Medieval artistic depictions of sins portrayed them as misshapen and deformed versions of some good quality. The reason is not hard to find. Lust takes the delights to be found in sexual desire and satisfaction and distorts it into an uncontrollable, damaging enslavement. Gluttony twists the pleasures of succulent roast beef and a glass of dark red Beaujolais and turns them into bloated, sickly over-consumption.

There is always something of the grotesque about sin. In old fairgrounds, there was always one stall where you would place yourself in front of odd-shaped mirrors, which would exaggerate parts of your body and shrink others. The result was on the one hand funny but at the same time, slightly frightening. Sin does the same thing. It takes something beautiful and makes it ugly by twisting it out of shape, so that it bears enough resemblance to the original to retain its attraction, but when seen in its full light, is as ugly as… well, sin. On one level, it’s funny. Most of our jokes revolve around the grotesque - things out of place, misshapen, strange. Yet there is a dark side as well and it is that that these medieval imaginative poems tried to unveil. Theologian Cornelius Plantinga says: “a sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.”

A woman in a hall of mirrors, circa 1935.

Although it can seem a monstrous and terrifying power that threatens to overwhelm everything, in the end, evil can only ever distort something that is at its heart good. Evil cannot create anything, it simply twists, caricatures, or destroys. Sin is always a parody, a type of behaviour that often looks vaguely like goodness, and often likes to pretend it is, and it sometimes takes some moral and spiritual discernment to tell the difference. Yet a difference there surely is, and the ability to tell good from evil is a real sign of human and personal maturity. But the reason why it is often difficult to tell is that sin always has at its heart something good. A fit of temper against a brother or sister or child usually justifies itself by the behaviour that provoked it in the first place, which probably was out of order; jealousy or envy persuades itself that it is really proper outrage against the deep injustice that has given to someone else what I really deserve.

This means of course that however monstrous sin or evil are, in the Christian view of the world, they are ultimately trivial and pathetic when compared to real goodness. St Augustine struggled all his life to understand the nature of malevolence. Towards the end of that life, the reality of evil began to recede from his attention, to be replaced by something much bigger. As Cambridge historian Gillian Evans put it:

“Where first he had been aware of (evil’s) perverseness and emptiness, its huge darkness, its hopeless entangled knottiness, now at last perhaps he had come to feel its essential triviality in comparison with the light and power of the Good.”

In the coming weeks, here on Seen and Unseen, we will be asking some of our regular contributors to write on each of the Seven Deadly Sins, analysing how they work their deadly poison, both in the past and in contemporary society. Keep an eye out for each article as they come – it might just be the spiritual health check you need.