"Measure for Measure": chiasmus, justice, and mercy

Style, Winter, 2001 by Ira Clark

Having watched Shallow and Davy, Falstaff analyzes the flagrant abuse of justice in a pair of chiastic expressions. As he contemplates telling a farce funny enough "to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter" through numerous court terms, Falstaff's chiastic expressions imitate wrongful elevating and leveling (5.1.67). Shallow's servants, "by observing him, do bear themselves like foolish justices; he, by conversing with them, is turned into a justice-like servingman" (5.1.56-58). The point of Falstaff's chiasmus is the inversion of status, for the justice unjustly considers himself above the law and wrongfully elevates his servants so they join him there. In the figure, Falstaff thus highlights a leveling of both judgment and status that overturns justice.

That point made, Falstaff goes on to compare master and servants to geese flocking together and transmitting diseases among themselves. Consequently, he continues, "If I had a suit to Master Shallow, I would humour his men with the imputation of being near their master; if to his men, I would curry with Master Shallow that no man could better command his servants" (5.1.60-64). Characteristically, in plotting to exploit Shallow and to entertain Hal, Falstaff turns the failure of justice into verbal commodity. But Falstaff's prospect of entertaining Hal as Henry V would exploit the very conditions Davy uses to exploit Justice Shallow: it levels the servant and the master by raising the servant to the status of the master and by raising them both above the law. So, later that evening, Falstaff feels confident in asserting, when he hears of the death of Henry IV, that "The laws of England are at my commandment" and so is the Lord Chief Justice (5.3.125-26). For Falstaff believes both that the "young King is sick" for him and that he is nearly even with the king above the law. The doubled chiasmus Falstaff employs in his analysis and his strategy lays bare the proposed interchange of inequitable roles and the discarded justice.

The scene Henry V stages for the Lord Chief Justice in view of his court turns that wrong to right. By means of doubling another chiasmus, it restores the order of justice by reversing the flow Falstaff perceived. Henry's decisive turn against Falstaff's inversion of justice comes after the new king's entry to the court of brothers and retainers apprehensive about his intentions. It provides the climax to a legal lesson. In that scene, the new monarch first argues his old personal case as prince against the Lord Chief Justice. Having once jailed Hal, the jurist rightly dreads forewarnings of the new king's grudge and the need to appease Falstaff. In his response to the king, the Lord Chief Justice features three approaches: first, recourse to a general impersonal principle in "The majesty and power of law and justice,/ The image of the King whom I presented" when Hal struck him (5.2.77-78); next, recourse to a specific precedent; and, third, recourse to a hypothetical case wherein the new king is to project a parallel circumstance with his son. Declaring him correct, Henry says that the Lord Chief Justice has weighed the case well and that he shall thereafter bear the insignia of his office, the balance and the sword. Then, in a chiasmus, Henry sums up his decision by quotation that gives justice the first and final place and the prince the intermediate role: