1. Is the Duke a Wise Governor or a Manipulative Schemer?

Argue whether Duke Vincentio's covert manipulations across the play represent legitimate stewardship of Vienna or a self-interested abdication of his duties as ruler. Use specific scenes to ground your case.

The straightforward way into this essay is to pick a side and marshal scenes that support it. If you argue the Duke is wise, your strongest evidence is structural: his interventions prevent any actual deaths, expose a corrupt deputy, and restore civic order through a series of marriages. He explains his reasoning to Friar Thomas in clear and apparently honest terms — fourteen years of unenforced laws, a deputy whose virtue needs testing, the political risk of cracking down himself. If you argue he is manipulative, your strongest evidence is the cluster of personal lies he tells inside the friar's habit: misleading Claudio about Angelo's intent, lying to Isabella about her brother's death, orchestrating Mariana's bed-trick on the basis of theological reasoning Mariana has no way to verify. Either thesis is defensible if you anchor it in specific scenes.

Detailed Analysis

A more ambitious version of this essay refuses to pick a side and instead argues that Shakespeare deliberately makes the Duke undecidable, and asks what work that ambiguity does in the play. The Duke's behavior in Act V is the strongest case: he stages the entire trial as theater in which he already knows every answer, drawing out the suffering of people he has chosen not to relieve sooner. That looks cynical. But the same scene also shows him pardoning every condemned character, restoring Claudio to Isabella, and producing a moment of mercy (Isabella kneeling for Angelo) that no other character could have produced. The strongest version of this argument recognizes that the Duke's instrumentalism and his eventual mercy are not separable — the cruel theatrical setup is what produces the morally exalted gesture. Whether that justifies the means is the question Shakespeare keeps open. Productive comparisons can be drawn to Henry V's wandering through his army in disguise the night before Agincourt, or to Prospero in The Tempest — Shakespeare clearly returned to the figure of the ruler-as-watcher across his career, and Measure for Measure is the version where the watcher is least obviously a hero. A strong essay might also engage with the historical context of James I's interest in disguised observation, but only as one piece of evidence, not as a substitute for close reading.

2. Reading Isabella's Silence in the Final Scene

Shakespeare ends the play with the Duke proposing marriage to Isabella, and gives Isabella no response. Argue what her silence means and what theatrical effect Shakespeare achieves by withholding her answer.

A direct approach to this essay starts by noting that the silence is Shakespeare's choice, not an accident — Isabella has been one of the most articulate characters in the play, and her sudden voicelessness at the end has to mean something. Possible readings include: she accepts (the comedy genre points this way; some productions stage a smile or nod); she refuses (she came to the play wanting stricter convent restraints, not marriage to a duke); she is processing (her brother has just been resurrected before her eyes after she spent the scene believing him dead); or her silence is the play's final unresolved question, a refusal of generic closure. Choose the reading you can best defend with text and stagecraft, and lay out which scenes earlier in the play support it.

Detailed Analysis

The strongest version of this essay treats Isabella's silence not as a problem to be solved but as the play's deliberate refusal to grant the audience the comic resolution the genre seems to promise. The Duke's proposal arrives without preamble, in front of an entire court, immediately after he has lifted what he himself describes as "the swift celerity of his death" — Isabella's grief over a brother who turns out not to be dead at all. Shakespeare has stripped the moment of every condition under which a normal proposal could be answered. A sophisticated essay might argue that Isabella's silence is the play's most honest acknowledgment that the comedy machinery has reached its limit, and that what would normally be the moment of romantic closure is, in this play, the moment when the Duke's stage management runs into a person it cannot script. Productive comparisons: Hero's silent reappearance in Much Ado, Hermione's silent reanimation in The Winter's Tale. Both are women whose silence at the moment of resolution carries weight the dialogue cannot. Strong essays will engage seriously with the production history — different staging traditions have read Isabella's silence in opposite ways, and any argument about textual meaning has to acknowledge that the silence's openness is itself the meaning.

3. Comparing Angelo and the Duke as Two Models of Authority

Compare the kinds of authority Angelo and the Duke exercise in the play — overt, codified, statute-based vs. covert, theatrical, surveillance-based — and argue which Shakespeare presents as more dangerous.

A clear way into this essay is to start with the obvious contrast. Angelo's power is public and rule-bound: a statute, an offense, a sentence. The Duke's power is private and theatrical: he watches, intervenes, manipulates outcomes from inside disguise. Make a list of moments that exemplify each style — Angelo's first interview with Escalus, the Pompey hearing, Angelo's order to execute Claudio early; the Duke's eavesdropping on Claudio and Isabella, his coaching of Mariana, the staged trial of Act V. Then make your case about which Shakespeare frames as more dangerous. The case for Angelo's authority being more dangerous is that codified rule without empathy can kill (Claudio nearly dies). The case for the Duke's authority being more dangerous is that covert manipulation undermines the very idea of public accountability — and Shakespeare repeatedly shows the Duke lying to people for what he claims is their own good.

Detailed Analysis

The strongest version of this essay would refuse the binary and argue that Shakespeare uses both Angelo and the Duke to interrogate a third, unnamed model — Escalus's experiential, mercy-tempered judgment, which the play presents as functional but unable to scale. The two prominent forms of authority both fail the play's main test. Angelo's overt statute fails because the man enforcing it cannot live up to it. The Duke's covert intervention "succeeds" only by accepting moral compromises (the bed-trick, the lie to Isabella) the play does not finally let the audience forget. Escalus, who handles the Pompey case with patience and pragmatic mercy, never gets to set policy. A nuanced essay can argue that Shakespeare is asking what kind of authority a city actually needs — not the choice between two flawed monarchs but the recognition that mercy without power and power without mercy are both insufficient. Engaging with the historical moment of Jacobean kingship debates strengthens this argument: James I had taken the throne arguing for divine-right monarchy; Shakespeare's play, written for his court, quietly insists that even divine-right rule has to come down to the moral judgment of individuals like Escalus and the Provost — minor characters who get the play's actual ethical work done.

4. Mercy, Justice, and the Bed-Trick

Evaluate the moral status of the bed-trick — Mariana taking Isabella's place in Angelo's bed under cover of darkness — using the play's own framework of justice and mercy. Does the play endorse it, condemn it, or hold it as deliberately unresolved?

A direct approach starts by laying out exactly what the bed-trick does in the play. Functionally, it: rescues Isabella from coercion, technically consummates the pre-contract Angelo broke with Mariana, exposes Angelo's double standard, and gives the Duke evidence to use in Act V. Theologically, the play frames it as legitimate because Angelo and Mariana were affianced — the act completes a contract rather than violating one. Whether that framing is convincing is your essay's question. You can argue it is convincing (the Duke and Isabella treat it as such; Mariana consents; no one in the play objects) or unconvincing (Angelo does not consent to sleeping with Mariana; the friar coercing the consent is the duke who has authority over both parties; the same logic could "legitimize" any number of horrors).

Detailed Analysis

The device's literary history complicates any clean moral reading. Shakespeare did not invent the bed-trick; it appears in folktales, in the Decameron, in Chaucer, and Shakespeare himself uses it in All's Well That Ends Well. In folklore, the device is morally weightless — a clever heroine outwits a villain, the comic universe absolves all parties. What Shakespeare does in Measure for Measure is import the device into a play that has already established a morally serious frame around sexual coercion (the entire Angelo–Isabella plot) and then refuse to wave away the consent issues with comic magic. A strong essay can argue that Shakespeare deliberately uses the bed-trick to create discomfort — that Mariana's complicity, the Duke's manipulation, and Angelo's inability to consent are all visible to the audience even as the plot insists the action is just. The discomfort is the point. A close reading of Mariana's lines in Act V, where she chooses to remain married to Angelo and asks Isabella to plead for him, allows the essay to argue that Mariana herself is the play's strongest voice for the bed-trick's redemptive possibility: she has loved Angelo for five years, the encounter brings her the husband she was denied, and her choice in Act V is the play's signal that her consent was real even if its terms were strange. A really strong essay refuses to settle the question and shows that Shakespeare's careful staging of every party to the device is what makes the play continue to provoke debate four centuries on.

5. How Does the Comic Subplot Comment on the Main Plot?

The play's "low" scenes — Pompey, Mistress Overdone, Elbow, the prison subplot in Act IV — are often dismissed as comic relief. Argue that the comic subplot is structurally essential to the play's argument, and identify specific scenes where the low and high plots illuminate each other.

The straightforward case here is to make a list of moments where Pompey or Lucio or Elbow says, comically, something the play takes seriously elsewhere. Pompey's "if your worship will take order for the drabs and the knaves" is the comic version of the play's whole argument against Angelo's enforcement project. Lucio's slander about the absent Duke turns out to be more accurate than the courtiers' praise. Elbow's malapropisms about "respected" women run the play's anxieties about female reputation through a comic register. Once you have the list, the essay's job is to argue that these moments are not interruptions but commentary — Shakespeare is using the subplot to critique what the main plot stages with high seriousness.

Detailed Analysis

A more sophisticated essay argues that the comic subplot is doing something specific to Measure for Measure as a problem play: it is the part of the work that tells the truth about the city. The main plot is occupied with high-status characters speaking in verse about virtue, mercy, and law. The subplot is occupied with the actual people the law is about to crush. Pompey's catalog of fellow prisoners in Act IV Scene III — "young Master Rash; ... young Master Deep-vow, and Master Copperspur, and Master Starve-lackey, the rapier and dagger man, and young Drop-heir that killed lusty Pudding ..." — gives Vienna a population the official register never produces. The promotion of Pompey to assistant executioner in Act IV is the play's most pointed structural joke: the bawd is now the hangman, and the city's two industries have collapsed into one. A strong essay shows how the comic subplot consistently makes the abstract arguments of the main plot concrete, and how Shakespeare uses the comic register to deliver moral observations the high-status characters cannot. The bonus argument is that the play's title, Measure for Measure, is itself rendered in two registers — high-mindedly by the Duke in Act V, and bone-dryly by Pompey throughout — and the play's actual moral position is closer to Pompey's than to the Duke's. That argument is provocative enough to anchor a strong essay if you can defend it scene by scene.