Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (review)

Paula Blank’s study analyzes diverse Shakespearean texts centered on the problem of measuring human experience. Blank argues that Shakespeare is deeply skeptical regarding the possibility of any objective application of quantitative measurements to human character and action. For Shakespeare, measurement “must be understood as a figure of speech when it is applied to people” (4). While these general claims may seem unsurprising, they ground intricate readings that at their frequent best elegantly demonstrate how Shakespeare brings to life the failure of measurement in diverse domains of human experience.

The book provides provocative interpretations of problems of measurement in the Sonnets, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and King Lear. Arguing forcefully against those who read Measure for Measure as showing how equity or mercy can overcome the shortcomings of strict justice based on proper measurement, Blank argues that the play instead dramatizes the inevitability of bias and misrule: the Duke, after all, “sets his own standards” and offers no basis for his final dispensations other than his declared “pleasure” (187, 184). The discussion of King Lear reveals the centrality of mathematical concepts and terms in the play. Blank argues persuasively that Shakespeare questions whether “mathematical measures . . . are apt to the purpose of determining justice” (147). She contends that the play echoes Thomas Elyot’s treatment of justice in The Boke Named the Governor as based on the governor’s knowledge of the ways in which men are both equal and unequal. Lear and Gloucester not only learn through suffering to feel compassion for fellow human beings; they also learn that one must recognize the “‘additions’” (a resonant mathematical term) that distinguish one human being from another (142). Lear dramatizes, however, the impossibility of properly measuring the “merit” (another key term, as Blank argues) that distinguishes unequal individuals. Not only does Lear notably fail in his initial attempt to measure such merit, but Cordelia herself expresses the “futility of efforts . . . to ‘measure’ human deserving” when she exclaims to Kent that “every measure” will “fail” in her attempt to “match” his “goodness” (147).

The first chapter has two loosely connected sections. The first sensitively examines how number tropes in Shakespeare’s sonnets reveal the poet’s inability to properly measure his beloved. Here, number and measurement tropes are of course but two of the many figures that critics have shown to complicate or undercut panegyric rhetoric. The second section agues provocatively for reading Shakespeare’s metrics as syllabic rather than syllabic-accentual. Yet Blank hedges on how important accent is for Shakespearean metrics (68), and she does not, to my mind, engage extensively enough with Shakespeare’s verse corpus, other contemporaneous verse, or the extensive scholarship on historical metrics to make conclusive claims. She is more convincing in arguing that metrical patterns in Shakespeare take on contextually specific resonances in relation to contiguous, contrasting metrical patterns or adjacent prose rhythms. She makes the interesting argument that Shakespeare’s irregular short lines are meant to be “stretched” or “lengthened” for emphasis to equal contiguous, regular ten-syllable lines (for instance, Hamlet’s “‘For Hecuba!’”) (74). Yet keeping in mind Blank’s own point that metrical effects are context specific, one could also argue that such short lines as Macbeth’s “‘Signifying nothing’” (76) are not meant to be lengthened to decasyllables but rather to be registered as harshly truncated.

The book fulfills its central goal of providing historically informed thematic readings of Shakespeare. It is less successful, however, in its brief forays into broad intellectual history. The introduction provides a useful discussion of the problems with standards for physical measurement in early modern England, but the intermittent histories of the applications of measurement to diverse human domains from the Greeks to the early moderns, based on quotations of well-known classical and Renaissance authors, are sometimes too sketchy to advance the discussion beyond previous scholarship. For example, the historical treatment of the relationship between divine and natural law, on the...