Twixt Will and Will Not

In this study, Carolyn Harper adopts a topicalist approach to understand the plays mysteries through literary criticism. She argues that Measure's Elizabethan audience would have been intimately in tune to the rhetorical device of the paradigma, especially those built on contraries. Knowing this, Shakespeare could purposefully devise a textual construct portraying characters and actions which appear seemingly contradictory. Utilizing numerous 16th- and 17th-century pamphleteers, Harper offers much primary material which has never before been applied to Measure for Measure. She demonstrates that this play could afford Shakespeare a vehicle which not only supported the English status quo but issued a warning of political and religious chaos should that status quo fail to prevail.