The borderless interiority which had before typified Heloise's femininity, has now, in Measure for Measure, infected the entire world of the theater. Elbow's own confusion is symptomatic of the atmosphere in Vienna, where 'all decorum has gone athwart.' The law itself, embodied in Angelo, has succumbed to a 'false plague;' and the paragon of virtue, embodied in Isabella, has taken part in deception to maintain the truth. Clearly, by Shakespeare's time, the dialectic oscillation between virtue and desire can no longer be inserted into a limpid framework of feminine 'weakness.' Human perspective itself has failed. The reason and [page 90] reliability which are, in turn, granted by perspective have become, as Montaigne famously wrote, "nothing but ceremony."[90]

The theater of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provided a fitting space to play out the complexity of early-modern religious experience. In the absence of what Harries calls 'firm ground,' all action, from one point of view, becomes a 'ceremony' of manipulation. Worldviews, after all, function only inasmuch as they render the richness of experience intelligible. If religious truth, mystic wisdom, and interiority cause boundaries rather to appear meaningless, then a worldview must rise to the challenge of substituting new appearances. This epistemological 'give and take' between dissolution and creation – explosive truth and reconstructive agency – marks the religious lives of Heloise and Shakespeare's Isabella. The avowal of either virtue or desire rests, in both instances, on one's perspective.

Endnotes

1. Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 3.
2. For more on subject of Luther's medieval characteristics, see Hieko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (New York: Image Doubleday, 1989).
3. See Ethan Shagan's Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
4. According to Blumenberg, history is not a matter of the simple transference of Christian 'contents' to dishonest, secular 'contents,' but, rather, the "reoccupation" of 'functional' frameworks [The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT press, 1983), p. 64]. This distinction, and the notion of 'function' it engenders, is essential for Blumenberg as well as for the subsequent scholarship concerning itself with early modernity. The most fundamental ontological questions (such as those regarding the truth or falsehood of humanity's assertion of itself over lived experience and historical process) and their respective responses have always served a 'functional' purpose. At the threshold of the modern epoch, these questions were not transformed but, rather, passed down. Moreover, because human self-assertion constitutes the basis of modernity, the enactment of proper 'function' unavoidably falls on the human agent. The answers are hence one's own, while the questions are deeply rooted in the past epoch.
5. For more on the process of self-fashioning as a theatrical endeavor see Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Alisdair Macintyre's "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science" in Paradigms and Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980).
6. Susan Schreiner has developed this characteristic of Iago in "Appearances and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare" in The Journal of Religion Vol. 83, No. 3 (July 2003), pp. 345-380. 
7. Hugh Grady, "Falstaff: Subjectivity between the Carnival and the Aesthetic" in Modern Language Review Vol. 96, No. 3 (2001), p. 610.
8. There was also a similar dynamic to be found within the work of the Italian mystic Nicholas of Cusa. Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia (1440) sought to recognize the artificiality of boundaries (characterized primarily by the limits imposed upon human perspective and noetic capacity) so that such boundaries might be transcended. The infinite nature of God, Cusa writes, "transcends all our understanding, which is unable by the path of reason to combine contradictories in their source, for we proceed by means of the things made evident to us by nature, but reason, falling far short of this infinite power, cannot join together contradictories, which are infinitely distant. Therefore, we see incomprehensibly […]" And elsewhere: "It is very clearly established from what has been said that the absolute maximum is both incomprehensibly understandable and ineffably nameable [Selected Spiritual Writings, Trans. Hugh Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), p. 92 Emphasis mine]." In other words, noetic deconstruction can be constructive – the recognition of limitation, freeing. As Blumenberg suggests, "it is a constitutive element of the modern age that it expands through restriction [The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 500 Emphasis mine]." However, Harries (as we see in the above quote) points to the dark shadow of 'learned ignorance' to be found primarily in the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. See also Giordano Bruno's treatment of epistemological themes in the Ash Wednesday Supper (1584) for more on the dark side of boundary dissolution.
9. For more on opposition to the Corpus Christi cycle, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Alters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 579-581. On interior idolatry, Huston Diehl writes, "because the reformers fear that any act of the imagination is potentially idolatrous, seducing people from God, the theatre cannot escape Protestant suspicions that it is dangerous even though it is a secular art form [Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 69]."
10. Beatrice of Nazareth, "There are Seven Manners of Loving" in Medieval Netherlands Religious Literature, trans. Eric Colledge (New York: London House & Maxwell, 1965), p. 204. In the twelfth century, Peter Abelard wrote to his beloved Heloise – a woman with whom a large portion of this essay will concern itself – that "the virtue of women is the more pleasing … because their nature is weaker [The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (New York: Penguin Classics, 1974), p. 121 Emphasis mine]." Andrea Nye has described these 'prevailing themes of womanhood' in Abelard and Heloise as those in which woman are at a remove from the logic and dialectic which comes to characterize the male scholastic. As long as these themes survive, she continues, the future of philosophy appears bleak.  "If rationality, logic, and correct methodology are structured according to universal categories that are sexist, racist, and body phobic, women may not be logical or rational. If logical thought requires that categories stay rigidly fixed, not coming into contact with lived experience and changing as a result, then women may again fail to succeed. If philosophy persists in being a professional discipline divorced from passionate experience and aspiration, women may not be interested ["A Woman's Thought or a Man's Discipline? The Letters of Abelard and Heloise" in Hypatia Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer 1992), p. 16]."
11. Augustine, "Of the Spirit and the Letter (De Spiritu et Littera)" in Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine: The Retractions, ed. Philip Schaff (Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 1968), p. 201 Emphasis mine.
12. "Letter 6, Heloise to Abelard" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 104.
13. Ibid., p. 113.
14. As Angelo asks himself: "Dost thou desire her foully for those things | That make her good? [William Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure" in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), Act 2, Scene 3, Lines 178-179 (Hereafter '2.3.178-179')]"
15. Worldviews, as the scholar Charles Elliot Vernoff has explained, "[arise] in fulfillment of the constitutive need of self-conscious beings for some comprehensive and integral orientation to the conditions of their existence ["The Contemporary Study of Religion" in Methodology in the Academic Teaching of Judaism, ed. Zev Garber (New York: University Press of America, 1986), p. 17]." They represent, Vernoff continues, "a view of 'the world' as total system, by and large internally logical and coherent, which satisfies the elemental human need to make sense of things as the means of establishing basic sanity and maintaining a foundation for practical action [Ibid., p. 18]." The role of women as 'brides' of Christ is, for instance, characteristic of a medieval or earl-modern worldview – that is, characteristic of an attempt to render what I have earlier called the 'explosive interiority' of Heloise 'internally logical and coherent.'  
16. "Peter the Venerable: Letter (115) to Heloise" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 217.
17. As Leif Grane has written, "we shall follow Abelard's career up to the time when, through his meeting with Heloise, he was diverted from his course [Peter Abelard: Philosophy and Christianity in the Middle Ages, ed. Derek Baker (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc, 1964), p. 35]."
18. "Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard," p. 69. 
19. In Romans 13:8 Paul writes, "Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law." In a similar passage from Galatians 6:2 he repeats, "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ [The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Emphasis mine]."
20. As mentioned previously, I am not arguing for an influence between these historically disparate figures. I have selected Heloise (d. 1164) and Beatrice (d. 1268) rather, because they embody a strand in mysticism which runs through two very different contexts – France of the 12th century and Belgium of the 13th century. Part of my hope is to suggest the pervasiveness of this strand of mysticism before attending to Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.   
21. As Heloise responds to Abelard, "My heart was not in me but with you, and now, even more, if it is not with you it is nowhere; truly, without you it cannot exist ["Letter 2, Heloise to Abelard" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 54]."
22.  "Letter 1, Historia Calamitatum," p. 9. On the latter 'evil,' the mere tone of the Historia is enough to suggest to the reader that Abelard may have had a problem with what he himself and others perceived to be conceit. He notes repeatedly "the loss to the Church and the grief of philosophers" that would result from his abdication of all things 'scholastic' [Ibid., p. 13]. The jealousy of lesser intellects is likewise a constant refrain. The above 'remedy,' for example, refers to a fateful altercation with the French mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux, which ultimately resulted in the condemnation of Abelard's treatise on the Trinity (Theologia) in 1121. From Bernard's perspective, Abelard's conceit had incited the foolhardy endeavor of applying dialectical reasoning to matters of faith. In Abelard's Historia, Bernard of Clairvaux is portrayed as less a living, breathing individual than a central protagonist in the author's spiritual drama.                    
23. Ibid., p. 36 Emphasis mine.  "Through persecution," he repeats, "my fame increased [Ibid., p. 8 Emphasis mine]."
24. Ibid., p. 13 Emphasis mine.
25. "Letter 5, Abelard to Heloise" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 73.
26. It is not inconsequential to note that Heloise entered the Paraclete at Abelard's behest. "It was not my own sense of vocation which brought me as a young girl to accept the austerities of the cloister," Heloise recalls, "but your bidding alone, and if I deserve gratitude from you, you may judge for yourself how my labors are in vain ["Letter 2, Heloise to Abelard," p. 54]." Abelard has complete control over Heloise in this 'bidding' just as, I argue, he has control over her identity through the exhaustive system of the 'temptress Eve,' 'Mary Magdalene,' and the 'Virgin Mary.'
27. In the late sixteenth century, the then-Catholic John Donne would satirize the poet's art in his elegy on "Love's Progress:" "Whoever loves, if he do not propose | The right true end of love, he's one that goes | To sea for nothing but to make him sick. | And love's a bear-whelp born, if we o'er-lick | Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take, | We err, and of a lump a monster make. […] Makes virtue woman? Must I cool my blood | Till I both be, and find one, wise and good? | May barren angels love so. But if we | Make love to woman, virtue is not she, | As beauty's not, nor wealth ["Elegy 13: Love's Progress" in John Donne: The Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 59-61]." Donne as a young man was thoroughly opposed to the Elizabethan regime. While studying at the Inns of Court he was an ardent Catholic. His poetry during this period made a mockery of the Queen's Protestantism, the role of a woman in general, and the Petrarchan sonnet sequence in particular – the last being, for him, a form of absurd flattery. 
28. "Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard," p. 69. "It was the first woman in the beginning," in Heloise's words, "who lured man from Paradise, and she who had been created by the Lord as his helpmate became the instrument of his total downfall [Ibid., p. 67]."
29. "Letter 2, Heloise to Abelard," p. 51.
30. "Letter 1, Historia Calamitatum" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, pp. 14, 15.
31. "Letter 2, Heloise to Abelard," p. 54.
32. Heloise writes: "I beg you, be fearful for me always, instead of feeling confidence in me ["Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard," p. 70]."
33. On weakness, Abelard writes that "the virtue of women is the more pleasing to him because their nature is weaker ["Letter 7, Abelard to Heloise," p. 121]." Similarly, Heloise informs us that, for her, "youth and passion and experience of pleasure which were so delightful intensify the torments of the flesh and longings of desire, and the assault is the more overwhelming as the nature they attack is weaker ["Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard," p. 69 Emphasis mine]."
34. "Letter 7, Abelard to Heloise," p. 113 Emphasis mine.
35. Ibid., p. 114.
36. "Letter 6. Heloise to Abelard" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 101.
37. As she addresses Abelard toward the conclusion of her letter: "Do you then also, I beg you, who seek to imitate not only Christ but also this apostle, in discrimination as in name, modify your instructions for works to suit our weaker nature, so that we can be free to devote ourselves to the offices of praising God [Ibid., p. 109]."
38. Ibid., p. 104. Heloise words here echo Paul's first letter to Timothy. In 1Timothy 5-7, Paul writes: "but the aim of such instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith. Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions [The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha]."
39. Elizabeth Zimmerman's affirmation of this question is helpful: "Its seems that her intentions were trumped by Abelard's will, under which she placed herself […]. In both matters – marriage and religious vows – Heloise consents, but only under Abelard's direction; he stands as the primary agent of the hypocricy which she is forced to live ["'It is not the Deed but the Intention of the Doer': The Ethic of Intention and Consent in the First Two Letters of Heloise" in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 42 No. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 257. 
40. Andrea Nye, "A Woman's Thought or a Man's Discipline? The Letters of Abelard and Heloise" in Hypatia Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer 1992), p. 13.
41. "For nothing," Heloise prefaces her third letter, "is less under control than the heart – having no power to command it we are forced to obey. And so when its impulses move us, none of us can stop their sudden promptings from easily breaking out, and even more easily overflowing into words which are the ever-ready indications of the heart's emotions ["Letter 6, Heloise to Abelard," p. 93]." And elsewhere: "How can it be called repentance for sins, however great the mortification of the flesh, if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires? It is easy enough for anyone to confess his sins, to accuse himself, or even to mortify his body in outward show of penance, but it is very difficult to tear the heart away from the hankering after its dearest pleasures ["Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard," p. 68]." Notice here the gendered language: Heloise associates the 'outward show' of 'repentance' with masculinity and the 'fire of the mind's desire' with femininity. Women are understood to be 'weak' because they are attached so closely to the heart and thus, as Nye explains, irrational. 
42. Beatrice of Nazareth, "There are Seven Manners of Loving" in Medieval Netherlands Religious Literature, trans. Eric Colledge (New York: London House & Maxwell, 1965), p. 204. As a side note, Bernard of Clairvaux, who would come to condemn Abelard's rationalism, uses similar language: "When will flesh and blood (Mt 16:17), this vessel of clay (2 Cor 4:7), this earthly dwelling (Wis 9:15), grasp this? When will it experience this kind of love, so that the mind, drunk with divine love and forgetting itself, making itself like a broken vessel (Ps 30:13), throw itself wholly on God and, clinging to God (1 Cor 6:17), become one with him in spirit and say, 'My body and my heart have fainted, O God of my heart; God, my part in eternity?' ["On Loving God" in The Selected Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. G.R. Evans (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), p. 195]"
43. Beatrice of Nazareth, "There are Seven Manners of Loving," p. 203.
44. "Letter 4, Heloise to Abelard" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 64. In the "lost love letters" (based upon and anonymous fifteenth-century manuscript thought to be part of the earliest correspondence between Abelard and Heloise) the female speaker uses even more powerful language: "since my mind is turning with many concerns, it fails me, pierced by the sharp hook of love…Just as fire cannot be extinguished or suppressed by any material, unless water, by nature its powerful remedy, is applied, so my love cannot be cured by any means – only by you can it be healed ["Appendix: The 'Lost Love Letters,'" p. 238].
45. Of course, this dynamic of 'virtue' and 'otherness' reemerges in the Petrarchan trope of the sixteenth-century sonneteer. In eulogizing the premature death of his patron's daughter in 1611, John Donne, for instance, unites two themes which had, for some time, figured prominently in the renaissance imagination: (A) the search for redemption through idealized love, as manifested in Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella and (B) the concern with human perception of, and interaction with, absolute or objective truth. Both themes pervade the full length of Donne's An Anatomy of the World, intermixing to such an extent as to become indivisible. Echoing Astrophil's dependence on his unattainable muse, Donne writes, "Her name defined thee, gave thee form and frame [John Donne: the Major Works, p. 214]." The mistress, in this case the young Elizabeth Drury, is the epitome of Petrarchan virtue: her cheeks are 'blushing red,' her face composed of "beauty's ingredients [Ibid., p. 215]." Donne, however, is not the poet to dwell overlong on such popular conceits, and the poem soon becomes a vehicle for his sentiments of profound displacement. "'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply, and all relation [Ibid., p. 212]." Where the muse had once granted 'definition,' the collective conscious is now 'in pieces:' undefined and frighteningly ambiguous. The death (or, in Beatrice of Nazareth's case, the rebirth) of the beloved, then, heralds the ruin of the intelligible sphere. In her wake, humankind is left scurrying about a barren landscape in which there is no center, no accord, and no sanctuary.
46. Romans 13:8 Emphasis Mine.
47. Alisdair Macintyre, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science" in Paradigms & Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), p. 56.
48. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1969), p. 95. Note that Tuner also suggests of the liminal person that "it is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life [Ibid., p. 95]."
49. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: WM. B. Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1989), I.XI.8. On Calvin and the 'labyrinth' of the sinful mind, see William Bouwsma's "Calvinism as Renaissance Artifact" in John Calvin and the Church: A Prism of Reform, ed. Timothy George (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990) and John Calvin: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). On the epistemological anxieties attending the 'New Philosophy' see, first and foremost, Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Karsten Harries' Infinity and Perspective, and Louise Dupré's Passage to Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On Shakespeare's England, see Patrick Collinson's "William Shakespeare's Religious Inheritance" in Elizabethans (London: Hambledon, 2003). By the time Calvin was writing, Nicholas of Cusa had unleashed the concept of 'learned ignorance' (which, in turn, was to be taken up by Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century); Copernicus had, perhaps unwittingly, dismantled the neatly-arrayed boundaries of the Aristotelian cosmos; and years of reform had left the intelligible and (most importantly) accessible Catholic ritual system in shambles.
50. Calvin, Institutes, III.VIII.1.
51. Huston Diehl, "Iconophobia and Gynophobia" in Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, pp. 158-159. And for this same subject with explicit reference to Measure for Measure, see Katharine Eisaman Maus' chapter on "Prosecution and Sexual Secrecy" in Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).  
52. William Shakespeare, "Sonnets 116, 137, 138" in Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), pp. 100-119.  Sonnet 138 is particularly instructive on the 'love is not love' paradox: "Therefore, I lie with her, and she with me, | And in our faults by lies we flattered be." 'I lie with her' as a mirror image of 'she lies with me' communicates the sole affinity between the two characters: they both 'lie.' The poet is limited by his belief that his lover 'is made of truth,' and the muse is constrained by her vain desire to make the poet the picture of 'youth.' The disjointed reasoning of the sonnet then leads to an absurd conclusion: namely, that which is communal in a relationship—that which brings the lovers together—is not unifying. What is shared, rather, is a tendency to stray from reality—that is, to 'lie.'
53. On the damaging effects of this perspective, Sir Philip Sidney has acknowledged in this period that, "true, […] on earth we are but pilgrims made, | And should in soule up to our country move: | True, and yet true that I must Stella love ["Sonnet 5" in Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and Other Writings, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (London: Everyman Paperbacks, 1997), p. 25]." In Sidney, Love of women easily substitutes love of God (our proper course as 'pilgrims').
54. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. Brian Gibbons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2.1.71-73. The phrase 'out of joint' is from Bouwsma's John Calvin: An Intellectual Biography, pp. 52-54.
55. The lord Escalus says of Elbow: "Do you hear how he misplaces? [Measure for Measure, 2.1.80 Emphasis mine]"
56. Ibid., 1.2.61.
57. Maus refers to Angelo, Isabella, and the Duke as "the three morally ambitious characters in Measure for Measure [Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance, p. 159]." In other words, both Angelo and Isabella have an ethic to which they subscribe. Angelo's ethic of exteriority and Isabella's interiority will be discussed in the succeeding paragraphs.
58. Measure for Measure, 2.2.187.
59. Ibid., 2.4.63, 2.4.171.
60. Ibid., 3.1.229. To quote the Duke's words in full: "This fore-named maid [Mariana] hath yet in her the continuance of her first affection. His [Angelo's] unjust unkindness, that in all reason should have quenched her love, hath like an impediment in the current made it more violent and unruly." In Mariana's case, as with most of the events in the play surrounding Angelo, 'all reason' has ceased to dictate action. 
61. Measure for Measure, 2.2.83.
62. Angelo, Maus writes, "everts his inwardness, holding his self-mortification up for display: even when his struggles, his agonies, his triumphs are undertaken in rigorous isolation, they acquire meaning insofar as they are narrated to or witnessed by others, rendered into patters for others to emulate. Nonetheless, Angelo's legalistic identification of the true with the publicly available turns out not to be merely impossible, but morally dangerous. It allows him to muddle the relationship between the realm of intention – acts merely contemplated but not executed – and the realm of the secret, which might include deeds as well as intentions [Inwardness and the Theatre in the English Renaissance, p. 162 Emphasis mine]." That is to say: Angelo's interior life is judged by his peers. There is no concept of an omniscient God. 'Deeds' that fall under the public radar are not, in his understanding, deeds at all. Everything happens within the realm of observable agency. Ironically, as the magistrate, Angelo is the representative of public opinion. His fall from grace into lechery must, therefore, be bracketed off from his own position as public defender.
63. Measure for Measure, 2.2.60.
64. Ibid., 2.2.121-126.
65. Note that Isabella refers to Angelo as an "outward-sainted deputy [Ibid., 3.1.88]."
66. We may again have recourse to Nicholas of Cusa's mystical tract, De Docta Ignorantia: "the quiddity of things, which is the truth of beings, is unattainable in its purity, and although it is pursued by all philosophers, none has found it as it is. The more profoundly learned we are in this ignorance, the more closely we draw near truth itself [p. 91 Emphasis mine]." Thus to 'set' the intellect 'up as law' is a form of idolatry in which human contrivance ('philosophy') eclipses the omniscient God. 
67. As Isabella states in her soliloquy at the end of Act 2: "oh, perilous mouths | That bear in them one and the self-same tongue, | Either of condemnation or approof, | Bidding the law make curtsey to their will, | Hooking both right and wrong to th'appetite | To follow as it draws [Measure for Measure, 2.4.173-178]. Heloise does not believe for a second that the law exists apart from the self – as Angelo would have her believe. It is also important to recognize that the basis for the tolerance Isabella seeks on her brother's behalf finds its corollary in the humanist tradition which preceded Shakespeare. In his Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus writes that the arbitrary nature of intolerance, is due to those Priests who "battle for (their rights to) a tithe with swords, spears, stones, and every force of arms in fine soldier style, while the sharp-eyes amongst them look to see if they can extract anything from the writings of the ancients with which to intimidate the wretched people into agreeing that more than a tithe is their due [trans. Betty Radice (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p.111]." Here we see a connection between the maintenance of the law by force (Angelo's persecution of Claudio) and the maintenance of ideologies (Abelard's scholasticism). Along similar lines, Sebastian Castellio, in the wake of the execution of Michael Servetus at the hands of John Calvin's Geneva, emphasizes the relativity of individual perception and, consequently, interpretation. In so doing, he brings learned ignorance under the rubric of social tolerance. "An impure and petulant tongue," he wrote, "is not to be ascribed to anyone who differs from Calvin on the Lord's Supper, infant baptism, predestination, and persecution, provided one believe in the truth …["Contra Libellum Calvini" in Concerning Heretics, ed. Roland H. Bainton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), p. 272]."
68. Isabella, we are told, is one of the "votarists of Saint Clare" [Measure for Measure, 1.4.5] – that is, one who has taken (or will soon take) vows in the Franciscan subset known as the 'Poor Clares.'
69. Ibid., 1.4.4-5. Heloise implores Abelard "that you will prescribe some Rule for us and write it down, a Rule which shall be suitable for women, and also describe fully the manner and habit of our way of life ["Letter 6, Heloise to Abelard" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 95]."
70. David Beauregard, "Shakespeare on Monastic Life: Nuns and Friars in Measure for Measure" in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. Dennis Taylor & David Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 316.
71. Measure for Measure, 2.2.140. See also 2.2.53-55: "But might you do't, and do the world no wrong, | If so you heart were touched with that remorse | As mine is to him?"
72. Measure for Measure, 2.4.76-77.
73. Peter Iver Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 112.
74. Measure for Measure, 4.3.100-101. Kaufman likewise speaks of the pietist's tendency "to find comfort in their discomfort [Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection, p. 48]."
75. Such a comparison becomes even more suggestive when we consider that the Duke is, in the eyes of many interpreters, a behind-the-scenes manipulator – that is, the creator of his own drama from start to finish. "I'll privily away," the Duke tells Angelo in Act 1. "I love the people, | But do not like to stage me to their eyes: | Though it do well I do not relish well | Their loud applause and aves vehement [Measure foe Measure, 1.1.67-70]." It is also hard for the reader not to speculate a bit into Shakespeare's own sentiments on play acting and writing here.
76. Ibid., 2.4.104. The term 'livery' comes from 2.4.139 where Angelo suggests to Isabella that she take up her "destined livery" as a woman "credulous to false prints [Ibid., 2.4.130]."
77. Measure for Measure, 2.2.7-16.
78. Katharine Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, p. 162. See footnote #62 for Maus' own words on this subject.
79. William Shakespeare, "Hamlet" in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997), 1.2.133.134. See also Hamlet's response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act 2: "This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours [Ibid., 2.2.290-293]." 
80. Susan Schreiner, "Appearances and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare," p. 379.
81. Ibid., p. 376.
82. Measure for Measure, 1.3.31-32.
83. Ibid., 2.4.160-161.
84. Compare Angelo's statement, 'let's write "Good Angel" on the devil's horn,' with Paul's oft-cited expression "Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light [2 Corinthians 11:14]."
85. Measure for Measure, 4.1.16. We may here compare Mariana's intensity with that of Heloise. "What king or philosopher could match your [Abelard's] fame? What district, town, or village did not long to see you? When you appeared in public, who – I ask – did not hurry to catch a glimpse of you, or crane her neck and strain her eyes to follow your departure? Every wife, every young girl desired you in absence and was on fire in your presence; queens and great ladies envied me my joys and my bed ["Letter 2, Heloise to Abelard" in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 53]." Just as Heloise laments the dearth of her 'philosopher,' so, too, Mariana laments the powerful presence of Angelo. Mariana is, Shakespeare tells us, 'on fire' for her lover – and fearfully 'unruly' in his absence.  
86. Measure for Measure, 5.1.177.
87. Ibid., 5.1.209.
88. William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 95" in Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 83.
89. Measure for Measure, 2.4.79-81.
90. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Presumption" in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 478.

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