Measure for Measure

When the Duke of Vienna leaves the city in the hands of his stern deputy Angelo, the puritanical official revives an old law and sentences a young man named Claudio to death for getting his betrothed pregnant. Claudio’s sister, a novice nun named Isabella, pleads for mercy, and Angelo counters with a monstrous bargain: her chastity for her brother’s life. Meanwhile the Duke, disguised as a friar, watches the crisis unfold and quietly steers it toward a reckoning. One of Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays, it wrestles with justice, hypocrisy, and the gap between public virtue and private desire, refusing easy answers even in its uneasy comic ending. This free PDF and EPUB edition makes a sharp, morally complex work easy to explore.