Duke has finally reconciled the “letter” of the law with its spirit and shown that mercy, and severity, if one
may be pardoned the pun, belong to the same coin of the law. Thus measure answers measure: the justice of
the true title flourishes the deceit. All that remains is for us to apprehend the time at which this epiphany will
register. Jesus speaks of the “pleroma,” or moment of fulfillment, that moment when “all things shall be
ready.”
Isabella, in the fifth act, echoes the Duke’s jingle with a variation on the de Vere motto, vero nihil verius
16
:
Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.
(5.4.45)
Here our Arden editors assist us by recalling the relevant source-passage from Cinthio’s Epitia
17
:
Più ver, che il vero
18
,
Which translated back into English reads “more true than the true thing” – but says nothing about time.
Replies the ever-ironic Duke:
Poor soul, she speaks this in the infirmity of sense.
(5.1.48).
16
Nothing truer than the truth.
17
On Cinthio’s Italian drama as one of the play’s source texts, see Kenneth Muir’s “Measure for Measure,” in Geckle, 13-20.
18
See also, of course, de Vere’s Jan. 1603 Danver’s Escheat letter: “I hope truth is subject to no prescription. For truth is truth, though never so
old, and time cannot make that false which once was true” (Fowler 771). Prescription is used in its technical legal sense as denoting the
“limitation of the time within which an action or a claim can be raised” -- which is same sense in which Isabella asserts the timeless and universal
character of truth.
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