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Angelo is the chief antagonist of Measure for Measure, and he represents the hypocrisy of an excessively repressive moral authority. Angelo begins the play as a man who’s eager to make a name for himself. It’s for this reason that the Duke selects him as his deputy. Yet the Duke also knows Angelo to be a man with very rigid ideas about moral purity—someone who holds himself to the highest standards of both religion and the law. Yet in his zeal to establish a reputation, Angelo immediately reveals himself to be something of a tyrant. As Isabella points out, Angelo is a poster child for the tyrannical overreach of authority: “[M]an, proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured” (2.2.146–48). What’s more, despite his claim to moral exemplarity, Angelo proves very susceptible to passion. He falls in love with Isabella almost immediately, and he desires her so intensely that he attempts to coerce her into having sex with him, thereby courting the very same crime for which he’s condemned her brother to death. Though named “Angelo,” he’s clearly no angel.
Though Angelo acts execrably throughout, frequently showing himself to be heartless as well as a misogynist, it’s worth noting that he is one of the play’s more three-dimensional characters. All the characters in the play, Angelo included, seem to hold unchanging views on the subject of fornication. Yet it is arguably only in Angelo that we see someone who struggles with their own internal experience. Although his proposition places Isabella in a difficult situation, she never wavers in her belief that fornication is morally wrong. By contrast, Angelo seems caught off guard by his desire. As he puts it shortly after meeting her: “What’s this? Is this her fault or mine? / The tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha?” (2.2.199–200). The surprise of his own lust leads him into confusing questions about who he really is: “What does thou, or what art thou, Angelo?” (2.2.210). Despite maintaining a persona that others consider cold and heartless, this glimpse into Angelo’s inner life reflects that he too is motivated by deeply human desires. That said, it’s unclear how much Angelo changes by the play’s end. Though he’s publicly chastened for his hypocrisy and sentenced to marry Mariana, he doesn’t seem particularly happy about it.
