Making up People in Measure for Measure

This essay is about comic form and the epistemological structure known in handbooks of rhetoric and legal reasoning as the argument from fiction. From Plautus to Shakespeare, comic characters use such arguments from fiction to think about the actions of other characters, modeling the interpretive work the audience engages in with respect to all the characters. But comedy also loves showing how often such arguments fail. I use Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as an example, because it is a virtual encyclopedia of arguments from fiction, nearly every one of which fails to produce real knowledge, or fails to persuade, or is simply pretense, because the speaker knows exactly what has been done and so needs neither inference nor argument. What generates knowledge about others in this play is not probable reasoning but theatrical deception: The tricks and disguises that are the material of its plot. The play offers a meditation on the conditions of our knowledge of other people and an exploration of the difference between the conditions of knowledge within a fiction and those outside it. The legal argument from fiction suggests that all our knowledge of other people is finally a knowledge about fictions. [B.R.]