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In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, that comedy which is no comedy since it dispenses with all pleasant qualities, one senses almost all the time what Sachs calls the 'tainted atmosphere of the jail and the brothel'. The keynote of the comedy which has an unexpected and, we feel, an unjustifiably happy ending, is extremely pessimistic. The comedy is of the same period as King Lear and Othello, the most pessimistic period of the great poet. The content is briefly that Angelo, the representative of the Duke of Venice had, during the latter's absence, sentenced a man named Claudio to death on the strength of a long disused law because, through him, his fiancée had become pregnant. When Isabella the sister of the condemned man comes to Angelo to plead with him for her brother, he himself falls desperately in love with her, having never really been in love before, and promises to let her brother go free if she will give herself to him for one night. The Duke, disguised as a friar, learns the truth and the evil intentions and arranges circumstances so that Angelo, instead of being shown Claudio's head, is shown another, the decapitated head of a man who had just died, as proof that the execution had taken place. Angelo's abandoned fiancée is substituted for Isabella and spends the night with him without being recognized; but Angelo, in spite of his promise, does not keep his word and orders Claudio's execution all the same. Through the Duke, however, everything turns out happily and no disaster occurs. The punishment for Angelo's wicked plan to deliver Claudio to the executioner and for violating his sister under cloak of the false promise that he would liberate the brother, is, astonishing enough, that he marry his abandoned fiancée. This is the Measure for Measure. Hanns Sachs shows us the deeper significance of the strange comedy. It is, 'Judge not that ye be not judged'. The mildness of the judgment pronounced is attributable to the recognition that unco