Measure for Measure has bothered me ever since I was assigned a scene from it for an acting class in college. There's nothing happy or comic about it up until the very last moments: I wondered whether Shakespeare got his pages mixed up and an everyone-gets-married scene got transposed from As You Like It in place of the tragic bloodbath which would fit much better with what came before.
In a post on the First Things website, Gabriel Torretta argues that while the conclusion is technically comic, it should be read darkly as the usurpation of the state over all other institutions. Then, in a nice turn, he considers the parallels between Shakespeare's Venice and present-day state behavior in these United States.
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