Measure for Measure

Paul Edmondson, Stuart Hampton-Reeves

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781403944177
• eBook ISBN: 9781350316805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Measure for Measure generates much debate and is strikingly modern. This introductory guide offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, a brief history of the text and first performance, studies of influential performances, a survey of film and TV adaptation, a wide sampling of critical opinion and annotated further reading.

1   The Text and Early Performances

Measure for Measure has a small cast but it deals with big themes. The play includes some of Shakespeare’s most powerful lines about the terror of death, and few of his plays are more cynical about the business of love. As it probes political corruption and sexual deviance, the play asks angry, insistent questions. Yet the play offers few answers. Some find this troubling and consequently, in modern times, the play has been burdened with the wholly unattractive and inappropriate label ‘problem play’. Hamlet is clearly a tragedy, there is no question that As You Like It is a comedy, but poor, ugly Measure for Measure is treated with puzzlement. There is no such genre as a ‘problem play’. It is we who have the problem.

This may be because Measure for Measure is not a particularly ‘readerly’ play. We do not expect this from Shakespeare, who is usually attentive to both readers and public audiences. To just glance over the text reveals an unpromising prospect for performance. Long speeches follow long speeches, scenes between two characters stretch for pages with much argument but little action. At times, the text seems stuck in complicated disputations of legal niceties and moral dilemmas which seem to be of their time, not ours. However, to merely read Measure for Measure is to misread it, for its real drama lies in what is not said. Few other plays by Shakespeare depend so much on unspoken thoughts and passions driving the action. Measure for Measure comes alive in its subtext, in unspoken thoughts and feelings. As the text is worked on in the studio, its secrets and its silences become ever more important.

First performances

Measure for Measure was, like all of Shakespeare’s plays, written for performance, but the circumstances of its performance was highly unusual. The play is tightly bound up with the cultural politics of 1604, the year when James I formally took his throne (having inherited it the previous year from his cousin Elizabeth). James was already King of Scotland, so his political views were well known, and many are reflected in Measure for Measure. He was certainly in the audience when the King’s Men performed it at court during the Christmas festivities of 1604. However, the play was not written to simply flatter one man. It had been in the King’s Men’s repertoire for some months and was probably first staged in April that year at the Globe playhouse in Southwark.

Measure for Measure balances these different audience positions without ever resolving them. The play moves between the two different worlds of court and city, between the high culture of dukes and the low culture of prostitutes, pimps and thieves. In both worlds, we see characters fretting about the nature of authority and suffering when authority is misapplied. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare and his company also moved between those worlds, playing in the city’s ‘red light’ district most of the time but also playing at court when summoned. Those in the audience at the court were invited to see in the play’s representation of justice a mirror for themselves. However, Shakespeare’s city audiences were much more sceptical about authority. They would have found common cause with the play’s rogues and rakes, for whom the sudden imposition of strict law is a nuisance and, in one case, nearly a tragedy.

The two principal theatrical spaces for which Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure were strikingly different. At court, the actors played at one end of a hall. If in attendance, the King was the most important participant, to some extent the main audience, and in many respects a more important spectacle than the show itself. The actor–audience dynamic closely resembled the ritual relationship between monarch and subject: the actors faced their audience and projected to them. The theatrical dynamics at the Globe were quite different. Plays were performed in the open air. Through a simple payment system, audiences were socially stratified, with the more wealthy patrons on sheltered benches and those who either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay more than a penny standing in the open area in front of the stage, the pit. A large thrust stage brought the action right into the audience and an actor could address their audience from three different sides, encouraging an intimacy between actors and audiences quite different to that at court. This was more than a feigned intimacy: there were usually only sixteen or so players in the King’s Men and most of them specialized in playing certain kinds of roles. Audiences knew the players well and knew their other roles. Richard Burbage was Shakespeare’s lead actor and would most likely have played the Duke, but he was also this audience’s Hamlet, their Henry V, and so on. Equally, as the company put on shows daily and probably played a very varied programme (we know from surviving account books that the rival Rose playhouse put on a different play virtually every day), the actors probably knew the audience, or certain characters in the audience, as well. The players had only themselves, their costumes and a few props to create their Vienna. No women were allowed to act, so all women’s parts would have been played by adolescent boys (Mistress Overdone is still often played by a man).

Because these spaces and audiences were so familiar, Measure for Measure was able to address them directly. Shakespeare had good reason to be strategic. The year 1604 was an anxious one because it was the first proper year of a new regime. Measure for Measure is, on one level, a play about succession management. For at least a decade before this, Shakespeare and his contemporaries had worried endlessly about what would happen to the country (and to their positions, their wealth, and so on) when the childless Elizabeth died, an event which could have come at any time. So destabilizing was this anxiety that Elizabeth outlawed any talk of it. Yet people always talk when a new regime is coming and the literature of these years is thick with the horrors of civil war. Shakespeare himself wrote seven plays about English civil war in almost as many years. A violent political struggle was a real possibility, especially in a country still stalked by the spectre of religious radicalism and still looked upon as a rogue state ripe for invasion by its neighbours. In the event, James’s accession went very smoothly and his formal entry into London through its city gates in 1604 was a memorable event. Shakespeare was part of the spectacle and he recalled it in the closing scene of Measure for Measure, which is based around the triumphant return of the Duke of Vienna through its city gates. Nevertheless, doubts and worries lingered. Measure for Measure is a product of that moment and seems to be a different play depending on which audience one imagines watching it. It is a strong affirmation of the importance of good governance for a court audience, and a cynical satire about the inconvenience of over-zealous authoritarianism for a city audience. Both plays exist in the same text, measure for measure.

The text

Measure for Measure was first published in 1623, nearly twenty years after it was written, when it was included as one of the comedies in Shakespeare’s first complete works, edited by two of his fellow King’s Men, John Hemminges and William Condell. The actual text was prepared by a scribe called Ralph Crane, who appears to have introduced changes to the text when he thought fit. The text shows signs of being edited after performances, perhaps to accommodate different circumstances, perhaps because a scene did not work as well on the stage as it did on the page. This leads to some curious plot-holes. In Act I, scene ii, one character, Mistress Overdone, rushes to tell her clients that their friend Claudio has been taken to prison. Later in the scene, she seems to not yet know about his arrest. However, these are relatively minor inconsistencies which can easily be straightened out in the rehearsal room.

It’s a truism to say that a play is ‘written for performance’. The text that we have of Measure for Measure was prepared long after Shakespeare and his company had put the play into performance. Its performance context shapes its text. For example, in addressing the play’s protean ability to mean different things to court and city audiences, Leah Marcus wonders if Measure for Measure is actually two plays or ‘double written’ (Marcus, p. 164). In similar terms, many critics have attempted to account for the way that the city and the court plays work together or against each other in the text. Understanding the conditions of the play’s first performances in 1604 shed much light on why the play is ‘double written’. Shakespeare had two audiences to write for in a climate where the nature of authority, following the accession of a new king and the founding of a new royal dynasty, was very much at the forefront of people’s minds.

The play’s twin performance contexts of court and city are reflected in the text. The play is set in Vienna which, after years of lax rule, has become a haven for promiscuous young men who want to dodge marriage and cavort with prostitutes. At court, the Duke, appalled by the state of the city, decides to disguise himself as a friar and explore it for himself. Meanwhile, he leaves in charge a straightlaced bureaucrat, Angelo, who he knows will ruthlessly enforce Vienna’s long-abused laws against illicit sex. The court and the city quickly become entangled when Angelo sentences to death one young rake, Claudio, for getting his fiancée pregnant. For Angelo, the distinction between court and city is an absolute one but he discovers his own hypocrisy when Claudio’s sister, Isabella, pleads with him for her brother’s life. Angelo becomes infatuated with Isabella and proposes a bargain: if she sleeps with him, he will release Claudio. The story of the corrupt judge was already an old one when Shakespeare wrote it. His innovation was to add to the story the disguised Duke (Shakespeare may well have had in mind the rumour that James I liked to go incognito about the city) who lingers around the prison and discovers Angelo’s crime. The play then pits the Duke’s governance against Angelo’s. The Duke tries to trick the trickster by substituting Isabella for Marianna, a woman to whom Angelo was once betrothed but who he cruelly abandoned. In this way, justice appears to be done, because it is no crime for Angelo to sleep with a woman who is nearly his wife. Court and city come together in the play’s dramatic final scene, when the Duke pretends to return to Vienna and discovers Angelo’s crime, and eventually reveals himself to be the Friar who has helped Isabella. However, this ending does not simply celebrate the restoration of order. True, Angelo is exposed, but he and Marianna are punished with a loveless marriage, and Vienna seems to remain as bad a place as it was at the start.

The text is full of gaps and silences. The most famous comes at the end. Almost as an afterthought, the Duke proposes to marry Isabella, a young woman who, at the start of the play, was training to be a nun. Until this point, there has been no romance between them. Isabella is apparently speechless. That is to say, she has no lines, but an actress still has to speak, even if it is silently. Isabella cannot just stand there as if nothing has happened; the Duke’s proposal is a startling and unexpected twist that demands some kind of response. The text is full of such lacunae. The only arguably happy marriage appears to be that of Claudio and Juliet. However, the text gives little indication about how deeply their love runs. Their marriage is mentioned briefly and as a punishment, as the Duke says: ‘She,’ [burying Juliet in a dismissive pronoun] ‘that you wronged, look you restore’ (V.i.517). That is all the text gives us. Productions often compensate for this by staging a joyful reunion between Claudio and Juliet, who enters carrying her illegitimate baby (which would have been far too shameful a thing for an early modern Juliet to do) and stands in Claudio’s arms, together the very image of a young, happy family. It is surprising how little the text provides to support this reading. No baby is mentioned; they have no lines (Claudio is silent for the whole scene, as is Juliet) and no stage actions. Very little is said about their love in the preceding text. Claudio mentions Juliet once in the whole play and that is when he is defending himself against his arrest. He insists to his friend Lucio that Juliet is ‘fast my wife’, that they were only hiding their love because Juliet did not have the money for a dowry and that her pregnancy was an unhappy accident. Claudio’s language is not love poetry and what he says smacks more of special pleading (I was going to marry her, honestly) than sincere emotion. Claudio and Juliet are hardly Romeo and Juliet. In fact, Claudio does not speak to Juliet in the whole play – not once.

Isabella is not alone in her silence, then. In fact speech and silence is one of the play’s major themes and is linked to authority in the opening, when the Duke worries that anatomizing the work of government would affect ‘speech and discourse’ (I.i.4) and shortly afterwards says to his favourite Angelo, ‘I do bend my speech’ (40), before exhorting him to ‘live in thy tongue’ (45). He makes Angelo his Deputy and then leaves. His other adviser, Escalus, asks Angelo permission ‘to have free speech’ with him (i.e. speak freely) (77). Speech is not free in Vienna and, despite the Duke’s opening lines, speech is already twisted, as is evidenced by the convoluted sexual puns (now inaccessible to most modern audiences) that dart back and forth between the wit Lucio and two soldiers he enters with in Act I, scene ii.

Speech is also linked to resistance. Claudio asks Lucio to ‘implore’ Isabella ‘in my voice’ and Lucio chides Isabella for having too ‘tame’ a tongue. Readying for the Duke’s formal return, Isabella is loath ‘to speak so indirectly’ (IV.vi.1) as the Duke (as the Friar) has persuaded her to do but, when she faces the Duke and the court, she insists, ‘I must speak’ (30) and ‘Most strange, but yet most truly will I speak’ (37) which the Duke, playing a part, dismisses as mad speech: ‘She speaks this in th’infirmity of sense’ (48). Isabella, who began the play discussing the nunnery’s strict rules about speaking to men and has to answer the door because she is the only one there who can speak to Lucio (having not yet taken her vows), ends by speaking for Marianna (now Angelo’s wife) and pleading for Angelo’s life. However, it is not Isabella’s speech but her silence that Claudio and Marianna want her for. Claudio tells Lucio that Isabella has a ‘prone and speechless dialect’ (I.ii.164); Marianna never asks Isabella to speak for Angelo but merely to kneel and ‘hold up your hands’ but ‘say nothing; I’ll speak all’ (V.i.431–2). Both want Isabella to be still and silent, but defying both and her ‘destined livery’ at the nunnery, Isabella speaks. Even the Duke does not want a talking Isabella for, as he leads her offstage, he asks her, ‘if you’ll a willing ear incline’, to listen to him (V.i.28). Isabella’s silence is not, then, an authorial oversight; she is deliberately silenced by the Duke who wants her only to listen to him. Still and speechless, or holding her hands up in silence, or inclining her ear to listen but not speak, Isabella is disempowered through silence. Ironically, the only person who wants her speech is Angelo who, seduced by her voice, says to himself, ‘I desire to hear her speak again’ (I.ii.182). In II.iv, Angelo’s chat-up line is ‘I do arrest your words’ (135), to which Isabella begs ‘I have no tongue but one . . . Let me entreat you speak the former language’ (140–1). The doubleness of language and the important role of speech in authority, whether speech is a way of policing people (ironic then that the play’s only policeman, Elbow, cannot speak properly but inverts everything), reflect the deeply ingrained duality of the play.

A note on the text

The edition of Measure for Measure used throughout this book is the New Cambridge Shakespeare edited by Brian Gibbons, which is among the best of the modern editions and was revised for a second edition in 2006. It is also a very practical text for the rehearsal room, as its footnotes do not take up much of the page.

One of the distinctive features of Gibbons’s edition is his verselining of half-lines. For example, Gibbons classes the following two lines as one:

ISABELLA Must he needs die?

ANGELO                                Maiden, no remedy. (II.ii.49)

Although there are two lines to be spoken, together they comprise one line of iambic pentameter. This is a helpful way to signal how artfully Shakespeare links certain characters and ideas in verse, and I have retained Gibbons’s verse lining for my scene notes.

In principle, this book can be used with most editions of the play which, as discussed above, do not vary significantly because there is only one authoritative text for editors to work from. Nevertheless, there are going to be minor discrepancies from edition to edition, and a group of students or actors should at least endeavour to all buy the same edition to avoid confusion.

2 Commentary

ACT I

Act I, scene i

The play begins with a certain amount of confusion. The Duke is inexplicably anxious, his speech unnecessarily convoluted, his intentions unclear to his subordinates who are stunned by his unannounced abrogation of power. Although some of the speeches are long, they should be delivered hastily. The Duke is being abstruse and unpredictable. As soon as he has taken Escalus into his confidence, he immediately makes Angelo his Deputy. For Angelo and Escalus and perhaps for the audience as well, the Duke’s behaviour is utterly baffling. Angelo especially seems uncomfortable with his promotion.

1–2 With one word, the Duke defines his relationship with Escalus: he is familiar and is confident that merely saying Escalus’ name is sufficient to command the old man’s attention. With two words spoken in response, Escalus signals his subservience. As the audience do not know who either of these men are, this little exchange is very important in establishing the political relationship between them. How the lines are delivered then becomes a crucial question, as it is very easy to load both lines with irony, uncertainty, tetchiness, even affection.

The text does not tell us why the Duke needs to call Escalus. Presumably they do not enter together, or if they do it is with a crowd of attendants. The Duke could be taking Escalus aside, in which case l. 2 might even register a note of surprise at his attention; the Duke could publicly summon Escalus to his side, which makes l. 1 commanding a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• 1  The Text and Early Performances
• 2  Commentary
• 3  The Play’s Intellectual and Cultural Contexts
• 4  Key Productions and Performances
• 5  The Play on Screen
• 6  Critical Assessments
• Further Reading
• Index