The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Heloise Senechal and Jan Sewell
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares
Measure for Measure
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and "Shakespeare's Career in the Theater": Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Charlotte Scott and Heloise Senechal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)
Playing Measure for Measure (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright): Trevor Nunn, Josette Simon, Roger Allam
Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Universite de Geneve, Switzerland
Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK
2010 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2007, 2010 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
"Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.
The version of Measure for Measure and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836875-1
www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction "Judge Not, That Ye Be Not Judged"
"The Old Fantastical Duke of Dark Corners"
Shakespearean Morality
About the Text
Key Facts
Measure for Measure List of Parts
Textual Notes
Scene-by-Scene Analysis
Measure for Measure in Performance: The RSC and Beyond Four Centuries of Measure for Measure: An Overview
At the RSC
Playing Measure for Measure: Interviews with Trevor Nunn, Josette Simon, and Roger Allam
Shakespeare's Career in the Theater Beginnings
Playhouses
The Ensemble at Work
The King's Man
Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology
Further Reading and Viewing
References
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
The Modern Library
INTRODUCTION
"JUDGE NOT, THAT YE BE NOT JUDGED"
The most widely read book in Shakespeare's England was the "Geneva" translation of the Bible. Because of this, the title of Measure for Measure would have been readily recognized by the play's original audience as an allusion to the opening verses of the seventh chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why see'st thou the mote, that is in thy brother's eye, and perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
The running head summarizing the content of this page in the Geneva Bible reads "Christ's doctrine--God's providence." Of all Shakespeare's plays, Measure for Measure is the one in which the dramatization of Christian doctrine and the motions of divine providence are most prominent.
It is actually unusual for Shakespeare to take his own title quite so seriously. Measure was written soon after Twelfth Night, with its throwaway subtitle or What You Will, and around the same time as All's Well That Ends Well, which pointedly modifies its own title in the climactic line "All yet seems well." Here, by contrast, the moral of the action is spelled out explicitly. Angelo sees the mote in Claudio's eye (getting his girlfriend Juliet pregnant before marrying her, albeit after becoming engaged to her) and fails to perceive the beam in his own (dumping his girlfriend Mariana upon discovering that she hasn't got any money). He judges Claudio, but the duke contrives to judge him by his own measure:
"An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!"
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure,
Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.
The Geneva Bible included interpretative glosses in its margins. Beside the "measure for measure" verses appeared the admonition "hypocrites hide their own faults, and seek not to amend them, but are curious to reprove other men's." That could as well be an instant character sketch of Angelo. He is more than once described as "precise," a term applied to no other character in Shakespeare. It was a word that often went with "puritan," as may be seen from the way in which Shakespeare's acquaintance John Florio defined the phrase Gabba santi in his Anglo-Italian dictionary: "a precise dissembling puritan, an hypocrite." Shakespeare was always guarded about the Roman Catholicism that was in his blood--was there a family connection with a certain Isabella Shakespeare, abbess of a nunnery not far from Stratford-upon-Avon?--but there is no doubt that he had little time for the puritans who stood on the opposite edge of the religious spectrum.
Despite the steer given by the title, the play is much more tangled than the old drama on which it was based, George Whetstone's History of Promos and Cassandra, which showed "the unsufferable abuse of a lewd magistrate," "the virtuous behaviour of a chaste lady," and "the perfect magnanimity of a noble king in checking vice and favouring virtue," all for the purpose of revealing "the ruin and overthrow of dishonest practices" and "the advancement of upright dealing." Shakespeare took Whetstone's basic plotline and principal characters--the indecent proposal, the hypocritical dealing of the lawgiver, the beautiful gentlewoman asked to give up her chastity in return for her brother's life, the ruler who returns and sorts everything out--but greatly complicated the moral vision. Whetstone's character of Promos has two anguished soliloquies in which he reflects on his desire for Cassandra. They offer a structural anticipation of Angelo's self-questioning "What's this? What's this? Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Ha?" and "When I would pray and think, I think and pray To several subjects." Whetstone, however, lacks Shakespeare's gift of writing soliloquy with meditative pauses, shifts between argument and emotion, and rhetorical twists that create the illusion that the character is having the thought as he speaks rather than speechifying on a predetermined theme.
Promos' dilemma is set up in terms of a simple opposition between reason and desire; with Angelo, on the other hand, it is the force of Isabella's reason--her powers of linguistic persuasion--that inflames his desire. He wants her not because she's beautiful or even because she is on the verge of taking a vow of perpetual chastity, but because he loves to see her mind and tongue at work. "She speaks, and 'tis such sense / That my sense breeds with it." Here rational sense is the very thing that stirs sensuality. In his book The Struc
ture of Complex Words (1951), the critic William Empson brilliantly demonstrated how a movement between the different senses of the word "sense" comes to the core of the play.
In a good production, sexual chemistry crackles between Angelo and Isabella even as she resists him. Being a man who is used to getting his way, he does not realize how much he loves it when he does not. Two strong wills strain against each other. As we watch, there is a little part of us that anticipates--or even hopes--that they will end up marrying each other in the manner of Shakespeare's other sparring couples, Petruchio and Kate, Berowne and Rosaline, Beatrice and Benedick.
Intriguingly, the Mariana plotline is Shakespeare's key innovation in the plot: Whetstone's play and the various sixteenth-century Italian versions of the story do not have the "bed trick" and they end with the king or duke punishing the Angelo figure by having him marry the Isabella figure (in order to repair her honor) before being executed. The Isabella figure then intervenes and professes her love for the man who has abused her; he is pardoned and they live happily ever after. Shakespeare transposes these turns onto Mariana and saves Angelo from execution. Mercy prevails over justice: it should be remembered that the "measure for measure" passage in St. Matthew's Gospel is at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus lays out his moral code, sharply distinguishing his new covenant of forgiveness from the harsher "eye for an eye" law of the Old Testament.
The introduction of Mariana into the story displaces the marriage plot from Isabella, seemingly leaving her free to return to the nunnery and take her final vows. But the play ends with the wholly unexpected twist of the duke's proposal. In one way, it is a fitting union. Having made the wrong choice of deputy (Escalus would have done the job much better), the duke makes the right choice of wife: Isabella will bring to his household the moral fiber that has been lacking, without any of Angelo's hypocrisy. Her "ghostly father" will become her husband and the Mother Superior of the nunnery will have to do without her: the monastic virtues will be brought from the contemplative to the active life, from the cloister to the secular state, in a manner characteristic of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. In another way, though, it is an astonishing ending. This has not been a courtship comedy. And is there not a little touch of moral blackmail in the proposal? Angelo's proposition was: sleep with me and I will save your brother's life. The duke's is: I have saved your brother's life, so marry me.
It has sometimes been argued that Shakespeare was becoming bored with comedy's conventional happy ending in multiple marriages. Perhaps this is a parody of a comic ending. He certainly turned away from comedy in the next few years of his writing career. Strikingly, Isabella does not respond to the proposal. Does she fall into the duke's arms with silent and submissive joy? Or look puzzled? Or aghast? Some productions of the play leave the ending open, with a kind of freeze-frame effect. It is not unknown--though without textual warrant--for Isabella to look the duke up and down, then turn away and march back to the sisterhood.
"THE OLD FANTASTICAL DUKE OF DARK CORNERS"
The puzzle over the ending is bound up with broader interpretative anxieties about the duke. He may be regarded as a God-like figure, benignly controlling the world of the play from behind the scenes. But is it healthy for a human to take on the role of divine providence? Angelo is a moral hypocrite, but it should not be forgotten that the origin of the word "hypocrite" is the Greek term for an actor. It is the duke who is the role player, the actor. Does he have the right to impersonate a friar and hear the confessions of Claudio and Mariana? "Confess" is another of the play's key words, used in both its spiritual and judicial senses.
The part of Lucio is considerably bigger than that of Angelo. Where Angelo is a false-seeming angel crested with the devil's horn, Lucio plays a seductive Lucifer to the duke's God. To adapt what William Blake said of John Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare was a true poet and of the devil's party without (perhaps) knowing it. Lucio speaks deep truths in light language: the extinction of sexual desire would require the gelding and spaying of all the youth of the city; the duke is in certain senses a creature of "dark corners." It is almost the first law of the Shakespearean universe that the voice of the devil's advocate should not be silenced. "I am a kind of burr," says Lucio, "I shall stick."
The first recorded performance of Measure for Measure took place on December 26, 1604, as part of the royal Christmas festivities. It was, then, one of the first plays written by Shakespeare for his new monarch. Within weeks of Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, Shakespeare's acting company had been renamed the King's Men. Over the next ten years they played at court between a dozen and twenty times a year, far more often than any other company. Though the duke is by no means an allegorical representation of King James, the play reveals Shakespeare moving into territory that fascinated the king: a concern with slander and reputation, an anatomy of the secret springs of power as opposed to a public display of majesty in the style of Queen Elizabeth's pageants and processions ("I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes"), a demonstration of the intricacies of theological and moral debate (one of James's first acts on arriving in London was to convene a conference at Hampton Court in which he participated in the contentions of high and low churchmen over such matters as the estate of holy matrimony and the question of who could legitimately perform the Sacraments). The king would therefore have been the ideal spectator for such set pieces as the duke's rhetorical mortification of Claudio ("Be absolute for death"). An acute ironist himself, he would have enjoyed the irony whereby Claudio is instantly persuaded by the duke's richly rendered argument, only to change his position a few minutes later when his sister tells him of Angelo's offer--at which point he voices a speech about the horrors of bodily decay and spiritual damnation that is the very antithesis of the duke's argument against life.
Though the play is set in Vienna, the brothels in the "suburbs" or "liberties" of the city evoke the London in which it was performed, where theater and the sex trade stood side by side on the south bank of the Thames. The malapropisms of Constable Elbow, meanwhile, are in the vein of very English humor associated with Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor. At the same time, the play has the whiff of both sexual license and political intrigue that the Elizabethans and Jacobeans associated with Italy. The duke's plan to get Angelo to do his dirty work for him could be read as a political strategy deriving from the pages of Machiavelli. There is a striking analogy with the strategy adopted by another duke, one of the Borgias, who is commended in the seventh chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli's handbook on the art of ruthless and pragmatic statecraft:
When the duke occupied the Romagna he found it under the rule of weak masters, who rather plundered their subjects than ruled them, and gave them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the country was full of robbery, quarrels, and every kind of violence; and so, wishing to bring back peace and obedience to authority, he considered it necessary to give it a good governor. Thereupon he promoted Messer Ramiro d'Orco [de Lorqua], a swift and cruel man, to whom he gave the fullest power. This man in a short time restored peace and unity with the greatest success. Afterwards the duke considered that it was not advisable to confer such excessive authority, for he had no doubt but that he would become odious, so he set up a court of judgment in the country, under a most excellent president, wherein all cities had their advocates. And because he knew that the past severity had caused some hatred against himself, so, to clear himself in the minds of the people, and gain them entirely to himself, he desired to show that, if any cruelty had been practiced, it had not originated with him, but in the natural sternness of the minister. Under this pretence he took Ramiro, and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed.
The duke of Measure for Measure might be considered to have
employed his deputy Angelo in a similar way, with the difference that, this being a comedy, he marries him off rather than executes him at the end of the play.
A drama is always a species of trial, in which actions, motives, and ideas are tested before the jury of an audience. The Duke of Vienna--like Duke Prospero of Milan in The Tempest--is a dramatist engaged upon a test. How is unbridled carnal license best restrained, in order to save society from the ravages of sexual disease and the burden of unwanted children? By extreme puritanism of the kind advocated by Angelo? This solution is tested and found severely wanting. What does the duke offer in its place? In theory the answer is a middle road between justice and mercy, license and restraint. The technical term for this third way is "temperance," a key virtue in classical ethics. The duke, says Escalus, is "A gentleman of all temperance."
Temperance, however, depends on everyone behaving reasonably and obeying the rule of moderation. What Shakespeare recognizes--as the duke does not--is that people simply cannot be relied upon to show perpetual temperance. So it is that at the very center of the action we find the extraordinary bit-part of Barnardine, the man who announces that he will not be executed today, thank you very much, because he has a hangover. The whole of the duke's plot nearly collapses because of him. It is only salvaged by the palpably improbable device of inventing the pirate Ragozine who just happens to look like Claudio and to die at the right moment. Barnardine, wrote the great nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt, "is a fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other characters of the play."
SHAKESPEAREAN MORALITY
Hazlitt was unusual among critics of his time in admiring Measure for Measure. Many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century readers had severe reservations about the play. Dr. Samuel Johnson greatly admired some of its sentiments, for instance the duke's speech to Claudio, readying him for death:
... Thou hast nor youth, nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep