Charles Gildon's Measure for Measure, or Beauty the Best Advocate (1700) was produced at the height of the vogue for inserting masques into plays. Gildon incorporated Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with a libretto by Nahum Tate, rearranged into four musical entertainments devised by Escalus to celebrate Angelo's birthday. Purcell's work was the first sung-through opera in English, and Gildon's deployment of the work was equally innovative. He used it to turn his play into a dramatic opera in which the story of Dido and Aeneas is integrated into the main plot and used to comment on Mariana's story. No contemporary scores survived, and Purcell's haunting music would have been lost had it not been for the play's survival.
Shakespeare's play was revived in 1720 at Lincoln's Inn Fields with James Quin as the duke. He continued to play the role in revivals until his retirement in 1750. From 1737 onward he was successfully partnered by Susannah Cibber, who played Isabella to great acclaim. Other notable actresses to play the part were Mrs. Yates and Peg Woffington. Mrs. Fitzhenry created a success in the part opposite Henry Mossop at Dublin's Smock Alley theater. Sarah Siddons was undoubtedly the most famous historical Isabella though, playing the part from 1783 to 1812, most often with her brother, the handsome and dignified John Philip Kemble, as the duke. Later their younger brother Charles joined the distinguished cast to play Claudio. Kemble's acting version, which cut sexual and bawdy references and thinned many of the longer speeches, continued in use for fifty years. In her 1808 edition of the play, Mrs. Inchbald writes that "Mrs Siddons's exquisite acting, and beautiful appearance in Isabella, are proverbial ... Mrs Yates was admired in the part--both her person and voice were favourable for the representation--but Mrs Siddons had not at that time appeared."2
The play continued to be revived periodically in increasingly heavily bowdlerized texts. One Victorian critic explained that there was "no other play of Shakespeare's in which so much of the dialogue is absolutely unspeakable before a modern audience."3 Samuel Phelps staged it periodically at Sadler's Wells between 1846 and 1857, with himself as the duke and Laura Addison as Isabella, again using a bowdlerized text. The only important production in the following decades was Adelaide Neilson's at the Haymarket theater in 1876 and 1878. In 1888 the Polish-born Helena Modjeska produced and starred in a one-night revival at New York's Fourteenth-Street Theatre to general critical acclaim:
A very large portion of the original text has been retained, but the comic scenes have been vigorously cut, and though Pompey, Elbow and Froth appear, their vivacity is kept within decent bounds. The performance, which was brilliant in an artistic sense and of rare beauty so far as Mme. Modjeska was concerned, was otherwise even and interesting.4
William Poel, the English actor-manager, was one of the leading theatrical figures in the reaction against over-elaborate Victorian staging who advocated a return to the fast-paced fluid action of the Elizabethan theater, inspired by the recent discovery of the Dutch traveler and student Johannes de Witt's drawing of the Swan theater made on his visit to London in 1596. Accordingly, the Shakespeare Reading Society staged Measure for Measure in 1893 within a reconstruction of a seventeenth-century playhouse inside London's Royalty Theatre. The attempt to recreate Elizabethan staging received a mixed reception:
The performance might fairly be described as a reading of the play by the members of the society in costume on virtually a bare stage, or, at least, a stage representing ... a "scene individable." Usually it is assumed that in such circumstances the imagination of the onlooker would be so stimulated as to conjure up streets and palaces surpassing the art of the modern metteur-en-scene. The present writer must confess that he had no such experience. In fact, though following the action closely, he had no picture of the scene before his mind at all.5
The 1908 revival of the production at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, was on the whole more warmly received:
Mr Poel did wonders, but he could not get rid of the proscenium arch. What he gave us was not an Elizabethan stage as it was to Elizabethan playgoers, but a picture of an Elizabethan stage seen through the frame of a modern proscenium. So we gained a good visual idea of a Shakespearean stage, but not the Elizabethan sensation of having an actor come forward to the edge of a platform in the midst of ourselves and deliver speeches from the position almost like that of a speaker from a pulpit or from a front bench in Parliament, with only the narrowest scope for theatrical illusion, with no incentive to naturalism, and with every motive for putting his strength into sheer energy and beauty of declamation, giving his performance the special qualities of fine recitation as distinct from those of realistic acting. But, without that, we got a good deal.6
Although Poel's own performance as Angelo was singled out for praise, criticism was made of the still heavily bowdlerized text used. The play's time had not yet come.
There were a number of productions in the early twentieth century, including Oscar Ashe's at the Adelphi in 1906. His wife, Lily Brayton, played Isabella but, like Poel, Ashe himself chose to play Angelo rather than the duke. The amateur production in the same year by the Oxford Union Dramatic Society aroused hostility among the townsfolk on the grounds of the play's "indecency," as did Poel's production at the Stratford Memorial Theatre in 1908. There were four revivals at the Old Vic between 1918 and 1937. In the earliest of these, Sybil Thorndike played the part of Lucio, owing to the shortage of male actors; according to critic Gordon Crosse, "Her man-about-town swagger was a real triumph."7 The 1933 production boasted a distinguished cast, with Charles Laughton as Angelo, Flora Robson as Isabella, Roger Livesey as the duke, and James Mason as Claudio. Laughton's Angelo was later described by Tyrone Guthrie as "not angelic, but a cunning oleaginous monster, whose cruelty and lubricity could have surprised no one, least of all himself."8
It was Peter Brook's 1950 production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford which was finally to establish the play in the modern repertoire:
Mr Peter Brook's intelligent production very successfully establishes the ambience of out-at-elbows evil. His settings are at once ingenious and practical, and his use of detail is unobtrusively felicitous--the tarboosh [fez] on a gaolbird's head to remind us that the frontiers of Asia are not so far away, the domesticated pheasants in the moated grange bequeathed not so long ago by the Romans ... The play, rarely done at all, can rarely have been done better.9
The performances of Harry Andrews as the duke, John Gielgud as Angelo, and the nineteen-year-old Barbara Jefford as Isabella were warmly received. Brook's production was innovative in a number of ways. Kenneth Tynan mentions the "grisly parade of cripples and deformities which Pompey introduces in that leprous Viennese gaol," in which "All the ghastly comedy of the prison scenes was summed up in this horridly funny piece of intention."10 It was the fifth act, however, that was "Brook's triumph," in which he "used another of his charged and daring pauses";
this time before Isabella at "Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd" knelt to plead for the life of Angelo. He asked Barbara Jefford to pause each night until she felt that the audience could stand it no longer. The silence lasted at first for about thirty-five seconds. On some nights it would extend to two minutes. "The device," Brook said, "became a voodoo-pole--a silence in which all the inevitable elements of the evening came together, a silence in which the abstract notion of mercy became concrete for that moment to those present."11
Cecil Clarke presented the play in the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival's production of 1954 "as a sober probing into the complexities and inconsistencies of human nature--with a generous injection of low and often bawdy comedy."12 Anthony Quayle's production at Stratford in 1956 built on Brook's success, with the production centered on Anthony Nicholls' benign duke and strong support from Margaret Johnston's austere Isabella, Emlyn William's Angelo, Alan Badel's Lucio, and Patrick Wymark's Pompey. The American Shakespeare Festival staged a production the same year in which the directors
John Houseman and Jack Landau apparently determined to prove t
hat ... this reputedly dark and difficult piece could be turned into very light comedy. By decking it out in late nineteenth-century costumes and playing it like a Strauss operetta, they managed to avoid the central acting and interpretive problems and to present an entertainment which was greeted kindly by some reviewers, if not by Shakespeare enthusiasts.13
1. 1950, Peter Brook production. Harry Andrews as the duke, surrounded by prisoners, a "grisly parade of cripples and deformities" which added to the "ghastly comedy."
In the American director Margaret Webster's 1957 production at London's Old Vic, Anthony Nicholls reprised the role of the duke and Barbara Jefford the part of Isabella, with John Neville playing Angelo. The duke was the central figure; "Miss Webster sees that it is not Angelo's conscience but the Duke's Wolfenden survey* which is the crux of the play, and if you can make the Duke seem a true sociologist and not a mere Arabian Nights farceur the usually intractable and tedious second half will come fully alive."14 In the early 1960s, productions
began, increasingly, to present the duke as the semi-allegorical, God-like figure that some theatrical reviewers had been looking for in the mid-1950s and that literary critics had been discussing since the 1930s. And, even more emphatically than Quayle's production of 1956 or Webster's production of 1957, these presentations made Duke Vincentio the leading character in the play.15
In Michael Elliott's 1963 production at the Old Vic, James Maxwell's duke appeared as a "mysterious, semi-divine personage."16 In the final act the duke was "robed in Cardinal's red, entering triumphantly to ecclesiastical music in front of a great sun, with onlookers falling prostrate before him."17
In the program notes to his 1966 production at the Bristol Old Vic, Tyrone Guthrie argues that,
I suspect he is meant to be something more than a glorified portrait of royalty. Rather he is a figure of Almighty God; a stern and crafty father to Angelo, a stern but kind father to Claudio, an elder brother to the Provost ... and to Isabella, first a loving father and, eventually the Heavenly Bridegroom to whom at the beginning of the play she was betrothed.18
Many of the critics were unconvinced by Guthrie's ideas, or rather John Franklin Robbin's performance of them. The London Times' reviewer thought that without Guthrie's program note "one might not have guessed that this jovially eccentric figure, whirling his crucifix like a propeller, was intended to possess metaphysical significance."19
Productions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all took the need for a happy ending for granted and altered the play in various ways in order to achieve this. Quin and Kemble omitted the last lines of the duke's final speech, adding lines of their own. Such efforts seem to point to a perceived need to make the union between the duke and Isabella more acceptable by adding elements of romantic courtship and wooing. In 1970 John Barton's RSC production (discussed in detail below) ended with Isabella alone on stage, without any sign of having accepted the duke's proposal of marriage. 1970 thus represents a watershed for the play.
Because of the controversial nature of the issues it deals with, Measure for Measure has been a play on which directors have been keen to impose strong readings and interpretations. Those qualities that condemned the play for a Victorian audience, the themes of sexual corruption and hypocrisy by an establishment of powerful men, have recommended it to late twentieth-and twenty-first-century audiences. Interpretations of the play have been influenced by Freudian ideas about sexuality, and feminist analyses of gender and the workings of patriarchy. Robin Phillips set his production for the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in 1975 "not in the mystic Vienna chosen by Shakespeare but in the realistic Vienna of Franz Josef at the beginning of this century."20 While praising Brian Bedford's "magnificently dry Angelo" and Martha Henry's "quivering passion" and "frenzy of Puritan zeal and its concomitant suggestion of sexuality," critics were most impressed/disturbed by William Hutt's "urbanely authoritative Duke--a man in this production with a taste for young women, young boys, mischief, and religiosity--and Richard Monette's powerfully, ingratiatingly sinister Lucio" seen as "something new":
Normally Lucio is seen as a rascal--Mr. Phillips makes him, rather than the Duke, the conscience of the play, the ironic, Brechtian commentator, who stands at the center of the action, all-knowing, all-seeing, half-shocked and half-amused.21
In the same year Charles Marowitz produced an adaptation which, differing from his usual "collage" technique of cutting, pasting, and redistributing lines, used what he calls "narrative guile" to persuade the audience that what they were seeing was a conventional production, before radically reworking the plot: "It was only at that point where most people felt reassured that this was Measure as they knew it that one began to switch rails."22 The most shocking difference in Marowitz's version was paradoxically the absence of the "bed trick." The duke does not disguise himself as "Friar Lodowick" and the rest of the revised narrative unfolds from that. As in earlier adaptations, the low-life characters were eliminated, which had the effect of darkening the play still further--with no space at all for a comic/romantic reading. The surreal dreamlike and recorded voice sequences intensified its nightmare quality.
Michael Rudman's decision to transpose the play to a post-colonial Caribbean island for the National's 1981 production at the Lyttelton Theatre was ultimately vindicated, despite the "risk of being labeled as a white political snob":
Some scenes are stunningly effective--our first glimpse of Eileen Diss's set, a colonial capital with its familiar traces of being a Western playground, gambling dens and tarts--the interrogation of Oscar James's Pompey which fails because of Elbow's illiteracy--the final street scene where the Duke (Stefan Kalipha) unmasks Angelo and so publicly proposes to Isabella (Yvette Harris). For once, too, we can believe that Isabella actually wants to marry the Duke, the correct interpretation. She is honoured, she does blush at the prospect and that dedicated religiosity (which has already been dented by her experiences) crumbles away.23
In the event, Mark Lamos' keenly anticipated 1989 production at the Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in New York was to prove a disappointment:
The beginning of Mr. Lamos's inventiveness, unfortunately, also proves to be its sum. While his "Measure for Measure" remains in present-day costume ... the production never achieves a specificity that might conjure up the atmosphere of the gritty world we live in. The play languishes instead in an antiseptic void: the standard-issue vacuum of Modern Dress Theater.24
Critic Frank Rich goes on to ask, "Why stage this fascinating play--whose so-called problems are challenges to theatrical exploration--if one has nothing burning to say about it?"25 Many directors since have been keen to explore theatrically the challenges and problems that the play poses, including Libby Appel's 1998 production for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which used a total of seven actors, "each playing both a higher and lower character. Vilma Silver, for instance, played both Isabella and Mistress Overdone."26 Jerry McAllister's 1999 production incorporated the city streets in his New York production, set not in Vienna "but Times Square right now."27 Mary Zimmerman's 2001 production in Central Park featured the park itself: "In focusing on a grand scheme that makes fools of prudes and tyrants, and choosing the comic over the grim whenever possible, the production makes Shakespeare's notoriously unpleasant play pass by quite pleasantly."28
In 2004 Simon McBurney's Theatre de Complicite's production was staged at the Royal National Theatre in London. Described as an "in-yer-face" production in which the "sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten Commandments" (1.2.7-8) was George W. Bush, whose face flashed up on large television screens overshadowing the stage.29 The production advertised its contemporary resonance with the Viennese prisoners wearing Camp X-Ray-like orange jumpsuits. As theater historian Stuart Hampton-Reeves comments, "Rarely had a production been so keyed to its moment. It caught the mood of audiences who were minded, it seemed, to embrace a play in which authority and manipulation are treated so ambivalently."30 The narrative focus
was "Angelo's psychological journey, which ended with a dramatic breakdown." David Troughton as the duke was "too cruel a character to be the main centre of dramatic tension," whereas Naomi Frederick's Isabella was "too abused to fill that role."31 In the final scene, the duke offered Isabella his hand,
and then stepped back to reveal a small chamber at the rear of the stage in which was a brightly lit white bed. Isabella was at the front of the stage, kneeling, her head turned back, her mouth gaping, so enacting the silence that Shakespeare wrote for her (and Angelo doing the same). The Duke was in the middle left, stooping, his hand stretched out towards the bed. The Olivier is a big stage ... so these spatial differences created a real impact: suddenly attention was thrown on the bed in the distance, the Duke isolated in the middle of the stage, the rest of the cast sharing the audience's view of these two lonely scenes, the Duke and his empty bed.32