The play's contentious subject matter did not recommend it to early filmmakers. Prints of an Italian film version from the 1940s are "believed lost."33 In 2006 the well-known cinematographer Bob Komar directed an updated film version set on a British army base. With a running time of eighty minutes, the text is heavily cut, eliminating the low-life scenes, but it does incorporate a short dialogue from Romeo and Juliet. There are strong central performances from Josephine Rogers as Isabella, Daniel Roberts as Angelo, and Simon Phillips as the duke. Peter Brook filmed his French adaptation with the Bouffes du Nord company for television, Mesure pour mesure, in 1979, the same year in which the BBC television Shakespeare was shown.
Measure for Measure was one of the earliest plays to be recorded in the BBC television Shakespeare series. It was directed by Desmond Davis and starred Kate Nelligan as Isabella, Tim Piggott-Smith as Angelo, and Kenneth Colley as the duke.34 The remit of this series was straight, no-frills Shakespeare. Colley's pleasant but lightweight duke is no match for Piggott-Smith's intense and brooding deputy, nor for Nelligan's serious-minded Isabella. Clad in a white habit throughout and made to appear deliberately sexless, she made a convincing nun. Her scenes with Angelo were compelling and Angelo's proposition seemed shocking and perverse. Piggott-Smith's performance suggested real, repressed passion and innate violence. Nelligan's portrayal of Isabella makes her acquiescence in the "bed trick" seem highly unlikely, however, as does her silent acceptance of the duke as a husband at the end, signaled by taking his hand and exiting with him. As is to be expected with the BBC, there is a splendid cast of low-life characters, led by John McEnery's engaging Lucio and Frank Middlemass's wonderfully gothic Pompey. Television's intense, melodramatic focus meant that the most successful scenes were bound to be the debates between Angelo and Isabella, and they were.
David Thacker's 1994 production for BBC2's Bard on the Box series, with Tom Wilkinson as the duke, Corin Redgrave as Angelo, and Juliet Aubrey as Isabella, was a braver and more challenging production. Set in an indeterminate, slightly futuristic period, Wilkinson's duke was world-weary, fleshy, greasy-haired, and drinking heavily, a middle-aged man in a midlife crisis. As the production starts, he is watching CCTV footage of sleazy street scenes of pimps and prostitutes, and pornographic videos, alone in a darkened room surrounded by a chaotic clutter of books and debris. This is a fast-paced production full of televisual awareness. The pace is achieved by heavy cutting--over one thousand lines, so that just less than two thirds survives with textual thinning throughout and some redistribution of lines. The low-life scenes are eliminated except insofar as they relate to the main plot, although Henry Goodman gives a bravura performance as a Spanish Pompey. The story this adaptation tells is of a sordid, modern, postindustrial city, presided over by gray-haired men in gray suits, and how two of these middle-aged men come to life again, awakened by the power of a young, lovely, and innocent girl. It seems to align Measure for Measure in a curious way with another "problem" play, All's Well That Ends Well, but instead of the king allowing Helena the husband of her choice, he suggests marriage to himself instead. This society is a real wasteland in which the old are rejuvenated at the expense of the young.
AT THE RSC
John Mortimer wrote that "a great play doesn't answer questions, it asks them,"35 and Measure for Measure, possibly more than any other play in Shakespeare's canon, leaves us with more questions and debate about characters, their motivation, and its resonance for our times, than most modern dramas. Reviewers, actors, and directors are consistently astonished by its modernity in this regard. Where the perspectives on the institutions of the state and the Church may seem antiquated and beyond our understanding, this play, which questions the very fabric of society through the assumed moral high ground of its leaders, has a direct relevance to contemporary society, which directors are keen to explore.
The RSC's productions of this play clearly demonstrate a shift in how society thinks about the world. As Nigel Wood explained, "social context, time and place will radically influence the text's interpretation and presentation to accord with the current fashions of criticism--feminist, Marxist, psychological ... together with the current forms of theater style."36
Judi Dench, who played Isabella in 1962, believed that:
There are many things in it that a modern audience can recognise very easily about corruption in a city on every level throughout government, throughout society as a whole. Corruption is not just confined to pimps and prostitutes ... this kind of corruption is a cancer. It's something that will break out again and again ... who can tell what might happen after the curtain comes down on that particular city with its seemingly redeemed society?37
Noting how the critical and cynical view of politicians in postwar generations had altered our interpretation of the play, critic Irving Wardle suggested that, "Intellectually fashionable since the end of the war, Measure for Measure has undergone a total reversal of meaning from a parable on divine justice to a fable of social oppression. It is clearly central to the prevailing moral climate."38
In its radical Brechtian rereading, Keith Hack's 1974 production launched "an indiscriminate attack on all forms of authority."39 Featuring a photograph of Richard Nixon, and saucy seaside-postcard-type illustrations, the program notes for this production included an alternative analysis of the play by controversial playwright Edward Bond, whose work had obviously influenced the director:
It is ironic that the academic theatre and the critics take the Duke at his face value, and remain caught up in the whole pretence of "seeming" that Shakespeare attacked. In fact, our politics are still run by Angelos, made publicly respectable by Ducal figure-heads and theories, supported by hysteria (Isabella), and mindlessly obeyed by dehumanised forces (the Provost and Abhorson).40
The Watergate scandal and the messy conclusion of the Vietnam War obviously informed this angry and impassioned reading of the play. "All the world's a tatty stage, and no one in authority is to be trusted."41 The collision and corruption of respected society and the Viennese "stew" was implied in casting and costume decisions: Mistress Overdone (played by a large Dan Meaden) was a "ginger-wigged drag act" who also doubled as a conspicuous nun, and Lucio wore "finery so shabby that his stockings are full of holes." The acting area was surrounded at the back by a wire grid through which Hogarthian grotesques would gaze at the action. Reminiscent of an insane asylum, "The resultant ambiguity was intentional. Who was in the cage--onlookers or actors (or audience)?"42
Many of the directors who have chosen to produce Measure for Measure have done so because they, like Keith Hack, have a burning desire to tackle issues directly relevant to their own time. When invited to direct a Shakespeare play for the RSC, director Nicholas Hytner decided to stage Measure because it seemed to him "a play about how individuals relate to government as well as to each other."43 At the tail end of the Thatcherite era, Hytner suggested that "a society is sick where rulers and ruled speak different languages, and that self-knowledge is the prime requisite of those who exercise power."44
The British government of the late 1980s promoted the moral values of the family unit, while some of its number were discovered to be conducting adulterous affairs and indulging in deviant sexual behavior. The word "sleaze" became synonymous with "politician." Reflected in Mark Thompson's setting for Hytner's production, "Soaring industrial towers, vaguely reminiscent of the Centre Pompidou or the new Lloyds Bank building in the City, swivel round to usher us into a dark underworld."45 To Roger Allam, who played the duke in Hytner's production, it was
significant that much of the play is set in a prison, the ultimate embodiment of the state's desire for control ... We move from the court into the world of pimps and whores, a public street-life teeming with vitality, but one that is corrupt [through fourteen years of non-government]. We stressed this very strongly in our production. The grey cut-away coats and knee-breeches of the court gave way to outrageous cycling shorts and Doc Marten boots. Most of ou
r whores were rent-boys, run by Pompey, working a gents' toilet that rose from the floor. This was our attempt to de-anaesthetise the cliched presentation of prostitutes in Shakespeare's plays, and thus shock and awaken our audience anew to the meaning of the scene ... We could only have come up with our particular view of the text at our point in history, that is, post-feminist, post-Aids, and post-Thatcherism ... Fifteen to twenty years ago many people viewed the state and its public institutions as corrupt, or useless, or repressive. After all the Thatcher privatisations, many of those same people look back with nostalgia and regret to those times of greater consensus.46
Trevor Nunn, in 1991, focused on the psychological drama inherent in the play. This created "a coherent, exciting, but deliberately narrow path through the play's vastness."47 His setting was fin-de-siecle Vienna:
To locate Measure for Measure in Freud's heartland, with psychoanalytic quotations in the programme, is to emphasise how eerily the play anticipates Freud. Nunn, in this admired production ... interprets the unconscious mind, with desires refusing to be repressed, as the play's [motivating] force.48
The production was staged in The Other Place studio theater in order to "put Shakespeare's celebrated 'problem play' under the moral microscope."49 By doing so, Nunn created a tension and intimacy that was palpable to the audience:
In The Other Place, no projection is required. The actors are in the same situation as in a television studio or before a film camera. The audience can hear them breathing and believes it can hear them thinking. All kinds of unexpected truths begin to emerge, all kinds of details and fluctuations of language and philosophical complexities and nuances of character.50
Nunn also found profound contemporary relevance in his innovative psychological focus:
Think of the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six.* An eminent judge can argue that it doesn't matter if innocent individuals suffer as long as the idea of the law is upheld and kept pure. Well, the distinction between law and justice is on every page of Measure for Measure ... Or think of the immediate scepticism that greets Isabella when she accuses Angelo in the last scene. You can't open a newspaper without it being asked whether the victim of a rape can be believed when she says she did nothing to encourage it. And then of course there's the whole issue of the permissive society. It is extraordinary that Shakespeare should actually use the word "permissive" ... You think, "I do not believe that this play was written in 1605."51
Through the examination of three pivotal areas we can see how directorial choices can alter the whole meaning of the play. The rest of this discussion will focus on the duke's motivation, Angelo's reaction to Isabella's plea, and Isabella's response to the duke's proposal. By exploring how the RSC has made sense of Measure's central characters we will discover some solutions to a play that provides no easy answers.
The Duke's Motives
Measure for Measure, like any other Shakespeare play but perhaps a little more than some, presents a vast area of choice to the director, not least in that great area of mystery, human and superhuman, surrounding the duke.52
Critics constantly refer to the word "enigmatic" when describing the character of the duke. He remains more elusive than most Shakespearean characters because he is a man who acts and schemes but rarely soliloquizes. We never hear why he does what he does. Actors playing the part, unlike readers of the play, have to make a solid decision as to the motivation of the duke in order to perform the role with any sort of coherency. Michael Pennington, who played the part in 1978, explained: "the part of the Duke is so enormous that you cannot take it on unless you have an attitude towards him. You have to suggest there is some kind of journey for him during the play which is both physical and spiritual."53
To show how "enigmatic" Shakespeare's text is with regards to the duke's character we will look at three extremely different readings from productions in 1974, 1987, and 1991.
Barrie Ingham's Duke for Keith Hack's 1974 production was presented as "the grand sexual manipulator and designer of the whole action."54 This Measure for Measure, which one reviewer referred to as "no better than an insult thrown in the face of the audience,"55 wallowed in the degeneracy of the ruling classes. A "garishly perverted sexuality was in league with an established church and the chief ally of the corruption,"56 the arch "melodramatic" manipulator of the action was the duke:
Mr Hack presents him as a morally discredited fraud wearing the mask of justice. The structure of the production, in fact, is to show the forces of law and order and the underworld victims as two sides of the same coin.57
Hack ... saw a sexual basis to the political hypocrisies of the Viennese state. Thus the Duke was a lecher fondling Isabella whilst pretending to comfort her, lustfully encompassing her in the folds of his cloak. The sexuality of this Duke was more perverse than that of Angelo, Lucio's words being taken at face value, "He had some feeling of the sport, he knew the service" [3.1.380-81].58
This extreme version of the play left no doubt as to the duke's nature, "a posturing role-player, one intoxicated with the joys of manipulating his subjects. In a corrupt Vienna, nothing was more corrupt than the motives of the Establishment."59 In his manipulation and pursuit of Isabella the duke became the "ultimate deviant of the play."60
This reading of the character came in for heavy criticism by critics who felt the director had altered the meaning of Shakespeare's text too much to suit his own vision. Many actors also felt that playing the duke as an amoral manipulator was to seriously misread the text:
There is a great deal of plotting and scheming, it is true, but, behind the scheming, there is, always, the drive of high moral purpose. And to those who would argue that he is unnaturally obsessed with the necessity to make his scheme succeed, I would answer that he is playing for the highest stakes, playing indeed for his life and the moral regeneration of his city and his subjects ... A gesture as immense as handing over the reins of power to a young and relatively inexperienced Angelo must go hand in hand, I felt, with some sort of psychological crisis.61
In Daniel Massey's evaluation of the duke there is an implied motivation for public good, but also one of self-discovery.62 Roger Allam, in Nicolas Hytner's 1987 production, took this "psychological crisis" as the main motivation for the duke's actions:
[the duke] seemed to be in the midst of a deep personal crisis about the value of life itself ... Does the experience and responsibility of power change your belief in how to live, even if you seem absolutely certain? [This] relates to the Duke as much as to Angelo. He needs to discover how power has changed his own purpose ... Angelo is used because he seems certain, not because he is suspected of being a hypocrite ... above all the Duke is testing himself [by using a surrogate]. The Duke constantly uses other people, Angelo, Claudio, Isabella, even Lucio, as a means of self-knowledge.63
Allam emphasized that the duke was at a turning point. At the start of the play, reviewers described him as being in the throes of a mental breakdown. The following action dictated whether he decided to go on living or chose death:
I felt strongly that if Angelo had not proved a hypocrite the Duke would never have returned to Vienna. He would either have entered "some monastery" or, remembering the despair of "be absolute for death," would have committed suicide ... A series of chances and "ifs" has occurred to pull the Duke back from despair.64
Through the "obliteration of public persona"65 the duke "dons a friar's habit almost as an act of therapy":66
Being a Duke would still mean paralysis, whereas as the Friar he has become someone who can use his intellect to solve problems, make judgements, and act upon them immediately whilst responding to events as they occur. He is, as it were, living. He is also speaking prose rather than verse.67
The formal constrictions of language and costume discarded, the duke discovers the freedom to understand that "life is all there is, so we might as well live it as best we can; that being human is not a given but something we have to strive for. That the reason we are her
e is to live and that this involves making many difficult judgements."68
Trevor Nunn's 1991 production included a piece of stage business and manipulation of the text to expose the duke's motives:
the lights went up on Philip Madoc's middle-aged, bespectacled, bearded Duke, sitting on a couch examining some scraps of paper in a folder--press cuttings they were, several of them, and they would appear again later as the Duke told Isabella the story of Angelo and Mariana and their broken betrothal. Retrospectively, one saw how the Duke was very deliberately engaged in a psychological investigation of Angelo. The couch, the choice of period, even, to some extent, Madoc's appearance, were all part of this Freudian allusion.69
Trevor Nunn transposed lines from Act 3 to the start of the play, "He who the sword of heaven will bear / Should be as holy as severe." Upon these words Escalus then entered and the normal play text began. In order to emphasize that the duke's interest in Angelo was also a concern to others, another adjustment was made when the duke goes to ask for the Friar's disguise. Initially very reluctant to lend the duke religious garments, the Friar seeks out the duke's true motivation. The words "Lord Angelo is precise" [meaning a puritan] "palpably struck an immediate chord with the Friar, as who should say: 'Now you're talking; I don't trust the slimy creep either. How many habits was it you said you'd like? What about the sandals?' "70
Isabella and Angelo acted out their neuroses on a minimal set dominated by a Freudian couch: "If Nunn finds an overall theme in Measure for Measure, it is the 'painful acquisition of self-knowledge' mentioned in the programme. Never has a revival left me so aware that all three main characters are undergoing an emotional education forced to accept the darkness within."71