In this production, Angelo, too, was clearly sexually repressed, of an age when he was no longer romantically eligible, he was nonetheless obviously somebody who both could and should be sexually active, but who had taken the decision that, for "moral" and intellectual reasons, he must abstain.
The title Measure for Measure is proverbial, and clearly applies to the kind of justice that is delivered at the end of the story (with Angelo being "punished" with the restoration of his relationship with Mariana, with Lucio punished with marriage to one of his whores, etc.), but the title is also a phrase about balance. Shakespeare provides us with central characters who are essentially unbalanced and pushes them into circumstances where they are forced to confront their extreme behavior and thereby possibly recognize that there is a better balance that could be either restored or discovered.
5. 1991, Trevor Nunn production. Claire Skinner as Isabella. "Isabella is not a 'heroine' in any traditional sense. She is a troubled and unbalanced character."
The play is a humanist masterpiece, and was clearly only a "problem play" in ages that required a clear "moral" purpose in drama or, at the very least, clear category distinctions of "tragedy" and "comedy." It is about flawed people, about how human nature is essentially flawed, contradictory, muddled, and, in post-psychological jargon, "mixed up." Accordingly, it is a play that accentuates just how crude and inappropriate are the human institutions of the law, the Church, the government, and, perhaps above all, the concept of the death penalty.
"[M]an, proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority" is Isabella's anguished outburst against her tormentor, but it stands emblematically as the observation that is most fundamental to Shakespeare's intention in this play. It's not a surprise, therefore, to discover that Shakespeare is also concerned not only with understanding and self-knowledge, but with forgiveness. The last scene of the play prefigures the ideas of forgiveness and reconciliation that we find so potently in the "late plays" like Cymbeline and The Tempest. Isabella, under the gaze of her guide and mentor, the duke, is given the decision to take of whether or not Angelo shall be in receipt of her mercy.
In my production (though I know for certain this also happened in Peter Brook's production of the play), the silence before Isabella spoke was very long, almost intolerably long. It was the silence during which her struggle with the extremes of her nature is being waged. As she finds that possibility of forgiveness in herself, the battle is won, her change toward a greater humanity and balance has begun, and, in turn, it takes Angelo to a place where, for the first time, the world seems to be different from what he had come to believe it to be.
This brings us to the question of what it is that happens finally between Isabella and the duke. It became fashionable, a generation or so ago, to play the final moments of Measure for Measure as evidence that all authority is corrupt and hypocritical, and thus in this reading, the duke, whom we had supposed was an enlightened man of conscience, cynically uses his power to force the much abused Isabella to his own bed. Since Shakespeare leaves her silent at the point of the duke's proposal, it is entirely possible to interpret this as evidence that the girl is aghast, speechless in horror, frozen with the realization that all men are the same and that there is now really nobody to whom she can complain. But I argued that such interpretation was entirely unfounded in the text, and that the opposite conclusion is not only more coherent, unifying the many themes of the play, but richly and rewardingly playable by the protagonists.
Isabella, alone in the world with her brother under sentence of death, has found one person she can turn to, rely on, and share with. She believes him to be a priest, but her increasing contact with him brings about increasing understanding and dependence. The discovery, in the final scene, that her mentor and friend is not a priest, but the much loved and much lamented duke, is for her as exciting as it is bewildering.
In this production then, Isabella's silence was tearful and profoundly happy, a charged emotional state that was too full to allow speech. In going to him, and he to her, she was aware that she was relinquishing her zeal to spend her life as a nun, that she was now wanting to live within the world, not outside it, and that she was instinctively committing to a future based on spiritual kinship, mutual respect, and a meeting of minds--to which we should admit no impediment. The point of the conclusion is that their future will not be based on or exhausted by sex.
So often we discover Shakespeare has a theme or a subject, every aspect of which he intends to explore, especially its opposite. Here in Measure for Measure, the subject is sex, but by that same token it is also an exploration of frigidity, or a holiness that eschews, through celibacy or decree, the functions of our bodies. And, as so often is also true, Shakespeare doesn't arrive at a proselytizing conclusion or a moral tag, he arrives at a sense of the need for humans to find the middle way, or the balance, or the measure that equals the measure.
Josette Simon: Playing Isabella
Did you work out a rationale for why Isabella wants to be a nun at the beginning of the play?
I didn't particularly have a negative rationale for her. I explored that. Especially because she and Claudio are (it seems) orphans and how that may have impacted on her and her emotional life. I felt that, for her, it was a very positive decision. I think that because it's such a strict and extraordinary thing to do, it's felt to be a negative decision: something sinister must have happened to her that she wants to lock herself away from the world. But I felt that for her it was a positive choice, I felt she was very happy to go in there. I didn't work out a complete rationale at that time but I felt that as part of the character of Isabella, she believed it was a positive step in her life.
She seems to want the conditions placed upon the nuns to be even stricter than they are--does that suggest that she has a certain fanatical quality herself?
That's right. I think the thing about her is that she's an absolutist. She's absolutely passionate about everything she does and she's absolute in everything she does. She has to do things to extremes. The order of Saint Clare's is a very strict order anyway; to want it to be even stricter may be bizarre but it absolutely fits with her character. She does things to the nth degree, and the fact is she isn't satisfied until she's absolute.
And is that maybe one of the things that attracts Angelo to her?
Yes, though not on its own. I think it attracts Angelo because he recognizes that quality, and also her passion, of course. There's something very attractive about her anyway; there's something extraordinary about somebody with that much passion and that much belief. Angelo is a dispassionate person. He's so rigid, so repressed that I think the combination of Isabella's qualities excites him. I think it is the absolute nature of her personality and her extraordinary passion, which is alien to him, that when combined together excites him.
Nuns are traditionally quiet women, and yet Isabella has superb powers of argument. Does she take pleasure in her debates with Angelo?
I certainly did when playing her. I don't think Isabella's enjoyment of her speeches is solely why she's able to argue so well, but I think she definitely gets transported. She has an extraordinary intellect, an extraordinary power of argument, and facility with language. Her words are exquisite, and I think she does enjoy the arguments, but not in a conscious way. I don't think she thinks "I love the feeling that I'm getting from doing this." I think the argument itself is what drives her and her aptitude with language. She enjoys trying to explain to Angelo exactly what she means.
For me, yes, the language is extraordinary. I remember at the time that the enjoyment of the language and the power of her argument always ran alongside an anxiety that as a performer you're drawing as much out of the language as you could. But you never can with Shakespeare; on the very last day you're still not satisfied, there's still more to go, and that's what's so joyous about it.
Is it uncomfortable for her to have Lucio around as her intermediary?
No, I don't think so. I
think if she'd met Lucio before the dilemma of her brother's plight had been put to her, she would have found him uncomfortable to be around. I think that there's a feature of Isabella that she's able to square certain slightly dodgy dealings with her own sense of righteousness. I think that with Lucio, the fact that she loves her brother so much and would do almost anything for him means she's able to qualify it--in order, she thinks, to get him off. I think Lucio being his friend is a much stronger resonance for her than what else he's capable of. Because she's trying to save his life I think she doesn't go into it too deeply; if she did, I don't think she would want to be anywhere near Lucio. But he fulfills a purpose and she's able to square that purpose within the boundaries of her humanity.
The line "More than our brother is our chastity" can be difficult for a modern, sexually free-and-easy society to accept: what was your take on this key point of principle?
I have to say that when Nick [Hytner--director] asked me to play Isabella, one of the first things that practically every single person said to me was, "How are you going to do that line?" I'm sure it happens today when an actor is asked to play her. It's sort of a Becher's Brook at the Grand National. Like approaching a very large fence. But actually, it's only one line!
Whenever you do the classics, you're always accompanied by many years of past performances that have been deemed "definitive," so you're always up against people's perceptions of how you're going to do a part, or how you're going to do that line. My answer whenever I approach the classics is to pretend it's never happened before. No one's ever seen the play, I don't know anything about it; I try to banish every single thing from my mind, because those preconceptions are not the criteria under which to try to breathe life into a part or fulfill the truth of a line. You can't approach it having that baggage in your head. So the line becomes something to do with the whole mining of the character of Isabella. It's also to do with you and the director and Shakespeare, fulfilling what you think Isabella is about, where she's at when she says that line. If in performance you come at it thinking, "Oh my God, I'm approaching that line!" then your head is already in the wrong place, because you should be trying to inhabit, in body, Isabella to such a degree that you know why she's saying that line. You believe it. You have the character's best interests at heart, so therefore, if you are embedded as deeply as you can possibly get yourself into that part, you will understand why you say that line, and that's all that matters.
Having said that, of course it is the most extraordinary line. And in this day and age, as you rightly say, it's very hard for an audience to go with that. But as I said, in a sense I didn't care what the audience was thinking, I cared what she was thinking. And in terms of caring what she thinks, she absolutely believes it. It's natural: it's part of her extraordinary character. It's part of the thing that excites Angelo. Who is this person? This is someone quite unlike anybody he, we, you, or anybody else has ever met. She's intriguing. It's telling that you don't just think she's a silly, prissy, repressed old cow! There's something endearing about her that she can hold such an absolute belief. I think in this day and age you can still go with that, and the answer lies absolutely in the belief of the person playing Isabella; not asking an audience to believe the same thing, but to understand why she believes it. For me, that line became part of the resolve to fully inhabit Isabella as a whole.
In your production, did Angelo come close to a sexual assault upon your Isabella?
Absolutely, he was very physical. He was violent and it was very scary for me. Obviously I knew what was happening, but you do get so deeply enmeshed with the person you're playing that it always came as a shock to me. The thing about it is you try to live in the moment, even though, of course, you are doing it every night. When he suddenly grabbed me I was thinking, as Isabella was, that the fact he wanted to see her again was that he'd been swayed. She was moving closer to Claudio's life being saved. He grabbed her with such violence, sexual violence, and although he didn't actually then do anything after that, hitherto he'd been very contained, so she had no idea what was going on inside of him. At that point, in our production, you feared for her life as well as her sexuality. I think it's a moment where he's so out of control that anything could have happened.
Is there anything problematic about Isabella's willingness to set up the "bed trick" with Mariana?
As I said earlier, she's able somehow to qualify things. Because Mariana was betrothed to Angelo, I think that just about qualifies it. If she was just a woman who was taking part in this "bed trick" then Isabella wouldn't do it; she couldn't countenance that at all. But I think the fact of the betrothal somehow squared it, just about. She finds something she can live with. The other thing to remember, of course, is that Claudio has had sex with his girlfriend before marriage: there are all of these things she's confronted with that in theory in the cold light of day she absolutely would not let pass. But there are certain qualifications that she's able to just about make and I think this is important in the whole of her journey.
I think that when I came to look at the journey Isabella had gone on there's a sense of compassion that she has learned. She starts the play incredibly passionate and absolute, and totally committed to her beliefs. She does of course contain a massive amount of humanity, but she doesn't particularly have a worldly humanity: in a sense, she was shutting herself off. Out of the world. Away from the world. But, having experienced the world, she couldn't live in the same way that she was when she started the play. I think she came to understand people, human frailty and fallibility, and I think she learned a lot about the wider world and her own place in it--about her own way of thinking about the world, being in the world, and about other people.
6. Josette Simon as Isabella, Sean Baker as Angelo. Angelo's "sexual assault": "he was very physical. He was violent and it was very scary for me."
Were there any intimations of the duke's marriage proposal before it actually came?
No. There were no intimations at all. Isabella is very focused, she has tunnel vision, she's absolutely committed to whatever it is she's fighting for. She doesn't see it coming. Not that his intentions were obvious; they weren't. It is a surprise to everybody. Including the audience.
And how did you respond to it when it did?
I remember during the rehearsal period we didn't make any decisions about it and quite late on still hadn't decided how it was going to end. And I realized that therein lay the answer: she hadn't decided. As we all know, Shakespeare doesn't do anything without a reason; there's always a reason when you're mining that script, you're like a detective looking for clues. Her last speech is to ask for Angelo's life to be spared and after that she says absolutely nothing at all for two and a half pages. She never speaks again. And there's a reason: he can't leave her for two and a half pages at the end of the play with nothing to say without some reason. That reason, it seemed to us, was that she didn't know whether she wanted to marry him or not. For me it was completely wrong that she should say "yes." Why should she say "yes"? Because it's right at the end of the play, we all go home happy and satisfied and think how wonderful, they go off together, they suit each other ... no, no, no. You have to ask why she is not speaking for all that time. So at the end of our production he asked her and she walked upstage to the exit: it was a very, very long walk upstage just before blackout, and a moment before the blackout, she turned around and looked at him. So you don't know what she decided. I loved that we did that because I think for me that was the absolute truth. Shakespeare gives you the answers: for me he gave the answer that she didn't speak.
Roger Allam: Playing the Duke
Why does the duke vacate his role at the beginning of the play?
... if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not....
(Act 1 Scene 1)
We have strict statutes and most biting laws,
...
Which for this fourteen years we
have let slip.
(Act 1 Scene 4)
The duke has been a recluse, has "ever loved the life removed," and through his inaction, over a period of fourteen years, has let Vienna fall into moral and political decay. In our production, directed by Nicholas Hytner at Stratford in 1987, the street life of Pompey, Lucio, and Mistress Overdone was lively and filled with vitality. But it is corrupt, a world of pimps and whores. The world of the court was sclerotic, seized up through fourteen years of a kind of non-government. The duke is in a personal crisis just as the state is in a public crisis. He has thought himself into complete paralysis. He has to do something drastic before he has a complete breakdown, so he runs away: he leaves the identity of being a duke and governing, and disguises himself so he can see how the state is run by Angelo.
Why did he choose Angelo?
Angelo seems certain of how to live his own life and govern other people's. He will be strict and govern according to a fundamentalist Christian view of life and human foibles, whereas the more liberal Escalus would not. Angelo has been given the power of life and death in Vienna, and complete scope to enforce the letter of the law or to qualify it. "Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose, what our seemers be." Perhaps the duke was once as certain as Angelo seems now. Through disguise and spying on the results of Angelo's prescriptive certainty, the duke will gain self-knowledge. Will power change Angelo's purpose? Did it once change the duke's? He doesn't really know. We felt that the duke in these early stages of the play was a desperate man on the run, clutching at straws to prevent himself from completely retiring from the world to a monastery, or perhaps even becoming suicidal.