Dreaming on both....
This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening. (Johnson's 1765 edition of Shakespeare)
But Johnson was puzzled by the ending--"It is somewhat strange, that Isabel is not made to express either gratitude, wonder or joy at the sight of her brother ... After the pardon of two murderers Lucio might be treated by the good Duke with less harshness; but perhaps the Poet intended to show, what is too often seen, that men easily forgive wrongs which are not committed against themselves"--and he felt that overall "the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labour than elegance. The plot is rather intricate than artful."
At the end of the nineteenth century the impassioned poet and critic A. C. Swinburne took a very different view. He suggested that Measure for Measure had long been an unpopular play not because, as certain French commentators had suggested, the cant and hypocrisy of Angelo presented too raw a portrayal of "the huge national vice of England," but because the failure to punish Angelo baffled the sense of natural justice. This, Swinburne noted, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reason for disliking the play: "The expression is absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored or even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck in the face" (Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, 1880). A deliberately outrageous and insulting play: what Shakespeare had done to expectations about justice in Measure for Measure is what Swinburne did to Victorian morality in his scandalously sexual Poems and Ballads of 1866. That is why Measure was one of the plays that he valued the most.
The changing fortunes of Measure for Measure coincided with the shift from Victorianism to aestheticism. Victorian Shakespeare was ushered in by Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler a generation before the young queen came to the throne. Measure for Measure was the one play that defeated their project to create a Family Shakespeare suitable for reading aloud in the home. They bowdlerized what they took to be obscenities out of all the other plays, but a sex-free Measure for Measure proved an impossibility: "the indecent expressions with which many of the scenes abound, are so interwoven with the story, that it is extremely difficult to separate the one from the other. Feeling my own inability to render this play sufficiently correct for family-reading, I have thought it advisable to print it (without presuming to alter a single word) from the published copy, as performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden" (prefatory note in The Family Shakespeare, 1818).
It was the aesthetes Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater who overturned the bowdlerian legacy in the 1870s--and they did so by making Measure for Measure into a central and characteristic, as opposed to a marginal and awkward, Shakespearean play. Walter Pater's 1874 essay on the play was stylistically inspired by Swinburne's criticism, but its original publication predated Swinburne's specifically Shakespearean musings. The essay was reprinted as the centerpiece of Pater's "art for art's sake" manifesto Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889). Pater read the play in terms of the disruption of northern European puritanism by what he called "southern passion." Richard Wagner had done something similar in Germany back in the 1830s: when turning the play into his early opera Das Liebesverbot ("the ban on love") he had shifted the action to Palermo. Pater's method of shifting the play southward was to link it to its Italian sources. But he also made extraordinary high claims. In Measure for Measure, says Pater, Shakespeare works out "a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgements." The play is "hardly less indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare's reason, of his power of moral interpretation." No one hitherto, except perhaps, by implication, Richard Wagner, had seen the centrality of Measure for Measure to the mind of Shakespeare.
Pater argues that the play deals not with the problems of one exceptional individual, as Hamlet does, but with "the central paradox of human nature." It brings before us "a group of persons, attractive, full of desire, vessels of the genial, seed-bearing powers of nature ... but bound by the tyranny of nature and circumstance." The characters are seen as embodiments of the force of life itself. Central to the sense of fully lived life is a consciousness of the power of death: Pater sees Claudio's "Ay, but to die ... to lie in cold obstruction and to rot" as perhaps the most eloquent of all Shakespeare's words. He finds the plea for life everywhere in the play, not least in Barnardine's line "Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live." Such is Shakespeare's elemental sympathy that even the meanest characters "are capable of many friendships and of a true dignity in danger, giving each other a sympathetic, if transitory, regret--one sorry that another should be so foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack." The need to seize the day is shown negatively in the way that "in their yearning for untainted enjoyment, [the characters] are really discounting their days." Pater notes here that this sentiment inspired Tennyson's great lyric poem on Mariana at the moated grange.
Pater ends his essay by returning to the idea that Measure for Measure offers in its ethics "an epitome of Shakespeare's moral judgments." He contrasts it with Whetstone's original and the older type of morality play in which the drama exemplifies some rough and ready moral lesson. In Measure for Measure, as its title suggests, the ethical vision is shaped by the very structure of the play. This is in accordance with Pater's key aesthetic principle: "that artistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled." The morality of Measure for Measure is that of poetic, not political or theological justice. What the play teaches us is that human beings all have "mixed motives," that our "real intents" are "improvised" by circumstance and that virtue and vice are often copresent in unexpected places:
The action of the play, like the action of life itself for the keener observer, develops in us the conception of this poetical justice, and the yearning to realize it, the true justice of which Angelo knows nothing, because it lies for the most part beyond the limits of any acknowledged law. The idea of justice involves the idea of rights ... The recognition of his rights therefore ... is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love.
For Pater, poetry is the highest form of sympathy. It is therefore the route to that true--and truly modern--form of justice that is built on the need to recognize all persons as they really are in their inmost nature. In interpreting Measure for Measure thus, Pater reads Shakespeare as a moralist ahead of his time, a playwright who profoundly anticipates a theory of justice more characteristic of the modern era than the early modern: "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others" (first principle in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971).
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).
Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee
the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format "Quartos" published in Shakespeare's lifetime and the elaborately produced "First Folio" text of 1623, the original "Complete Works" prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Measure for Measure, however, exists only in a Folio text that is reasonably well printed. However, the surviving text may represent a theatrical adaptation postdating Shakespeare's retirement, possibly overseen by Thomas Middleton. The extent of Middleton's involvement is debated by scholars. There are a number of inconsistencies, puzzles, and textual anomalies. Why, for instance, does Juliet appear on stage in three scenes but only speak in one of them? Why is the duke unnamed in the play, but called Vincentio in the list of roles attached to it? Why are his remarks about how "might and greatness" or "place and greatness" cannot escape censure split into two very short soliloquies at different points in the action (3.2, where the sentiments are relevant, and 4.1, where they are not)? Why does Mariana's song "Take, O, take those lips away" also appear, with an additional stanza, in John Fletcher's play Rollo Duke of Normandy of The Bloody Brother (written between 1617 and 1620)? Some editors have considered the array of such problems to be little more than the result of minor tinkering with the script in the two decades between its first performance and publication in the Folio, while others have argued for wholesale revision on Middleton's part. The Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007) actually prints a "genetic text" of the play by "William Shakespeare, adapted by Thomas Middleton," with many passages printed in bold type to indicate possible authorship by Middleton, who is said to have changed the play's location to Vienna, for political reasons, from an allegedly Italian setting in Shakespeare's original (conjecturally Ferrara).
Shakespearean textual debates of this kind go in cycles: the Cambridge editor in the 1920s proposed an elaborate theory of revision; the Arden editor in the 1970s thought that the text was close to its Shakespearean original; the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Oxford editors have seen more Middleton than ever before. For the purpose of our edition, which is fidelity to the Folio, we print a modernized version of the 1623 text and leave speculation to others.
The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, one of which is Measure for Measure, so the list at the beginning of the play is adapted from that in the First Folio. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus "The DUKE, unnamed in play, but 'Vincentio' in Folio list of roles").
Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which Measure for Measure is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations ("another part of the city"). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often with an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page. They are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Measure for Measure, the entire action is set in and around Vienna.
Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division was based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King's Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare's fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentarily bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.
Speakers' Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. Thus POMPEY is always so-called in his speech headings, but "Clown" in entry directions.
Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction ("turnd" rather than "turned") to indicate whether or not the final "-ed" of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus "turned" would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, nor did actors' cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker's sentence.
Spelling is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.
Punctuation in Shakespeare's time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. "Colon" was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare's time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a period (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.
Entrances and Exits are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. "[and Attendants]"). Exit is sometimes silently normalized to Exeunt and Manet anglicized to "remains." We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.
Editorial Stage Directions such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters' position on the gallery stage are on
ly used sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as directorial interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a different typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside? (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or as a direct address--it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.
Explanatory Notes explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.
Textual Notes at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with "F2" a reading that derives from the Second Folio of 1632 and "Ed" one that is derived from the subsequent editorial tradition. The rejected Folio ("F") reading is then given. Thus, for example, "3.1.143 penury = F2. F = perjury." This indicates that at Act 3 Scene 1 line 143 the Folio compositor erroneously printed "perjury," which the Second Folio corrected to "penury."