Measure for Measure

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal 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 Héloïse Sénéchal
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, Université de Genève, 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 © 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: 978-1-58836-875-1

www.BookishMall.com

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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 Structure 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.