October 2017

There’s been a bit more Shakespeare action this past month, both in my little world, and out there in the big one. After much struggle I finished a text on that difficult play, Measure for Measure, which seems to become more problematic each time we read it. I’m not completely unhappy to leave it for this time, but what to choose next? A more pleasant problem!

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Shakespeare sightings:

• In the novel A Separation by Katie Kitamura the narrator compares her mother-in-law to Lady Macbeth. She’s not terrible fond of her mother-in-law.
• In Stephen King’s massive It (1090 pages) he only manages two references to Shakespeare:
• One of the characters is taking a writing course and the teacher asks, ‘Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck?’ implying of course that he wasn’t. Well, he probably was, maybe not only but quite a lot.
• When Beverly insists that it’s her husband who has all the talent, not her, friend Richie says, ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’
• In Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies one of the thugs is called Shakespeare ‘because he was as verbose a thug as you could find.’
• In the film Genius the author Tom Wolfe (Jude Law) considers himself Caliban, ugly and deformed, and his editor Max Perkins (Colin Firth) exchanges some quotes with him.
• Dagens Nyheter
• had a long article about a children’s illustrated version of Hamlet by Barbro Lindgren and Anna Höglund. It’s called Titta Hamlet (Look Hamlet) and the first line is, ‘Look Hamlet. Hamlet not happy.’ The reviewer thinks it’s a small masterpiece. ‘This is not just a good start for those who want to meet Shakespeare for the first time, but a surprisingly strong interpretation even for those who have kept company with Hamlet for a long time.’
• is selling tickets to Rickard III (with Jonas Karlsson, we saw it a couple of years ago – brilliant!).
• had an article about great finds in used book stores and mentions William Shakespeare – comedies, histories and tragedies. Published according to the true original copies. The second impression.’ It’s the most expensive book on antikvariat.net, printed in 1632 and sold for 2 440398 Danish crowns in the Aanehus Aarhus antikvariat.
• The TV program Go’kväll also talked about the above-mentioned kids’ version of Hamlet and the reviewer said essentially that the kids she’s read it to love it.
• In the YA fantasy novel City of Bones the author Cassandra Clare starts out with a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘I have not slept. /Between the acting of a dreadful thing /And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasm, or a hideous dream’. Sadly, though the novel is entertaining (somewhat), this quote does not make it great literature.

Further since last time:

• Started reading: James Shapiro’s 1606 – The Year of King Lear
• Finished reading aloud with Hal: Measure for Measure
• Started reading aloud with Hal: the Sonnets, then reading the Swedish translation by Walter Dan Axelsson, then listening to those that are on the CD From Shakespeare with Love (bought because David Tennant reads many of them). So far we’ve read up to 18 (‘Shall I compare thee…’). Sadly, I really don’t like many of these early sonnets.

Posted this month

• ‘Losers’ in Measure for Measure https://rubyjandshakespearecalling.blogspot.se/2017/10/losers-in-measure-for-measure.html
• This report

Losers in Measure for Measure'

Losers

in

Measure for Measure

     What murky darkness plagued Shakespeare as he was writing this play? It’s called a comedy – they get married in the end and no one dies, thus fulfilling the requirement – but it is the least comical of all the plays. It’s twisted, it’s sick, it’s disturbing. Coleridge called it painful. Oh, yes.

     I have already written about how puzzlingly dreadful the characters of the Duke, Isabella and Angelo are in Shakespeare Calling – the book (pages 390-398). In this exploration of what other scholars thought of these characters and the play I applauded Harold Bloom’s assessment of ‘blasphemous’, and Katherine Eisamen Maus writes that viewers/readers must be aware of the Christian church’s fear and loathing of sex. Since this still has bearing on our society I would like to look at how the Duke, by playing God, and Angelo, by being a tyrannical hypocrite, they make like miserable for more than just the victims Claudio and Juliet.

     Times are hard in this Vienna. We see this when Mistress Overdone informs Lucio and the other gentlemen that she has witnessed the arrest of Claudio. He is to be executed in three days’ time and she laments: ‘…what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk’ (Act 1.2). In other words, there are fewer and fewer men to visit her bawdy house.

     It gets worse for Mistress Overdone. Enter Pompey who informs her that all the bawdy houses in Vienna’s suburbs will be closed in the new strictness. Mistress Overdone: ‘Why here’s a change indeed in the commonwealth! What shall become of me?’ (Act 1.2). Though Pompey reassures her that she will manage, she’ll find a new house, and though this scene is, I assume, usually played for laughs, and though in our day and age in some of our countries at least bawdy houses are seen as exploitive and oppressive of women, Mistress Overdone’s distress at the threat of losing her livelihood is very real. Starvation was never far away in her world.

     She is right to be worried. Two acts later she is hauled before Escalus who orders the officers, ‘Go, away with her to prison.’ She pleads for mercy, claiming that Lucio has informed on her despite her caring for his illegitimate child. To no avail. Escalus: ‘Away with her to prison. Go to, no more words’ (Act 3.1). And indeed, we hear no more words from Mistress Overdone.

     Lucio is an odd character, complex and often quite likeable. Upon the news of Claudio’s arrest, he’s disturbed. ‘But, after all this fooling, I would not have it so’ (Act 1.2). He is supportive of Isabella in her first encounter with Angelo. ‘Well said…thou’rt i’ th’ right, girl, more o’ that’ (Act 2.2).  He speaks shrewdly to the Duke, disguised as a friar, about Angelo’s cruel enforcement of the law: ‘Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great kindred; it is well allied, but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down’ (Act 3.1).

     He’s not kind to Pompey, taunting him and refusing to help him as he’s hauled off to prison for being a bawd. Throughout the play Lucio jokes crudely about his exploits with prostitutes – not an admirable attitude – and he is an irritant to the Duke (amusing to the reader/audience) but the Duke, supposedly satisfied with the convoluted solution he has concocted to the Angelo-Isabella problem, is unnecessarily excessive in condemning Lucio for the crime of slandering a prince first to marrying the mother of his child then to whipping then hanging. It’s a comedy so possibly the Duke is jesting but this is Shakespeare’s England (never mind that the setting is Vienna) so probably not. Not terribly amusing in any case.

     Three more victims must be mentioned briefly. Pompey, an amiable fool, is as already noted imprisoned for bawdiness. Unlike Mistress Overdone, whose fate after imprisonment we are not told, Pompey, though snubbed and unaided by Lucio, lands on his feet. If he agrees to become an assistant to the executioner his prison sentence, including a whipping, will be cancelled. Not an enviable exchange, one might think, but Pompey approves the proposal: ‘Sir, I have been an unlawful bawd time out of mind, but yet I will be content to be a lawful hangman’ (Act 4.2). Hmmm, on second thought, this is indeed a step up on society’s ladder, so by rights I should remove Pompey from this list of losers.

     Nor does Mariana regard herself as a loser. She gets the husband she has longed for. How many times have we asked ourselves why so many of Shakespeare’s clever women are madly in love with such dreadful men? Surely Angelo is the most dreadful of them. Being married to him makes Mariana, without question no matter what she says, a loser.

     What Isabella thinks of her fate remains a mystery. Married to the Duke? No doubt seen by everyone else as a true prize. But Isabella, as cold and fanatical as she may be, is surely sincere in her aspirations to become a nun. By Shakespeare’s time there were few nuns left and in his fanatically Protestant England being a nun was only a step up from death as an acceptable fate for women, but Isabella is so very strong in her role as a novice that becoming a wife, no matter how aristocratic and wealthy, is to lose the independence, odd as it may seem, of being God’s servant. So, on my list of losers Isabella must remain.

     Shakespeare never makes things easy for us. Villains, heroes, winners, losers, they’re often one big muddle. Claudio and Juliet start out being the main losers in this play but they might just be – along with the unbearably smug Duke – the only ones who aren’t losers in this most troublesome of Shakespeare’s plays.

    

Works cited:

• William Shakespeare, the Complete Works, the RSC edition, 2007. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.

 Films seen this time:

• From Shakespeare Calling – the book, page 398:
• ‘BBC, 1979. Directed by Desmond Davis. Cast: Isabella – Kate Nelligan; Angelo – Tim Pigott-Smith; the Duke – Kenneth Colley; Claudio – Christopher Strauli; Lucio – John McEnery; Escalus – Kevin Stoney; Pompey – Frank Middlemass; Mariana – Jacqueline Pearce. 
• A straightforward interpretation that seems to miss the essence of the play.  The cast is for the most part earnest, except for Lucio who is silly when he should be sardonic and cool.  The disgusting absurdity Shakespeare is trying to show us is not presented as an outrageous comedy, but as a … I’m not sure what.  Still I enjoyed it quite a lot until the final scene when Isabella smiled and took the Duke’s hand.  That kind of ruined everything.’ I agree with my earlier assessment.
• The Globe, 2015. Director: Dominic Dromgoole. Cast: Isabella – Mariah Gale; Angelo – Kurt Egyiawan; the Duke – Dominic Rowan; Mistress Overdone – Petra Massey; Pompey – Trevor Foxe; Claudio – Joel MacCormack; Lucio – Brendan O’Hea; Mariana – Rosie Hilal; Juliet – Naana Agyei-Ampadu
• Seriously flawed version. O’Hea interprets Lucio as a limp-wrist fop – awful! The farcical aspects completely destroy the comic elements of this tragic comedy. Egyiawan as Angelo is good though, and Gale does a serious Isabella though she’s a bit one-note weepy.