The Duke, the Professional Virgin and the Dastardly
Deputy
in
Measure for
Measure
The first time Hal and I
read Measure for Measure aloud, we
said, “Huh?” But that was when we were
just getting into Shakespeare so we figured we just didn’t get it. The second
time, on our first read-all-the-plays-in-chronological-order sessions, we said,
“Huh?” Now we’ve read it in our second read-all-the-plays sessions and this
time we said, “Huh?”
This is just a really hard
play to understand. Not the story.
That’s easy like all of Shakespeare’s stories. The Duke temporarily hands over
the power to rigid but virtuous Angelo and pretends to leave town but comes
back disguised as a friar to connive and manipulate everybody. Angelo immediately uses his power to enforce
a long-ignored law against pre-marital sex and condemns poor amorous Claudio to
death for impregnating his bride-to-be Juliet.
Claudio’s sister is in the process of becoming a nun. She asks Angelo to spare Claudio’s life.
Angelo says he will if she’ll have sex with him. She says, “Oh horrors. Never.”
The Duke arranges things to make Angelo think he is
having sex with Isabella but he’s really having sex with his long-rejected
fiancée Mariana. Things sort of turn out
in the end. Claudio doesn’t get executed anyway.
The problem is, why are
they all so neurotic and perverted and disgusting? Well, not all of them. Some of the characters
are puzzled and troubled by the events but the main three – the Duke, Isabella
and Angelo –are horrible and I just can’t figure them out.
Seeking enlightenment I
took several books from our Shakespeare shelves and because I had found Wilson
Knight’s chapters on Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida interesting, I
started with him.
I was skeptical from the
start because of his title: “Measure for
Measure and the Gospels” but I read it. Not surprisingly he compares the
whole play to the measure for measure story in the biblical Book of Matthew and
concludes that the whole play is a warm, deeply ethical play.
The Duke, according to
Knight, stands “for a psychologically sound and enlightened ethic.” He is “the prophet of an enlightened
ethic. He controls the action from start
to finish…he is lit at moments with divine suggestion comparable with his
almost divine power…and wisdom” (page 80).
Knight cannot praise the Duke highly enough. He tells us, “The Duke’s
sense of human responsibility is delightful throughout: he is a kindly father,
and all the rest of us are his children” (page 86). That’s meant as a compliment. I think. Knight
says of the Duke’s monologue to poor about-to-be-executed Claudio about life being
lousy so it’s better to die, “The thought is profound” (page 92). Well, it is,
but I think he means that it’s a good profound
thought. Knight concludes that the Duke
had been right from the beginning to be lenient, and that the marriage between
the Duke and Isabella will be “the marriage of understanding with purity; of
tolerance with moral fervor” (page 107).
He’s got to be kidding.
Isabella then. She stands
for “sainted purity” (page 80). I think he means this as a compliment too. He
emphasizes her plea to Angelo for mercy but he also realizes that her “saintliness”
is “self-centered” and her “sanctity” is “ice-cold” (page 102). She “lacks human feeling” (page 103) and her
fall, Knight thinks, is deeper than Angelo’s because “she sees her own soul and
sees it as something small, frightened, despicable, too frail to dream of such
a sacrifice…she, like the rest, has to find a new wisdom” (page 104). When
Mariana pleads in the last act for Angelo’s life because she loves him anyway (which Knight doesn’t seem to find unreasonable),
Isabella “suddenly shows a softening, a sweet humanity.” Angelo’s passion has
“thaw[ed] her ice-cold pride” (page 104). The Dukes sees that she has learned
her lesson and “she bows to a love greater than her own saintliness” (page
105). So she (supposes Knight) marries the Duke and “will learn from him
wisdom, human tenderness, and love…” (page 107).
He’s kidding, right?
Yucky Angelo then, what’s
Knight’s take on him? He sees Angelo not
as “a conscious hypocrite: rather as a man whose chief faults are
self-deception and his own righteousness” (page 94) but realizes that “he
swiftly becomes an utter scoundrel” (page 97). Then Knight comes to the odd
conclusion that “Angelo is the symbol of a false intellectualized ethic
divorced from the deeper springs of human instinct” (page 98). What?! When he
is exposed in Act V Angelo realizes he had “aimed too high when he cast his
eyes on the sainted Isabel; now, knowing himself, he will find his true level
in the love of Mariana…his acceptance of Mariana symbolizes his new
self-knowledge” (pages 105-106). What
acceptance? Yes, Mariana inexplicably loves him still even though he has been
“a little bad” (Act 5.1) but he gives no sign in the play that he accepts this
love. He marries her because the Duke tells
him too.
Hm. So much for Knight. My
reaction is still, “Huh?”
The introductions in the
plays in the Norton edition have been consistently helpful in understanding the
plays so next we read this one by Katherine Eisaman Maus. It does indeed
clarify some things. She puts the Duke’s, Isabella’s and Angelo’s views on sex
as evil and dangerous to society in the historical context of Plato and later
the Christian church’s equation of sex with sin. However it would be completely wrong to say
that everybody in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance actually thought this way
and KEM asks the question, “What makes sexuality so troublesome in this
play?” In Measure for Measure Shakespeare’s linking in the earlier comedies “between
heterosexual desire and marriage seems to have snapped” (page 2040). In this
play the more reasonable characters – Lucio, Pompey, Escalus – regard chastity
as a good enough thing but not for them.
But the Duke’s system of oppressive laws against sex “would not have
been unfamiliar to Shakespeare’s original audience” (page 2041). Moreover the Puritans were on the rise and
KEM wonders if Shakespeare was asking in this play “what would happen if, as
some argued, sexual misconduct could be punished with death?” (page 2041). By
setting the play in Catholic Vienna, Shakespeare protects himself from offending
the contemporary English Puritans but the parallels are surely there.
About the three characters
we are looking at in this study KEM offer this:
The Duke like the others
sees sex as “sordid…a sign of degradation rather than a means of creativity or
love,” (page 2040) and he is in charge of a system that also makes it
illegal. She points out that his
character is controversial amongst critics and viewers. Some see him as nearly
divine (she means Knight, perhaps?). Others see a parallel to King James I who
had recently succeeded Elizabeth I, while still others see him “as a schemer
who foists his dirty work onto political subordinates and meddles impudently,
even sacrilegiously, with the lives of his subjects” (page 2045).
Isabella, too, is
interpreted in different ways and probably elicited the same mixed reactions in
Shakespeare’s time as in ours, according to KEM. Is she defiantly heroic for defying Angelo or
chillingly selfish to let Claudio die? Chastity was a serious business back
then, and as KEM points out “her obstinacy seems justified after the fact, when
Angelo has Claudio executed anyway” (page 2043). But KEM goes on to point out
that Isabella isn’t as pure as she seems.
“She not only shares Angelo’s assumption that the sexual act is a
defilement but like him she finds the discipline exciting” (page 2044). Well, that’s interesting.
So, on to Angelo. KEM deals with him brusquely. He is “rigid
and self-righteous…[he] imagines himself as tainted meat rotting all the faster
under the very sun that gives life to innocent, lovely things…[he] is sexually
aroused by prohibition…If he rationalized his behavior on Isabella, he would lose
the nearly sensual luxury of self-hatred” (pages 2042-2043). In the end, as KEM points out, he shows no
gratitude for having been spared and given Mariana as his wife (page 2045).
So I’m not the only one
who thinks these three are awful. KEM helps me put them into a believable
framework.
Now Professor Harold
Bloom, author of Shakespeare – the
Invention of the Human. I always wonder what he’s going to come up with
since he’s so often a mish-mash of nonsense and brilliance. And what’s this? He
starts out by stating that Measure for
Measure and Macbeth are his
favorite plays. Another “huh?” Macbeth
sure, but M for M? Now I’m curious.
The Duke, then, what does
Bloom have to say about the Duke? Words
like “dubious”, “peculiar”, “sanctimonious” appear early in the essay. Bloom compares the Duke to Iago but says
there “is no Othello for the Duke to bring down, but he seems to plot, quite
impartially, against all his subjects, for ends in no way political or moral”
(page 361). About Duke Vincentio’s way
of running things Bloom says, “The idea of order in Vincentio’s Vienna
ultimately is an idea of death” (page 375). The Duke’s treatment of poor
Claudio in his life-is-lousy speech, more properly known as the “Be absolute
for death” oration, “is blasphemously anything but Christian comfort”. It sounds
impressive…but the emptiness at our core that harried Hamlet appears to be a
rather good thing to the Duke-friar. If he is serious, then he is half-crazed, which very well may be the case” (page
369). Bloom sees the Duke’s relationship
with Isabella as more or less the same as Angelo’s: “Angelo’s sadomasochistic
desire for the novice nun is more palpable than the Duke’s lust, but the
difference between them is in degree, not in kind” (page 365). He manipulates the terrified Claudio as part
of his seduction of Isabella and stoops to “the sadistic degradation of lying
to Isabella that her brother has been executed” (page 379). And then he publicly proposes marriage to
her. Why? Because he “has emptied life of all value…he wants [Isabella because]
he is so vast a sensible emptiness that her zealous chastity at least might
spur him on to some zest of his own” (page 372).
Bloom also notes that
“Vincentio invariably speaks nonsense” (page 376).“Vincentio makes no sense
whether as Duke or as friar” (page 378).The Duke’s “flight from the city’s stew
of sexual corruption is manifestly a flight from himself” (page 370) and
“Vincentio is his own Vienna, he is the disease he purports to cure” (page
371).
Yes! Thank you, Bloom! You
saw through the Duke! I’m not the only one who really thinks the Duke is a
creep!
On Isabella, Bloom has
less to say but what he says is pithy.
He points out that she “is nothing but the voice of the dead father,
feeding upon life” (page 372). This in
her regard to her happiness when Claudio says he is ready to die: “There spake
my brother: there my father’s grave/ Did utter forth a voice. Yes, thou must die” (Act 3.1). When she then turns on him viciously because
he pleads with her to help him live and calls him “O, you beast!/ O faithless
coward! O dishonest wretch!” (Act 3.1), Bloom rightly calls this “plain
nastiness” (page 374). He shows her to
be “sublimely neurotic” and “unable to distinguish any fornication whatsoever
from incest” (page 360). She is simply
“maddest of Vienna’s mad” (page 372) and her “peculiar” defense of Angelo in
the last act (and her last lines in the play) are described thus: “Isabella,
being crazed, must be serious” (page 379).
Isabella as crazy – that works for me.
Finally Angelo. None of us
like him. Why should we? Bloom says it
“is difficult to decide who is more antipathetic, Angelo or Duke Vincentio”
(page 365) but at least Angelo is blatant about his lust for the forbidden.
“One feels,” observes Bloom, “that Angelo’s heaven would be a nunnery” (page
366) and sums him up thus: “This
splendid Return of the Repressed makes for wonderful melodrama, particularly
when its theatrical context is comic, however rancidly so. Angelo is bad news and Shakespeare happily
sees to it that the news gets no better, right down to the end of the play”
(page 367).
And that brings us back to
Shakespeare. What does he mean? What is Measure for Measure about? What’s the bigger picture?
Wilson Knight sees in it a
play about “Christian redemption” (page 81), the Duke’s “gospel ethic” (page
80), “Christian ethic” (page 80), a satire “directed primarily against
self-conscious self-righteousness” (page 83), “the moral nature of man in
relation to the crudity of man’s justice” (page 79). Knight sees the Duke to be
“like Jesus…the prophet of a new order of ethics” (page 88). To Knight the play is a “masterpiece of
ethical drama” and “must be read, not as a picture of normal human affairs, but
as a parable, like the parables of Jesus…it will be found to reflect the
sublime strangeness and unreason of Jesus’ teaching” (page 107-108).
No. Sorry. That just isn’t
it. If you want this play to reflect
Jesus then Jesus isn’t the good guy a lot of people want him to be.
Katherine Eiseman Maus, in the spirit of the New
Historicist interpretation in the Norton edition, writes as mentioned earlier
that this play must be seen/read within the framework of the Christian church’s
fear and loathing of sex. While
Shakespeare is not recommending anything, KEM points out that he is “deeply
attentive to general issues about the often-vexed relationship between civic
life and human passion, and between religious commitment and the conduct of
secular affairs. What happens to individuals and a community when
sexuality…becomes the subject of public discipline” (pages 2041-2)? This
question, KEM adds, is highly relevant in our day too. The question of chastity in Shakespeare’s
play must also be seen against the backdrop of both the Catholic and the
Protestant paradoxical views on sex.
Neither church could (can) make up its mind on what to do about
sex. This, if I have read KEM right, is
one of the things Shakespeare was trying to point out.
I certainly have no
argument with that.
Bloom is definitely not a
New Historicist. In fact he rails quite wildly at times against them (us). But here there is no conflict. On Measure for Measure he minces no words
on the question of Christianity. The fact that the title is taken from the
Sermon on the Mount “has suggested an interpretation as crazy as the play but
much less interesting: certain Christianizing scholars ask us to believe that Measure for Measure is an august
allegory of the Divine Atonement” (pages 359-360). Shakespeare, Bloom says,
“involves his audience…in the…simultaneous invocation and evasion of Christian
belief and Christian morals. The evasion decidedly is more to the point than
the invocation, and I scarcely see how the play, in regard to its Christian
allusiveness, can be regarded as anything but blasphemous” (page 359).
Wow. Dear old Bloom. We’ve
had our differences. You’ve called me names (or at least people who think like
me) and I’ve called you names. We will undoubtedly do so again but here? Hats off to you! You have made this play work
for me. “Nihilistic”. “Outrageous”. “Blasphemous”. The Duke, Isabella, Angelo,
and all the rest fall into place (their historical place, I might add!). They are neurotic and perverted and
disgusting. I was right all along.
Knight’s Christian view?
The Bible has many words of wisdom but this play is not a representation of
them. So no thanks. KEM’s New
Historicism? Absolutely. That’s always right. But Bloom’s blasphemy? Oh yes. I
like that.
I like that very much. Now
Measure for Measure makes a kind of
crazy sense. I think that’s what
Shakespeare was aiming for.
Works cited:
- The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008.
- Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare - the
Invention of the Human. 1998.
- Eisaman Maus, Katherine. Introduction, Norton edition.
- Knight, Wilson. The Wheel of Fire.
1930 and 1989.
Film seen:
- 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.
Seen on stage: no.
