by Emma Smith
Antonio, then, is a character who seems unnecessary, even extravagant in theatrical terms, but turns out to do important thematic and structural work for Twelfth Night. His presence at the end of the play gives a different, oblique perspective on its resolution, and his irreconcilability into the married world of the finale complicates Twelfth Night’s movement from queer to straight, from homoeroticism to heterosexuality. His is the desire that cannot be contained in the marital conclusions typical of romantic comedy. The seventeenth-century diarist and theatregoer Samuel Pepys grumpily thought the play ‘silly’ and ‘not related at all to the name or day’, but he was missing something important. Although it doesn’t address it directly, the play is named for the last day of the Christmas festivities, and there’s something wistful about the ending, a sense that the party is over, rather than, like the marriages, just beginning. ‘The clock upbraids me with the waste of time’ (3.1.129), Olivia notes as she hurtles through her heady interview with the beautiful Cesario. The play’s conclusion calls time – almost – on the erotic alternatives with which it keeps flirting. But, as Antonio witnesses, it is a bittersweet conclusion, shot through with losses as well as gains.
CHAPTER 13
Measure for Measure
‘That Shakespear made a wrong Choice of his Subject, since he was resolved to torture it into a Comedy, appears by the low Contrivance, absurd Intrigue, and improbable Incidents he was obliged to introduce, in order to bring about three or four Weddings, instead of one good Beheading, which was the Consequence naturally expected.’ Charlotte Lennox, one of the earliest female commentators on Shakespeare, did not like Measure for Measure at all. In her Shakespear Illustrated of 1753, she condemned its contrived plot, which had no purpose ‘but to perplex and embroil plain Facts, and make up a Riddle without a Solution’ that was ultimately ‘absolutely defective in a due Distribution of Rewards and Punishments’. The idea that the subject matter of the play – enforced, commodified and otherwise transgressive sex – was unsuited to a comedy and could only be effortfully reconciled into this shape by torture is a recurrent theme in the reception of Measure for Measure. Ending in marriage, this play may look like a duck but doesn’t quite quack like one: what sort of play is it, then?
There’s an easy answer to this question. It’s a comedy. Measure for Measure was not published at the time of its first performances in the early Jacobean period, and had to wait until the posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623. Among other innovations, this volume divides the plays into three genres: its title is Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Measure for Measure is listed among the comedies, and therefore for its first readers it was clearly generically allocated. Read within this framework, its allegiances are clear: like Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure concludes with multiple marriages; like As You Like It or The Two Gentlemen of Verona, it has themes of disguise; like The Comedy of Errors, it deploys a deus ex machina figure to bring about its final reconciliations; like The Merchant of Venice, not everyone is happy at the end; like Much Ado About Nothing, it deals with high-born families and their interactions with comic low-life; like The Taming of the Shrew, it ends with a woman forced, or agreeing, to say the opposite of what she previously espoused. Comedy: full square. But on the other hand, as in Hamlet it has musings about what death might be like; as in Richard II and 1 Henry IV, it is about the nature of good government. Its locations are not the green world of comedy but the distinctly urban scenes of the prison, the courtroom, the brothel and the city gates. Sex here is most definitely before, and instead of, marriage – not the implied post-play culmination of those romantic comedies ending, decorously, at the newlyweds’ bedroom door. Measure for Measure borrows, that’s to say, from Shakespeare’s creative experience across different genres, to create a play that butts up against generic limitations and explores the elasticity of notions of comedy.
To start with, Shakespeare selects a plot that was never comfortably comic. He takes the story of Isabella, who refuses to have sex with the city governor Angelo to release her brother Claudio from prison, from two related kinds of source. The first is a sort of general, folkloric one which appears in many cultures and offers what the formal analysis of myth calls a mytheme, or plot function. The second are more direct sources: a play by George Whetstone called Promos and Cassandra; and the English version of an Italianate story by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, usually known as Cinthio, which also provided the source for Othello, written in the same year – 1604. The first sort of source is sometimes known as the story of the ‘monstrous bargain’: sleep with me, and someone – usually a brother or husband – will be saved. In the twenty-first century we might call this out as a #MeToo plot. In most versions of this story before Shakespeare, the woman accepts this terrible choice and does sleep with the governor or authority figure, and in most cases this is not enough to save her imprisoned brother or husband. Often the story ends with an emperor or higher authority coming in and making the bad man marry the woman he has slept with, thus making a sort of reparation for his behaviour. In Cinthio’s version of the story, Epitia’s sixteen-year-old brother is in prison for rape. This is a crime punishable by death, despite the fact that he agrees to marry his victim. Epitia sleeps with the official in order to save her brother. When this is revealed, the official is forced to marry her, and then she successfully pleads for his life.
We can see in this outline something of Shakespeare’s play, but with some key differences. First, whereas Cinthio’s character is in prison for rape, Shakespeare makes it clear that Claudio is not a habitual fornicator, and that he and Juliet were engaged to be married, or had even undergone a civil but not a church marriage ceremony (depending on how we interpret his claim that ‘Upon a true contract, / I got possession of Julietta’s bed. / You know the lady; she is fast my wife’ (1.2.133–5)). Juliet also makes clear that her pregnancy is ‘mutually committed’ (2.3.29), not the result of coercive violence, in a scene with the Duke/Friar that seems to have the sole purpose of establishing this fact. Shakespeare’s change makes Claudio much more sympathetic than he might have been if he had been guilty of rape, and thus the severity of Angelo’s interpretation of the law here seems all the more unreasonable. If the job of the deputy is to sort out civic morality and to close down Vienna’s brothels, he seems to have picked the wrong case (although Claudio’s familiarity with the bawd Mistress Overdone might suggest he is indeed a part of the city’s red-light district culture). Secondly, Shakespeare has made his Isabella into a nun, or at least a novice nun. The extent of her religious scruples about sleeping with Angelo is a key axis in the play. Her strong statement of rebuke: ‘More than our brother is our chastity’ (2.4.185) has earned her scant appreciation from readers and theatregoers. But Shakespeare has deliberately made Isabella into more than a woman of upright moral character; rather, she is one about to devote herself to strict religious principles (this slightly obscures the ethical point for modern viewers: whether she is a sex worker or a nun, Isabella surely has our support when she refuses unwanted sex?). Thirdly, Shakespeare develops the character of the Duke, who, in the disguise of a friar, observes much of what is happening – he calls himself ‘a looker-on … in Vienna’ (5.1.314) – and plots to engineer a rather complicated denouement. In the sources, the Duke figure comes in at the end to sort things out, but has no larger role in the unfolding story. All three of these changes – the substitution of consensual sex for rape, making Isabella into a nun, and developing the role of the Duke – could also be said to bring moral questions to the fore of Shakespeare’s drama – and the evidence that these have been introduced deliberately makes it difficult to explain them away as somehow incidental or irrelevant to the plot. In Measure for Measure, then, Shakespeare seems to have systematically complicated and darkened the ethical dilemmas at the heart of the ‘monstrous bargain’ plot.
There’s one other significant change to Cinthio’s so
urce which bears on the question of genre. Cinthio’s Isabella-figure, Epitia, is the main character in the story, and this isn’t quite so clearly the case in Measure for Measure. Cinthio’s emphasis aligns his story more closely with comedy, the Shakespearean genre which is most hospitable to women: whereas Shakespeare’s tragedies tend to be structured around male experience, in comedies women take on agency, and their story quest structures the narrative. They use this agency in different ways: in The Merchant of Venice Portia bests the Venetian lawyers to save her husband’s friend; in As You Like It Rosalind escapes her tyrannical uncle and makes a life in the Forest of Arden; in All’s Well that Ends Well, Helen sets her sights on marrying Count Bertram and follows him across Europe to trick him into bed. That’s not to say that women are always dominant quantitatively. In Much Ado About Nothing, for example, we may feel Beatrice and Benedick are evenly matched in their verbal sparring, but they most certainly are not in terms of their stage presence: not only Benedick but also Leonato, Don Pedro and even the vapid Claudio all have more lines than Beatrice. Antony out-talks Cleopatra. And while everyone in The Taming of the Shrew may feel that Katherine is an exhausting scold, she has only a third of the lines of Petruchio, and fewer even than the servant Tranio. As the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead puts it in her rap ‘Men Talk’, ‘Women prattle, woman waffle and witter/Men Talk. Men Talk’: women, and women characters, are often perceived to talk more than they actually do. As You Like It is the only Shakespeare play where the largest role is female, although women’s roles across the comedies are proportionately much larger than in the tragedies. In Measure for Measure the Duke speaks the largest proportion of the lines by far: 30 per cent. Isabella comes next, with 15 per cent; with Lucio, the play’s commentator and observer figure, and Angelo speaking about 11 per cent each of the play’s lines.
Isabella, then, speaks half the number of lines of the Duke; but perhaps it’s more interesting to break these figures down. She speaks much more in the first half of the play than in the second; these proportions are reversed for the Duke, who becomes much more talkative in the second half. Perhaps these are causally connected: the Duke asserts himself by diminishing Isabella. By silencing a previously dominant female character and turning the plot away from Isabella’s agency, Measure for Measure seems almost to dramatize its own retreat from the conventions of comedy. It moves from a world at the beginning where women characters are vocal and dramatically powerful, to a world by the end in which women are virtually silenced or puppeted by male directors. Isabella changes from the character Claudio calls upon for help with his imprisonment and describes as eloquent, with ‘prosperous art /When she will play with reason and discourse, / And well she can persuade’ (1.2.172–4). By the end of the play she is forced to read a script effectively prepared for her by the Duke, and then to hear, without giving any verbal response, his unexpected proposal of marriage to her:
Dear Isabel,
I have a motion much imports your good,
Whereto, if you’ll a willing ear incline,
What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
(5.1.533–6)
That Isabella does not answer this proposal in the play’s final lines produces one of the most pregnant silences in Shakespeare. The first attested reader of Measure for Measure, an early seventeenth-century Scot, observed in a marginal note to his copy of the plays: ‘The Duke takes Isabella to wife’, apparently assuming that her consent can be taken for granted. Directors and readers who want a neat comedy ending likewise rush to some gloss or wordless choreography to indicate Isabella’s delight at this turn of events. But for others the failure to direct Isabella’s assent is a gap that strikes at the heart of romantic comedy, leaving the question hanging that other comic heroines like Olivia (in Twelfth Night) or Beatrice (in Much Ado) flirt with but ultimately suppress – do I even want to get married? We can read Isabella’s silence psychologically as the plausible response to an extraordinary sequence of events, including pleading for the life of the man who abused her, and discovering that the brother she thought was dead because of her own choices is in fact alive after all. But we can also read it generically. She has been beaten as the play’s central character, bested by the Duke, and the individual gender politics of their roles can be read out into the genre politics of comedy and tragedy. On the one hand, that’s to say, the marriages at the end of Measure for Measure affirm one of the prominent traditions of comedy endings; on the other hand, by silencing one of the genre’s most prominent characters – the active woman – they seem to negate comic expectations.
Perhaps it’s worth pausing to think about what those comic expectations might reasonably have been for the play’s first audiences familiar with Shakespeare’s own previous plays and those of his company. Measure for Measure dates from the end of the sequence of comedies Shakespeare had produced during the 1590s, so theatregoers were probably well schooled in what to expect: interrupted courtship, inadvertent humour from low-born characters, disguise, marriages in conclusion. Fashionable playgoers who were au fait with more modern kinds of comedy (Shakespeare’s Never-Never Land comic worlds were beginning to look a bit outdated in the theatre economy of the early Jacobean period) might have been more comfortable with the play’s frankly unromantic designation of sex within an economy of civic transactions: looked at in the context of non-Shakespearean comedies of the period, Measure for Measure is more recognizable. This is the closest Shakespeare comes to a popular genre of contemporary city comedy, with its cheerfully dog-eared cast of prostitutes, bawds, young lovers, corrupt patriarchs – and, unsurprisingly, modern scholars believe that it was partly written by the master of the genre, Thomas Middleton. City comedy takes some of the fairy tale out of comedy, resituating it in the contingent and commercial world of getting and begetting, revealing virtue as a commodity and marriage as a business transaction. It also has its own values: acceptance or forgiveness rather than punishment, an awareness that the moral high ground is dangerously vertiginous, that grown-up sense we’ve all been round the block a time or two, and it’s probably best not to ask too many questions about the past. All these are features, and not altogether negative ones, of Measure for Measure’s compromised urban world.
But there’s an awareness of mortality in Measure for Measure that exceeds city comedy, which is often characterized by a sense of the teeming fecundity of contemporary London (Middleton’s brilliant comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, for example, offers a reproductive frenzy fuelled by a potency elixir). In the middle of the play we get an extraordinary speech from the imprisoned Claudio, urged to prepare himself for his execution for the crime of fornication. Isabella explains that the one thing that would save him, her sacrificing herself to Angelo’s demands, is impossible. At first Claudio accepts this advice, but with the realization ‘Death is a fearful thing’ (3.1.116), he breaks out into an existential cold sweat that continues to send shivers down the play’s spine:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling – ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
(3.1.118–32)
This really isn’t the stuff of comedy. All Isabella can proffer in reply is the despairing ‘Alas, alas!’ (133) and an outburst abusing her brother as a ‘faithless coward’ (138): no one in the play can begin to engage with
Claudio’s nihilistic post-mortem imagination. In a world where the central characters are, respectively, a novice nun of the order of St Clare, and a duke disguised as a friar, there is precious little Christian comfort for the disconsolate prisoner. Condemned by his horrified sister for even contemplating a moral recalibration of the monstrous bargain – ‘Sure it is no sin,’ Claudio ventures, ‘Or of the deadly seven it is the least’ (109–10) – Claudio wishes instead for death: ‘I am so out of love with life that I will sue to be rid of it’ (173–4). And although he does not actually die, he never speaks again in the play, which, in theatrical terms, is essentially the same thing.
Stand-up comedians describe an act during which they don’t get any laughs as ‘dying’ on stage. Dying literally, metaphorically and proleptically (in advance), as here in Claudio’s prison cell, is a failure of comedy. Claudio’s encounter with death at the heart of Measure for Measure is a real challenge to the play’s generic dues. Immediately, Measure for Measure gets to work to get comedy back onto the agenda – and the disobliging shock troops of this generic realignment are led by the unlikely commander, Duke Vincentio.
The Duke is a distinctly ambiguous character. We don’t even know his name save for the list of characters appended to the first printed text. We meet him when he is handing over power to his deputy, Angelo, and leaving Vienna in haste, for reasons that are never made clear. He tells his courtiers: ‘I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes’ (1.1.67–8), sometimes seen as a reference to the public reticence of the new king, James I. But the Duke has not left Vienna: he borrows friar’s robes (he says he will explain why ‘at our more leisure’ (1.3.49), but that time never comes, at least not in our hearing), and suggests that he has delegated to Angelo the task of reinstating the law which has become ‘more mocked … then feared’ (1.3.27) under his rule. Some part of the Duke’s motivation seems to be to test Angelo: ‘Hence shall we see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be’ (1.3.53–4). He withdraws from the play for much of its first half, reappearing to visit the pregnant Juliet and offer her moral guidance. Before Claudio’s great prison valediction, therefore, the Duke’s main role in the play has been to make the arrangements for his own absence. But after this point, he is newly revitalized. He takes on the role of ringmaster to the play’s ragtag human circus, choreographing its acrobats and clowns, often against their own will, into an uncomfortable comedy.