Half Measure

MEASURE FOR MEASURE
CANADIAN STAGE: SHAKESPEARE IN HIGH PARK
CUSHMAN COLLECTED

I wonder why nobody ever gets Measure for Measure right. It is, plainly, a play about three people who try to deny their humanity, especially their sexuality, and find out that they can’t. This is obviously true of Angelo, the puritanical deputy, who has spent his life denying the promptings of his flesh and then finds himself overcome with desire for the novice nun Isabella who has come to plead with him for the life of her brother, condemned to death for getting his fiancée pregnant. Angelo, in defiance of all his judicial and sexual principles, offers her a deal: her brother’s pardon in exchange (“give up your body to such sweet uncleanness”) for her presence in Angelo’s bed.

Measure is generally classified as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”. How do you solve a problem like Isabella? She’s first seen suggesting that the strict religious order she is about to enter should have even more rigorous restrictions than it already has. Angelo’s proposition naturally appals her: naturally and rightly, though her belief that her brother will be glad to sacrifice his life for her virginity proves to be excessively optimistic. The play gets her off that particular hook. But she gives no indication that she is thinking of getting herself back to the nunnery. The end of the play sees her about to marry the Duke of Vienna, the ruler for whom Angelo has been standing in and who has now reappeared to tidy everything up. He has proposed to her and there is no indication that she refuses him.

What always seems to escape notice is that the Duke has been in the same kind of denial as the other two. He never actually leaves Vienna; he hangs around dressed as a priest. He emphatically denies to the friar who furnishes him with his disguise (or you might say, indulges him in his habit) that his motives are in any way romantic: “Presume not that the dribbling dart of love Can pierce a complete bosom”. Plainly he’s protesting too much; by the end of the play the dart of love has got to him as well. He may speak disdainfully of “the aims and ends of burning youth” but he’s no more fireproof than anybody else.

This is a play that deals in parallels, drawing them together at its close. There used to be a critical legend about the Duke’s “undue harshness” to Lucio, the rake-about-town who has dogged the Duke in his disguise, retailing or inventing scabrous gossip about his behaviour as a ruler. One of his revelations is that he himself was once had up before the Duke on a charge of getting a wench with child; he was guilty, as he cheerfully admits, but denied it at the time; “they would else have married me to the rotten medlar”. Now, with all disguises off, Lucio is held accountable for what the Duke calls his “slanders”, sentenced to be whipped and then hanged. That certainly sounds excessive, but the penalties are no sooner pronounced than revoked. What does stand in force is the demand that he marry the woman he got into trouble. This is exactly what is required of Isabella’s reprieved brother Claudio; he must wed his partner Juliet to whom, by his own account, he’s practically married anyway. It’s also what happens to Angelo; he must marry Mariana, the woman to whom he was betrothed and whom he then rejected before the play started, and who has willingly taken Isabella’s place in his bed. (Because she loves him. Go figure.) All these arrangements are made in the Duke’s – and the play’s – last speech, and nobody registers any objections to them – well, nobody except Lucio who leaves the stage exclaiming that “marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.” He too is protesting too much, and knows it, and the Duke repays him in his own semi-serious coin: “Slandering a prince deserves it.” Then, in his very next line, he turns to Claudio: “You, Claudio, that you wronged, look you restore”. Admittedly, I have never heard the line delivered with those emphases. But I think it should be. It would make sense of the whole play.

Well, maybe not complete sense. One of the people who have failed to get Measure for Measure right may be its author. It’s a critical commonplace that there’s a severe drop in dramatic pressure half-way through the play. Angelo’s attraction to, and blackmailing of, Isabella, drawn out over two scenes, continue to carry more of a charge than almost anything else in Shakespeare; and Isabella’s prison-visit to her brother, which follows immediately, is almost equally powerful, as she lashes out at him while he swings from defiance to terror to contrition. Then everything changes. Most noticeably, the principal characters start talking in prose, a medium previously reserved for the inhabitants of the city’s police courts and brothels. Most of the talking is done by the disguised Duke as he outlines his plan to save Isabella’s honour and her brother’s life by substituting Mariana (of whom, in what feels like cheating, we are now hearing for the first time). The change of register suggests that he talks very fast, thinking on his feet and relying on his assumed spiritual authority to brush aside objections. He almost forgets that he isn’t really a priest, and it may be that Shakespeare almost forgets too, and is improvising right along with him. For stretches of the play the Duke ceases to be a character with an inner life and becomes a plot-mechanic.

Not all the time though. After his encounter with Lucio, the Duke meets Escalus, “an ancient lord”, Angelo’s fellow deputy and one of the play’s reliable humane voices. Shaken by what Lucio has said about him he asks – in desperation, I think - “what manner of man was the Duke?”. He gets a reassuring answer: the Duke was a thoughtful man who, above all other things, strove to know himself. He still does. Lucio held up a frightening mirror to him, but the image was distorted. Freed from it, he regains control, over the action and over himself. He expresses it in the strange rhyming soliloquy that begins “He whom the sword of heaven would bear Should be as holy as severe”. Angelo has failed that test. The Duke, to his own relief, has passed it.

So, with that off his mind, he can set about planning a happy ending. (As of course can Shakespeare.) The Duke is, after all, the protagonist of a comedy: a genre in which, if you’ll pardon the expression, boy gets girl. (Several times over in this case.) I’m not going to claim that the principal romance is very satisfactorily dramatized; before proposing in the next-to-last couplet, the Duke makes only one glancing reference to his love for Isabella, and she makes none at all. In a play that has carried as much moral freight as this one, that’s frustrating. But the pattern is clear: the man who has laughed at “the aims and ends of burning youth” (and he probably should be young) ends up acknowledging them. He asks Isabella for her hand “if you’ll a willing ear incline.”  He doesn’t, whatever some directors might like to believe, force himself on her.

Measure for Measure is a play of discords, that it tries to resolve by main force; unlike its near-contemporary Troilus and Cressida which embraces them, or the much earlier Love’s Labour’s Lost which holds out the promise of a happy ending and then, brilliantly and audaciously, withholds it. It’s a hard play to make consistent sense of, and Severn Thompson’s High Park production, though lively and pointed, doesn’t bring it off. It certainly sidesteps the problem of the Duke. Allan Louis is an actor whom Stratford should snap up but his Duke, slipping into a West Indian accent for his priestly pronouncements, is little more than a self-satisfied mischief-maker.

Park protocol dictates a running-time of ninety minutes. This means that a lot of text gets cut, including, dumbfoundingly, the most notorious line in the play. Isabella, reeling from Angelo’s blackmail, doesn’t get to say “more than our brother is our chastity”: the words that define her moral position (and that she never abjures). Maybe the production didn’t want to risk casting its heroine in so unflattering a light. It’s an abject decision, and also a perplexing one, since the great strength of Natasha Mumba’s performance is its uncompromising forcefulness. Duelling with Angelo, berating her brother, she never lets up; but she never seems to be straining. So when she does soften, almost at the play’s last moment, the effect is all the greater. Angelo, his villainy exposed, is condemned to death: a sentence that, in this production, looks like being carried out on stage and immediately. Mariana kneels to beg for her new husband’s life, and beseeches Isabella to join her. Impossible, says the Duke; how can you expect her to do that after what Angelo’s done to her? Secretly, he’s testing the capacity of this would-be saint for charity; maybe it’s his equivalent of a courtship. And, after the longest and most suspenseful of pauses, she passes the test, taking a knee and pleading – passionately – for her enemy’s life. It’s quite a moment.

Angelo himself has mostly been absent from the stage after his great temptation scenes; it’s as if he’s  too disturbing a character to fit into the comedy of intrigue that takes over the play’s second half. Christopher Morris’ clearly drawn performance, first rigorous, then tortured, keeps him in our minds. Richard Lam is a Claudio whose despair is a match for his sister’s fury, and Helen Taylor is a quietly excellent Escalus. The low-life characters – pimps, clients, cops and executioners – are mostly too fussy to be funny, let alone to stake out any position on the play’s moral landscape. The grand exception is Nora McLellan who as the bawd Mistress Overdone makes her points economically on the lines, and renders the same service in two other roles; she’s the friar who helps the Duke pursue his plans and, most memorably, she’s Barnardine, the death’s row prisoner who comes near to frustrating them by refusing to get out of bed and be executed, so that his head may be sent to Angelo in place of Claudio’s. This puts both the Duke and his dramatist in a pickle, one from which they can only extricate themselves with what can only be called barefaced trickery. (Those who know the play will get what I mean.) You can almost sense Shakespeare grinning. You can also see the Duke behaving like a beleaguered human being: not a Christ-figure, as an old school of critics used to believe, nor a heartless manipulative villain, as a later school would insist. Rather he’s a conscientious ruler, learning lessons and acting on them, discovering things about his society and about himself. I wouldn’t say this production gets that across. But I think it’s what the play believes.