[In the following essay, Chedgzoy explores Measure for Measure's status as a “problem play,” examining stagings of the drama, particularly its final scene, from the seventeenth to the late-twentieth century.]

Measure for Measure, along with some other Shakespeare plays that date from the first few years of the seventeenth century, is often referred to as a ‘problem play’: All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida are the other plays most often included in this curious category. At times, this designation seems to indicate little more than a desire to tidy away Shakespeare's plays into neatly classified and labelled boxes—a desire that is frustrated by the diversity of the plays, and by the complex and inventive ways in which Shakespeare experimented with dramatic genre. But it is also a label that can be very revealing about changing attitudes to this strange and fascinating play, and in particular about the shifts in readers' and audiences' responses to its handling of the central, controversial issues of power, justice, sexuality, and the relation between religious principle and social practice.

The term ‘problem play’ is a modern one, which would have been entirely unfamiliar to Shakespeare, yet a century after it was first applied to Measure for Measure and a few other plays it has become so familiar that it is taken for granted. It may therefore be useful to look at it afresh, setting it in historical context in order to indicate what it means and how it came into use. In the mid-twentieth century, there was a widespread notion that Shakespeare wrote the so-called problem plays during a period of his life when he was experiencing some kind of personal turmoil, which found expression in the bitter, misanthropic nature of his work. More often, though, the ‘problem’ has been located in the structure or content of the plays themselves. The plays were first described in this way by the scholar Frederick S. Boas in 1896:

throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome. … Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theater of today and class them together as Shakespere's [sic] problem-plays.¹

Boas did not, therefore, invent the term, which was already in use to describe the plays of writers such as Ibsen and Shaw, whose dramas treated complex social problems of the time, often in a mode that mingled the tragic and comic and left endings open and unresolved. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, reviews of Measure for Measure and of contemporary ‘problem plays’ often perceive them in strikingly similar terms. Discussing a New York production directed by Helena Modjeska (who also played Isabella) in 1896, just at the turn of the century in which the play was to achieve new popularity and prominence, one reviewer complained that her efforts to eliminate the play's ‘nastiness’ were futile, ‘for the trouble is radical’; she ‘covered the cesspool … but it is there, nevertheless, breeding disease and distorting minds’.² Similarly, Ibsen and the other authors of the nineteenth-century ‘problem plays’ who influenced Boas were accused of descending into the gutter and wallowing in psychological filth.

In both Measure for Measure and its late-Victorian counterparts, the exploration of these social issues is often organized around questions of sexuality and marriage. The problem plays of Ibsen and his contemporaries are frequently concerned with the processes by which past sexual transgressions, hitherto kept secret, become known and therefore subject to the moral strictures and disciplinary powers of the public realm. Heroines, in particular, find their present and future under threat because of their sexual past: Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is a good example of this. Measure for Measure has a complicated and mixed relation to this issue, in ways that reveal the interweaving of sexuality, morality, and power. On the one hand, it shows the traumatic consequences of extending the legal surveillance of people's behaviour into what we might consider the private realm of sexuality; on the other, it shows how hard it can be to bring sexual wrongdoing into the light and have it acknowledged and believed. Thus, Claudio and Juliet's main fault seems to be letting the premature consummation of their marriage be betrayed by the corporal sign of Juliet's pregnancy: as Lucio says, Claudio is to be executed because ‘He hath got his friend with child’ (1.4.29). On the other hand, Angelo's warning to Isabella that no one will believe her accusations against a man of his status and reputation seems incontrovertible:

ISABELLA
Sign me a present pardon for my brother,
Or with an outstretched throat I'll tell the world aloud
What man thou art.
ANGELO
Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoiled name, the austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place i'the state,
Will so your accusation overweigh
That you shall stifle in your own report
And smell of calumny.

(2.4.152-9)

The unusual length of line 153 mimics Isabella's straining, in the final scene, to project her voice into an arena where—despite the apparent fulfilment of Angelo's warning that she will be disbelieved and humiliated—her cry for justice can ultimately be heard. Similarly, the irreconcilable accounts that Angelo and Mariana offer of the history of their relationship show the difficulty of establishing the truth about the sexual past. Angelo draws on dominant ideologies of sexuality and courtship to make his case, claiming that Mariana's dowry was inadequate (‘her promised proportions / Came short of composition’ (5.1.217-18)) and that her behaviour did not conform to his expectations of his bride: ‘her reputation was disvalued / In levity’ (5.1.219-20). Mariana has to rely on ‘words from breath’ (5.1.223), words that ‘make up vows’ (5.1.226). But her words are not acceptable to this impromptu court, and it is only when the Duke emerges from his disguise to endorse her story that she is believed.

Reviewing the history of critical and theatrical responses to Measure for Measure, it often seems that all the problems posed by the play coalesce in the extraordinary dramatic, moral, and social tensions engendered in its long, demanding final scene. Within two hundred lines of the ending of the play, Measure for Measure seems to be set on a course for tragedy, though admittedly the tragic mood is repeatedly punctured by Lucio's lewd and witty commentary. Only in the last hundred lines or so is the happy ending of comedy secured, with the arrangement of multiple marriages, and the return to the stage of Claudio as if from beyond the grave. What is repeatedly emphasized in attempts to make sense of Measure for Measure's problematic generic status is this mixed, uneven quality. One way of tackling this has been to argue that the play belongs to the specifically mixed genre of tragicomedy, which at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a new, avant-garde form that was to enjoy considerable popularity in the succeeding decades. Towards the end of his career, Shakespeare collaborated on several plays with John Fletcher, a successful practitioner of tragicomedy. Fletcher offered an intriguing definition of tragicomedy, portraying it not as an independent genre in its own right, so much as a failure to conform to generic requirements: ‘it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.’³ Conventionally, the avoidance of deaths and the guarantee of a happy ending provide tragicomic drama with satisfactory closure. What make Measure for Measure different from tragicomedy, therefore, and uniquely problematic, are the discomfort and uncertainty that the ostensibly happy ending generates.

In remarking of Measure for Measure, ‘it is a comedy of the flesh and a tragedy of the soul’⁴ the nineteenth-century American commentator Edward Arlington Robinson oddly prefigured another way of thinking about the mixed, multifaceted nature of Measure for Measure, an approach to the play that was to be offered by the celebrated theatre director Peter Brook. His 1950 production with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford has been described as the single event that did most to establish the play as a standard of the modern Shakespearian repertoire. Some twenty years later, Brook returned to Measure for Measure in his influential book on theatre, The Empty Space. Brook sketches out an overarching theory of theatre, which has two key facets: the Holy and the Rough. Holy Theatre is the ‘Theatre of the Invisible—Made—Visible’,⁵ a sacred ritual that makes possible a glimpse of the eternal in the everyday. Rough Theatre embodies the popular in all its multifaceted, grotesque, satirical directness. Brook argues that in Measure for Measure these two elements coexist almost schematically, and are vitally interdependent: the ‘absolutely convincing roughness and dirt’ of the ‘disgusting, stinking world of medieval Vienna’ give Isabella's plea for grace more meaning than it would have in ‘lyrical comedy's never-never land’. The press release for the 1950 production said that the designs—for which Brook was also responsible—drew on the work of the artists Brueghel and Bosch to reflect ‘the cruelty, vice and squalor of medieval Vienna’. But records of the staging and Brook's discussion of the play in The Empty Space testify to an understanding of this aspect of Measure for Measure that is reminiscent of the notion of the grotesque or carnivalesque found in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. By means of a study of festivity in medieval Europe, Bakhtin traces the cultural uses of release—even if constrained and temporary—from the rules and conventions that govern everyday life, identifying the grotesque as a source of liberatory or critical energies. Brook takes up a similar stance in relation to Measure for Measure, arguing that ‘when so much of the play is religious in thought, the loud humour of the brothel is important as a device, because it is alienating and humanizing.’⁶ The idea that particular dramatic strategies can be used to alienate—roughly, to distance and challenge—the audience is derived from the work of Bertolt Brecht, who, as we have already seen, brought a distinctive, politicized attitude to bear on Measure for Measure in the 1930s. What the notion of alienation implies here is that the rough world of the prison and the streets of Vienna enable the audience to adopt a critical stance in relation to the religious world view that informs the behaviour of the central characters. Brook argues that in Measure for Measure the rough world expresses itself in prose, the holy in verse, and that these two regions of the play require different approaches in staging. For him, therefore, the vitality and significance of the play lie in Shakespeare's ‘ever-shifting devices’: ‘If we follow the movement in Measure for Measure between the Rough and the Holy we will discover a play about justice, mercy, honesty, forgiveness, virtue, virginity, sex and death: kaleidoscopically one section of the play mirrors the other, it is in accepting the prism as a whole that its meanings emerge.’⁷ Brook sees this mobility and multiplicity as the distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays in general, but as particularly central to Measure for Measure. In his account, therefore, Measure for Measure moves from being a marginal and problematic Shakespearian play, to one that can almost be taken as representative of Shakespeare's whole approach to theatre.

Though Brook's influence has been considerable, it is not solely due to him that in Europe and North America in the late twentieth century Measure for Measure has become one of the most frequently staged of Shakespeare's plays. However, its popularity was not always so assured, and its chequered fortunes on the stage are very instructive about changing perceptions of its ‘problems’. The Revels Accounts, which document performances at the Jacobean court, note that a play by ‘Shaxberd’ called ‘Mesur for Mesur’ was performed, probably for the first time, in the principal London court theatre, the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall on St Stephen's Night (26 December) 1604. It is hard to know what to make of these facts. Though the date obviously indicates that the performance formed part of the extended period of Christmas festivities, and it is widely accepted by scholars that the audience included King James, who had been on the throne of England and Wales for just a few months at this point, these disparate scraps of information cannot furnish a clear sense of how this first audience might have responded to the play. What we do know is that there is no further record of any performances of Measure for Measure in London before the theatres closed in 1642. We should, though, bear in mind the possibility that there were other performances, in London or when the players were on tour in other parts of the country, and that the play was more popular than this apparent absence from the stage would suggest.

This contention is supported by the fact that it was one of the first of Shakespeare's plays to be performed when the theatres reopened in 1660—albeit in thoroughly rearranged form. Sir William Davenant, one of the most influential figures in the London theatre of the 1660s, adapted several of Shakespeare's plays. He hit on the ingenious idea of combining Measure for Measure with Much Ado about Nothing, throwing in an armed revolution, and closing the play (rechristened The Law against Lovers) by marrying off Isabella to Angelo while the Duke retires to a monastery. Prim and sentimental in comparison with Shakespeare's play, Davenant's adaptation seeks to make Measure for Measure into a more straightforwardly comic piece, softening its rough edges in accordance with Restoration taste. Similarly, in 1700, Charles Gildon decided that, as the basis of a night's entertainment, Measure for Measure would be improved by being interwoven with Purcell's 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas: though separately both these works are quite wonderful, the combination does no favours to either of them.

The fact that dramatists of this period saw Shakespeare's plays as a kind of quarry from which attractive but rough-hewn lumps of dramatic material could be mined and reworked to make them more aesthetically pleasing tells us a good deal about the changes that his reputation and status have undergone over the centuries. The adaptations of Davenant and Gildon reveal a sense that, while Measure for Measure has potential, it is commercially unsatisfactory because it fails to conform to the tastes of the age, and this is what they seek to rectify. Later in the eighteenth century, though, a sense that there was something more deeply troubling about the play began to crystallize. This perception was vividly articulated by Charlotte Lennox, a prolific writer across a range of fictional and non-fictional forms, who is now less well known than she deserves to be. With the three volumes of her Shakespear Illustrated, published in 1753-4, Lennox pioneered the source-study of Shakespeare's plays, translating ‘the Novels and Histories on which the Plays of Shakespear are founded’, and offering critical comment on the transformations Shakespeare wrought on his material.⁸ Lennox valued Shakespeare's originality, and argued that what he did with his sources was more significant than the eventful histories he found in them: ‘a very small Part of the Reputation of this mighty Genius depends upon the naked Plot, or Story of his Plays.’⁹ As we have seen, the densely detailed theatrical world of Measure for Measure is shaped out of a wide range of cultural materials, from the Bible to contemporary thinking about prisons, and modern scholarship takes account of this. Charlotte Lennox's project was more narrowly defined, and she concentrated on exploring the relevance to Measure for Measure of Novella 5 of Decade 8 of the Italian writer Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi (1565).

Like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Hecatommithi is a compendium of stories supposedly told by a group of travellers to beguile the duller moments of their journey (another of the tales provided Shakespeare with the basic situation and story for Othello). The story that underlies Measure for Measure concerns a young man called Vico, Claudio's counterpart, whose beautiful and virtuous sister Epitia, lacking a puppet-master Duke to stage a bed-trick for her, is obliged to submit to the hypocritical Iuriste, an Angelo-like figure acting as deputy for the absent Emperor Maximian. Piratical substitutes being unavailable in Cinthio's narrative, Vico is executed, to the horror and rage of his sister. On the Emperor's return, Epitia, no less eloquent than Isabella and more readily believed, reveals the wrong that has been done to her and her brother. Appalled, the Emperor orders Iuriste to make amends for his two crimes, by marrying Epitia, and then submitting to execution. Epitia begs for the life of her newly-acquired husband to be spared; moved by her goodness, Maximian agrees, and the conclusion of the novella assures us that they will enjoy a long and happy marriage.

Though Charlotte Lennox was in general an enthusiast for Shakespeare, she was thoroughly underwhelmed by his handling of this story in Measure for Measure. She shared with many of her literary contemporaries a commitment to the moral function of art, and like other readers—notably Samuel Johnson, one of the era's most celebrated commentators on Shakespeare—she found the endings of both Cinthio's tale and Shakespeare's play emotionally frustrating and morally unsatisfactory:

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 Incident, 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. … This play therefore being absolutely defective in a due Distribution of Rewards and Punishments; Measure for Measure ought not to be in the Title, since Justice is not the Virtue it inculcates …¹⁰

In Lennox's attack, moral concerns are intertwined with a strong sense of the requirements of genre, which are not met by the ending of this play. Though the terms in which she makes this charge are very much of her time, the basic sentiment has been shared by many subsequent audiences and readers. I have already mentioned how close the ending of the play comes to tragedy; I want now to suggest that the final scene has echoes in particular of the subgenre of revenge tragedy, extremely popular at the turn of the seventeenth century, and a form in which Shakespeare showed himself to be adept with plays such as Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. In revenge tragedy, a mourner finds it impossible to get redress for the murder of a loved one through the normal channels of justice, usually because these have been corrupted and have fallen into the hands of the murderer or their allies. Thus the revenger is driven to seek justice by alternative means, often being forced to take the law into his or her own hands: Shakespeare's contemporary Bacon famously described revenge as a ‘kind of wild justice’. In this case, Isabella holds Angelo responsible for the judicial murder of Claudio, and in phrasing that echoes one of the most successful revenge dramas, The Spanish Tragedy, directs her call for redress—‘Justice, O royal Duke! … justice, justice, justice, justice!’ (5.1.20, 25)—to a source of authority in which she still trusts. But, as I noted in the previous chapter, this impassioned plea erupts into a formal, ceremonial moment as the returned Duke invites Escalus and Angelo to walk beside him in a public demonstration of the masculine unity of those who rule Vienna. And the dramatic impact of the moment underlines the revenger's exclusion from the circuits of power and entitlement. To place Isabella and her call for justice, which resonates through the final scene (the word is used eleven times) within the theatrical revenge tradition sharpens the focus of the contest between the law that demands ‘measure for measure’ in the form of appropriate retribution, and the more merciful law which requires its subjects to judge as they would be judged, to measure as they would be measured. The Duke pretends to assume that Angelo would have operated according to this latter principle: ‘If he had so offended / He would have weighed thy brother by himself, / And not have cut him off’ (5.1.110-12). But it is Isabella who puts it into practice, when she lays aside the revenger's obligation and joins Mariana in pleading for Angelo's life. Playing Isabella in Peter Brook's 1950 production, Barbara Jefford was instructed to pause at this point for as long as she thought the audience could bear: legend has it that she sometimes remained speechless and immobile for over a minute, producing an extraordinarily tense demonstration of the theatrical power of silence.

Though they do not receive an immediate answer, Angelo is saved and Isabella's generosity rewarded a few moments later when Claudio is produced by the Provost. The siblings' reunion is another of the play's many eloquent silences, in which bodily performance must fill in for absent speech, though its intensity is indicated by the Duke's breaking-off of his ineptly timed proposal to Isabella:

If he be like your brother, for his sake
Is he pardoned, and for your lovely sake,
Give me your hand and say you will be mine,
He is my brother too—but fitter time for that.

(5.1.489-92)

This leads us, of course, to Measure for Measure's most famous and problematic silence, that with which Isabella greets the Duke's reiterated proposal in the closing moments of the play. We cannot know how this fraught moment would have been played by Shakespeare's company. In modern productions, actors and directors have to decide whether Isabella's unscripted response to the Duke's proposal of marriage should be a positive or negative one, and how this should be indicated in gesture or movement. The actress Juliet Stevenson, who played Isabella to considerable acclaim with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1983, suggests that, though this question must always be addressed in production, a definitive answer to it can never be achieved: ‘there isn't a fixed end to the play. The script ends. The words run out. But the ending—that's something that has to be renegotiated every performance.¹¹

As Juliet Stevenson's comment shows, performance history is important because, where discussion in the classroom, the scholarly journal, or among readers can examine the supposedly problematic aspects of the play from all angles and yet leave them unresolved, in the theatre decisions about how to solve these problems—if only in the most provisional and temporary way—have to be taken time after time. Some Isabellas flatly refuse the Duke, and this can provide the play with a powerful ending, although one that seems to work against the grain of its generic movement towards closure in marriage. In contrast, Stevenson herself succeeded, most unusually, in demonstrating the growth of love between Isabella and the Duke throughout the play, and so her considered, heartfelt acceptance of his proposal was no surprise. Two years earlier, in the National's Caribbean production, Yvette Harris's lithe, confident Isabella had also accepted her Duke gladly, appearing honoured by his proposal. Darker, more troubled readings have been offered: Robin Phillips's Freudian staging in Canada in 1975 depicted an Isabella whose flight from sexual desire was defeated by the Duke's proposal, but who expressed her disillusionment and distress at the sexism of the culture that had ensnared her by violently ripping off the headdress of her white religious habit. More recently, Stella Gonet's Isabella brought out what one reviewer called the ‘grim farce’ of the play's uneasy, unstable conclusion by first slapping and then embracing the Duke, finally collapsing in tears. Isabella's significant silence holds open a space at the end of Measure for Measure that criticism and performance will always be driven to fill, but can never succeed in closing.

Notes

1. Frederick S. Boas, Shakspere and his Predecessors (London: John Murray, 1896), 345.

2. Atherton Brownell, ‘Rambles in Stageland’, The Bostonian (Feb. 1896), cited in Shakespearean Criticism, 23 (1994), 281.

3. John Fletcher, quoted in Mark Eccles (ed.), Measure for Measure (New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare's Works; New York, 1980), 417.

4. Edward Arlington Robinson, quoted in ibid. 398.

5. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 42.

6. Ibid. 88.

7. Ibid. 89.

8. I draw here on the brief critical account of Lennox and the extracts from her work in Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (eds.), Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 15-21.

9. Ibid. 19.

10. Ibid. 16-18.

11. Juliet Stevenson, quoted in Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London: Women's Press, 1988), 52.