SOURCE: McGuire, Philip C. “The Final Silences of Measure for Measure.” In Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences, pp. 63-96. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, McGuire describes the way five late-twentieth-century productions of Measure for Measure depicted the muteness of Angelo, Barnardine, Claudio, Juliet, Mariana, and Isabella in the play's final scene. By means of nonverbal gestures, blocking, and shifting the sequence of lines, McGuire observes, the directors of these productions explored the many possible interpretations and implications of these characters' silences.]

Measure for Measure provides the most challenging and complex example of Shakespeare's use of open silence. During the final moments of the play six characters fall silent. One of them is Angelo who, after being compelled to marry Mariana, speaks just once. With those words, the last he speaks, he asks for the imposition of a lasting silence: “I crave death more willingly than mercy; / 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it” (V.i.472-73). Barnardine, a convicted murderer who had earlier refused to be executed (IV.iii.33-61), is brought on immediately after Angelo says he craves death. The contrast between the two characters deepens when Barnardine silently accepts from the Duke the life-giving mercy that Angelo has just explicitly rejected. Claudio (like Barnardine, with whom Shakespeare has him enter) says nothing all the while he is on stage during the final scene—not to the Duke whose maneuvers have saved his life, not to his sister, Isabella, not even to his beloved Juliet. Juliet also enters with Barnardine and Claudio, and her presence during the final scene is also characterized by unbroken silence. Even her reunion with Claudio does not prompt her to speak. Mariana and Isabella slip resolutely into silence after each of them calls upon the Duke to extend to Angelo the mercy that Angelo himself subsequently rejects with the last words he speaks. Isabella maintains her silence not only when she sees alive the brother whom the Duke has twice told her is dead but also when the Duke himself twice proposes marriage to her. The silences of Angelo, Barnardine, Claudio, Juliet, Mariana, and Isabella are made all the more striking by the sustained contrast with Lucio's irrepressible garrulousness. His flamboyant and repeated failure to hold his peace, even after the Duke commands him to be quiet, accentuates the silences in which the other six characters wrap themselves as the play concludes.

Each of those six silences is open, and each of them can alter an audience's sense of the moral vision of Measure for Measure. As the implications and impacts of those silences vary from production to production, the play's perspective upon a host of issues shifts accordingly. Those issues, several of which continue to trouble and divide societies to this day, include the role of deception in the act of governing, the proper exercise and the limits of civil power, the relationship between mercy and human systems of justice, the morality of capital punishment, the wisdom of using law to control sexual behavior, the conflicting desires to engage in and to withdraw from a sordid world, and the interplay between legal authority and erotic love in the institution of marriage. The openness of each of these separate silences deepens and becomes more extensive because of the groupings that emerge from them.

Consider that during the final scene four men appear on stage who are or come under the sentence of death. One of them, Barnardine, has killed a man; another, Angelo, has tried to kill a man; the other two, Claudio and Lucio, are “guilty” of fathering a child out of wedlock. All are spared, but three of them say nothing. Only Lucio responds verbally to the Duke's words of life-giving mercy. “Upon mine honor,” the Duke tells him,

                                                            thou shalt marry her.
Thy slanders I forgive, and therewithal
Remit thy other forfeits. Take him to prison,
And see our pleasure herein executed.

(lines 513-16)

Lucio's reply to the Duke expresses something other than gratitude: “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (lines 517-18). None of the four men reprieved from the death sentence, not even the one among them who speaks after being saved, utters a word of gratitude for the life he has been given. Lucio's spoken response can sharpen the audience's awareness of the silence—the absence of words—by which the other three respond to the words the Duke speaks to put aside the sentences of death previously pronounced upon them. The interplay of words spoken and silences maintained during the final moments of the play underscores the power of language in this play. The Duke, Angelo, or whoever is the voice of Viennese law can, by phrasing words into sentences, take or bestow human life. “Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue and heart” (I.i.44-45), the Duke tells Angelo on appointing him deputy.

The silence that the words of Measure for Measure impose on Barnardine, a convicted murderer whose guilt is “most manifest, and not denied by himself” (IV.ii.135), has the potential to confirm, cast into doubt, or totally undercut the Duke's mercy toward him. Robin Phillips, in his production of Measure for Measure at the Stratford Festival in 1975, acknowledged the problematic qualities of Barnardine's silence and used entrances and exits to isolate and diminish their impact.¹ The playtext of Measure for Measure specifies that Barnardine enter with the Provost, Claudio, and Juliet immediately after Angelo declares that death is “my deserving, and I do entreat it.” In Phillips' production, Barnardine was brought on with the Provost and Claudio but without Juliet.² The exclusion of Juliet muted the contrast between Barnardine's silence here and Juliet's earlier declaration of penitence for having had intercourse with Claudio: “I do repent me as it is an evil, / And take the shame with joy” (II.iii.35-36). Excluding Juliet from the entrance also had the effect of presenting as a group three men who received life from the Duke without speaking a word: Barnardine, Claudio, and Angelo. That grouping of the speechless recipients of the Duke's mercy heightened the contrast between Angelo's desire to die and the earlier refusals of Barnardine and Claudio to accept death. Presenting the three men as a group also sharpened the audience's sense of the discrepancy in the crimes that prompted the death sentences from which the Duke had reprieved them. Barnardine stood condemned for taking human life, Claudio for begetting human life, and Angelo for killing a man who remains alive.

Earlier, in defending his decision to have Claudio executed, Angelo had argued that the act of illicitly begetting a human life was morally equivalent to the act of taking a human life:

                                                            … It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stol'n
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid: 'tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made,
As to put mettle in restrainèd means
To make a false one.

(II.iv.42-49)

Phillips' grouping of Barnardine, Claudio, and Angelo helped the audience to see that the Duke's mercifulness during the play's final moments confirms that disturbing equation. The Duke treats as equally “good” a murderer, a would-be murderer, and the father of an illegitimate child: he spares them all. Angelo, in pursuing rigorous justice, and the Duke, in dispensing all-inclusive mercy, both act according to systems of values that regard murder and fornication as morally equivalent. For Angelo, both are acts that merit death. For the Duke, both are acts that call forth mercy.

By having the Duke forgive the “earthly faults” of a Barnardine who had earlier spat in his face, Phillips established the selflessness of the Duke's mercy while making all the more disturbing the silence with which Barnardine accepted it. However, by having Friar Peter take Barnardine away before the Duke turned to ask, “What muffled fellow's that?” (line 482), Phillips isolated the Duke's act of mercy toward Barnardine from those acts of mercy, soon to follow, by which life is granted to Angelo, Claudio, and Lucio (whose slanders against the Duke are metaphorically equivalent to spitting in his face). Thus, Phillips did not allow the first and perhaps least deserving beneficiary of the Duke's mercy to remain onstage as a silent, visible reminder of how freely, and perhaps how imprudently, the Duke dispenses mercy.

In Keith Hack's 1974 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Barnardine was played as “a belching, bare-bummed loon.”³ Summoned from his cell to be executed (IV.ii), that grossly fat Barnardine proceeded to frustrate the Duke's design to use his head to deceive Angelo and save Claudio. Refusing to accept that his time to die had come, Barnardine bared his buttocks to all onstage and in the theater before defiantly returning, through the stage trapdoor, to his cell. During the final scene Barnardine entered—with Claudio and Juliet—through that same trapdoor, but the Duke's lines forgiving him were dropped entirely, and he remained visible for the rest of the scene: the silent, huge embodiment of the impulses toward rebellious defiance and carnal fulfillment⁴ still present in Vienna despite the Duke's effort to impose his conception of order upon the city and its people. Barnardine's continuing presence defined, in effect, the limits—practical and moral—of the power of a Duke whom Edward Bond's program note characterized as “a vain face-saving hypocrite.”⁵

The Barnardine of Barry Kyle's 1978 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company was naked when he was called from his cell. Speaking with the accent of an educated Englishman, he refused to be executed, then strode with resolute dignity back to his cell. When brought on during the final scene, however, Barnardine was no longer naked but wore a white garment of the same color as the monk's garb in which the Duke was attired—a visual and nontextual detail that suggested either a change in Barnardine's attitude or the successful assertion of the authority he had earlier defied. As the Duke said, “But for those earthly faults, I quit them all,” he took Barnardine's hand, a gesture that linked that act of forgiveness to two other moments during the scene. Earlier, with the words “give we our hand” (line 13), the Duke had seemed to approve Angelo's conduct as his deputy by taking his hand, and almost immediately after taking Barnardine's hand as a gesture of forgiveness, the Duke proposed to Isabella by offering her his hand and asking for hers: “Give me your hand and say you will be mine” (line 488). This Barnardine, like the Barnardine of Hack's 1974 production, remained onstage until the conclusion of the play. Kyle directed the audience's attention to him one more time by having the Duke speak lines 480-82 to him as part of the final address, in which he counsels Claudio to “restore” Juliet and counsels Angelo to “love” Mariana. “And pray thee,” the Duke then told Barnardine,

                                                            take this mercy to provide
For better times to come. Friar, advise him:
I leave him to your hand. …(6)

All in all, the context established during Kyle's production made Barnardine's potentially disturbing silence convey the appropriateness of having the Duke spare his life. The naked man who earlier had resolutely voiced an impatient refusal to accept death and had then strode off in defiance did not stride off self-assertively during the final moments of the play. Instead, he remained onstage—clothed, patient, silent. Barnardine's silent presence affirmed the Duke's power and mercy rather than (as in Hack's production) suggesting their limits.

Desmond Davis' 1978 television production of Measure for Measure for “The Shakespeare Plays” series muted Barnardine's character and eliminated some of the potentially problematic aspects of his final silence. In refusing to die, Barnardine was firm without being outrageous. He did not spit on the Duke nor bare his buttocks, and he was modestly, if raggedly, clothed. Because he remained in his cell during this scene, he did not have an opportunity to convey his resolve to continue living by returning self-assertively to the cell from which he had been summoned. Instead, he terminated the exchange with the Duke more passively—by rolling over so that his back was turned to the Duke and resuming his sleep. This Barnardine ignored the Duke more than he defied him.

During the final scene of Davis' production Barnardine and Claudio were brought on together; Juliet's entrance was delayed, as in Kyle's production, until immediately after Lucio's exit. Claudio and Barnardine were both hooded as if for execution, a detail that suggested the effective imposition on Barnardine of that authority he had earlier frustrated. Barnardine was then unhooded as the Duke had been earlier. Barnardine's unhooding linked the surprise felt by the assembled citizens of Vienna when he was pardoned with their previous surprise at finding the Duke beneath the friar's hood and their subsequent surprise at finding Claudio beneath the hood of a condemned man. Once unhooded, Barnardine, dazed, was pushed without noticeable resistance to his knees, and he remained in that position, without trying to turn away, while the Duke, in another exercise of his authority, spoke the words with which he gave him life. Thus tamed, Barnardine rose and bowed his head slightly in a nod of assent, then drifted into the crowd (and off camera) with Friar Peter⁷ as the Duke turned away asking, “What muffl'd fellow's that?” (line 482). The audience's final glimpse of Barnardine affirmed his inclusion in the new order established by the Duke. He could be spotted, briefly, among the train of characters who, following the Duke and Isabella, exited through the applauding crowd and past the camera.

A second grouping that emerges from the silences of the final moments of Measure for Measure consists of those who say nothing when confronted with the fact or the prospect of marriage.

Angelo and Mariana exchange no words after the Duke reveals himself and orders their marriage. Although they are onstage together during the final scene, Juliet and Claudio say nothing to one another or to anyone else, and Isabella says nothing in reply to either of the Duke's proposals of marriage. Thus, Measure for Measure—a play that concludes with multiple marriages either performed or made possible—ends without any verbal expression of reciprocal love, and that in turn generates a field of possible effects and meanings as wide and complex as those arising from the silences of those who receive life from the Duke. The range of possibilities comes into view if we consider just two of many alternatives. The first is that the silences of those facing marriage at the end of the play are an expression of their mute, accepting wonder at what has come to pass. The second is that their silences testify to a resistance that wordlessly but effectively drives home the fact that at least two of the marriages result far more from the Duke's exercise of his legal authority than from the imperatives of shared erotic love.

Angelo and Lucio are both beneficiaries of acts of mercy that spare their lives, but they are sentenced to live out those lives as married men. Lucio, as he is led off to have his sentence of marriage executed, equates the state of matrimony that awaits him with the more lethal sentences he has been spared: “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging.” The words with which he enters into matrimony resonate against the silence of Angelo, who, earlier, was taken off wordlessly to be married to Mariana. Brought back onstage as “this new-married man” (line 396), Angelo says nothing for the rest of the play to the woman who has been made his wife. Thus, the only couple whose marriage during the play is required by Shakespeare's playtext never exchange words once they are made husband and wife. The timing and content of the only words that Angelo does speak after being married are also troublesomely suggestive. Angelo tells the Duke, “I crave death more willingly than mercy,” shortly after the woman who has been made his wife in compliance with the Duke's orders has pleaded for her new husband's life with the words, “I crave no other, nor no better man” (line 422). The repetition of “crave” underscores that what Mariana wants is precisely what Angelo has no desire to be: a living man who is her husband. What Angelo expressly asks for with the last words he utters is death, but what he receives from the Duke is life, and it is life with a woman to whom he never again speaks.

The silence that Angelo maintains toward Mariana from the moment he realizes that she must be his wife becomes total; after saying that death is preferable to married life, Angelo speaks to no one for the remainder of the play. He remains silent even when Claudio is brought forth living and he “perceives he's safe” (line 490). “Methinks,” the Duke continues, “I see a quick'ning in his eye” (line 491). The Duke's words in and of themselves do not require that what he says he thinks he sees in Angelo's eyes be there. For one thing, the Duke's phrasing is decidedly tentative, cautious: “Methinks I see.” In addition, Angelo himself never voices the “quick'ning”—the awakening of his desire to live—that the Duke thinks he sees. Finally, most (if not all) members of a theater audience cannot, given their distance from the stage and the actors, actually see for themselves what is (or is not) in Angelo's eyes. Thus, the “quick'ning” that the Duke says he thinks he sees must be validated by an appropriate and clearly visible gesture on the part of a silent Angelo. He might, for example, take Mariana's hand or put his arm around her or kiss her. Without such a gesture of confirmation, however, the possibility increases that Angelo's “quick'ning” exists only in the mind and eyes of a Duke whose capacity to say what he knows is not the truth and to overestimate the effectiveness of his own designs⁸ has been well established.

After declaring that he thinks he sees a “quick'ning” in Angelo's eyes, the Duke charges him: “Look that you love your wife; her worth, worth yours” (line 493). In the final lines he speaks to Mariana and Angelo, the Duke rephrases that charge: “Joy to you, Mariana; love her, Angelo; / I have confessed her and I know her virtue” (lines 521-22). The combination of Angelo's continuing silence and the Duke's calls for him to love his wife raises but does not resolve the issue of whether Angelo does now or ever will reciprocate Mariana's love for him. The more often the Duke calls and the more persistently Angelo stays silent, the less certain we can be that Angelo feels the love that in a comedy we would expect a newly married husband and wife to share. The combination of the Duke's calls for love and Angelo's enduring silence also raises the issue of the limits to the power that the Duke exercises during these final moments. He can compel his subjects to marry but is it consistent with comedic values that he should? And can he compel Angelo to love the woman whom he has been sentenced to take as his wife? Is love—as distinct from the institution of marriage—subject to ducal dictate?

By its contrast with Lucio's outspoken words equating marriage with death and the Duke's twice-repeated call for Angelo to love his wife, the silence Angelo maintains first toward his new wife and then toward everyone can direct attention to a disconcerting parallel between the beginning and the conclusion of Measure for Measure. In the early scenes Angelo, as the highest officer of Vienna, condemns Claudio to death in an application of Viennese law that makes impossible the union in marriage of the only man and woman in the play who are required by Shakespeare's words to love one another: Claudio and Juliet. The play concludes with the Duke himself utilizing Viennese law to impose marriages on two pairs of men and women—Lucio and Kate Overdone, Angelo and Mariana—whose affections are not undoubtedly reciprocal. One can see Measure for Measure as a play that opens with the law being invoked to punish fornication by death and that closes with the law being utilized to punish fornication by marriage.

Comparisons with A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It also bring into focus some unsettling aspects of the silences at the end of Measure for Measure. All three plays conclude with multiple marriages or betrothals, but only in Measure for Measure are any of them the result of an exercise of legal authority. In As You Like It, two of the four marriages are “conjured” into being by Rosalind's “magic,” which operates in isolation from the authority of Duke Senior, her father. His ducal authority is employed only to marry those pairs of “country copulatives” (V.iv.53-54) who, impelled by Rosalind's “magic” or by mutual desires, come before him to be wed. Among them is Phebe who, because of her promise to marry Silvius if she should ever refuse to wed Ganymede, finds herself obliged to become the wife of a man whose love she has rejected throughout the play. In contrast to the silent Angelo, however, she makes explicit her acceptance of her spouse: “I will not,” she tells Silvius, “eat my word, now thou art mine; / Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine” (V.iv.143-44).

At the start of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Duke Theseus attempts to impose upon Hermia a marital pairing consistent with the Athenian law upholding her father Egeus' right to marry his daughter to Demetrius, the man he has chosen for her. Ultimately, however, Theseus accepts, at the cost of setting aside the law he initially upheld, the pairings among the four young lovers that have inexplicably formed after their night in the woods. Those pairings—Hermia with Lysander, Helena with Demetrius—are based on mutual attraction rather than paternal preference or Athenian law. Theseus not only accepts but also formally and officially validates the pairings by combining the weddings of the four young lovers with his own wedding to Hippolyta. Theseus puts law aside in order to allow the four young lovers to marry, whereas Duke Vincentio employs law toward the end of Measure for Measure as an instrument to bring about marriages.

In his 1974 production of Measure for Measure for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Keith Hack responded to the “openness” of the silence with which Angelo accepts marriage and life by both lengthening that silence and simplifying it. In Shakespeare's playtext Angelo speaks his final words (expressing his craving for death) in response to Escalus' expression of sorrow that

                                                            … one so learned and so wise
As you, Lord Angelo, have still appeared,
Should slip so grossly, both in the heat of blood
And lack of tempered judgment afterward.

(lines 466-69)

In Hack's production, that exchange was moved forward nearly 100 lines and placed immediately after Angelo's request that the newly revealed Duke speedily impose the death sentence: “Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death / Is all the grace I beg” (lines 369-70). That repositioning meant that the Angelo of Hack's production did not—as he does in Shakespeare's playtext—continue to call for death even after he is married to Mariana and after both she (as his wife) and Isabella plead for his life.

Hack simplified Angelo's silence in another way—by having Angelo and Mariana embrace one another, crying and on their knees, as the Duke, speaking lines that were significantly different from Shakespeare's, called in the same breath for Angelo to be both married to Mariana and executed with dispatch:

DUKE:
Say, was thou ere contracted to this woman?
ANGELO:
I was, my lord.
DUKE:
You should be married to her instantly.
The very mercy of the law cries out
“An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!”
Waste still pays waste, and pleasure answers pleasure,
Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.(9)

Thus, the Duke in Hack's production called for the death of an Angelo whose gestures forcefully and unequivocally conveyed both his acceptance of Mariana and his desire to live. Mariana followed the Duke as he moved away, clutching at him as she pleaded for Angelo's life:

MARIANA:
                                                            O, my most gracious lord,
I hope you will not mock me with a husband.
DUKE:
It is your husband mocked you with a husband.
MARIANA:
                                                                      O my dear lord,
I crave no other, nor no better man.

However, Hack's production omitted the offstage marriage between Mariana and Angelo that, according to Shakespeare's playtext, precedes Mariana's lines in which she pleads for the Duke to spare him. Thus, in that production, Mariana craved the life of a man who was not yet legally married to her and who did not continue to crave death even after she and Isabella pleaded for his life. Once Claudio was revealed as being alive, Mariana returned to Angelo, and they remained side by side, holding hands. When the Duke spoke his final words to them (“Joy to you, Mariana; love her, Angelo; / I have confessed her and know her virtue”), they came forward together, as a couple, to accept the applause of an audience who had seen in their gestures evidence that Angelo's silence expressed his full acceptance of Mariana as the wife-to-be with whom he would live out a life that he now intensely wanted.

David Giles's 1969 production of the play for the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival also gave the silence between Angelo and Mariana a positive cast, but without distorting Shakespeare's playtext. Brought in after their marriage, Angelo and Mariana remained together and unguarded on the second step of the stage, on the periphery of the action. When Mariana heard the Duke sentence Angelo “to the very block / Where Claudio stooped to death” (lines 410-11), she proceeded to the deck of the stage to plead for her husband. As the Duke repeated the sentence (“Away with him to death,” line 425), she moved to the center of the stage, stopping on the word “death.” She then turned to look toward Angelo, directing to him the words, “O my good lord!” (line 426). He and the guards who were leading him off turned back on hearing her, after which she asked Isabella to “take my part” (line 427). Mariana and Angelo remained separated while the Duke heard Isabella plead for him, inquired how “Claudio was beheaded / At an unusual hour” (lines 453-54), pardoned Barnardine, and revealed that Claudio was still living. After proposing to Isabella, the Duke took Mariana across the stage and presented her directly to Angelo with the words, “Look that you love your wife; her worth, worth yours.” Angelo remained with his wife, and that, together with his silence, suggested that his craving for death had subsided. Giles affirmed the bond between Angelo and Mariana more directly by pairing them during the Duke's final speech with Juliet and Claudio. That pair of lovers walked toward the center of the stage from the steps on the left of the stage as the Duke said, “She, Claudio, that you wronged, look you restore” (line 520). When the Duke directed his next words to Angelo and Mariana (“Joy to you, Mariana; love her, Angelo; / I have confessed her and know her virtue”), they also walked together toward the center of the stage from the steps on the right.

Angelo's silence was given much less prominence in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1978 production of Measure for Measure, directed by Barry Kyle. After Claudio was revealed, Angelo and Mariana moved together when the Duke charged him, “Look that you love your wife.” They remained together, holding hands, on the periphery of the action for the rest of the scene, before exiting together at what were, in that production, the Duke's last words, “So, bring us to our palace.”

Desmond Davis, in his television production, used the gesture of holding hands to give the silence between Angelo and Mariana overtones that were more ambiguous and less positive. At the Duke's command, the couple left to be married and walked through the crowd holding hands in a formal manner—arms held chest-high, her hand atop his without their fingers interlocking. They returned in the same way, and never once did the audience see Angelo smile, nor did they witness between the newlyweds any physical contact such as an embrace or a touch that was any less stiff or more intimate than their hand-holding. Often when the camera showed Angelo—for example, when he said he craved death—it also showed Lucio in the immediate background, as if linking Angelo, now married, with the character who subsequently denounced as the equivalent of pressing to death, whipping, and hanging the state of matrimony to which he too would later be sentenced.

Robin Phillips in his 1975 production for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival established a context that, without doing violence to Shakespeare's playtext, allowed Angelo's silence to convey his resistance to the marriage imposed upon him. Angelo's silence also conveyed the force of the sexual desire (what Escalus calls “the heat of blood,” line 468) that consumed the chastity that he, like Isabella, deeply prized. The Angelo of Phillips' production stayed apart from Mariana even after Claudio was revealed. The Duke's twice-repeated call for him to “love” his wife was addressed to a man whom the audience never saw paired with her except when, under guard, they were taken off to be married and then brought back. Phillips also used the play's final exits to establish the distance between Mariana and Angelo that his silence toward her can imply and to define parallels between him and Isabella. After the Duke spoke the last lines (“So, bring us to our palace, where we'll show / What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know,” lines 533-34), the stage emptied, except for Isabella and Angelo, the two characters whose self-knowledge had been most rigorously tested by the events of the play. They stared silently at one another across the stage and then, following a prolonged pause, Angelo, using the exit through which the others (including Mariana) had already departed, left the stage, moving briskly but alone.

The only sexual pairing in the play that Shakespeare's playtext unambiguously establishes as being both reciprocal and fruitful is that of Claudio and Juliet, and they are also enveloped in silence during the final scene. They say nothing, not even to one another, after they enter, and theirs, too, is a silence whose meanings and effects elude purely literary analysis and therefore must be established in performance.

Hack, in his 1974 production, followed the playtext of Measure for Measure by having Claudio and Juliet enter together and with Barnardine immediately after Angelo had said that he craved death. By having them enter through the trapdoor—an entry used before only by Barnardine—Hack presented them as a trio sharing correspondences that set them apart from other characters. None of the three speaks after entering, and all are known violators of Viennese law—Barnardine by murdering a man, Claudio and Juliet by conceiving a child out of wedlock. Juliet's previously expressed repentance for her “crime” contrasts with Barnardine's silence, and although Barnardine and Claudio have committed different offenses, both (in contrast to Angelo) have refused to accept the death to which each has been sentenced. After Claudio had been revealed, he and Juliet stood together inconspicuously on the perimeter of the subsequent action, then came forward and took a bow together as the Duke spoke the only words addressed directly to either of them during the scene: “She, Claudio, that you wronged, look you restore.”

Phillips, by contrast, altered the conventional entrances by having Juliet enter not with Claudio and Barnardine but with the newly married Angelo and Mariana (at line 395). The decision had the effect of encouraging the audience to compare the couple who had been parted by law early in the play with the couple who never exchange words after they are married by law during the play's final scene. In each case, the sexual relationship between the pair was consummated in secret and prior to the formalities of matrimony, then was humiliatingly revealed to full public scrutiny. Viennese law, which Angelo employed as punishment for the fornication between Claudio and Juliet by sentencing Claudio to a death that would have canceled any possibility of marriage between the lovers, is the instrument by which the Duke, responding to the sexual union between Angelo and Mariana, yokes them in a marriage that may be devoid of mutual affection.

In Phillips' production, Claudio entered with Barnardine, and that set up a further contrast. After Claudio's unhooding, he and Juliet—unmarried lovers—walked to each other and embraced without speaking, then remained together, standing on the fringe of the ensuing events. In contrast, Angelo, who had entered paired with Mariana as her lawful husband, silently kept a distance between himself and his spouse. The timing of Juliet's entrance also meant that, carrying life in her womb, she was present as both the still chaste Isabella and the no longer virginal Mariana called upon the Duke to let Angelo live. Juliet's speechless presence helped to reveal a crucial but unarticulated link between her and the Duke: each of them has the power to give life—he by means of the words sparing Angelo that the other women present call upon him to speak, she by means of the silent (wordless) processes of gestation.

Juliet's procreative powers were made visually explicit in Davis' production of the play for television. She entered carrying an infant, and her entrance came immediately after Lucio was taken off to be married. That repositioning set up a three-way contrast between Juliet's silence, Lucio's talkativeness, and the wail that announced the infant's presence even before it was visible. Davis' relocation of Juliet's entrance also gave to the reunion of the two lovers who had been taken from one another at the start of the play greater prominence than would be possible if she had entered with Barnardine and Claudio. Babe in arms, Juliet entered from the rear of the crowd and proceeded on her own down the lane they formed for her. As she approached the foot of the slightly raised platform on which the Duke sat, Claudio stepped toward her and they embraced. Their embrace also marked the meeting of a father freshly saved from death with his child newly born to life, and that moment made visible the conjunction of two different expressions of mankind's power to give life, the one biological and natural, the other political and cultural.

In the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1978 production, Kyle, like Davis, had Juliet enter directly after Lucio's exit, but she carried no infant, and the Duke's role in bringing the separated lovers together was far more pronounced. The Duke escorted Juliet by the hand down the stage, while Claudio, leaving Isabella with whom he had been kneeling downstage, rose and rushed toward her. While all onstage watched wordlessly, the lovers embraced joyously and sensuously. After a sustained pause, the Duke broke the silence by addressing to Claudio the first line of the play's concluding speech: “She, Claudio, that you wronged, look you restore.”

By giving Juliet a separate entrance, Davis and Kyle both isolated the reunion of the lovers, thus heightening its theatrical impact and establishing it as a parallel to the earlier reunion between brother and sister. Both reunions are marked by silence: neither the lovers nor the siblings speak to one another. The silence that Isabella and Claudio maintain when they are brought face to face comes into revealing focus if their reunion is set against the moment in Twelfth Night when Viola, like Isabella, finds herself looking upon a brother she thought was dead:

SEBASTIAN:
Do I stand there? I never had a brother;
Nor can there be that deity in my nature
Of here and everywhere. I had a sister,
Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured.
Of charity, what kin are you to me?
What countryman? What name? What parentage?
VIOLA:
Of Messaline; Sebastian was my father;
Such a Sebastian was my brother too;
So went he suited to his watery tomb.
If spirits can assume both form and suit,
You come to fright us.
SEBASTIAN:
                                                            A spirit I am indeed,
But am in that dimension grossly clad
Which from the womb I did participate.
Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,
I should my tears let fall upon your cheek
And say, “Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!”

.....

VIOLA:
If nothing lets to make us happy both
But this my masculine usurped attire,
Do not embrace me till each circumstance
Of place, time, fortune do cohere and jump
That I am Viola; …

(V.i.218-33, 241-45)

The tone of the words they exchange is questioning, tentative. Sebastian and Viola are baffled and amazed, but—in contrast to Claudio and Isabella—they do not remain silent in one another's presence.

The potential ambivalence of the silence between Isabella and Claudio becomes evident if one recalls their only conversation together. Before leaving her brother's prison cell, Isabella vowed to speak “no word to save thee” (III.i.147) and concluded by declaring,

Thy sin's not accidental, but a trade;
Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd,
'Tis best that thou diest quickly.

(III.i.150-52)

Thus, the last words an audience hears Isabella speak to Claudio are those with which she denies his fitness to receive the mercy that she, looking on in silence, sees the Duke extend to him during the final scene. The silence between Claudio and Isabella may be tantamount to a retraction of the bitter words they had earlier exchanged, or—to pose another possibility—that silence may signify a continuing rupture in their relationship.

The silence between Claudio and Isabella coincides with the silence with which she responds to the Duke's initial proposal of marriage. The lines in which the Duke presents and pardons Claudio are also those in which he reveals himself as Isabella's suitor:

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. …(10)

(lines 486-89)

The roles of husband and brother come close to converging at this point, and that conjunction seems particularly appropriate given Claudio's earlier declaration to Isabella concerning how he would face death:

                                                            … If I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride,
And hug it in mine arms.

(III.i.83-85)

The newly unmuffled man will be spared insofar as he is “like” the brother whom Isabella thought dead, and the Duke's proposal of marriage, if Isabella accepts it, will make that man the Duke's brother as well as hers.

Isabella's silence here is all the more striking because the Duke phrases his marriage proposal as a call for her to assent with words as well as with a gesture: “Give me your hand and say you will be mine” (emphasis added). The Duke's request (or command) can be set against Mariana's earlier call for Isabella to join her in seeking mercy for Angelo: “Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me, / Hold up your hands, say nothing, I'll speak all” (lines 433-34). Offered that chance to be silent, Isabella chooses to speak on Angelo's behalf, yet when called upon to voice her acceptance of the Duke, she says nothing. The Duke, whose declared wish to become a husband has been met with silence, breaks that silence by turning to Angelo, who has been made a husband by ducal command, and calling upon him to “love your wife.” The Duke's shift from Isabella to Angelo helps to emphasize that both respond to the marriages they face with silence. Isabella says nothing to the man who would make her his wife, just as Angelo says nothing to the woman who has been made his wife.

The Duke's words pardoning Claudio, proposing to Isabella, and instructing Angelo to love his wife are embedded within as many as five silences: Isabella's toward the Duke, Angelo's toward Mariana, Claudio's toward both Isabella and Juliet, and, if he remains visible, Barnardine's. Each of these silences is open to a range of meanings and effects, and the interplay among the silences generates a cumulative openness that is even more challenging. The result is a theatrical moment strikingly rich in possibilities. By means of gestures, movements, and other nonverbal details of performance, all productions of Measure for Measure tap that richness, giving those individual silences and the relationships among them definition and coherence. In so doing, every production aligns in different ways the erotic, sibling, and marital bonds that can come into conjunction at this extraordinarily challenging moment in the play.

The directors of the specific productions being considered here responded to the complexity of that moment by narrowing, and thus simplifying, the confluence of silences in different ways and to different degrees. Keith Hack, in his 1974 production, simplified most drastically the possibilities inherent in that moment. As the Duke of that production brought Claudio and Isabella face to face for the first time since their encounter in Claudio's prison cell, he said, “If he be like your brother, for his sake / Is he pardoned.” However, the line in which the Duke proposed to Isabella was dropped, thus concentrating attention upon the reunion, in silence, of the sister and brother. Isabella crossed to Claudio and kissed him. Claudio's response to that gesture was a chilling stare as he silently rejected the sister who had refused to sacrifice her virginity to save him but had been willing, a few moments before, to plead in tears for the life of the man who, she thought, had had her brother executed. As Isabella watched silently in dismay, Claudio stepped away to be with Juliet. His silence in embracing Juliet contrasted with both the silence with which he responded to Isabella's kiss and the silence with which she watched her brother walk away from her and toward his lover. By omitting the Duke's proposal of marriage, Hack made Isabella's silence toward the Duke insignificant. That, in turn, permitted Hack to use the concurrent silences between Isabella and Claudio and between him and Juliet to convey the final rupture of familial ties and the triumph of the erotic bond that unites Claudio and Juliet—the only pair who have loved each other from the start of the play and who have expressed that mutual love in sexual acts that have engendered new life. The Duke broke those silences by addressing himself to another pair of silent characters, Angelo and Mariana—the only other couple in the play whose relationship has been consummated sexually: “Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well. / Look that you love your wife; her worth, worth yours.” As he spoke, Mariana crossed to Angelo (a movement that paralleled Isabella's earlier crossing to Claudio), but Angelo did not move away from her. They stood together, paired like Claudio and Juliet in a silence that affirmed the bonds between them, while Isabella, who had refused to have sexual intercourse with Angelo in order to save Claudio, stood alone and silent.

Two other directors—Barry Kyle and Desmond Davis—narrowed the silences in a different way, by delaying Juliet's entrance until after Lucio's final exit. That enabled both directors to postpone the silence between Juliet and Claudio, thereby intensifying the audience's concentration on the silences between Isabella and Claudio and between her and the Duke. In Kyle's 1978 production, the Duke, after unmuffling Claudio, knelt between him and his sister while addressing to Isabella the words sparing her brother and asking for her hand. The Duke's act of kneeling linked that moment to others earlier in the scene when Isabella had knelt to him—first to plead (falsely) against Angelo for violating her chastity and then to plead in earnest for the Duke to spare Angelo's life. When the Duke finished speaking his words of pardon and proposal, Isabella crossed past him to Claudio and caressed her brother's face for a moment before recrossing to the Duke and raising him from his knees. The gestures and blocking in Kyle's production emphasized Isabella's status as the person who has the power to make Claudio and the Duke brothers, to make true the words with which the Duke concludes his proposal of marriage: “He is my brother too.” In the specific context of that production, the silence that Isabella maintained established the possibility of reconciling fraternal and marital bonds—of merging the family into which she was born with the new family that the Duke asks her to help bring into being. In her surprise, she spoke neither to the brother whom she was stunned to find alive nor to the friar-turned-Duke whose expressed desire to make her his wife was equally stunning. The hands with which she silently stroked her dazed brother's face were also the hands she silently extended to raise the wooing Duke from his knees. That gesture, although it was not an explicit rejection of his proposal, was not an unambiguous acceptance of it either. Kyle's production concluded the conjunction of silences that the moment generates by affirming the bond between brother and sister, which was shattered in Hack's production. As the Duke turned to address Angelo, his words breaking the silences, Isabella moved with her brother to a point downstage center, where she knelt with him, staring into and stroking his face. That downstage tableau of the reunited brother and sister functioned as a “frame” through which the audience watched as, upstage, the Duke proceeded to deal with Lucio.

Davis intensified the impact of the sibling bond in a different way and set it sharply against the marital bond offered by the Duke. As soon as the Provost (not, as in Kyle's production, the Duke) removed the hood from Claudio's head, Isabella rushed to embrace her brother. As the television camera showed them in close-up clinging to one another, the audience heard the Duke's voice intrude to propose a marriage that would make Claudio his brother too. The camera continued to focus on Isabella, rather than the Duke, giving weight to her response to what she was hearing. Her arm still around Claudio's neck, as if to emphasize that he was her brother, Isabella stared blankly toward the man proposing marriage to her from a distance. In contrast to Kyle's kneeling Duke, this Duke, as he spoke of marriage, remained seated on the throne placed on the rostrum at the foot of which Isabella and her brother stood paired together. The Duke's “but fitter time for that” quickly followed, breaking in upon Isabella's silence and sounding like an embarrassed, even defensive reaction to her blank expression, her silence, and her evident love for Claudio. The camera followed the Duke when he turned away, and as Claudio and Isabella disappeared from the audience's view, the Duke urged the silent Angelo to give to his wife the love that the silent Isabella, his own would-be wife, had shown no sign of extending to him.

In his 1975 production, Phillips also made the silences between Isabella and Claudio and between her and the Duke the center of the audience's attention, but he did so without excluding Juliet and in a way that made visible in still another fashion the conflict between Isabella's role as sister and the role of wife that the Duke asks her to assume. The Duke stood between Claudio and Isabella—as much a barrier as a bridge—while holding out his hand and asking for hers. As Isabella stared silently at her brother, the Duke circled her until, stung by her failure to extend her hand to take his, he turned away, hands clasped behind his back, to announce to Angelo the pardon that he had previously made Mariana and Isabella plead for on their knees. As he did, Isabella crossed to Claudio, who stood with Juliet. That sequence of movements and gestures conveyed an alignment of erotic and familial bonds different from that established in Kyle's production. By crossing from the Duke to Claudio and Juliet, Isabella signified her approval, as Claudio's sister, of the erotic bond uniting her brother and his beloved, and at the same time she excluded the Duke from the merging of an old and a new family implicit in her actions. By remaining silent and not giving her hand to the Duke, she chose not to make Claudio the Duke's “brother too.”

The presence of both Claudio and Juliet gave visible expression to another facet of Isabella's silence toward the Duke. The couple kept before the audience the example of an erotic pairing based on something other than deception like that which the Duke, Isabella, and Mariana practiced with such skill in order to bring about the sexual coupling and then the marriage between Angelo and Mariana—who, in Phillips' production, remained apart from each other all the time they were on stage after being married.

The woman whom the Duke asks to be his wife has herself been subjected to his powers of deception. Twice before proposing marriage, the Duke lies to Isabella with cold-blooded precision about the death of her brother. As Friar Lodowick, he tells her false “news” of Claudio's execution as part of his scheme “to make her heavenly comforts of despair”:

ISABELLA:
Hath yet the deputy sent my brother's pardon?
DUKE:
He hath released him, Isabel, from the world;
His head is off and sent to Angelo.
ISABELLA:
Nay, but it is not so.
DUKE:
It is no other. Show your wisdom, daughter,
In your close patience.

(IV.iii.107, 111-16)

Shakespeare's playtext emphasizes the anguish that the Duke's deception, however well-intentioned, has caused Isabella. Twice in subsequent lines, the Duke must interrupt what he is saying and urge her to stop crying, and even the usually flippant Lucio responds sympathetically to her pain: “O pretty Isabella, I am pale at mine heart to see thine eyes so red; thou must be patient” (lines 151). The audience's sense of Isabella's grief can be sharpened in performance. The Isabella of Kyle's production sank to her knees on hearing of Claudio's death, then slowly, somewhat angrily, removed her veil and cincture before leaning wearily against the Duke. In Davis' production, the camera gave added impact to Isabella's anguish by moving in for a close-up shot of her tears and then allowing the audience to see her walking slowly and solitarily away into the dawn mist while, in the foreground, the Duke and Lucio continued talking.

During the final scene the Duke lies to Isabella a second time:

Your brother's death, I know, sits at your heart,
And you may marvel why I obscured myself,
Laboring to save his life, and would not rather
Make rash remonstrance of my hidden power
Than let him so be lost. O most kind maid,
It was the swift celerity of his death,
Which I did think with slower foot came on,
That brained my purpose; but peace be with him.
That life is better life past fearing death,
Than that which lives to fear. Make it your comfort,
So happy is your brother.

(lines 385-95)

Those words, spoken after the Duke has shed his disguise as a friar and revealed his identity, are untrue. The more intensely Isabella grieves in response to what the Duke tells her is the fact of her brother's death, the more likely it is that the audience will find the Duke's sustained deception of her distasteful, cruel, or even inhuman.¹¹ The more pronounced her anguish, the more moving will be her capacity to plead for the life of the man she thinks has killed her brother, and the more willing an audience will be to accept any shock or dismay or hesitation she shows when the Duke first proposes to her. Isabella begins her speech on Angelo's behalf—sometimes after a prolonged hesitation¹²—by calling upon the Duke to act as if her brother's death were the fiction he knows it to be:

                                                                      Most bounteous sir,
Look, if it please you, on this man condemned
As if my brother lived. …

(lines 439-41)

The words with which Isabella concludes that speech are the last she utters during the play, and, significantly, they specify a realm of human experience that lies beyond the Duke's authority: “Thoughts are no subjects, / Intents but merely thoughts” (lines 449-50).

In Phillips' production, Isabella's silence in response to the Duke's initial marriage proposal—her refusal to express her thoughts—was tantamount to another assertion of the limits of ducal prerogative and power. That refusal also pointed to the contradiction between the love that presumably motivated the Duke to propose marriage and the anguish that he inflicted upon her by lying twice about her brother's death. Her silence also served as an indictment, appropriately wordless, of the Duke's tendency to abuse or even to corrupt language by employing his powers of speech to deceive rather than to enlighten. In addition, her silence conveyed her recognition that she had compromised herself by participating in that abuse of speech. Her speeches earlier in the final scene denouncing Angelo for subjecting “my chaste body / To his concupiscible intemperate lust” (lines 97-98) are, after all, as false as they are eloquent. The context established by Phillips' production enabled him to employ Isabella's first silence to pose—if not to answer—the question of whether the Duke's exercise of his powers, particularly with respect to Isabella, had been moral, humane, or loving.

David Giles's 1969 production at Stratford, Ontario, invested the silences surrounding the Duke's first proposal with still another set of effects and meanings. Barnardine's silence was cut short by having him exit with Friar Peter at line 482, before the Duke asked, “What muffled fellow's that?” After Claudio was unhooded, he and Isabella embraced at center stage, then crossed together to Juliet, standing at the left on the first step. As the Duke said, “Give me your hand and say you will be mine,” he stepped toward the trio. He and Isabella joined hands while Claudio and Juliet, the only couple in the play whose love is from the first undoubtedly reciprocal, stood together with them. Isabella's silent but unambiguous assent and the proximity of the two couples established correspondences between erotic and familial love different from those in the other productions under discussion. By giving her hand to the Duke, Isabella made Claudio his “brother too,” and as the two couples stood together—one newly united, the other reunited—their pairings made visible the possibility of renewing a family that seemed to have no future when Claudio the brother was arrested for a crime punishable by death on the same day that Isabella the sister “should the cloister enter” (I.ii.172).

Isabella's silence in response to the Duke's second proposal of marriage exists within a network of silences less complex than that of which her silence in response to his first proposal is a part, but her second silence is nevertheless open in performance to a range of meanings and effects that have the potential of being all the more resonant because they come so near the conclusion of the play. Giles enhanced the impact of Isabella's final silence by relocating the last two lines of Shakespeare's playtext, placing them after the Duke's call for Angelo to forgive the Provost. When the Duke said, “So, bring us to our palace, where we'll show / What's yet behind that's meet you all should know” (lines 533-34), the other characters exited, leaving the Duke standing upstage center and Isabella seated on a bench downstage center. The last words the audience heard were:

                                                            … 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.

(lines 529-32)

Isabella's wordless response to that second proposal was as eloquently affirmative as her response to the first. She rose after the Duke finished speaking, paused briefly but noticeably, then went swiftly toward him. They embraced and kissed, their affectionate gestures made all the more prominent by their isolation on the stage; then they exited together. Isabella's movement toward the Duke reciprocated his earlier movement toward her with his first proposal, and the kiss they shared manifested a kind of love different from, yet linked to, the love expressed in the embrace that Isabella and Claudio had shared earlier in the scene. Her free and considered acceptance of the Duke—in private and for a second time—capped and endorsed the order the Duke had effected. At the same time, her acceptance muted any distaste the audience might have felt for the manipulations and deceptions he had practiced upon her, and others, in the process of establishing that order.

Hack's production, on the other hand, prompted the audience to feel a distaste for the Duke, his methods, and the order he established. Hack dropped the Duke's first proposal of marriage to Isabella, and his production concluded (as did Giles's) with the words “What is yours is mine.” As he spoke those final words, however, the Duke embraced Isabella, enfolding her stiff, resisting body within the vast golden robes of his office. Earlier in the scene, after the Duke had abandoned his disguise as a friar, those robes had been stripped from Angelo. Now, those same robes of state helped to establish that in embracing Isabella and taking her for himself, the Duke was succeeding where Angelo had failed.

The Isabella on whom the Duke imposed himself was wearing the brownish-orange dress worn by Mariana in previous scenes; Mariana appeared during the final scene in the severe yet ornate black dress that Isabella had worn throughout the play.¹³ That exchange of dresses extended the pattern of entrapment in the play. Isabella found herself snared by the Duke just as Angelo found himself snared by Mariana. The switch in dresses had the additional effect of momentarily involving the audience in a visual deception akin to that practiced upon Angelo. Those watching the production were forced to rework the visual clues by which they had previously identified and to some extent “measured” Isabella and Mariana.

The exchange of dresses was one of several Brechtian devices employed during the performance to make the audience aware that the events unfolding during the final scene and the order emerging from them were, on one level, a contrivance of the Duke and, on a second level, a contrivance of the performers and playwright. Scaffolding and other apparatus usually kept out of sight were visible when the audience entered the theater and remained so throughout the performance. The entire final act was played under a banner reading “Deus ex machina,” which dropped into view as the Duke entered and greeted Angelo and Escalus: “My very worthy cousin, fairly met. / Our old and faithful friend, we are glad to see you” (lines 1-2). As the Duke, in the final speech of the play, addressed Escalus, Claudio, Juliet, Angelo, Mariana, and other characters, he beckoned them forward, individually and in pairs, to take their curtain calls. The applause that the theater audience gave them echoed earlier moments during the scene when the Viennese citizenry, assembled as an onstage audience, broke into applause. The most chilling of such moments came when they began to clap rhythmically and ominously as the Duke, with Mariana and Angelo kneeling and embracing tearfully at his feet, called for Angelo's execution: “‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!’” (line 405).

A series of gestures emphatically established that the anguish that moved Mariana, Isabella, and Angelo to tears during the scene was provoked, perhaps even gratuitously exacerbated, by a Duke whose manipulations of his subjects and their emotions came to have an unsavory quality, particularly with respect to the women. When Isabella first called out for “justice, O royal Duke … justice, justice, justice, justice!” (lines 20-25), he carefully turned her around to face the theater audience before saying, “Relate your wrongs” (line 26). The Duke also turned Mariana to face the theater audience when she came before him, and after she unveiled herself, he turned her in a full circle, in smiling self-satisfaction, showing her face to all onstage and in the theater, before allowing her to proceed, tearfully, with her charges against Angelo. The embrace to which the Duke forced Isabella to submit at the conclusion of Hack's production was, therefore, the culmination of a series of actions by which he repeatedly turned and manipulated the bodies as well as the emotions of those “poor informal women” (line 234), one of whom he sentenced his deputy to marry, the other of whom he literally took for himself as he spoke the production's final words, “what is yours is mine.” In that context, Isabella's speechlessness conveyed her horrified, even hysterical helplessness before the willful authority of the Duke, who had exercised his power to impose on her and on Vienna an order whose moral foundations were seen to be self-serving, if not perverse.

Though produced for television, Davis' production, like Hack's, gave the final scene a specifically theatrical quality. A rostrumlike platform on which a throne had been placed provided what Davis himself termed “the bare bones of an Elizabethan theater,”¹⁴ and the courtiers and people of Vienna, assembled in daylight in the city square, constituted an audience who broke into applause on several occasions. Their applause, however, was never threatening as in Hack's production but was genial, even festive.¹⁵ Davis presented the final scene as a play (within a play) staged by and starring the Duke,¹⁶ but this Duke, in contrast to the Duke of Hack's production, employed his power to deceive and manipulate people less as a means of indulging his own vanity and desires than as a way of making clear to all Vienna that humanity and life itself are best served when justice is tempered by mercy.

The Duke's participation in his own “play” marked a significant change in his character. Toward the end of Shakespeare's opening scene, immediately before the Duke seems to leave Vienna, he says:

I'll privily away; I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes;
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement,
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it. …

(I.i.67-72)

Hack's Duke turned smiling and bowed slightly to the theater audience while speaking those lines, by his gestures inverting the literal meaning of his words. What he said he did not like was what, in fact, he deeply relished. Davis' Duke spoke the same words with sincerity, addressing them directly, almost intimately, to Angelo amid the background noise of the crowded throne room. Very shortly after, the Duke made his exit swiftly and somewhat uncomfortably through the ranks of applauding courtiers, his gaze fixed rigidly ahead.

The Duke's entrance at the beginning of the final scene in Davis' production was not done at all “privily” but was a carefully arranged public spectacle. The Duke entered on horseback, waving in response to the applause of a crowd that had gathered in the square on his orders.¹⁷ The first of his two exits during the final scene closely paralleled the exit the audience saw him make during the opening scene. After delegating to Angelo and Escalus the task of rooting out the conspiracy, the Duke strode off through his subjects who, like the courtiers in the opening scene, applauded as he, again, passed without looking to either side. The audience sensed in his departure the same distaste for “loud applause and aves vehement” that he had expressed before leaving his court in act I, scene i.

The parallel, however, had limits that are themselves significant. A few moments after that departure the Duke returned wearing the disguise he had earlier assumed in order to hide himself from his subjects. Once Lucio had unhooded him, however, he stepped out of his friar's robes, mounted the rostrum, and, reclaiming the throne from Angelo, proceeded to perform in full public gaze the very duties of finding and punishing evil that he had previously seemed to reject. As he carried out his ducal tasks, he seemed at times not displeased with the surprised gasps stirred in the throng by such feats as the unhooding of Claudio and his reunion with Juliet. The Duke did not relish or “affect” their applause, but neither did he shrink from it. What the audience and his subjects saw in the play's closing moments was a man who had moved closer to being able to reconcile his taste for privacy with those demands of office requiring him to act effectively before the eyes of the people.

The interplay between public roles and private preferences in Davis's production had an important bearing on the Duke's proposals of marriage to Isabella. In contrast to the “proposal” made to her in private by Angelo, both of the Duke's proposals were made in public, revealing to all present personal feelings the Duke had hidden so deeply that no sign of them had been given previously either to Isabella or to the audience. His first proposal was made with a self-protective formality; the Duke remained on his throne while asking for Isabella's hand. Proposing the second time, he made himself, despite her nonacceptance of his first proposal, even more vulnerable as his people watched. Leaving his throne, he stepped closer to her and, no longer relying on words alone, he held out his hand to her rather than asking that she give him hers. His words and that gesture proved all the more moving because they were, in effect, his response to her earlier silence and her unwillingness to give him her hand. For several seconds (six by my count) Isabella stood expressionless, motionless, silent—her stillness intensified by the hush of the crowd. Then, with the beginnings of a smile, she accepted the hand the Duke was holding out to her. Amid a storm of applause the couple swept off hand in hand through the crowd, followed by the other major characters. Isabella's pronounced hesitation before taking the Duke's hand contrasted directly with the swiftness with which, in response to Mariana, she knelt to plead for the life of Angelo, the first man to propose sexual union with her. That contrast helped to define her silent acceptance of the Duke's hand as being an act of forgiveness for the pain he had inflicted upon her as much as an act of love. By accepting the Duke as her husband when asked a second time, Isabella in effect extended to him a mercy tempered with love that matched the justice tempered with mercy he had extended to others.

Kyle's production, however, established a context in which Isabella's final silence became more an expression of her power. The entire final scene was played on a white forestage outside the three-sided box formed by contiguous black walls that represented urban Vienna and within which all other scenes had been set. The forestage had been used just once before the final act. After Pompey, Mistress Overdone, and her prostitutes were taken off to prison, the Duke stepped forward onto the white forestage and defined the demands that the office of duke makes upon the man who holds it:

He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go;
More or less to others paying
Than by self-offenses weighing.

(III.ii.244-49)

The responsibilities that the Duke articulated were those that Angelo failed to meet, and they were also responsibilities that set the man holding ducal office apart from other men—a loneliness that, in Kyle's production, was given visual expression through the Duke's isolation on the forestage. The final scene, set on that same forestage, marked the completion of the Duke's efforts, by applying “craft against vice” (III.ii.260), to set right the wrongs generated by Angelo's failure.

In Kyle's production, Isabella, silently crossing from her brother to the Duke, had raised the Duke from his knees after his first proposal, and he had proceeded to assure Angelo of his safety and to mete out justice to Lucio. While he did, Isabella accompanied Claudio to a point downstage center and knelt there with him, stroking his face. When Juliet entered, via the same rear entrance through which Lucio had just been taken off, the Duke escorted her toward the center of the stage as Claudio, leaving Isabella kneeling alone, went toward her. The lovers embraced at center stage. The movements of the different characters established parallels that made visible a conception of the relationship between erotic and familial love different from those of Phillips, Giles, Hack, and Davis. Just as Isabella crossed from Claudio to the Duke, so Claudio crossed from his sister to embrace Juliet. Just as Isabella's act of crossing to the Duke and raising him from his knees held open the possibility that, through her, Claudio might become his “brother too,” so the Duke's act of bringing Juliet downstage (as Isabella had earlier brought Claudio) emphasized—in a way Davis' production did not—his role in completing the process of bringing together again two lovers from whose earlier union new human life had sprung. Erotic and familial love were seen as distinct yet complementary.

The embrace between Juliet and Claudio intensified the audience's sense of Isabella's isolation as she knelt downstage, and that embrace continued while the Duke addressed various characters. That final speech begins with what can be construed as the Duke's command for Claudio to marry Juliet (“She, Claudio, whom you wronged, look you restore”), and the last sentences he addresses to a specific individual are those in which he proposes again to Isabella. Even after hearing that second proposal, Isabella remained kneeling—isolated and silent. A long pause followed while the Duke waited for her to reply. He ended the silence by speaking to all others assembled around him the final words of the play: “So, bring us to our palace, where we'll show / What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know.” The Duke waited, looking at Isabella, as his subjects, in response to his command, exited from the white forestage, passing through doors in the black walls of urban Vienna. Their departures left him increasingly alone, and his gradual isolation upstage paralleled Isabella's downstage, thus visually linking his isolation in office with her double isolation—as the sister of a brother who has committed himself to another woman, and as a woman who had earlier sought to become a religious sister, shunning the presence of men among “the votarists of Saint Clare” (I.iv.5). Isabella rose and, as she went toward the exits used by the others, she walked past the waiting Duke. Then she stopped and looked back to him. He walked toward her, and they exited side by side in a pairing that diminished, even if it did not end, their respective isolations. In Kyle's production the pairing of Isabella and the Duke was a mutual decision: she chose the Duke for her spouse as much as he chose her for his. Within the specific context created by that production, the silence that Shakespeare's playtext imposes upon Isabella did not reflect either her helplessness (as in Hack's production) or her almost reflexive acceptance of the Duke. Her silence arose from and expressed the power she came to have and to exercise during the final scene. That power made Isabella, as she and the Duke left the stage together, his equal.

Phillips, in his 1975 production, also made Isabella's final silence an expression of her power and will, but she exercised them in ways that infused the play's final moments with still another cluster of meanings and effects. Proposing for the second time, the Duke stood with arms outstretched toward Isabella—a gesture that tied that moment to the earlier moment during the scene when Isabella, falsely denouncing Angelo, had knelt with her arms outstretched to the Duke. On hearing the Duke's second proposal Isabella remained—as she had on hearing his first—both motionless and silent. After an excruciatingly long wait, during which the Duke's happy anticipation changed to embarrassed anger, he lowered his arms and, tersely stressing the first word, said, “So, bring us to our palace” (line 533). He exited quickly with the others, perhaps even leading them, and Isabella and Angelo were left looking across the stage at one another for several long moments. That tableau impressed upon the audience one last time the symmetry between those two characters, both of whom had had their once-certain conceptions of virtue and of their own identities challenged by what they had experienced.

After Angelo's departure through the exit used by the others, the stage gradually darkened, and Isabella stood alone in a small pool of light that further emphasized her isolation.¹⁸ Carefully, she removed the severe wire-rimmed glasses that she had worn throughout the play. Then, with a slowness suggesting both deliberation and a touch of weariness, she took off her religious headdress and veil, at which point the theater was plunged into darkness. Those last gestures conveyed her recognition, as much pained as joyous, that she was now so enmeshed in worldly concerns that returning to the serenity of the convent was no longer possible. Having deliberately rejected the roles of wife and “sister,” the Isabella of Phillips' production stood alone at the play's conclusion, but alone in an isolation she had freely and knowingly chosen for herself.

The five productions of Measure for Measure I have discussed demonstrate that the silences that occur during the play's final moments are open—individually and in combination—to a wide variety of meanings and effects. An assessment of the specific meanings and effects generated during a particular production requires that we judge how well or how poorly a director and a group of performers have used the freedom that open silences allow. In reaching those judgments, literary analysis has a clear but ultimately limited role. The fundamental norm of literary analysis is fidelity to the words that make up the Shakespearean playtext and, at a more sophisticated level, to meanings and patterns of meanings that those words yield. That norm permits us to make some definite judgments about Hack's 1974 production of Measure for Measure for the Royal Shakespeare Company. We realize that Hack substituted words of his choice for those in the playtext, converting, for example, Shakespeare's “Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure” (line 406) into something decidedly different: “Waste still pays waste, and pleasure answers pleasure.” Hack omitted the offstage marriage between Angelo and Mariana, and he repositioned the lines in which Angelo craves death so that they preceded rather than followed (and thus contradicted) the appeals for his life made by Mariana and Isabella. Hack also dropped entirely lines as important as those in which the Duke spares Barnardine's life and those in which he first proposes to Isabella. Those cuts, among others, allowed Hack to avoid the question he would otherwise have had to answer: why a Duke who is presented as selfishly willful and a “public fraud” grants life to Barnardine and finds it necessary to propose twice to an Isabella who is powerless to defy his wishes.

Hack's production is a clear and distressing example of how, to avoid the complexities posed by the words Shakespeare wrote, a director has refashioned them so that they conform to and confirm, rather than challenge, his own conceptions. Rather than engage in the creative collaboration between playwright, director, and performers that open silences help to foster, Hack preferred to make the production a vehicle for transmitting insights and attitudes that he shared, not with Shakespeare but with another playwright, Edward Bond. In a note addressed to Hack and published in the program, Bond set forth what seems to have been the controlling vision of the production:

Angelo is a lying, self-deceiving fraud, the Duke a vain face-saving hypocrite, and the saintly Isabella a sex hysteric. That is a total arraignment of conventional authority and the morality used to explain and excuse it. I also think that Lucio is a prototype of the fool in Lear, and that he tells the truth about the Duke. That is, he describes the Duke as another Angelo, a public fraud. … There is no political problem that the Duke can solve, no reason for him to dress up a fake holy-father, nothing for him to put right in the city. The city is happier and more peaceful without him. The problem is in him, Angelo, Isabella, and those who support them. It's not just the ending of the play that's a charade, the whole political set-up is.

However, our success in using even such an unsophisticated mode of literary analysis to make judgments about Hack's production underscores the difficulties we face when using the same kind of analysis to judge the other four productions under consideration. None of them is absolutely faithful to the words of Shakespeare's playtext. Three of the directors, for example, reposition Juliet's entrance during the final scene. Shakespeare calls for her to enter after line 473 when three other characters also enter; the words of the Folio text are “Enter Barnardine and Provost, Claudio, Julietta.” Both Davis and Kyle had Juliet enter far later in the scene, immediately after Lucio is taken off to be married to the whore who has borne his child. In Phillips' production, Juliet entered earlier, during line 395, and with the newly married Angelo and Mariana (as well as Friar Peter and the Provost). Giles did not shift Juliet's entrance, but he did reposition what Shakespeare wrote as the final lines of the play. The Duke in that production said, “So, bring us to our palace, where we'll show / What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know” before proposing marriage to Isabella a second time.

Even if those four productions had not deviated in the slightest from the words of Shakespeare's playtext for Measure for Measure, the fact remains that we still could not use fidelity to the playtext as the measure by which to judge how each production utilized the open silences of the play's final moments. Why? Because an open silence is characterized by the absence of words spoken by or in reference to the silent character(s). There are, then, no words of Shakespeare's to which open silences can be “faithful.” The productions directed by Giles, Kyle, Davis, and Phillips endowed those silences with different, even contradictory meanings and effects. I prefer Phillips' production to the other three, principally because it did more than convert Isabella's final silences into either outright acceptance or outright rejection of the Duke's marriage proposal. I cannot, however, defend my preference by arguing that Phillips remained truer to the words of Shakespeare's playtext and to the patterns of thought and feeling they yield than did Kyle, Davis, and Giles, each of whom had Isabella accept the Duke as her husband and leave the stage paired with him. Indeed, there is nothing in the playtext of Measure for Measure that rules out Hack's presentation of some of the final silences: a Barnardine who remains defiant and unsubdued, a Claudio who spurns his sister and embraces Juliet instead, an Angelo who accepts Mariana as his wife and is eager to live. The playtext even allows the possibility of a Duke who imposes himself on a helpless and unwilling Isabella after having given her, with his first proposal of marriage, an opportunity—perhaps out of his own vanity—to accept him freely.

The six open silences of the final scene of Measure for Measure and the groupings that can emerge as a result of the links among them give the play an extraordinary freedom, a capacity for contingency and change unmatched by any other Shakespearean play with the possible exception of King Lear. We cannot even be certain what kind of play Measure for Measure is. During the first two acts, it heads toward tragedy, but then veers away and ends in a fashion that Northrop Frye and Suzanne Langer have told us is typical of comedy—with deaths avoided and with marriages performed, proposed, or imminent.¹⁹ We cannot doubt the presence of such comedic elements, but the open silences shared by those spared from death and those confronted by marriage allow us to question whether the presence of such elements in Measure for Measure affirms or undercuts those values essential to comedy that prize human life and celebrate its capacity to persist and to renew itself through sexual energies that lead to marriages based on mutual love. As a murderer, Barnardine is the antithesis of the comedic values that emphasize preserving and continuing human life. Sparing him from death can mean that he is free to kill again. The Duke uses his legal authority to force Lucio to marry a woman whom he certainly does not love, and Angelo's silence can mean that he must live out the life given to him as the husband of a woman whom he has been forced by law to marry and does not love. Isabella may silently refuse to become the Duke's wife. Such a refusal would undercut the values of comedy, particularly if it involved her resolve to return to the convent, to a realm that excludes the sexual energies necessary for the renewal of human life. Measure for Measure may be a comedy, but it does not have to be. The open silences that abound during its final moments ensure that its generic identity is not fixed and cannot be definitively specified.

Measure for Measure must always pose problems for those who equate the play with the words that Shakespeare wrote, who seek to make the play conform to the words that are a major part of it. Those words establish the presence of open silences that require the play, during its final moments, to move beyond and float free of its verbal elements. As it ends, Measure for Measure defies easy categorization as a comedy and mutely but insistently asserts its identity as drama, as “a piece of pure theatrical art, dependent upon nothing except the conditions of theatre for its effect and meaning.”²⁰

Notes

1. This production was revived for the 1976 season, but since I did not see the revival, I shall discuss only the original production.

2. She had entered earlier, with the newly married Angelo and Mariana.

3. Michael Billington, Guardian (London, Manchester), 5 September 1974, p. 10.

4. The actor playing Barnardine (Dan Meaden) also played both Mistress Overdone and Francisca, the nun with whom Isabella is speaking when Lucio brings news of Claudio's imprisonment. The tripling of roles juxtaposed the chastity of a nun to the extremes of carnality embodied in the madame and the murderer who refuses to die.

5. The note was on the rear cover of the program.

6. The Duke's assignment of Barnardine to Friar Peter's hand was especially significant in this production because the Duke had earlier taken Barnardine's hand in his when forgiving his act of murder.

7. In this production Friar Peter was renamed Friar Thomas.

8. See particularly IV.ii.104-9, when the Duke confidently declares in an aside that the message from Angelo, which the Provost has just received, is Claudio's pardon. The Duke then discovers that it reiterates the order that Claudio be executed and adds the stipulation that Claudio's head be sent to Angelo.

9. Here and in the next passage quoted, Hack combines into a single exchange lines that are separated in Shakespeare's playtext: V.i.371-73 and V.i.403-7; V.i.412-14 and 421-22. In addition to rearranging Shakespeare's words, he also changes them. For example, Shakespeare's V.i.403-7 read:

   The very mercy of the law cries out
   Most audible, even from his proper tongue,
   “An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!”
   Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure,
   Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.

10. I follow here the Pelican edition; the Folio gives the lines as follows:

    If he be like your brother, for his sake
    Is he pardon'd, and for your lovelie sake
    Give me your hand, and say you will be mine,
    He is my brother too: …

11. If, however, a production effectively establishes that the Duke is under pressure or that he feels pain because of the suffering he is inflicting on Isabella, the audience's judgment of him softens. Davis, for example, tempered any inclination the audience might have to dislike the Duke by having the camera register in telling close-up the supremely confident Duke's pained surprise when what he expected to be Angelo's letter pardoning Claudio turned out to be an order for his swift execution. Giles's production justified the Duke's tactics by opening with a kind of dumb show that established the breakdown of order in Vienna. A blind man entered and was mugged beneath corpses dangling from scaffolds. That blind man, the audience subsequently learned, was the Duke.

12. For example, in Giles's production, Isabella deliberated and looked first at the Duke, then at Mariana, and finally at Angelo before turning back and speaking to the Duke.

13. What the Duke and Isabella are wearing when he proposes to her is an important factor in giving her silences meaning and effect. In most productions, Isabella wears a nun's habit throughout the play, but Shakespeare's playtext allows some leeway. Isabella is not, when the audience first sees her, a full-fledged member of “the votarists of Saint Clare,” and Francisca, the nun with whom Isabella is speaking when Lucio calls, asks her to deal with him precisely because “you are yet unsworn” (I.iv.5, 9). Kyle's production emphasized Isabella's free decision to don religious garb before undertaking the effort to save her brother's life. Isabella wore secular dress during the scene, but at the end she exited with Francisca in order to put on the nun's habit she was carrying in her arms.

    In the productions directed by Phillips and Davis, the Duke doffed his friar's garments completely once he was unhooded and wore secular garb (in Phillips' production, a military uniform) when proposing to an Isabella who was dressed in a nun's habit. In those specific contexts, the proposed marriage seemed to entail a union of the secular and the religious. The Duke in both Giles's and Hack's productions wore his friar's robes, with the hood thrown back, when he proposed to an Isabella dressed in a nun's habit. The method of costuming muted any sense of the proposed marriage as a merger of church and state. Hack, by having the Duke put on the golden robes of state before proposing to an Isabella whom the audience never saw in religious garb, made the proposal of marriage a purely secular assertion of Vincentio's ducal power.

14. See Henry Fenwick's essay, “The Production,” in the edition of Measure for Measure prepared as a companion to the television production: The BBC-TV Shakespeare: Measure for Measure (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1979; New York: Mayflower Books, 1979), p. 25.

15. Adding to the sense of festivity was the silent presence of Elbow, the malapropian constable. It was he who took Isabella into custody and, with the Provost, brought in the Duke disguised as a friar.

16. See chap. 8 of Josephine Waters Bennett, Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); also pertinent are pp. 44-47. In The Problem of Measure for Measure: A Historical Investigation (London: Vision Press, 1976; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), Roselind Miles surveys critical and theatrical treatments of the play. Other books devoted exclusively to the play include Darryl F. Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law and the Covenant (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Nigel Alexander, Shakespeare: Measure for Measure (London: Edward Arnold, 1975); William B. Bache, Measure for Measure as Dialectical Art (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1969); David L. Stevenson, The Achievement of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), and Mary Lascelles, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (London: Athlone Press, 1953).

    My early thinking about this play was influenced greatly by Francis Fergusson's chapter, “Philosophy and Theatre in Measure for Measure,” in The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957). Of the many articles on Measure for Measure, I found three especially valuable: Marvin Rosenberg, “Shakespeare's Fantastic Trick: Measure for Measure,” Sewanee Review 80 (1972): 51-72; James Trombetta, “Versions of Dying in Measure for Measure,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 60-76; and Jane Williamson, “The Duke and Isabella on the Modern Stage,” in Joseph G. Price, ed., The Triple Bond (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), pp. 149-60. In his chapter on Measure for Measure in Changing Styles in Shakespeare (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), Ralph Berry discusses the productions directed by Hack and Phillips and offers a particularly valuable assessment of John Barton's 1970 production for the RSC. That production concluded with “Isabella alone on stage, unresponsive to the Duke's overtures, silently resistant,” and in so doing “launched a complete theatrical re-examination of the text” (pp. 40-41). Jonathan Miller's 1975 version of his famed production of Measure for Measure, Berry observes, continued and, in a sense, completed that re-examination. In Miller's production, Isabella backed away in horror from the Duke when he proposed the second time, and thus the production “appeared to terminate a line of inquiry, leaving the possibilities only of imitation. Ever since 1975, Isabellas have continued to express doubts about the Duke, with varying degrees of emphasis” (p. 45). In chap. 5 of Renaissance Drama and a Modern Audience (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 61-75, Michael Scott discusses British productions of Measure for Measure during the 1970s, including those directed by Barton, Miller, Kyle, Hack, and Davis.

17. The Duke's entrance on horseback provides an excellent example of how the technical resources of television can visually complement and enhance a pattern of imagery established by the words of Shakespeare's playtext. Consider the following passages, which relate riding a horse to governing a city and controlling sensual appetites:

    Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness,
    Or whether that the body public be
    A horse whereon the governor doth ride,
    Who, newly in the seat, that it may know
    He can command, lets it straight feel the spur;
    Whether the tyranny be in his place,
    Or in his eminence that fills it up,
    I stagger in—…

    (I.ii.153-60)

                                                                I have begun,
    And now I give my sensual race the rein.

    (II.iv.159-60)

18. Alexander Leggatt's description of the final scene of this production in “The Extra Dimension: Shakespeare in Performance,” Mosaic 10 (1977): 37-49, establishes the context for Isabella's final isolation:

    The scene began (again, this was a nineteenth-century setting) with jolly band music and much twirling of parasols to greet the Duke's return; with its colour and bustle, it looked like the conventional comic finale. As the scene advanced, the revelations became more painful and complicated, business was contrived so that more and more characters left the stage and did not return. (At the scandalous accusations of the women against Angelo, a party of children was whisked off by their nursemaid.) Towards the end some half-dozen figures were left—and finally Isabella stood alone, tearing off her nun's headdress with an expression of bewilderment and dismay. The gradual filling of the stage, so basic to the traditional comic ending, was reversed; the effect was of deliberate parody, underlying the sense of unease, even failure, that lies beneath the apparent satisfaction of the scene as written.

    (pp. 46-47).

19. Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953); Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957); and Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), pp. 58-73.

20. Berners W. Jackson, in a review of Giles's production, published in the Hamilton Spectator (Ontario), 28 June 1969, p. 25.