What sort of a comedy is - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

What sort of a comedy is Measure for Measure?

EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of his TimeSlide2
Slide3

Festive comedy

In his essay ‘The Argument of Comedy’ (1949), Northrop Frye identified “a

social as well as an individual

theme” in the marriage with which a comedy traditionally concludes:

“In

the last scene, when the dramatist usually tries to get all his characters on the stage at once, the audience witnesses the birth of a renewed sense of social integration. … The essential comic resolution, therefore, is an individual release which is also a social reconciliation

.”

(Palmer

1984: 75-6)

You may remember this pattern from other Shakespearean comedies:

“…

the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world

.”

(Palmer 1984: 80)Slide4

Festive comedy

More recently, Christopher Booker elaborated upon this formula in his book

The Seven Basic Plots

. In comedy, says Booker,

“we

see a little world in which people have passed under a shadow of confusion, uncertainty and frustration, and are shut off from one another

;”

“the

confusion gets worse until the pressure of darkness is at its most acute and everyone is in a nightmarish tangle

;”

“finally

, with the coming to light of things not previously recognised, perceptions are dramatically changed. The shadows are dispelled, the situation is miraculously transformed and the little world is brought together in a state of joyful

union.”

(Booker 2004: 150

)Slide5

The earliest recorded performance of Measure for Measure was in a festive context: before the King himself at Whitehall, on 26 December (St. Stephen’s Day) 1604.

Like

Twelfth Night, it’s a play about the forces of hedonism and sensuality versus the forces of

repression. But

where is the audience positioned?

Festive comedy and carnivalSlide6

Dominic

Dromgoole’s

production for Shakespeare’s Globe, 2015

pre-show reminiscent of Breughel’s

Fight Between Carnival and Lent

transitional vignettes between scenes becoming increasingly troublingSlide7

As Brian Gibbons points out, “In Measure for Measure there is a polarisation of social life into opposed extremes: on the one side serious and strict isolation – the court, the nunnery, the moated grange, the prison cells in which Claudio, alone, and Juliet, alone, are shut up – and on the other side promiscuous – not to say contagious – crowding: the alehouse, the house of resort, the streets.”

(1991

: 24)

Carnival and Lent in

Measure for MeasureSlide8

Lenten repression:DUKE.

Lord Angelo … scarce confesses

That his blood flows, or that his appetiteIs more to bread than stone. (1.3.50-3)

ANGELO.

What’s this, what’s this? Is this her fault or mine? (2.2.168)

There was a tendency

in 2015 productions to play Isabella’s

“Go

to your

bosom”

(2.2.140) as Angelo’s sexual

awakening…

Carnival and Lent in

Measure for MeasureSlide9

Isabella’s first appearance in the play shows her desiring “

no farther privileges” but rather “wishing a more strict

restraint / Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare” (1.4.1-5).Claudio

seems willing to exploit his sister’s

repressed sensuality

:

“…

in her youth / There is a prone and speechless

dialect

/ Such as move

men”

(

1.2.170-2).

ISABELLA

.

I’ll to my brother:

Though he hath fallen by

prompture

of the blood,Yet hath he in him such a mind of honour. […]Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die:More than our brother is our chastity. (2.4)Juliet Stevenson: “Her line, “More than our brother is our chastity,” is the trickiest moment of the performance for any actress playing Isabella.” (Rutter 1988: 26)

Carnival and Lent in

Measure for MeasureSlide10

Paola Dionisotti

:

“My Isabella was very frightened of sexuality. My Isabella was going to be a bride of Christ… As a nun, you marry Christ. He knows everything about you and he’s always whatever you want him to be. That’s so safe. But

of course, marrying Christ is one thing; getting close to another human being is something different, because human bodies touch each other.” (Rutter 1988: 33)

Carnival and Lent in

Measure for Measure

RSC, 1978, dir. Barry KyleSlide11

Juliet Stevenson on the same issue:

“…

she should be looked at not as a frigid hysteric with a big problem about sex … we should kick off by exploring the positive reasons for entering a convent.” (Rutter 1988: 40)

Carnival and Lent in

Measure for Measure

RSC, 1983, dir. Adrian NobleSlide12

The play contrasts the Lenten repression of the law and the convent with the carnivalesque

excess of the low-life characters:

ESCALUS. Now, sir, come on, what was done to Elbow’s wife, once more?

POMPEY.

Once, sir? There was nothing done to her once. (2.1.135-6

)

“

Pompey generally conforms to the spirit of Carnival, uninhibited, spontaneous, mocking, inverting authority’s forms and procedures, always choosing the erratic, the discrepant, not the logical or the consistent or coherent. The scene

[2.1] serves

more generally as comic burlesque, in anticipation, of the play’s main events

.” (Gibbons 1991: 27)

Is the Carnival spirit defeated when we see Pompey’s absorption (alongside numerous former clients) into the punishment system?

Is

Barnadine

also a Carnival figure?

Carnival and Lent in

Measure for MeasureSlide13

Compare the structure of

this play with that of other

comedies of mistaken identity such as The Comedy of Errors or Twelfth Night

(a key

difference

is that

Duke has engineered

this one).

Stuart

E. Baker gives the following outline of the “basic plot formula” of farce (NB this is describing 19th-century 3-act farce):

“In

the first act one or more deceptions are planned, started, or revealed. … The threat of exposure … results in a desperate series of lies, evasions, and frantic attempts to hide or escape. A bewildering profusion of

quiproquos

[mistaken identities] develops, producing such confusion and misunderstanding among the characters that the misunderstandings continue … until the problems are more or less settled

.” (1981

: 26)

Playwright

Ben Travers on “the general formula for farce: Act II – the sympathetic and guileless hero is landed into the thick of some grievous dilemma or adversity. Act I – he gets into it. Act III – he gets out of it” (1978: 63).Measure for Measure as farceSlide14

PROVOST. Here in the prison, father,

There died this morning of a cruel fever

One Ragozine, a most notorious pirate,A man of Claudio’s years, his beard and headJust of his colour. […]

DUKE.

O, ’tis an accident that heaven provides! (4.3.66-74

)

Both productions to date at the reconstructed

Globe theatre

(John Dove, 2004 and Dominic

Dromgoole

, 2015) have opted for

a reading

of the Duke as

a good-natured

bumbler

improvising his way through the play, rather

than

as a controlling Machiavellian.

Measure for Measure as farceSlide15

Measure for Measure as farce

Mark Rylance: “I’ve found that he [the Duke] is prepared for many things, but also some things do go wrong and as a result he has to improvise – he has to come up with solutions on the spur of the moment

.”Rylance’s stuttering delivery of the following lines indicated that even

the Duke was

not

convinced by some of these improvisations:

DUKE

.

[to Mariana]

Nor, gentle daughter, fear you not at all.

He is your husband on a pre-contract.

To bring you thus together ’tis no sin… (4.1.69-71)Slide16

The 2004 Globe actors had difficulties

with audience

laughter during the Isabella/Angelo and Isabella/Claudio scenes.Sophie Thompson (Isabella):

“We got all varieties of laughter, which surprised me. For example, when Angelo grabs Isabella’s crotch

[

2

.4

], there was not only a reaction of shock – there was also some laughter and it was the kind you can’t really categorise. That is the sort of moment when I do expect people to laugh a bit, though, because it’s such a difficult moment to cope with

.”

Rob

Conkie

objected that at such moments, “the

audience had been invited... to regard

[

the female

characters’]

various plights as little more than laughable”

(2006: 45).

Measure for Measure as farceSlide17

The play’s ending tends to resist playing as festive comedy for numerous reasons:

Lucio and Angelo are forced to marry their wives (Kate

Keepdown and Mariana) as punishments for their transgressions, not because they are willingly reconciled;The Duke’s manipulation

of events

in

the final

act (“I

will keep her ignorant of her

good, / To

make her heavenly comforts of

despair / When

it is least

expected”; 4.3.106-8) makes him suddenly inscrutable and in-control;

The Duke’s surprise proposal to Isabella (“

Give me your

hand,

and say you will be

mine”; 5.1.491) casts doubts on the purity of his motives and remains unanswered at the play’s conclusion.

The endingSlide18

The ending

How

does

Isabella respond?

Mary Lamb,

Tales from Shakespeare

(1807):

“

Isabel, not having taken the veil, was free to marry; and the friendly offices, while hid under the disguise of a humble friar, which the noble duke had done for her, made her with grateful joy accept the honour he offered her; and when she became duchess of Vienna, the excellent example of the virtuous Isabel worked such a complete reformation among the young ladies of that city, that from that time none ever fell into the transgression of Juliet, the repentant wife of the reformed Claudio.” (1918: 138-9)Slide19

Even until the mid-twentieth century, critics tended to assume that Isabella accepted the Duke’s proposal: E. M. W.

Tillyard

writes of Isabella “consenting to marry the Duke at the end of the play” (1957: 119), while William Empson refers to “her decision to marry the Duke” (1951: 284).Ralph Berry suggests that “in a sense, they were not wrong. They were faithfully reporting their recollection of the play as seen.

Isabellas

, it seems, used always to accept the Duke’s proposal” (2005: 41).

The endingSlide20

The ending

This all began to change around 1970, since when we have seen

Isabellas standing in horror-struck silence (Barton 1970, McBurney

2004), gazing sadly at her nun’s veil (Kyle 1988) or his discarded Friar’s habit (

Dromgoole

2015), being manhandled into an uncomfortable tableau of fake happiness (Hill-Gibbins 2015) and even slapping him in the face (Donnellan 1994).

Cheek by Jowl, 1994, dir. Declan DonnellanSlide21

As we have seen, the tendency in festive comedy (e.g. A Midsummer Night’s Dream

) is

to leave the city for a disordered “green world” and then to return; also to contrast the oppressive order of the city with the saturnalian

chaos of the “green world”.

In

Measure

, we start with a city which is both oppressive

and

in chaos, and remain there for the duration (though do Mariana’s “moated grange” and Angelo’s walled garden serve as

“green worlds”

of sorts

)?

Indeed, can Carnival really flourish unless it takes place in a holiday space of license and misrule?

City comedySlide22

With its farcical elements, its focus on

sex and exchange rather than romantic love, and its large number of characters driven primarily

by self-interest, Measure for Measure is arguably more reminiscent of “city comedy” than it is of Shakespeare’s festive comedies.

Naomi Conn

Liebler

describes this Jacobean comic form thus:

“With city comedy, the city itself is the subject and focus, and the citizens are what they are and do what they do largely because their city is a bigger animal than they are. These figures, marked in medieval morality-play fashion by names reflecting their functions or typology, are squeezed into behaviours that set them apart, isolate them from any larger sense of community.”

(2005

: 253)

City comedySlide23

Liebler describes city comedy as being concerned with “the special brands of human frailty and error familiar in — or produced by — urban life”:

cony-catching [i.e. con-artistry]

prostitutioncheating in the marketplace

cheating in the household

She notes that “city comedy depends less than other kinds of plays on any requirement for communal renewal and more on an emphasis on individual, mostly economic, survival”

(2005

: 254).

There

are, however,

limits to

Measure for Measure

’s similarity to city

comedy. In

its non-English setting

and

its complete absence of the mercantile middle class, it does not fully conform to the

genre’s norms – though one could argue that both London and its middle class are present in veiled, satirical form…

City comedySlide24

Since theatres were closed due to plague in 1603, 1604 was the first theatrical season of James I’s reign.

When Pompey reports that “All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down” (1.2.87-8), it is almost certainly a reference to James I’s 1603 decree that due to “excessive numbers of idle, indigent, dissolute and dangerous persons”, many of London’s suburban tenements must be pulled down (Howard 2007: 122-3).

A play about London?Slide25

According to John Michael Archer, 1603 “also saw a further strengthening of the office of Provost Marshal by London’s Court of Aldermen”:

“Marshals had been assigned to direct constables in the searching out of vice in the 1590s, a measure that probably indicates a lack of faith in the lower officials. The duties of the Provost Marshal and his assistants included escorting vagabonds to prison as well as overseeing constables.” (2005: 65-6)

Certainly Puritans such as Philip

Stubbes

would have been only too happy to see a death penalty introduced for transgressors like Claudio and Juliet:

“I would wish that the man or woman who are

certainlie

knowne

and

prooved

without all scruple or doubt, to have committed the horrible fact of

Whoredome

,

Adulterie

, Incest, or Fornication, should […] taste of present death, as Gods

worde

doeth

commaund, and good pollicie allowe” (Anatomy of Abuses, 1581)A play about London?Slide26

Measure for Measure was also, perhaps, one of Shakespeare’s more site-specific plays – if, as seems likely, the play was performed at the Globe, it would have been performed in an area notorious for its brothels.

In

1603, as Brian Gibbons notes, Bankside was reported to the Privy Council as being full of “theeves

,

horse-stealers

, whoremongers, cozeners,

[and]

coney

-catchers”, and numerous key figures in early modern London’s theatre business were also brothel-owners (1991

: 23

).

A play about London?Slide27

Mistress Overdone, Elbow, Froth, Kate Keepdown

etc. are English types, with names

like the characters of city comedy (compare Middleton’s Sir Walter Whorehound, Master Yellowhammer, Master

Beggarland

, Mistress

Underman).

In fact, the

play is included in OUP’s recent

Collected Works

of Thomas

Middleton. John

Jowett

believes it is “clear that the 1623 text [of

Measure

] had undergone adaptation by Middleton” (2007: 1542), and argues that among other changes, Middleton “accentuated the role of Juliet”, added Lucio to 2.2, substantially augmented 1.2 (adding all of the business with Lucio and the gentlemen), and possibly added Pompey’s stand-up sequence in 4.3 (2007: 1543).

A play about London?Slide28

Note the names of Mistress Overdone’s

customers: young Master Rash, Master Caper, young Dizzy, young Master Deep-vow, Master Copper-spur, Master Starve-lackey, young

Drop-heir, Master Forthright, brave Master Shoe-tie, and wild Half-can.

Pompey observes that all of these prisoners (and “forty more”) were customers of Mistress

Overdone’s

brothel:

many are

associated with fashion (Master Caper failed to pay “for some four suits of peach-coloured satin”, while Master Copper-spur and Master Shoe-tie’s names suggest unnecessary ornamental footwear; Master Starve-lackey and Master Forthright are both noted for their involvements in fashionable sports

);

others are associated

by their names (Rash, Dizzy, Forthright) or actions (murders, duels) with

hot-headedness.

Is it significant that

Pompey describes them all in the present tense as “here

”…?

A play about London?Slide29

Sex as commercial exchange

The first woman we see in the play is a prostitute, Mistress Overdone, who thinks of sex primarily in terms of its financial value:

MISTRESS OVERDONE.

Thus

, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the

gallows,

and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk

. (1.2.80-2)

She and Pompey tend to use the language of business in order to describe their “profession”.

Angelo likewise presents

his attempt at sexual blackmail as a form of direct

exchange:

ANGELO.

Redeem

thy brother

By yielding up thy body to my will (

2.4.163-4)

The success

of Isabella and Mariana’s ‘bed-trick’ seems to suggest that women in this society are seen as interchangeable sex objects.Slide30

Marriage as commercial exchange

CLAUDIO.

Thus stands it with me. Upon a true contract,

I got possession of

Julietta’s

bed.

You

know

the lady; she is fast my wife,

Save that we do the denunciation lack

Of outward order. This we came not to

Only for propagation of a dower

Remaining in the coffer of her friends,

From whom we thought it meet to hide our love

Till time had made them for us. (1.2.133-41)

Note the parallel here with Angelo and Mariana: both Mariana and Juliet lack dowries… Slide31

ANGELO. My lord, I must confess I know this woman;

And five years since there was some speech of marriage

Betwixt myself and her,

which was broke off,

Partly for that her promised proportions

Came short of composition, but in chief

For that her reputation was disvalued

In

levity…

(

5.1.214-20)

The parallel is so striking, in fact, that it lays the Duke open to charges of

hypocrisy (“’tis

no

sin…”?).

Marriage as commercial exchangeSlide32

In Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896), F. S. Boas defined

Measure

(alongside All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet

) as a “problem play”:

“…throughout

these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome… Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them together as Shakespeare’s problem-plays.” (1910: 343)

A ‘problem play’?Slide33

In her preface to the play for The Riverside Shakespeare

(1997), Anne Barton called

Measure “the last comedy Shakespeare ever wrote”, a play that “appears to embody some of the problems of a Shakespeare now seemingly disillusioned with that art of comedy which, in the past, had served him so well” (1997: 583).Paul

Yachnin

lists

Measure

alongside

Troilus

and

All’s Well

as “plays in which the figure of festival is either expunged from comedy, transformed into private and illicit desire, or transplanted to the inhospitable ground of satire or

tragedy” (1997

: 76

).

A ‘problem play’?Slide34

Indeed, many commentators have found it helpful to think of

Measure for Measure

in terms of tragicomedy.For Peter Brook, for example, Measure is emblematic of Shakespeare’s ability to switch between scenes that encourage us to “

identify

emotionally

,

subjectively” and those that ask us to “

evaluate politically, objectively in relation to

society” (1990: 98):

“From

the fanatical chastity of Isabella and the mystery of the Duke we are plunged back to Pompey and

Barnadine

for douches of normality. … If we follow the movement in

Measure for Measure

between the Rough and the Holy we will discover a play about justice, mercy, honesty, forgiveness, virtue, virginity, sex and death: kaleidoscopically one section of the play mirrors the other, it is in accepting the prism as a whole that its meanings emerge

.”

(1990: 99-100)

A ‘problem play’?Slide35

We might even read Measure for Measure

as a meta-comedy, with the Duke as a playwright-like figure intent on engineering a sense of communal renewal whatever the cost.

Rylance on the Duke again:

“…

he’s trying to create the circumstances under which people will become conscious and take responsibility for their own lives. … To encourage people to take responsibility and develop compassion, the Duke sets them on what seems like a cruel path. He makes it seem like they’ve lost something that’s precious to them

.”

“

If

a farce is to hum like a spinning top, the writer must take a delight in pushing things to extremes. This will be evident in the accelerating pace of the action, the multiplication of misunder­standings, reversals, and confusions of identity, and often also in the inventive prodigality of the playwright, a

juggler’s

ability to keep a great many balls in the air at once

.”

(Smith

1989: 207

)

A ‘problem play’?Slide36

Archer, John Michael (2005) Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays

, New York / Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Baker, Stuart E. (1981) Georges Feydeau and the Aesthetics of Farce, Ann

Arbor

, MI: UMI Research Press.

Barton, Anne (1997) Introduction to

Measure for Measure

in G. Blakemore Evans et al. [

eds

]

The Riverside Shakespeare

, 2

nd

edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 579-83.

Berry, Ralph (2005)

Changing Styles in Shakespeare

, Abingdon: Routledge.

Boas, F. S. (1910)

Shakespeare and his Predecessors, third edition, London: John Murray.Booker, Christopher (2004), The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, London: Continuum.Brook, Peter (1990) The Empty Space, London: Penguin.ReferencesSlide37

Conkie, Rob (2006) The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity

, New York: The Edwin

Mellen Press.Empson, William (1951) The Structure of Complex Words, London:

Chatto

&

Windus

.

Gibbons, Brian (1991) ‘Introduction’ to

Measure for Measure

, Cambridge: CUP, 1-71.

Howard, Jean E. (2007)

Theater

of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642

, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jowett, John (2007) ‘

Measure for Measure

: A Genetic Text’ in Gary Taylor and John

Lavagnino

[eds] Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Oxford: OUP, 1542-6.Lamb, Charles and Mary (1918) Tales from Shakespeare, New York: Harper.ReferencesSlide38

Liebler, Naomi Conn (2005) ‘English Comedy, Elizabethan and Jacobean’, in Maurice

Charney

[ed.] Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, Volume 1, Westport, CT / London: Greenwood, 248-62.Palmer, D. J. (1984) Comedy: Developments in Criticism

, London: Macmillan.

Rutter, Carol (1988)

Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today

, London: The Women’s Press.

Smith, Leslie (1989)

Modern British Farce: A Selective Study of British Farce from Pinero to the Present Day

, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble.

Tillyard

, E. M. W. (1957)

Shakespeare’s Problem Plays

, London:

Chatto

&

Windus

.

Travers, Ben (1978) A-Sitting on a Gate, London: W. H. Allen.Yachnin, Paul (1997) Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.References