1 00:00:02,280 --> 00:00:06,270 OK. So this is the third of five lectures approaching Shakespeare this week. 2 00:00:06,270 --> 00:00:09,610 I'm talking about measure for measure. 3 00:00:09,610 --> 00:00:17,490 What I want to try to do this week is to show that the play insistently demands that we ask what kind of play is it? 4 00:00:17,490 --> 00:00:25,320 What genre is it? And as usual, to try and show some of the different ways we can approach that question. 5 00:00:25,320 --> 00:00:30,810 What kind of genre of play is measure for measure? 6 00:00:30,810 --> 00:00:37,260 I think I've been trying to say throughout this series that answers to questions about Shakespeare's plays are often less interesting 7 00:00:37,260 --> 00:00:45,390 than the questions themselves and that more substantially the fact that we ask those questions is really intrinsic to the play. 8 00:00:45,390 --> 00:00:50,940 A part of it's addressed to us, not just an obstacle. We need to get round. 9 00:00:50,940 --> 00:00:56,160 However, notwithstanding all that, there is actually quite a simple answer to the question of what kind of genre of play. 10 00:00:56,160 --> 00:01:01,050 Measure for measure is. And that answer comes from the book. 11 00:01:01,050 --> 00:01:05,580 We heard about last week the collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. 12 00:01:05,580 --> 00:01:15,060 Gathered together by his fellow actors, John Hemming and Henry Kondo in 16 23 as the First Folio. 13 00:01:15,060 --> 00:01:19,440 Last week I mentioned that Hemming and Kendall's description of how previously 14 00:01:19,440 --> 00:01:24,480 works by Shakespeare had entered print was in fact economically motivated. 15 00:01:24,480 --> 00:01:34,410 It was an attempt to discredit previous publications in order to make the current rather expensive and rather belated volume more saleable. 16 00:01:34,410 --> 00:01:36,720 We might read a similar agenda into that place. 17 00:01:36,720 --> 00:01:46,920 That book's title, Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, an attempt to use three genres to suggest breadth. 18 00:01:46,920 --> 00:01:53,100 Fun for all the family. But those three genres, which have been established by the title of the First Folio, 19 00:01:53,100 --> 00:02:00,600 by its catalogue page, have been one of its lasting bequests to Shakespearean scholarship. 20 00:02:00,600 --> 00:02:04,980 The First Folio catalogue, which lists the comedies. 21 00:02:04,980 --> 00:02:12,950 Then the histories. Then the tragedies. The First Folio catalogue places measure for measure firmly amongst the comedies. 22 00:02:12,950 --> 00:02:21,990 It snuggled in before comedy of errors and after Merry Wives of Windsor in a place which could hardly be more generically stable. 23 00:02:21,990 --> 00:02:30,510 So lecture over what kind of plays measure for measure. Measure for measure is a comedy. 24 00:02:30,510 --> 00:02:35,190 Well, OK, let's carry on. Let's think about why this clear attribution of genre. 25 00:02:35,190 --> 00:02:40,590 The fact that there is such a simple answer to this question. Why has that been thought insufficient? 26 00:02:40,590 --> 00:02:46,980 Like Twelfth Night or Midsummer Night's Dream. Measure for measure ends with marriages like ours. 27 00:02:46,980 --> 00:02:52,110 You like it? Or two gentlemen of Verona. It has themes of disguise, like the comedy of errors. 28 00:02:52,110 --> 00:02:57,540 It keeps a day of sex machinea figure for the end to bring about reconciliation. 29 00:02:57,540 --> 00:03:02,190 Like The Merchant of Venice. Not everyone is happy at the end. Like much ado about nothing. 30 00:03:02,190 --> 00:03:08,040 It deals with highborn families and their interactions with low life, like The Taming of the Shrew. 31 00:03:08,040 --> 00:03:14,670 It ends with a woman forced to or at least agreeing to say the opposite of what she previously held dear. 32 00:03:14,670 --> 00:03:22,500 So. Measure for measure in our own ornithological designation looks Quark's and is a duck. 33 00:03:22,500 --> 00:03:29,190 Why is this not been the end of the story? In this lecture, I'm going to use Shakespeare's sources, um, productions of his plays. 34 00:03:29,190 --> 00:03:38,520 But I'm also going to use some of the critical history to trace the evolution of measure for measure out of the genre of comedy. 35 00:03:38,520 --> 00:03:44,620 Measure for measure wasn't really very comfortably a comedy when Shakespeare got hold of this story, 36 00:03:44,620 --> 00:03:49,170 and nor has it really been a comedy since it left is his hands. 37 00:03:49,170 --> 00:03:54,870 It's somehow like one of those pop up tents that's always resting out of its packed up shape. 38 00:03:54,870 --> 00:04:00,390 Only Shakespeare, it seems, has the knack to jam it into the comedy bag. 39 00:04:00,390 --> 00:04:02,640 So. Measure for measure. 40 00:04:02,640 --> 00:04:11,160 Before Shakespeare here were in the territory of Bullock's narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, which if you haven't looked at yet. 41 00:04:11,160 --> 00:04:17,640 I really do recommend that you do. There are two kinds of source for measure for measure. 42 00:04:17,640 --> 00:04:20,100 The first is a kind of general folkloric one, 43 00:04:20,100 --> 00:04:28,500 which appears in many formats and can give us what the formal analysis of myth calls a myth theme or a plot function. 44 00:04:28,500 --> 00:04:32,850 This is the kind of source that Shakespeare could have got from any number of places. I'm from it. 45 00:04:32,850 --> 00:04:40,820 The play takes contos of its structure and its plot, not the details of language or characterisation. 46 00:04:40,820 --> 00:04:45,000 So the first is that sort of general kind of folk story source. 47 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:52,710 The second is one that's more direct of some kind of version of an Italian story by Jim Theo. 48 00:04:52,710 --> 00:04:59,260 The same sources for Othello in the same year. Talk about both these sources. 49 00:04:59,260 --> 00:05:06,820 The first kind of source, the folkloric source, is sometimes known as the story of the monstrous bargain, the monstrous bargain. 50 00:05:06,820 --> 00:05:14,050 Sleep with me. And X will be saved in most versions of this story before Shakespeare. 51 00:05:14,050 --> 00:05:19,240 The woman does sleep with the governor or the authority figure. 52 00:05:19,240 --> 00:05:26,200 And in most cases, this is not enough to save her imprisoned brother or husband. 53 00:05:26,200 --> 00:05:30,370 Often these monstrous bargain stories end with an emperor, 54 00:05:30,370 --> 00:05:44,100 king or other higher authority coming in and making the bad man marry the woman he has slept with, thus making a sort of reparation for his behaviour. 55 00:05:44,100 --> 00:05:52,440 In Cynthia's version of this story, the woman is the central character in the tale. 56 00:05:52,440 --> 00:05:57,060 Her 16 year old brother is in prison for raping a woman. 57 00:05:57,060 --> 00:06:03,190 A crime punishable by death. Despite the fact that he has agreed to marry his victim, 58 00:06:03,190 --> 00:06:10,230 an acceptable reparation for the crime of rape in many societies, probably including Jacobean in England in Chintu. 59 00:06:10,230 --> 00:06:15,960 Then the woman sleeps with the official to save her brother. But then all is revealed. 60 00:06:15,960 --> 00:06:21,600 He is forced to marry her, and then she successfully pleads for his life. 61 00:06:21,600 --> 00:06:27,060 So we can see in this outline something of Shakespeare's play. But with some important differences. 62 00:06:27,060 --> 00:06:32,910 Firstly, in Chin Theo, the character of the brother is in prison for rape. 63 00:06:32,910 --> 00:06:39,750 Shakespeare makes it quite clear or reasonably clear, in fact, that Claudio is not a habitual fornicator. 64 00:06:39,750 --> 00:06:47,670 He and Juliet were engaged to be married. They'd even perhaps undergone some kind of civil handfasting, if not a church marriage ceremony. 65 00:06:47,670 --> 00:06:50,940 There is some uncertainty about this in the play. 66 00:06:50,940 --> 00:07:00,120 But Juliet, in her interview with The Friar, makes it clear that her pregnancy is the result of mutual and consensual lovemaking, not violence. 67 00:07:00,120 --> 00:07:07,170 That seems to be the only point of that scene actually with the Duke and Juliet is to establish that important point. 68 00:07:07,170 --> 00:07:14,070 It's the only time she speaks, isn't it? In the play is to say more or less to say I wasn't raped. 69 00:07:14,070 --> 00:07:18,270 So Shakespeare's change has made Claudio more sympathetic than he might have been. 70 00:07:18,270 --> 00:07:26,790 Were he guilty of rape and thus makes the severity of Angelo's interpretation of the law seem all the more questionable. 71 00:07:26,790 --> 00:07:33,030 If the job of the deputy is to sort out brothels and fornication, he seems to have picked the wrong case. 72 00:07:33,030 --> 00:07:40,740 Although, of course, Claudio's familiarity with Mistress Overdone might suggest that he is indeed a part of this underworld. 73 00:07:40,740 --> 00:07:47,230 Secondly, Shakespeare has made his izabella into a nun or at least a novice nun, 74 00:07:47,230 --> 00:07:52,980 and the extent of her religious scruples about sleeping with Angelo is a key axis in the play. 75 00:07:52,980 --> 00:07:59,700 Can we agree with that strong statement? More than our brother is our chastity? 76 00:07:59,700 --> 00:08:09,090 Isabella is not simply a woman of upright moral character. That's to say that one who is about to devote herself to strict religious principles. 77 00:08:09,090 --> 00:08:16,410 Another, therefore, we might think of the extremists who populate this play and another way in which, uncomfortable as it may seem. 78 00:08:16,410 --> 00:08:25,020 She and Angelo are rather well suited. Thirdly, Shakespeare develops the character of the Duke in his play. 79 00:08:25,020 --> 00:08:32,760 The Duke in the Disguise of a Friar, observes much of what's happening and plots to engineer that rather complicated denouement. 80 00:08:32,760 --> 00:08:39,240 In all the sources, the Duke figure comes in at the end as the classical dair sex machinea a fantastical, 81 00:08:39,240 --> 00:08:47,850 authoritative personage who enters the play right at the conclusion to bring about a resolution in measure for measure. 82 00:08:47,850 --> 00:08:55,920 Shakespeare makes the Duke want central and marginal to the action, a looker on in Vienna, as he calls him. 83 00:08:55,920 --> 00:09:00,780 With all the associations of the techniques of surveillance politicised by Fusco's 84 00:09:00,780 --> 00:09:07,640 work on the prison and on the literary criticism which has drawn on those themes. 85 00:09:07,640 --> 00:09:11,750 All three of these changes, the substitution of consensual sex for rape. 86 00:09:11,750 --> 00:09:15,950 The making of Isobella into a nun. And the development of the role of the Duke. 87 00:09:15,950 --> 00:09:22,970 They could all be said to bring moral questions to the fore in Shakespeare's version of the story. 88 00:09:22,970 --> 00:09:27,050 And the evidence that these have been introduced deliberately makes it difficult to 89 00:09:27,050 --> 00:09:33,020 explain them away as somehow incidental or irrelevant to the plot were adjacent, 90 00:09:33,020 --> 00:09:38,300 I think, to that notion of strategic opacity, strategic opacity. 91 00:09:38,300 --> 00:09:44,990 Stephen Greenblatt's useful term to designate that characteristic manoeuvre of Shakespeare when confronted 92 00:09:44,990 --> 00:09:50,450 with simple behavioural narratives and his sources like the question of the Alagoas motivation, 93 00:09:50,450 --> 00:09:56,900 which was when we came into contact with this idea before in measure for measure, 94 00:09:56,900 --> 00:10:02,810 the strategic opacity seems designed to have complicated the source material 95 00:10:02,810 --> 00:10:10,740 in order to bring unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions to the four. 96 00:10:10,740 --> 00:10:14,550 There's one other change to Cynthia's sauce that we might think about. 97 00:10:14,550 --> 00:10:19,420 I said that in that story, the woman at the centre is the main character. 98 00:10:19,420 --> 00:10:22,290 Now, that does seem interesting for the genre. 99 00:10:22,290 --> 00:10:30,960 The question of John, in measure for measure, there's a strong association of comedy, Shakespearean comedy with dominant women characters. 100 00:10:30,960 --> 00:10:40,680 The book by the critic Linda Bamber. Comic Women and Tragic Men summarises the gender politics of Shakespeare's genres quite neatly. 101 00:10:40,680 --> 00:10:46,460 Where are Shakespeare's tragedies tend to be structured around male experience in comedies. 102 00:10:46,460 --> 00:10:52,490 Women have agency and their story structures the narrative. 103 00:10:52,490 --> 00:10:57,950 That's not to say that women are dominant in a quantitative sense. 104 00:10:57,950 --> 00:11:06,110 One of the most useful parts of Jonathan Bate Macmillan edition of The Complete Works, which has been marketed as the RISC Shakespeare, 105 00:11:06,110 --> 00:11:13,940 is that in front of each play he gives a numerical breakdown of the number of lines spoken by each of the major characters. 106 00:11:13,940 --> 00:11:19,370 From this we can see that no play by Shakespeare is dominated by women either in the sense that a woman 107 00:11:19,370 --> 00:11:25,820 speaks the largest number of lines or that women characters collectively carried the majority of lines. 108 00:11:25,820 --> 00:11:32,960 Based analysis for the RSG Shakespeare. It's full of surprises in Antony and Cleopatra, for example. 109 00:11:32,960 --> 00:11:37,160 Antony has 25 percent of the lines. And Cleopatra. 110 00:11:37,160 --> 00:11:43,610 Only 19 percent quite disproportionate. Particularly considering Antony dies at the end of Act four. 111 00:11:43,610 --> 00:11:48,110 At least we might think, given Cleopatra a chance to get a word in edgeways here. 112 00:11:48,110 --> 00:11:54,920 The numbers don't really compute with a qualitative sense that Cleopatra tends to be seen as dominant. 113 00:11:54,920 --> 00:12:00,050 Similarly, in much ado about nothing, the numbers tell us that not only Benedek, 114 00:12:00,050 --> 00:12:07,430 but also Leonardo, Don Pedro and the vapid Claudio all have more lines than Beatrice. 115 00:12:07,430 --> 00:12:15,050 But what the numbers do tell us is that in comedies, women talk more than they do in other genres. 116 00:12:15,050 --> 00:12:23,510 Now, Bates figures for measure for measure are as follows the Duke, 30 percent of the lines izabella 15 percent. 117 00:12:23,510 --> 00:12:27,560 Lucio 11 percent. Angelo 11 percent. 118 00:12:27,560 --> 00:12:31,390 And then the other characters in descending order. So the Duke, 30 percent. 119 00:12:31,390 --> 00:12:35,900 Isobella, 15 percent. Lucio eleven. And Angelo, eleven. 120 00:12:35,900 --> 00:12:42,860 Isabella speaks half the number of lines of the Duke, but perhaps it's interesting to try to break down these figures. 121 00:12:42,860 --> 00:12:48,770 She speaks much more in the first half of the play that in the second half will work out the figures if you're interested. 122 00:12:48,770 --> 00:12:54,650 My sense is she speaks about three quarters of the lines in the first half of the play and only about one quarter in the second, 123 00:12:54,650 --> 00:13:02,900 probably the opposite proportions of the Duke. So somewhere we've got we've got a two hander play a plays, which is about two characters. 124 00:13:02,900 --> 00:13:09,240 But there who has the upper hand in that it flips, I think, around the middle of the play. 125 00:13:09,240 --> 00:13:15,830 Isabella has the upper hand, the dominant hand in the first half, the Duke in the second half. 126 00:13:15,830 --> 00:13:22,160 So what the play somehow seems to dramatise structurally is its own retreat from comedy by moving 127 00:13:22,160 --> 00:13:27,590 from a genre at the beginning where women characters are vocal and dramatically powerful. 128 00:13:27,590 --> 00:13:36,110 We get to a genre by the end, in measure for measure in which women are virtually silenced, or at least puppets by male characters. 129 00:13:36,110 --> 00:13:44,690 We can see some echoes of this structure, perhaps in the gender distribution of lines in the Winter's Tale or in Macbeth. 130 00:13:44,690 --> 00:13:54,110 So I suppose I am suggesting that we might read that much discussed silence of Isabella in response to the Duke's unexpected marriage proposal. 131 00:13:54,110 --> 00:13:58,340 Not so much in psychological terms. Will she marry him? 132 00:13:58,340 --> 00:14:03,690 Or in social terms? Does she have any choice but in generic ones? 133 00:14:03,690 --> 00:14:12,740 She's been beaten as the play's central character. She has been bested by the Duke and therefore she has nothing else to say here. 134 00:14:12,740 --> 00:14:19,250 The gender politics can be layered onto the genre politics of comedy and tragedy. 135 00:14:19,250 --> 00:14:26,000 On the one hand, that's to say the marriages at the end of measure for measure are firm one of the traditions of comedy endings. 136 00:14:26,000 --> 00:14:30,200 On the other hand, by silencing one of the Joan with most prominent characters, 137 00:14:30,200 --> 00:14:35,180 the active woman, the end of the play seems to negate comic expectations. 138 00:14:35,180 --> 00:14:41,240 So both it both endorses them and negates them. 139 00:14:41,240 --> 00:14:55,430 What, though, were comic expectations? Well, there is one kind of generic expectation that we might see generated by Shakespeare's own previous plays. 140 00:14:55,430 --> 00:14:58,790 Measure for measure is probably the last of the comedies, 141 00:14:58,790 --> 00:15:04,790 a genre that Shakespeare has been writing in right since the beginning of his work in London. 142 00:15:04,790 --> 00:15:11,690 Audiences might then have been schooled from the previous plays about what to expect interrupted courtship, 143 00:15:11,690 --> 00:15:16,460 disguise, inadvertent humour from lowballed characters marriages. 144 00:15:16,460 --> 00:15:25,850 In conclusion, as we've already identified, measure for measure, both does and does not fit into these expectations. 145 00:15:25,850 --> 00:15:32,480 But theatre goers who are ofay with a more contemporary kind of comedy, though, might have been a bit more comfortable with the plays, 146 00:15:32,480 --> 00:15:40,040 frankly, unromantic designation of sex within a within an economy of civic transactions. 147 00:15:40,040 --> 00:15:47,510 Measure for measure is Shakespeare's closest attempt that a city comedy in the manner of Middleton, Marston and Decker, 148 00:15:47,510 --> 00:15:55,520 where a cast of prostitutes, Bordes, young lovers and corrupt patriarchs battle it out in the contemporary city. 149 00:15:55,520 --> 00:16:02,760 Unsurprisingly, the text of measure for measure as we have it almost certainly has some Middleton in it too. 150 00:16:02,760 --> 00:16:05,510 And if you want to follow that up, you should look at the Oxford Middleton, 151 00:16:05,510 --> 00:16:11,810 the complete complete collected Oxford Middleton, edited by Gary Taylor and John Love. 152 00:16:11,810 --> 00:16:18,210 I mean, it's really interesting to look what measure for measure looks like in that context where it's being seen as a middle Tonin play, 153 00:16:18,210 --> 00:16:21,950 a Middleton rewrite. So measure for measure. 154 00:16:21,950 --> 00:16:26,540 That's to say may be more problematic in the light of previous Shakespearean comedies than 155 00:16:26,540 --> 00:16:31,940 it is in the light of comedies by other writers in the first months of the Jacobean period. 156 00:16:31,940 --> 00:16:36,830 So if we go to Shakespeare wanting it to be same old, same old stuff, he's been doing it for years. 157 00:16:36,830 --> 00:16:45,350 Measure for measure may seem problematic if we're going to the theatre to see the latest kind of John, that the latest kind of play, 158 00:16:45,350 --> 00:16:52,550 the city comedy politics and the city comedy style of magical measure is likely to seem much less difficult. 159 00:16:52,550 --> 00:17:00,740 It may be then that our or our focus on the author as the primary agent of meaning has produced measure for measure as an anomalous comedy. 160 00:17:00,740 --> 00:17:05,150 And if we were to think about chronology or history as the primary agent of meaning, 161 00:17:05,150 --> 00:17:13,470 this would look like a comedy very much in keeping with comedies by other people from the same period. 162 00:17:13,470 --> 00:17:22,030 Now, when I was talking about a fellow in first week, I mentioned Frederick Jamison on genre theory. 163 00:17:22,030 --> 00:17:29,010 Am I going to go back to this idea? Because I think it's helpful for us in thinking about measure for measure. 164 00:17:29,010 --> 00:17:37,770 Jamison, you remember distinguish between two types of genre theory. The first was semantic semantic theories of genre. 165 00:17:37,770 --> 00:17:44,220 Jamison argues aim to describe the essence or meaning of a given genre. 166 00:17:44,220 --> 00:17:54,600 The spirit of comedy or tragedy. So I take the semantic understanding of genre to be one that often seems instinctive to us, 167 00:17:54,600 --> 00:18:06,420 the sense that the comedies are fun, light-hearted and comic, and that therefore tragedies are serious, grave and tragic. 168 00:18:06,420 --> 00:18:12,360 So that's semantic criticism, the kind of the experience, the general spirit of the play. 169 00:18:12,360 --> 00:18:20,220 Jamieson's other type of genre criticism is one he calls syntactic syntactic syntactic genre. 170 00:18:20,220 --> 00:18:29,100 Criticism focuses on the mechanisms and structure of genres such as comedy to determine its laws and limits. 171 00:18:29,100 --> 00:18:32,460 Quite an interesting legalistic definition by Jainism. 172 00:18:32,460 --> 00:18:40,530 Quite interesting for the themes of a measured measure itself to determine the law, the law of anger and its limits. 173 00:18:40,530 --> 00:18:48,920 Jamieson argues that semantic criticism focus focuses on what the text conveys, syntactic criticism on how it works. 174 00:18:48,920 --> 00:18:52,480 And we can see an example of how syntactic criticism of comedy, 175 00:18:52,480 --> 00:18:59,760 a structure based on formal structures and semantic criticism based on the tone, are in conflict. 176 00:18:59,760 --> 00:19:05,250 In this, this is an idea about comedy from Northrop Frye. 177 00:19:05,250 --> 00:19:09,060 He's writing about the endings of Twelfth Night and as you like it, case here. 178 00:19:09,060 --> 00:19:15,210 I think those two versions of genre theory are in in conflict. 179 00:19:15,210 --> 00:19:21,720 Does not Northrop Frye on the end of Twelfth Night. And as you like, the real critical question involved here is trust. 180 00:19:21,720 --> 00:19:31,110 Frye does anything that exhibits the structure of a comedy have to be taken as a comedy, regardless of its content and our attitude to that content? 181 00:19:31,110 --> 00:19:36,980 So structurally is like a comedy. Does the content matter? 182 00:19:36,980 --> 00:19:41,090 And Fry says, no, it doesn't matter. The structure is what counts. 183 00:19:41,090 --> 00:19:47,060 Does anything that exhibits the structure of comedy have to be taken as a comedy, regardless of its content and our attitude to that content? 184 00:19:47,060 --> 00:19:51,500 The answer is clearly yes. A comedy is not a play which ends happily. 185 00:19:51,500 --> 00:19:56,720 It is a play in which a certain structure is present and works through to its logical end. 186 00:19:56,720 --> 00:20:03,470 Whether we or the cast or the author feel happy about it or not, the logical end is festive. 187 00:20:03,470 --> 00:20:09,320 Fry writes. But anyones attitude to the festivity may be that of Orlando or of Jay, please. 188 00:20:09,320 --> 00:20:17,120 A comedy is not a play which ends happily. It's nice. It's a nice challenge to a kind of easy, easy construction of what comedy is, Fry says. 189 00:20:17,120 --> 00:20:22,010 No. Comedy is not a play which ends happily. It ends according to the structures of comedy. 190 00:20:22,010 --> 00:20:29,200 But the emotional content of that ending is irrelevant. 191 00:20:29,200 --> 00:20:37,520 So happy ending happily as an emotional semantic version of genre fries talking about structuralist one. 192 00:20:37,520 --> 00:20:38,520 So in a structure, 193 00:20:38,520 --> 00:20:46,310 his view of genre that a comedy has a certain structure and works through to its logical end measure for measure is again entirely a comedy. 194 00:20:46,310 --> 00:20:52,250 It's only on tonal grounds. It's only because we don't feel happy about it then because it's not a happy ending. 195 00:20:52,250 --> 00:20:59,120 Which Frys said, doesn't matter that the play creates comedy. The play creates problems for us. 196 00:20:59,120 --> 00:21:01,970 So much of a measure has the syntactic qualities of a comedy. 197 00:21:01,970 --> 00:21:06,950 It ends in multiple marriages, but it has the semantic qualities of something quite different. 198 00:21:06,950 --> 00:21:15,530 Maybe even a tragedy, a bleakly existential world which raises and cannot resolve difficult ethical and moral issues. 199 00:21:15,530 --> 00:21:20,480 It's interesting in this regard, perhaps this emptiness, the ethical emptiness of this world, 200 00:21:20,480 --> 00:21:28,640 that the the friar who is taking confessions from people and bringing them supposedly bringing them comfort in prison is actually just dressed up. 201 00:21:28,640 --> 00:21:36,110 It's kind of completely empty philosophies. And it is a religion which has no which has no ground to it. 202 00:21:36,110 --> 00:21:45,980 At the heart of measure for measure is a scene is the scene in which Claudio in prison is urged to prepare himself his imminent execution. 203 00:21:45,980 --> 00:21:53,800 Death, says Claudio, is a fearful thing. Isabella replies quickly, unchained life, a hateful. 204 00:21:53,800 --> 00:21:59,720 And then Claudio has an amazingly powerful speech, actually, about death. 205 00:21:59,720 --> 00:22:03,770 Let's just have that speech now. I want to die and go. 206 00:22:03,770 --> 00:22:09,620 We know not where to lie in cold obstruction and to rot. 207 00:22:09,620 --> 00:22:19,520 This sensible war motion to become a needed clod and the delighted spirit to bathe in fiery floods or to reside in thrilling region 208 00:22:19,520 --> 00:22:27,740 of thick ribbed ice to be imprisoned in the view Alice winds and blowing with restless violence round about the pendent world. 209 00:22:27,740 --> 00:22:32,540 Or to be worse than worst of those that lawless and incertain thought. 210 00:22:32,540 --> 00:22:36,230 Imagine howling. Tis too horrible. 211 00:22:36,230 --> 00:22:48,860 The weariest and most low, that worldly life, that age ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death. 212 00:22:48,860 --> 00:22:54,170 Claudia's speeches here on the fear of death, completely uncomfort to unconfident and discomfited. 213 00:22:54,170 --> 00:22:58,430 Nobody in the play is able to respond to this at all and say it doesn't. 214 00:22:58,430 --> 00:23:01,880 It's not like that. It's in the fact that Claudia doesn't die. 215 00:23:01,880 --> 00:23:10,200 I don't think in any way it raises the sort of awful bleakness of that of that vision. 216 00:23:10,200 --> 00:23:17,450 Claudio, speeches on his fear of death in the middle of measure for measure, give him momentarily a tragic status reminiscent of Hamlet. 217 00:23:17,450 --> 00:23:20,180 It's very like aspects of Hamlet. 218 00:23:20,180 --> 00:23:27,140 I think it's quite interesting that the effort of being so tragic seems to exhaust Claudio and he never again speaks in the play. 219 00:23:27,140 --> 00:23:35,480 He can't come back. That's to say, as a comic figure, he's had his tragic moment here and he never gets back. 220 00:23:35,480 --> 00:23:39,740 He doesn't have a role to play in the way the play is going to turn out because he's not in. 221 00:23:39,740 --> 00:23:48,420 That's not the play. He is in. Here, the players tussle with generic conventions has a kind of fulcrum around the act of cloud, 222 00:23:48,420 --> 00:23:56,430 the fate of Claudio in Act three, the fact perhaps that he isn't executed means that comedy lives to fight another day. 223 00:23:56,430 --> 00:24:01,110 And in that it structurally may be the reverse of the same point in Romeo and Juliet, 224 00:24:01,110 --> 00:24:11,020 which gives us the murder of McCue show the last hope in that play for comedy and the sign that tragedy is going to take over. 225 00:24:11,020 --> 00:24:11,140 Now, 226 00:24:11,140 --> 00:24:20,350 one of the ways we've dealt with the problematic disjunction between syntactic and semantic is to it is to turn the disjunction into its own genre. 227 00:24:20,350 --> 00:24:27,820 The genre of the problem play. Talk a bit about what problem play might do. 228 00:24:27,820 --> 00:24:32,890 In answer to the question, what kind of play is measure for measure? 229 00:24:32,890 --> 00:24:43,850 Firstly, I think it's important to note that we have distorted the original political meaning of problem play when in the 80s 90s, 230 00:24:43,850 --> 00:24:50,470 Frederic Blow US identified a category of Shakespearean drama he called Problem Play. 231 00:24:50,470 --> 00:24:53,470 He took the term from the drama current. At the time, 232 00:24:53,470 --> 00:25:05,440 he was writing the challenging depictions of sexual relations and social mores in didactic drama by Ibsen or George Bernard Shaw for Boaz. 233 00:25:05,440 --> 00:25:09,190 The problem plays well. Measure for measure. All's well that ends well. 234 00:25:09,190 --> 00:25:17,220 Troilus and Cressida so far perhaps so familiar and then, more surprisingly, Hamlet. 235 00:25:17,220 --> 00:25:24,910 For Boaz, the defining characteristic of the problem play was that it dramatised a moral problem. 236 00:25:24,910 --> 00:25:30,810 So it was about a problem rather than being one. 237 00:25:30,810 --> 00:25:44,520 The play's the problem plays both argued, introducers into highly artificial societies whose whose civilisation is ripe to rottenness at the close. 238 00:25:44,520 --> 00:25:56,490 Our feeling is neither simple joy nor pain. We are excited, fascinated, perplexed for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome. 239 00:25:56,490 --> 00:26:01,530 The issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome. 240 00:26:01,530 --> 00:26:09,180 Problem plays, both suggests, are concerned with questions that can only be explored, not resolved. 241 00:26:09,180 --> 00:26:15,510 The late 19th century problem plays focussed on almost abstracted philosophical discussion, 242 00:26:15,510 --> 00:26:24,210 sometimes to the extent of sacrificing dramatic characterisation or narrative realism. 243 00:26:24,210 --> 00:26:31,770 But in this sense of the term problem play, we might reinterpret Hamlet as focussed on a central moral dilemma. 244 00:26:31,770 --> 00:26:35,100 Should the dead to be revenged? 245 00:26:35,100 --> 00:26:42,420 And in the case of measure for measure, it becomes easier to see it as a deliberate dramatisation of various moral problems. 246 00:26:42,420 --> 00:26:47,460 Our harsh laws. Justified is a woman's chastity worth more than a man's life? 247 00:26:47,460 --> 00:26:53,780 How can the problem of sex outside marriage be regulated? 248 00:26:53,780 --> 00:26:58,640 The boss is rather nice designation of the problem plays on rabbi reference to the pioneering 249 00:26:58,640 --> 00:27:04,130 social and philosophically committed drama of his own period has got lost by criticism. 250 00:27:04,130 --> 00:27:10,130 So we've started to think of problem plays as being problems rather than about problems. 251 00:27:10,130 --> 00:27:16,550 Problem play for Boaz is not a term of disapproval, but it very quickly became one. 252 00:27:16,550 --> 00:27:21,320 We can see this in John Dover, Wilson's ingenious designation of problem plays. 253 00:27:21,320 --> 00:27:28,760 In 1957, Wilson tells us there are at least two kinds of problem child. 254 00:27:28,760 --> 00:27:34,040 First, the genuinely abnormal child whom no effort will ever bring back to normality. 255 00:27:34,040 --> 00:27:38,120 And second, the child who is interesting and complex rather than abnormal. 256 00:27:38,120 --> 00:27:44,450 APT indeed to be a problem for parents and teachers, but destined to fulfilment in the larger scope of adult life. 257 00:27:44,450 --> 00:27:52,590 Now all's well and all's well in measure for measure. Like the first problem child, there is something radically schizophrenic about them. 258 00:27:52,590 --> 00:27:59,870 Hamlet and Troilus and Tresidder alike. The second problem child. Full of interest and complexity, but divided within themselves. 259 00:27:59,870 --> 00:28:02,870 Only in the eyes of those who have misjudged them. 260 00:28:02,870 --> 00:28:09,680 To put the difference another way, Hamlet and trollers and Tresidder are problem plays because they display interesting problems. 261 00:28:09,680 --> 00:28:15,500 All's well in measure for measure because they are problems in the family of plays. 262 00:28:15,500 --> 00:28:24,080 Then these are the ones we don't let out. They, like the Queen's mad cousin, shut up secretly in that asylum in Kent. 263 00:28:24,080 --> 00:28:32,840 They are, honestly. Double Wilson's view of the plays is we can see deeply normative. 264 00:28:32,840 --> 00:28:37,220 These plays are problems when set against other normal plays. 265 00:28:37,220 --> 00:28:46,520 To be schizophrenic is to be difficult. Unaccommodating do not, not, does not, not designated for fulfilment in the scope of adult life. 266 00:28:46,520 --> 00:28:52,490 Perhaps we can get a clue about the lovely blonde haired plays he's thinking about in the title of one of his other books. 267 00:28:52,490 --> 00:29:01,270 Shakespeare's happy comedies. So the question of genre is deeply implicated here with an investment in the normal. 268 00:29:01,270 --> 00:29:06,220 The idea of the normal, which extends far beyond early modern comedies. 269 00:29:06,220 --> 00:29:13,810 And in this, I think Derval Wilson represents the views of his age rather than being exceptional. 270 00:29:13,810 --> 00:29:16,960 So what now about the genre of problem plays? 271 00:29:16,960 --> 00:29:25,660 Well, first, we need to acknowledge the massive shift in the term problem within critical discourse in the last 30 or so years. 272 00:29:25,660 --> 00:29:32,650 To be problematic is now to be edgy, interesting, a square peg in a round hole. 273 00:29:32,650 --> 00:29:41,860 These are all now highly positive terms of differentiation from the implicit blandness of the unproblematic in this critical environment. 274 00:29:41,860 --> 00:29:47,170 Measure for measure may seem to have found its place less hoppity scripted than the other comedies. 275 00:29:47,170 --> 00:29:51,190 Not so much in the way of Hey Noni Noni. Not quite so sunny. 276 00:29:51,190 --> 00:29:58,810 A strong sense that sex is powerful and savage and damaging rather than cheerfully deferred into Beatrice and Benedict's interminable banter. 277 00:29:58,810 --> 00:30:05,410 Just get a room, guys. Or the interchangeable pairs at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream in measure for measure. 278 00:30:05,410 --> 00:30:13,000 Things go wrong. That can't be easily put right. The damage to the relationship between Claudio and Isabella, for instance. 279 00:30:13,000 --> 00:30:21,520 And then this the play can seem more grown up and less escapist than the world the comedies have traditionally presented. 280 00:30:21,520 --> 00:30:26,440 I talked last week about Henry the Fifth as a fantasy, a historical fantasy, 281 00:30:26,440 --> 00:30:32,410 a fantasy of victory over the French [INAUDIBLE] Irish fantasy of the underdog triumphing 282 00:30:32,410 --> 00:30:37,690 a fantasy of social hierarchies flattened in military camaraderie and we might think, 283 00:30:37,690 --> 00:30:43,000 a fantasy of male relationships free from the complications of women. 284 00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:51,550 Four years later, in measure for measure, the theatre is presenting a very different kind of entertainment. 285 00:30:51,550 --> 00:30:56,230 One way of seeing that measure for measures total awkwardness has found its moment in the late 286 00:30:56,230 --> 00:31:03,070 20th century is to see how its difficulties have been projected back onto earlier comedies. 287 00:31:03,070 --> 00:31:09,790 To the history of performance of measure for measure in the middle 20th century might have 288 00:31:09,790 --> 00:31:16,000 been to try to make measure for measure more like one of those normal comedies in particular. 289 00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:23,110 By jollying up the conclusion Isabella throws her girlish arms around the Jiuquan realises she never wanted to be a nun at all. 290 00:31:23,110 --> 00:31:31,740 Claudio and Juliet look down adoringly at their cute baby and even grumpy old Angiulo sex starts to think he hasn't got such a bad deal after all. 291 00:31:31,740 --> 00:31:38,980 For a version of this, you could look at the BBC version of the play directed by Desmond Davis in 1979. 292 00:31:38,980 --> 00:31:47,980 This is a kind of production of measure for measure, which also has no truck with generic difficulties and which affirms it very clearly as a comedy. 293 00:31:47,980 --> 00:31:52,030 But I think the opposite has now begun to happen. 294 00:31:52,030 --> 00:32:02,770 Rather than trying to interpret measure for measure in terms of the happier comedies, some of its darkness seems to have rubbed off on them. 295 00:32:02,770 --> 00:32:06,580 We are more likely to see a production of Twelfth Night Now, 296 00:32:06,580 --> 00:32:15,370 which maximises rather than minimises the weirdness of those final marriages where Olivia, as you remember, has married someone she's only just met. 297 00:32:15,370 --> 00:32:25,240 We'll see. You know, has a lady boy for his fancies. Queen Antonio looks on sadly from the sidelines, and Malvolio swears revenge on his enemies. 298 00:32:25,240 --> 00:32:31,630 We're much more likely to see a version of The Tempest, which stresses Antonios unrepentant. 299 00:32:31,630 --> 00:32:35,140 Another example of an instance of textual silence, 300 00:32:35,140 --> 00:32:43,030 which now tends to interpret to be interpreted not so much as tacit agreement with what's been said, but as unreconciled resistance to it. 301 00:32:43,030 --> 00:32:47,710 So the silence of Antônio about Prospero's forgiveness rather similar. 302 00:32:47,710 --> 00:32:54,610 An adjacent to the Duke's marriage proposal at the end of Measure for Measure and many of the other comedies, 303 00:32:54,610 --> 00:32:57,760 including The Winter's Tale that I'll talk about in a couple of weeks, 304 00:32:57,760 --> 00:33:04,120 have undergone a similar theatrical darkening to become less resolved, less happy, 305 00:33:04,120 --> 00:33:09,370 more problematic in the manner of measure for measure seen in this light. 306 00:33:09,370 --> 00:33:15,310 Then measure for measure has been central to the redefinition of the comedies are serious 307 00:33:15,310 --> 00:33:22,120 and complex rather than as it was in previous critical and theatrical dispensations. 308 00:33:22,120 --> 00:33:30,080 The exception to the genre's intrinsic lightness and good humour. 309 00:33:30,080 --> 00:33:40,430 One last element I want to try to take on in thinking how we could investigate the question of measure for measure genre is the notion of tragicomedy. 310 00:33:40,430 --> 00:33:46,720 Now, tragicomedy is something I'll talk about more in the last lecture of this series on The Winter's Tale. 311 00:33:46,720 --> 00:33:56,260 But it may be that it's useful here to. One last source of Shakespeare is the measure for measure that I haven't yet mentioned. 312 00:33:56,260 --> 00:34:05,640 It's a dialogue of plays by George Wetstone. The play is a cold Promus and Cassandra. 313 00:34:05,640 --> 00:34:09,900 Wetstone is also drawing on the Italian stories of Chintu, 314 00:34:09,900 --> 00:34:15,600 and we think Shakespeare consulted both this English source Wetstone Promise and Cassandra and the Italian. 315 00:34:15,600 --> 00:34:25,200 Although there are debates about how good Shakespeare's Italian was, Wetstone divides the play promicin Cassandra into two parts. 316 00:34:25,200 --> 00:34:31,500 The first is a broadly tragic episode in which Promus the governor bargains with 317 00:34:31,500 --> 00:34:38,490 Cassandra to have sex with him in order to save her brother from execution. 318 00:34:38,490 --> 00:34:45,180 Wetstone gives us a scene in which Cassandra visits her brother in prison, just as Isabella does Claudio. 319 00:34:45,180 --> 00:34:50,280 But in Wetstone, the brother persuades Sandra that she must undertake this bargain. 320 00:34:50,280 --> 00:34:57,800 So what happens in Shakespeare is Isabella is not persuaded by Claudia and and leaves him to it, 321 00:34:57,800 --> 00:35:06,150 in which then the brother does persuade her that it's the right thing to do, to sleep with the governor, to get his to get his freedom. 322 00:35:06,150 --> 00:35:12,330 Having had his way, Promis sends to Cassandra, the head of her brother, in fact, is not the head of her brother. 323 00:35:12,330 --> 00:35:21,350 The brother has escaped, but the first part of the play ends with her suicidal grief and promises increasing feelings of guilt. 324 00:35:21,350 --> 00:35:25,760 So the first part of the play. It is it is a tragedy. And it says it's a set. 325 00:35:25,760 --> 00:35:33,280 It's separated out as a tragedy. The second part is all about comic restitution. 326 00:35:33,280 --> 00:35:37,330 Cassandra approaches the king to intervene. He pardons her brother. 327 00:35:37,330 --> 00:35:42,700 He makes promises go through with his promise to marry her. 328 00:35:42,700 --> 00:35:46,000 Now, there's lots of interesting things, I think, here in generic terms. 329 00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:52,030 It's that wetstone divides the two sections into a tragic movement and then a comic movement, 330 00:35:52,030 --> 00:36:00,970 as if the span of the story is so extreme that it can't be incorporated satisfactorily into a single, aesthetically coherent frame. 331 00:36:00,970 --> 00:36:09,520 It's interesting to think whether you whether you feel Shakespeare had succeeded in bringing these two parts together or whether the join shows, 332 00:36:09,520 --> 00:36:15,070 I was trying to say I think the joint is this is somewhere in EP three. 333 00:36:15,070 --> 00:36:20,680 Interesting, too, to think about whether that source story, even where Shakespeare has changed it, 334 00:36:20,680 --> 00:36:27,830 is somehow imprinted in a ghostly form on measure for measure. 335 00:36:27,830 --> 00:36:35,060 I'm thinking in particular of those highly charged interviews between Isabella and Angelo in Act two. 336 00:36:35,060 --> 00:36:39,320 In a perverse way, these conversations stand for all the courtships. 337 00:36:39,320 --> 00:36:45,110 We don't get in the play and which are usually the stateful plot of romantic comedy. 338 00:36:45,110 --> 00:36:48,860 We never see Claudia and Juliet together. We never see Lucy. 339 00:36:48,860 --> 00:37:01,550 Okay, keep down. We never see the Duke and Isabella undergoing this sort of conversation in order that his Angelo and Isabella don't get together. 340 00:37:01,550 --> 00:37:09,160 We may feel that Shakespeare has had to work rather hard and that the effort somewhat shows he introduces the Bedrick, 341 00:37:09,160 --> 00:37:20,360 the belated figure of Marianna, and stretches the role of the supreme governor Wetstone King across the whole of the play. 342 00:37:20,360 --> 00:37:29,270 Perhaps there is a sense of strain in this play, a sense that the characters are not all fully signed up to the same genre. 343 00:37:29,270 --> 00:37:36,270 Angelo, for instance, wants to be in a trip. He wants to be in a tragedy. He, too, is kicking against the play as a comedy. 344 00:37:36,270 --> 00:37:38,900 So I've tried to suggest that there's the question of the genre. 345 00:37:38,900 --> 00:37:45,830 Is it somehow internal to measure for measure, not just external to our attempts to categorise it? 346 00:37:45,830 --> 00:37:48,050 So perhaps there's a sense of strain in this play, 347 00:37:48,050 --> 00:37:52,850 a sense that the characters are not all fully signed up to the same genre and that the syntactically 348 00:37:52,850 --> 00:38:01,500 comic ending can only be achieved with some visible strain both within and through the play. 349 00:38:01,500 --> 00:38:10,360 So so far, I've talked a lot about Shakespeares sources in order to corroborate rather than answer the question about it, John. 350 00:38:10,360 --> 00:38:18,370 What the sources show us is that the question of Shakespeare's Yorick, a measure for measure, is of interest to the play. 351 00:38:18,370 --> 00:38:24,310 And therefore asking the question is what the play demands. 352 00:38:24,310 --> 00:38:31,090 I want to end with some tiny version, though, perhaps of a point which relates more specifically to the texts of the play. 353 00:38:31,090 --> 00:38:38,710 Spent a lot of time on Henry the Fifth last week talking about the different material texts of that play. 354 00:38:38,710 --> 00:38:46,750 There is no quarto text of measure for measure. It's published for the first time, the first and only time in the Folio. 355 00:38:46,750 --> 00:38:51,490 So it isn't a play that's susceptible to the kind of comparative analysis I was trying to show last 356 00:38:51,490 --> 00:38:57,550 week when I talked about the fact that the choruses to Henry the Fifth were not present in the quarter. 357 00:38:57,550 --> 00:39:01,000 But there still are some things in the Folio text of measure for measure that 358 00:39:01,000 --> 00:39:06,370 are interesting and that we tend not to see in our modern edited editions. 359 00:39:06,370 --> 00:39:18,210 And my last point is a single word. In the Folio text, Claudio greets the news of Angelo's terrible proposal to his sister in the exclamation, 360 00:39:18,210 --> 00:39:24,310 the Prensky, Angelo, Prinsloo, P, R, E and Z i e. 361 00:39:24,310 --> 00:39:32,020 Isabella picks up the same quote a few lines later. Prensa Gods frenzy is a word. 362 00:39:32,020 --> 00:39:38,230 We do not have a meaning for some editors who work with the not entirely unreasonable 363 00:39:38,230 --> 00:39:43,000 premise that their job is to make Shakespeare's comprehensible as possible. It meant the word. 364 00:39:43,000 --> 00:39:48,070 So we lose a word. We don't know what it means. Frenzy and we get a new word in its place. 365 00:39:48,070 --> 00:39:55,390 Usually we get the word precise, a word which in the period is very strongly associated with Puritanism and 366 00:39:55,390 --> 00:40:00,000 therefore helps the reading of Angelo's character as religious and hypocritical. 367 00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:04,450 Claudius seems to be saying the Puritan Angello has made you has made this bargain to you. 368 00:40:04,450 --> 00:40:12,300 You know, that's that's particularly outrageous. But the word in the Folio twice is Prensky. 369 00:40:12,300 --> 00:40:22,540 I think I want to end the lecture with a plea for Prensky as a tiny microcosm of the questions unanswerable that the play throws out. 370 00:40:22,540 --> 00:40:30,190 Those are questions which I think we should respect as questions rather than try to replace with answers. 371 00:40:30,190 --> 00:40:34,740 Now, next week, I'm going to talk about Macbeth. 372 00:40:34,740 --> 00:40:47,373 And my question about Macbeth is going to be, why do the things in this play happen?