Shakespearing #46 by David Foley

Passion and Confusion: Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience

Measure for Measure has the bones of a simple story. The Duke of Vienna leaves his city in charge of Angelo, a cold-hearted moralist who condemns a man to death for fornication. When Isabella, the man’s sister, comes to plead for his life, Angelo’s cold blood heats up and he offers mercy in exchange for her virtue. The Duke, however, has remained in the city disguised as a friar. He foils Angelo’s stratagems and leads everyone to a happy ending.

But Measure for Measure isn’t simple. It’s a mess, and a moral mess at that. In her Riverside introduction to the play, Ann Barton argues that its “moral confusion” is “surely deliberate,” though that may depend on what you mean by deliberate. When I wrote about it a couple of years ago, it seemed to me that, here and in his two previous plays, Shakespeare was “thrashing about” in a “moral wilderness.” Whether this is true, and if true, why (artistic crisis, the soul’s dark night, drunken incoherence), it’s a difficult play. More than difficult. Other Shakespeare plays are difficult, but it’s satisfying to wrestle with them. This one leaves you fretful and anxious.

Whether it needs to leave you as fretful as the recent production at Theatre for a New Audience I don’t actually know. It’s a fun production, and the director, Simon Godwin, strives to make the play relevant. As the evening starts, you are ushered through the back passageways of Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, which have been transformed into Mistress Overdone’s brothel.

Cast members loll around in bondage gear among displays of dildos and butt plugs. Leaving the brothel, you find yourself onstage. This is pleasing. It suggests the way we all step from the world of unseemly desire into the performance of a public self. And since the stage is an enormous conference table, it creates a sharp division between two worlds: the world of desire and the bureaucratic world that seeks to control it. It’s a smart image for a play about the dangers and difficulties of controlling desire.

Then the play starts, and we see the Duke writhing about on stage shooting up, the first of a series of images whose relevance is both provocative and hard to pin down. Angelo appears. He looks like Nixon, wears a Trumpian red tie, and speaks with the hidebound certainty of a CEO or Republican senator. Escalus, now Escala, appears in a red power suit and a helmet of auburn hair. They’ve got a microphone on their desk, which they resort to from time to time, giving their lines the heft of public pronouncements.

None of this is necessarily bad. You can have some fun teasing out the contemporary associations for what they produce. But they don’t help to make sense of a play which, to be fair, is difficult to make sense of. The Duke’s behavior is particularly hard to parse, though I’m not sure it helps to imagine he’s tweaking.

The most powerful moment in the production is also, I think, the most misguided. When Angelo makes his offer to Isabella, he pulls her violently towards him, groping her breast. It’s a moment of visceral contemporary relevance: a woman’s body physically violated by a powerful man.

But the offense to Isabella is not to her body; it’s to her sense of justice (“justice, justice, justice, justice!” as she cries in the last scene) and moral purity. Angelo and Isabella are matched in this sense, proponents of a purity the play dismantles. Theirs may be the play’s central relationship, and if Isabella becomes merely Angelo’s prey, it loses its unifying force.

One of the oddities of the play is that sparks fly more convincingly between Isabella and Angelo than between her and the guy she ends up with. Before going to the show, I’d assumed that sexy Jonathan Cake, who plays the Duke, would be playing Angelo. It might be better if he had, just as Thomas Jay Ryan (Angelo) might have better captured the Duke’s gentle and disturbing ambiguity. Both do great work in the parts as conceived; it’s the way the parts are conceived that makes the play harder to track.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that contemporary resonance is all well and good, but with Shakespeare character runs the show. As contradictory as she is, there’s a reason actresses love to play Isabella. She’s a woman possessed of a moral passion. (Is it an accident that Henry James called another character possessed of a moral passion Isabel?) Tap into that moral passion and, though you might not make sense of the play, you can ride the rhythm that drives it: moral certainties crashing against the unaccountable world.

Shakespeare’s comedies test the moral world. We re-learn the rules by breaking them and, in so doing, reaffirm them. If the ending of Measure for Measure leaves us anxious, it’s because here the moral world fails the test and nobody seems to notice. They go on behaving as if it hasn’t. Central to our understanding of this is the Duke, whom Barton cannily sees as a playwright failing at his task. He’s not strung out on drugs. He’s high on the belief that he can make sense of a world that exceeds all his efforts to do so. This is its own kind of moral passion. And confusion. Whether the play’s moral confusion is deliberate or not, it leaves us with the image of a man unaware that the sense he’s made of the world makes no sense.

Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience plays until July 16th.

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #40 by David Foley

A Reflection

I’m supposed to come up with some final thoughts about Shakespeare after my long trek through the plays, but I keep thinking about his books. I recently stumbled on a Times article from 2005 in which the author flogs the old idea that Shakespeare couldn’t have written his plays because he left no books in his will. There are several things wrong with this assumption, beginning with the question of whether Shakespeare actually owned the books he used; but it suddenly occurred to me that all the anti-Shakespearean arguments based on what’s in the plays—he must have owned tons of books; he must have been trained in law; he must have been a nobleman; he must have gone to sea—evade the central mystery of the work, which is a mind so preternaturally absorptive that it saw, heard, sensed all; everything was material to be captured and pinned down in words. It begins to feel relentless and insatiable, this will to absorb the world and put it in words.

This may be why Shakespeare still feels like one of us, even though logic tells us that he’s not. It’s as if he’s constantly striving to see past the filter of country, time, and culture to the thing itself, and as a result, for sudden, thrilling moments, he helps us see past our own filters. The other night I saw Cymbeline in the Park. The sexual politics of Cymbeline are alien to us, but Imogen’s intelligent despair is not.

Which makes me think that it’s not just the thing itself that he captures, but some kind of ideal of what it is to be human. Last week I saw Ubu Roi. I wrote in my notebook that it’s what you would get if you stripped Shakespeare of any notion of the basic dignity of the human endeavor. Not such a bad play to produce teetering on the verge (1896) of the twentieth century. But the humanist ideal dies hard, and if we keep returning to Shakespeare, it’s because he tells us that even our madness has meaning. Our sorrows are deep and often of our own making, but they’re woven into the fabric of the world and resonate in its reaches. As are our joys.

One reason Shakespeare is a touchstone for writers is that we all do some version of his grab and capture. We try to get the world in words. We do it with joy and conviction when we’re young—a clever satisfaction in the neatness of the trick—and with increasing befuddlement, perhaps desperation as we get older. The world eludes us; the project of capturing it becomes harder, the usefulness of the project more suspect. We use thornier sentences to capture a human meaning that becomes more and more elusive.

You can sense this happening to Shakespeare as he gets older. The language becomes denser, the images knottier, his faith in the dignity of the human endeavor shakier. But if you’re a writer you keep trying. As I was writing this, my sister emailed me a wonderful piece about Grace Paley, who says, “[The writer is] like an idealist who marries nearly the same woman over and over. He tries to write with different names and faces, using different professions and labors, other forms to travel the shortest distance to the way things really are.” In my Love’s Labor’s Lost posting, I suggested that Shakespeare is “our greatest poet of the real.” Maybe this is what I meant, that he succeeds more than any of us in leaping that distance to the way things really are. But even he seems to have been driven forward by the maddening inachievability of the task.

He was also a man of the theatre. I began this project in part because I wanted to get at Shakespeare the playwright. Part of the fun of it has been intuiting the ways in which Shakespeare’s theatre—so different from ours in so many ways—might have shared, indeed might have provided the first iteration of, certain features of our own: fandom, rivalry, and backbiting; celebrity playwrights and the people who collected their plays; art as an accidental byproduct of a make-or-break business; and even an audience demographic that tilted towards the queer.

It’s also been fun to see Shakespeare develop. To see him go from journeyman to innovator to, in his young old age, a kind of restless experimenter, teasing the boundaries of what theatre can and should do, so that his last plays seem to quietly break and remake the rules. Having just seen Cymbeline I can tell you that the long, closing recognition scene—containing twenty-four separate revelations, my friend told me—shouldn’t work and does. It’s thrilling.

A long time ago, on a grant application, I wrote rather grandiosely that I thought theatre tries to capture the condition of a human being trapped between earth and sky. As a formula it lacks multiplicity—it leaves out not just the range and complexity of Shakespeare’s worlds but the fact that theatre inevitably deals with human beings in relation to each other. But it does capture something about the theatrical space: boards planked above Eurydicean depths; overhead: empty, aspirant air. Between these spaces Shakespeare gave us a bewildering variety of worlds. How is it possible that the same writer gave us A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coriolanus? King Lear and Taming of the Shrew? And yet you can see that the same mind, the same way of seeing and shaping the world, created them all. No alternate explanation of authorship can crack that riddle. As I say, it’s a mystery. Unless it has something to do with what I’ve been talking about: in each new world a flying, ferocious attempt to give us the world itself.

So my trek through the plays ends here, but Shakespearing doesn’t. John will open it up to other writers, and hopefully I’ll chime in, too, when I’ve got something new on my mind. Thanks for following me on the journey.

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David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.