MEASURE FOR MEASURE

To begin with, a description of an excellent but disconcertingly politically correct production of Measure for Measure by Compass Theatre Company. The group, directed by Neil Sissons, is a small one and, as with Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they generated a stunning new reading of the text by doubling members of the cast. Isabella and Mistress Overdone were played by the same actress; Angelo, Claudio, and Barnardine by one actor, and the authority figures of the Duke and Elbow by another. The revelation of the production came with the recognitions of the last scene. In that final sequence, the Friar is unmasked as the Duke: in this production, in a resonantly quoted gesture, Angelo was also stripped down – the cast wore modern dress – to the long-johns he had worn as Claudio in prison. At the Duke’s question ‘Which is that Barnardine?’ (5.1.477), the actor simply adopted the half-crazed mannerisms he had deployed for Barnardine during the short sequence that follows.

David Westbrook had played Angelo as a compulsively smiling, bespectacled, and totally bald young man whose first act on acquiring power was to tidy the Duke's desk. He looked like the most dangerous sort of train-spotter who revealed his true day-dreams as he wrestled Isabella to the ground at the end of 2.4. Handy-dandy, which was which? The doubling of the actors led to an equation of the 'naturalness' of Claudio's 'tilth and husbandry' with the depravity of Angelo the 'virgin violator': Claudio was merely Angelo in disguise, and, more horribly, Angelo was Claudio in disguise.

I want in this essay to listen to some of Shakespeare’s jealous husbands as they discover the pathos and panic of male sexuality within a marital economy of masculine possessiveness. Since my attention to the suffering of men may seem perverse, let me begin by acknowledging the infinitely greater impositions of that economy on women. Petruccio’s boast – “I will be master of what is mine own. / She is my goods, my chattels. She is my house, / My household-stuff, my field, my barn, / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything” (3.3.101–4) – may conceal or reveal whatever lovable little ironies it wants, but still it registers the plain facts of the Elizabethan laws of coverture. Modern historians who disagree on other matters agree on this: thus Lawrence Stone writes that ‘By marriage, the husband and wife became one person in law – and that person was the husband. He acquired absolute control of all his wife’s personal property, which he could sell at will’; and Martin Ingram, who thinks that Stone exaggerates the iron claim of patriarchy and underestimates the role of affection in Elizabethan marriage, writes that ‘married women had no property rights independent of their husbands; while the law prescribed that “the husband hath . . . power and dominion over his wife, and may keep her by force within the bonds of duty, and may beat her” (albeit not in “a violent and cruel manner”). Ann Jennalie Cook quotes a 1632 treatise called The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights: '“That which the Husband hath is his owne”, while “That which the Wife hath is the Husbands”': 'At the end of the wedding day', Cook writes, 'the woman yielded up her body, her name, and her worldly goods.'

The quest for the sources of Shakespeare, as for that of the Nile, can develop into a fixation which outgrows its purpose. It is a scholarly activity which tends towards the production of catalogues like Jan Harold Brunvand’s dry but valuable Indiana University doctoral dissertation documenting in detail the folktale origins of The Taming of the Shrew, which has finally reached print after thirty years. It is sensible to proceed from making catalogues to using them, but all too often students of the subject have more limited horizons: preoccupied with the mere presence or absence of influence, without going on to consider its significance, they make source-hunting an end in itself, unconcerned with the critical responsibility of telling us something important about the plays.

This is the downfall of Charles and Michelle Martindale's Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (London and New York, 1990), which seeks to demonstrate Shakespeare's debt to the classics. It is a workmanlike analysis, though occasionally over-reliant on shaky, negative evidence: it may indeed be unreasonable to suppose that Shakespeare was never exposed to certain Latin authors, but that is not in itself a prima facie case that they influenced his work, especially bearing in mind the vagaries of a schoolboy's memory and attention-span. On the whole, however, it is a competent if unimaginative restatement of the case for Shakespeare's classical knowledge. The problem is that this is taken to be the object of the exercise, and there is in consequence a curious dislocation between the Martindales' discussion of the sources and their analyses of the plays: because there is no sense of why it should matter whether or not Shakespeare read Plautus, or Seneca, or Ovid, the close readings are treated simply as evidence towards the conclusion that he did.

Shakespeare as a thinker is notoriously hard to pin down. One can use the critical pronouncements of Ben Jonson or John Milton to interpret their works with some confidence, but for Shakespeare such pronouncements are hard to come by, and equivalent ideas within the plays and poems are veiled in dramatic irony or else tantalizingly incomplete. One could argue, as Bernard Shaw does, that Shakespeare's ideas are conventional and trivial, not worth recovering, even that he is hopelessly confused about the abstractions of philosophical thought and perhaps not very much interested in them. However, that is not a position to be taken without at least considering alternatives.

One school of thought that was in part rediscovered in Shakespeare's day shares this ironic elusiveness and taint of anti-intellectualism in the eyes of its opponents: the radical scepticism associated with the name Pyrrho of Elis. This philosophy as set forth in the manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus inspired Montaigne and others to take very seriously the teachings of Pyrrhonism as a means of living through an age of doubt and controversy about basic issues of philosophy and religion. Irony comes naturally to the Pyrrhonist, who uses the tools of rational analysis to undermine the claims of reason. My aim is to demonstrate some striking parallels with Pyrrhonist thought in Shakespeare's plays and poems and then to speculate (with more boldness than sceptical restraint) on the significance of those parallels. This is to associate Shakespeare with scepticism as many critics have done, but in a more specific way, aiming at what is distinctively Pyrrhonist.

Perhaps William Butler Yeats anticipated the arrival of the post-modernist movement called deconstruction in his splendid poem, ‘Lapis Lazuli’. After all, the carved Chinese stone that he received from Harry Clifton contains not only a scene suggestive of the journey of life and the role of art amidst all the tragedy, but

In other words, as in deconstructionist doctrine, the work of art contains the elements of its own undoing. A critic who patiently ‘teases out’ the contradictory aspects of any piece of literature, especially the way in which the rhetoric works against the overt statement, can show how the meaning is subverted, just as the crack in the lapis lazuli threatens to destroy the carving. In fact, no critic is needed. Eventually the work will deconstruct itself; even individual words are forever engaged in the process of their own subversion as new meanings develop, new texts are brought to bear on old ones, and the stream of language constantly shifts. Deconstruction may indeed be a very elaborate way of insisting on a Heraclitean view of life and language.

The great flux of decay and re-creation of meaning is nowhere more evident than in the stage history of Shakespearian drama since mid-century. Anyone who has sampled the vast variety of productions of Shakespeare in that period is intensely aware of the purposeful assaults on the old doublet-and-hose meanings that go against all previous interpretations. Happily Shakespeare has been strong enough not only to withstand such reshaping but to return, like the mythological hero he has become, revitalized. I am reminded particularly of the Michael Bogdanov production of The Taming of the Shrew (1978, 1979) by the Royal Shakespeare Company with Jonathan Pryce and Paola Dionisotti, which turned the play into a feminist tract with exceptional skill and ingenuity.

Fashionably enough, the central farcical scene of Twelfth Night concerns an act of reading. What Malvolio reads and how he reads it have significant connections both with other events in the play, and with the wider world of seventeenth-century English society. The letter he finds invites him to join the festive rituals of love - to disguise himself, to smile, and to become a wooer, on the expectation of ending the revelling with epithalamium and marriage. This model for human conduct - the argument of romantic comedy - is in fact endorsed by a secondary text hidden within the first, as we shall see. But Malvolio, reading the words eagerly in the light of his predisposition, sees no subtleties, let alone the gaping trap. The festival in which he has already begun to take part is not the affirmative and sustaining one he imagines, but a punitive, defaming, mocking ritual aimed at him, his pride, pretensions, and authority. His reading — or misreading — marks his entry to a festive world, and festivals, like texts, are ambiguous. Particularly his treatment at the hands of the plotters forms a suggestive inverse ritual to set against those patterns which are traced by the energies of misplaced and baffled erotic desire, eventually untangled and fulfilled.

'New plays and maidenheads', according to the Prologue of The Two Noble Kinsmen,

The endless renewal of the spoken word, the play whose every performance is almost but not quite the originary 'first night's stir', is comparable here to the virgin whose maidenhead is taken yet 'still is modesty', still seems 'more of the maid' than not. I want to take up here some of the ways in which plays and maidenheads are related, how Shakespeare's dramatic language represents sexuality. It will be necessary to narrow the focus considerably, of course - in terms of language and sexuality in Shakespeare, here, if anywhere, is God's plenty. My argument will therefore only concern female sexuality as a production of male discourse, and I mean to use the term 'sexuality' rather than 'gender' because I will examine the biological semantics at work in the plays. Some feminist theorists have argued that female sexuality is, in patriarchal discourse, unrepresentable - conceptually available only as lack, invisibility, or negation. I will pursue that position through the different, sometimes contradictory ways in which the language of several early modern writers, particularly Shakespeare, represented female sexuality and biology. Ultimately, I will examine some of the mystifications of the Tudor—Stuart discourse of virginity, the ne plus ultra, so to speak, of female sexuality — looking particularly at how certain modes of discourse registered the presence or absence of virginity.

Bernard Shaw wrote on 4 October 1897 that the Shakespearian producer Augustin Daly ‘was in full force at the Islington Theatre on Monday evening last with his version of “As You Like It” just as I don’t like it’. Surprisingly, the reaction of many people in the late twentieth century to this most actable of plays is often one of disappointment. The actress Juliet Stevenson, who played Rosalind in 1985, complained of productions which offered ‘“a rural romp in an Arden full of polystyrene logs”’ and protests: ‘I’d always suspected that there’s a much more dangerous play in As You Like It.’ The 1990 Cheek by Jowl all-male production was greeted ecstatically by both male actors and male critics: Adrian Lester’s Rosalind was voted ‘sexy’ and exciting. Men liked it. But what about women? If a woman’s voice was raised in the critical debate, I missed it. In the past, of course, there would have been no such voice, except from the reminiscences of a few celebrated actresses. How different our theatrical records might have been had Elizabeth Pepys scribbled in the margin next to her husband’s account of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the most ridiculous and insipid play he ever saw in his life: ‘Sam didn’t like it but I thought it was great, very sexy.’

What did the numerous women in Shakespeare's audience like? The Elizabethans considered theatre-going to be unavoidably erotic, and in anti-theatrical literature it was feared the boy actor would arouse homoerotic fantasies. But what, in that case, would the fantasy life of the women in the audience look like?

Five more volumes from the New Cambridge Shakespeare bring the series past the half-way mark. All the editions are worth having and represent an enormous amount of valuable editorial and critical work: some can for the moment claim their place as the best available edition. The introductions are on the whole useful, even if some contain material which would be better suited to a periodical article rather than to an edition which undergraduates will buy and use. The textual introductions are rather good, but the handling of questions such as date and occasion is very patchy. Some editors go to great lengths to investigate the history of their play in the theatre, often turning up new and diverting information, but only Hattaway manages to use the history to illuminate the play itself.

The series also contains a number of minor but still irritating inconsistencies. The asterisk in the commentary, used to indicate editorial emendation, appears to have been silently dropped: it is present in 2 Henry VI but not in Measure for Measure (both published in 1991) nor in The Poems or Henry V. Use of the Oxford edition of the complete works is still sporadic. Relined verse, verse set as prose, and prose as verse, are sometimes recorded fully and sometimes only occasionally: the same is true for the recording of stage directions and of spelling variants. In the note on 2.4.186 Gibbons reports the sententiae marked by the Folio in Measure for Measure, but Roe ignores their presence in his collations and commentary to Lucrece.

Shakespeare’s turn from tragedy to romance coincides with a similarly radical change in the style of his verse. This complicated and self-conscious poetry has attracted a wide variety of labels, from Baroque to incompetent to post modern, but it has not been carefully described nor have its implications been adequately assessed. These metamorphoses of dramatic mode and verse style are partly attributable to Shakespeare’s evolving and contradictory opinions about language itself, and the late tragedies, especially Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, are a good place to start in studying these changes because together they constitute a kind of hinge or pivot on which Shakespeare turns from one kind of drama to another. For my purposes, their particular utility derives from their dependence upon similar conflicts of gender that not only help to forecast Shakespeare’s narrative and thematic interests but also influence the kind of poetry he will devise for the final phase of his career. Recent criticism has begun to establish that, historically speaking, certain expressive styles could be sexually coded, and I shall draw upon some of that work to assert that what we witness in the final phase of his career is the feminization of Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic style.

The argument that follows, simply stated, is that the complex verse patterns of the late plays are intimately related to Shakespeare's imaginative recovery of the feminine, that the origins of these thematic and stylistic conflicts emerge clearly in the last classical tragedies, and that the romances constitute a conditional resolution of these concerns.

Iago tells tales, tall tales. He fabricates a story – Desdemona’s adulterous liaison with Cassio – and then relies upon his own ingenuity and the propensity of those around him to be persuaded by the internal logic of his comedic narrative: ‘the knave is handsome, young, and hath all those requisites in him that folly and green minds look after; a pestilent complete knave, and the woman hath found him already’ (2.1.245–7). His few, well-placed innuendos are fully dramatized in Othello’s imagination, testifying to all the powers of suggestion as his words translate into action. And, although lago’s story-line is enacted in the play’s performance, Shakespeare images it throughout the play quite literally. That is to say, he stresses the literariness, the sheer wordiness of lago’s narrative. Cassio’s actions are thus ‘an index and obscure prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts’, a text which Othello’s ‘unbookish jealousy must conster’ (2.1.257–8; 4.1.101). Rapt, Othello looks on while lago ‘begins the story’, and is so mesmerized by the tale that he too rewrites his wife: ‘Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write “whore” upon?’ (4.1.130–1; 4.2.71–2). As he moves through the play, Othello's ensign displays a sign of love which, as he declares himself, 'is indeed but sign' (1.1.157). Unlike the 'certaine signes' of the Spenserian text, however, which direct the reader toward 'matter of iust memory', Iago's sign is detached, aberrant, free-floating, mischievous, confounding — leaving one character after another to ask (as we might) 'What is the matter?'

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions and adaptations are included. Information is taken from programmes, supplemented by reviews, held in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library. Details have been verified wherever possible, but the nature of the material prevents corroboration in every case.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Commonweal Theatre Company, the Shaw Theatre, London and tour of South West England: 9 April 1991

Director: Tony Hegarty

Music/Enobarbus: Max Hafler

Antony: Andrew McDonald

Cleopatra: Susan Curnow

The set used Egyptian lettering to symbolize Egypt and Roman to symbolize Rome. The Romans, in black, recalled Mussolini's Fascists.

Talawa Theatre Company, the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool and tour: 24 April 1991

Director: Yvonne Brewster

Designer: Helen Turner

Antony: Jeffery Kissoon

Cleopatra: Dona Croll

An all-black cast.

Birmingham Repertory Theatre: 6 April-4 May 1991

Director: John Adams

Designer: Roger Butlin

Antony: Malcolm Tierney

Cleopatra: Sylvia Syms

A traditional production.

Adaptation

All for Love by John Dryden

The Almeida Theatre, Islington, London: 25 April 1991

Director: Jonathan Kent

Designers: Peter J. Davison and Sue Willmington

Music: Jonathan Dove

Antony: James Laurenson

Cleopatra: Diana Rigg

There seems to be a peculiar difficulty these days in fitting Shakespeare productions to the available theatre spaces. At one end of the range, small theatres and theatre-spaces do not necessarily either only deserve or only receive small-scale productions. The necessary aim of aptness and appropriateness of scale can often result in productions being oversized or, equally common at the other end of the spectrum, undersized for their stages. Some productions take on the scale assumed to be required by a particular space only to find that assumptions about that scale have carried with them, parasitically, assumptions about an appropriate style that are constricting and stultifying. As directors confront the often bewildering variety of spaces in which Shakespeare plays are now performed, their sense of scale often seems to go seriously awry. In the Royal Shakespeare Company the problems are exacerbated both by the tempting availability in Stratford of that most desirable of theatres, the Swan, a theatre into which many Shakespeare plays seem so naturally to fit, and by the awkwardnesses of the main house, a theatre into which the talents of the cast and crew seem now all too rarely to fit.

I take it that there are, along this particular faultline, two modes of production which ensure that the tectonic plates of production and theatre do not grind together, split apart or awkwardly overlay each other: the productions which manage the perfect and comfortable fit, small-scale in, say, the Other Place or medium in the Swan, and productions which make the space appear exhilaratingly barely able to contain them, the strain at the seams being a controlled part of the effect.

GENERAL STUDIES AND COLLECTIONS

Shakespeare criticism is under particular pressure at the moment. The clash of different critical perspectives has been a constant feature of these surveys, but Ivo Kamps’ collection of essays, Shakespeare Left and Right (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), which begins with four papers originally presented at a Special Session of the MLA on ‘The Role of Ideology’, powerfully indicates the ways in which the internal squabbles of the academy have suddenly come to matter in the world outside. In Britain, the Conservative Government’s co-option of Shakespeare in their attack on ‘lefty’ teaching in schools has an analogous effect in the focusing of critical minds, and to that challenge Lesley Aers and Nigel Wheale respond with their anthology Shakespeare in the Changing Curriculum (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Whatever one might think of these collections, and both have a tendency to a strident querulousness, their effect is to superimpose upon familiar questions of the relationship between text and critic an urgent need to focus on the relationship of literary criticism to the audience for whom it is written. But one of the sharpest perceptions that come from attempting such a survey as this is a depressing sense of a fragmented landscape where critics call only to the like-minded, a feeling which becomes stronger as the volume of work continues to grow. (There is little sign of a world recession in Shakespeare criticism, and the plenitude of book-length studies has forced an even more restricted notice of critical articles in this year's survey.)

Perhaps no final scene of a play has had more attention than the end of King Lear. Regardless of how any one critic interprets the play, an important element of that interpretation involves a response to the action from Lear’s entrance with Cordelia in his arms to his death. And, however this scene is integrated into or used as justification for an overall interpretation, there is usually an acknowledgement of its inherent ambiguity: that we cannot be certain how to respond to these concentrated, intense moments. This has prompted everything from unqualified optimism to unrelieved pessimism - responses probably revealing more about the spectator or critic than the play. But the most perceptive attempts to understand the play allow for both joy and sorrow at its conclusion, a response signalled several times during the action. As essentially tragic as the ending is, there also is, or should be, a sense of rightness about it that cannot be ignored in production and interpretation without lessening the impact by reducing the relationship between the conclusion and what has gone before. That things have come full circle is an idea voiced towards the end of the play. We are prompted to become aware of its complexity not so much by the rationalizing observations of Edgar and Edmund or the optimistic commentary of Albany and Kent as by signals in the language and action immediately before Lear's death suggesting a renewal of his essential roles of king and father for a few brief but significant moments. In this play built on visual and verbal paradoxes, in which appearance and speech obscure deeper truths, it should not be surprising that what is done and said at the protagonist's end contains and completes this motif.