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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Measure for Measure
by William Shakespeare
Vienna is in crisis and decay. The Duke abdicates responsibility to his deputy Angelo, an authoritarian moralist who seeks to create a moral panic to deflect attention from the crisis. But he himself becomes a victim of his own morality.
Sounds familiar? Think of Lilley’s attack on single parents, Howard’s repressive Criminal Justice Bill and Major’s ‘back to basics’. And then remember Mellor’s lust, Milligan’s orange and Yeo’s children.
It is uncanny how the play mirrors the Tories own hypocritical moral panic. This production by Cheek by Jowl successfully embraces these contemporary parallels by setting the play in modern dress.
Vienna is a world where sex is a commodity. Two young lovers, Claudio and Juliet, are chastised by the authorities for having sex and Claudio put under sentence of execution for making Juliet pregnant.
Through this harsh puritan repression all notions of sexuality are distorted.
Not only do the young innocents suffer but so do the most exploited of all, the prostitutes and low life who are the very people Angelo wishes to sweep off the streets.
In Jacobean England there was a moral crackdown against the low life. At the time of the abortive Essex rebellion the authorities feared that a ‘great multitude of base and loose people’ who ‘lie privily in corners and bad houses, listening after news and stirs [prostitutes], and spreading rumours and tales, being of likelihood ready to lay hold of any occasion to enter into any tumult or disorder.’
The rulers wanted to suppress sexuality as part of their desire to achieve a disciplined society. Some puritan extremists advocated the death penalty for prostitution. Theatres were closed because many theatre owners were also brothel keepers.
Shakespeare was probably appalled at the crackdown. But his position was as contradictory as the Duke’s. After abdicating his responsibility to Angelo, the Duke goes into disguise to walk amongst his people and to discover the effects of the repressive state, subjecting both state and people to a moral test.
Central to this moral testing is Isabella, a nun and sister to the condemned Claudio. She is put under severe pressure by Angelo, who offers Claudio’s life for her chastity. By the end of the play she is the only one to pass the distorted logic of the Duke’s test. Her unpalatable prize is marriage to the Duke.
But back in power the Duke doesn’t undo any of Angelo’s repressive laws. The unsatisfactory end to the play indicates that Shakespeare, like the Duke, believed in the notion that there can be a more benign repression. It is his way of warning the feudal class not to be undermined by rampant puritanism.
This production clearly points the finger at the Tories’ hypocrisy. But not all the parallels work – especially Isabella dressed in a nun’s habit turning moral somersaults.
Nevertheless this production is accessible, interesting and you can sense the few Tories in the audience squirming as we indulge in their misfortune.
Measure for Measure plays at the Hammersmith Lyric in London until 16 July
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