The last and only time I read William Shakespeare was "Romeo and Juliet" in high school and I have been wanting to read him again but I always felt a little intimidated but after reading Tennyson's Mariana and seeing Milais's Mariana, I decided to read his, "Measure for Measure" first. I did not read this edition but from a collection of his works which I did not care for because of the navigation and outlay was very annoying, so I changed to another edition quite early on. I read from a Delphi collection of his works which was to my liking. It took me longer to read because I wanted to understand him completely, so re reading certain passages and double checking with "Sparknotes" to see if I understood correctly, which I did a large amount. The Sparknotes website brought certain things unclear to me about the brothels which in Shakespeare's wording, I had not a real clue. So I was quite happy with myself and I think the years of reading older material has helped me grasp sooner than a younger me would have had to read a passage multiple times.

In my edition this information precedes the story.

"This problem comedy is believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. The play deals with issues of mercy, justice, and truth and their relationship to pride and humility. A virtuous maiden is given the ultimatum of surrendering her chastity in return for saving her brother’s life, thus revealing the play’s controversial and problematic dilemma. The plot deals with Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, who makes it known that he intends to leave the city on a diplomatic mission. He leaves the government in the hands of a strict judge, Angelo. The play draws on two distinct sources. The original is The Story of Epitia, a story from Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, first published in 1565. Shakespeare was familiar with this book as it contains the original source for Othello. Cinthio also published the same story in a play version with some small differences, which Shakespeare may have been aware of. "

The crime and the punishment are the main focus of this play which brilliantly shows justice for one is different for another, especially the powers that be, the inequality, being too hard without thought of leniency. Hand picking what laws to enforce goes with the enforcers fancy and it is better to have guidelines with sentences not draconian measures. The humor moves the play along with a playful tone. This Shakespeare play is quite bawdy reminding me of some of the Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, I was a little surprised it was from Shakespeare but then again, I only read him once before.

The story in short- Claudio and Juliet are expecting a baby out of wedlock, Angelo in charge gives strict orders to execute for his unlawful behavior will his sister give up her virginity to save him?

I had recently read Alfred Tennyson's Mariana and added from that review below.

I was excited about John Everett Millais's work after seeing the cover with his, "Mariana". Not knowing the poem or the play which inspired this painting but seeing a work of art that spoke to me. I love art and enjoy seeing artists' work but this painting is one of my favorites. The colors are bright and the feeling of weariness had my intense interest. Alfred Tennyson's poem brings this painting to life and brings the romantic angle missed without the poem. I will come back and edit this review after reading William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.

"The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof, The slow clock ticking, and the sound Which to the wooing wind aloof The poplar made, did all confound Her sense; but most she loath’d the hour When the thick-moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Was sloping toward his western bower. Then, said she, “I am very dreary, He will not come,” she said; She wept, “I am aweary, aweary, O God, that I were dead!”"

I did not read from this edition but a Delphi collection of Tennyson's work and the below highlight is from Delphi Master of art, John Everett Millais' Mariana.

"Completed the following year, this painting is based on the solitary figure of Mariana from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (c. 1606). In the tragicomedy, although Mariana was intended to be married, she was rejected by her fiancé Angelo when her dowry was lost in a shipwreck and so doomed to live out a solitary seclusion in a moated grange. Her story was later retold by Tennyson in Mariana (1830), which provided additional inspiration for Millais’ canvas. The painting is particularly celebrated for what had become noted as the artist’s customary precision, attention to detail and adept skill as a colourist. A fundamental practice of the PRB was the use of allegorical images to create a narrative, often didactic in tone, stressing the importance of a moral virtue. The members also liked to refer to contemporary literature, including numerous details or “props” that would encourage the viewer to “read” the painting. Tennyson’s poetry was especially popular with the Brotherhood and Millais liked to challenge his audience to read the entire poem “through the painting”. When Mariana was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, the display caption presented these lines from Tennyson’s poem: She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,’ I would that I were dead!’"

"Both in Millais’ painting and Tennyson’s poem, there is no hint of the young lady’s eventual happy ending that occurs in Shakespeare’s play. No hope is in sight."

I first heard of "Measure for Measure" from William Somerset Maugham's Cake and Ale and added the highlight from that novel below.

"He said that when Shakespeare retired to Stratford-on-Avon and became respectable, if he ever thought of his plays at all, probably the two that he remembered with most interest were Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.”

I have "Hamlet" on my schedule for later this year.

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I enjoyed how The Duke had disguised himself as a friar, especially listening to all the false stories that Lucio would spout out. I was not sure how he would deal with the hypocrite Angelo but since Mariana really wanted him, well I suppose she may rule over him, if she wanted to. Isabella not giving in to sleeping with him, one would say especially in this modern world, why not? But she would just have lost her respect and much more because Angelo was going to kill Claudio anyway. I was happy that the Duke and Isabella were to be married, though it was not clear if she loved him, it seemed that she did not object either.

2015 Reading Challenge: A Book You Were Supposed to Read in High School But Didn't

I honestly don't have an explaination for this one. The characters didn't sit well with me. The dilemma about the brother's life(who was after all guilty), and the sistet's virtue annoyed me greatly, as I think that crimes deserve punishment.
Also, whatever comic element there was in this, it was lost on me. I didn't find anything in "Measure for Measure" funny. All of the character were too flawed to be fun or in any way pleasant.

I really enjoyed this play!

He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go;
More nor less to others paying
Than by self-offences weighing.
Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking!
Twice treble shame on Angelo,
To weed my vice and let his grow!
O, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!
How may likeness made in crimes,
Making practise on the times,
To draw with idle spiders’ strings
Most ponderous and substantial things!
Craft against vice I must apply:
With Angelo to-night shall lie
His old betrothed but despised;
So disguise shall, by the disguised,
Pay with falsehood false exacting,
And perform an old contracting.

Shakespeare'in diğer komedyalarına kıyasla daha ciddi bir tona sahip olduğu için tragikomedya olarak tanımlanabilecek "Measure for Measure / Kısasa Kısas", içinde birçok ahlaksal konuyu barındıran eleştirel alt metniyle oldukça başarılı bir eser. İnsan erdemliliği üzerine düşündürücü öğeler okuma şansı bulduğumuz oyunun cinsellik ve bekaret üzerine olan yenilikçi tutumu hem Shakespeare oyunları açısından hem de zamanının şartlarına göre fazlasıyla önem taşıyor. Öte yandan, zaman zaman İncil'le paralellik gösteren eserde insanların adalete olan tek taraflı bakış açısına da yakından bakma şansı buluyoruz. Kesinlikle okunması gereken Shakespeare oyunları arasında.

07.06.2015
İstanbul, Türkiye

Alp Turgut

http://www.filmdoktoru.com/kitap-labo...

"The miserable have no other medicine but only hope: I've hope to live, and am prepar'd to die."

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

I will be honest with you here, and let you know that I barely remember this play. I had to refresh myself quite a bit before I wrote this.

There were only a handful of Shakespeare's plays that I made it out of school not having read, and this was one of them. I've been meaning to read it for years but never seemed to get around to it. Honestly, I wish I hadn't read it, because at least there was a pleasing sense of mystery to it, with me wondering what it was about and only imagining good things. I had no idea it's considered to be one of his "problem plays" (a term which doesn't mean what you think it means, but works well in its original context but also if you use it to just mean "problematic", because it certainly is).

The "problem" for Shakespeare scholars is that this play isn't a true comedy, nor is it a tragedy or a history, but has elements that sort of slither back and forth. It's not easily categorizable. As someone who absolutely loves genrebusters (and a mix of tones) I see no problem with this. My problem is with the story, which is about the Duke of Vienna, who decides to be tricksy and deputizes this dude Angelo (I had to look up these names while writing this) but then sneaks back into the city in disguise to watch how the city fares without him as basically an ego trip. 

Angelo stirs up some shit. He closes all the brothels. He tries to hang people for sexing outside of wedlock. Then asks to take a woman's virginity in exchange for him not hanging her brother. This is so funny so far. Anyways, everyone ends up getting their due, but the whole thing feels very unnecessary because you feel like the Duke knew Angelo was a shithead, and instead of just shitcanning him or exiling him or whatever, he wants to like, humiliate him publicly first. Then he gets rewarded with the marriage of a virtuous woman and this other dude Lucio (who humorously had been slandering the Duke to his face while he was in disguise) is made to marry a prostitute he seduced and abandoned, who is now having a baby. So, things end up good for the good guys and bad for the bad guys, in true Shakespearean comedy fashion, but there's just this icky sense you have the whole time, like this just doesn't feel good, guys. 

I think you could probably make a case that Shakespeare's social commentary here about sexual hypocrisy and the mores of the time were pretty incisive, but it's also just sort of a mess. I'd skip this unless you're a completionist.

Fast to read and very entertaining. Really excited to discuss this one in class!

I have conflicting feelings about the Duke, honestly I think he is as bad as Angelo, even though he thinks himself above anyone else. The Duke simply didn't want to dirty his hands by tainting his otherwise "clean" reputation. So Angelo was put in charge.
Angelo is a young, inexperienced man, who is very cold, detached from emotions and "virtuous" -or so did Shakespeare wants us to believe... I don't think he is blameless, after all he blackmailed Isabella in the most horrible of ways. But still, I think his punishment was unfitting.

I supposed Lucio's and Angelo's punishments were considered fitting at the time Measure for Measure was written, nowadays we'd see Lucio's crime as non existing, for he in fact didn't do anything wrong, and he was sentenced to marry someone he had impregnated,to be whipped and hanged afterwards. In my view his punishment should be to indeed marry the poor woman he had slept with, but what would be the point in marrying her and then dying?

Oh Shakespeare.

If undercover boss was a Shakespeare play

This is a much more troubling play than a comedy really has a right to be. To be honest, it is very hard to call this play a ‘comedy’ – unlike Much Ado or Twelfth Night, the laughs don’t exactly come thick and fast. In general outline this could easily enough be considered a romantic comedy – girl in trouble, boy cleverly rescues girl, girl marries boy; a perfect description of the genre? But the central story to this one is a very strange idea for a comedy.

Here’s the main story-line with the incidental stories and characters cut. There is a Duke of Vienna that seems to be well loved by his people, though mostly because he is fairly hopeless at keeping the moral order of the place. He knows things have got to get cleaned up, but also seems to know he isn’t really the man to do it. There is a young man he plans to allow to fix things, Angelo, who, despite his show of goodness, the Duke knows isn’t nearly as virtuous as he makes himself out to be. Nevertheless, the Duke believes he probably has what it would take to get rid of most of the immorality that’s going on about the place (read, brothels and sexual excesses). The Duke says he is off to Poland, but instead he gets dressed up as a Friar so he can watch just what Angelo does in his absence.

The first thing Angelo does is find someone to use to punish as an example of immorality. There is a law, never previously applied, that if you get someone pregnant prior to marriage then you forfeit your life. Claudio and Juliet have (as Iago would have it) made the two-backed beast and so Angelo sentences Claudio to death in the morning (everything is to happen quickly in this play – even if nothing ever seems to prove to).

Claudio has a sister, Isabella – she is a nun in training and when told of her brother’s fate goes around to see if she can convince Angelo not to kill Claudio. Angelo at first is unmoved by Isabella, but soon decides this innocent virgin is a temptation too great to be resisted. He tells her that he will save her brother’s life if she agrees to sleep with him. She refuses – as all good nuns should – and goes to tell her brother that he had better prepare for his forthcoming trip to meet his maker.

At first Claudio is suitably revolted by Angelo’s suggestion, but then the full implications of Isabella’s refusal to sleep with Angelo (that is, his own death) suddenly makes him think that in the balance of things – well… Isabella sees where all this is headed and is outraged and tells him again to prepare to die.

But the Duke, dressed as the Friar, has been listening to all this and decides it is time to come to the rescue – but not in the most obvious way, but saying ‘tat-tah! It was me all the time’. Rather, he decides to set up a complicated and, well, frankly dangerous set of schemes in order to trick Angelo.

It turns out that Angelo had been engaged to a woman a couple of years before and was about to marry her when her brother was lost at sea and her family wealth went down with him. Angelo promptly broke off the engagement. The Duke decides to get this woman to sleep with Angelo in Isabella’s stead – so, Isabella tells Angelo she will sleep with him as long as it is in the dark and in total silence. The switch is made and Isabella’s virtue is secured by the Duke and all’s well. Except Angelo goes back on his word about Claudio – on the very reasonable assumption that although Claudio may well be happy as Larry to not be dead for the time being, sooner or later he is going to want to be revenged on Angelo for his shagging his sister and threatening to kill him. Angelo demands Claudio’s immediate execution. The Duke is less than impressed and so needs to do some fancy footwork to save Claudio’s life and also supply a decapitated head for Angelo.

The Duke then announces he is on his way home – and arrives at the town saying that if anyone has any complaints they should come forward with them then and there – he has set up Isabella to denounce Angelo and say what happened in front of everyone, which she does. Angelo has a very uncomfortable time of it, but appears to have the Duke’s unequivocal support. But things turn bad for him when his ex turns up and says she was the one who had slept with him, and not Isabella – things become even worse when it turns out that the Duke and the Friar are one and the same people. Angelo confesses and pleads to be killed. The Duke first forces him to marry your woman he was supposed to have married years before and then says he is to be executed. The new bride isn’t exactly over the moon at the prospect of becoming a widow quite so soon – and pleads first with the Duke and then with Isabella to help her convince the Duke to save Angelo’s life.

Isabella kneels down – now, look, I’m a complete sucker generally for unreasonable forgiveness (the fact it is the main lesson of Christianity is also probably part of the reason it is generally ignored by most Christians, but the whole ‘love thine enemy’ idea – particularly when such forgiveness seems utterly impossible and improbable – almost always leaves me on the verge of tears). The Duke then pulls Claudio out of the hat and asks Isabella to marry him – which she agrees to do. They all live happily ever after.

I guess now you can see why it is hard to really call this infinitely complicated plot a comedy. The other thing is that a lot of the ‘morality’ of this play is really very questionable and requires much more thought than is reasonable for a comedy. And not just the morally questionable idea of getting Angelo to sleep with is ex as a way to confound his plans to sleep with Isabella – what was his ex thinking? How would anyone feel at being asked to do such a thing – you’ll get to sleep with the guy you love, but he will think he is sleeping with someone else. Yuck. But the final forgiveness of Angelo for what was his intended rape and murder seems, well, rather mild for what might otherwise be considered a couple of rather serious and career-limiting mistakes.

Like I said, I really do get choked up when someone does an act of infinite forgiveness – as Isabella does in the final scene, except even this scene is very odd. I’m going to quote the speech she gives in full:

Duke: He dies for Claudio’s death.

Isabella: (kneeling) Most bounteous sir,
Look, if it please you, on this man condemned
As if my brother lived. I partly think
A due sincerity governed his deeds
Till he did look on me. Since it is so,
Let him not die. My brother had but justice,
In that he did the thing for which he died.
For Angelo,
His act did not o’ertake his bad intent,
And must be buried but as an intent
That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects,
Intents but merely thoughts.

Which is to say – Angelo was a fine and upstanding young man until he looked at me and then, well, how could he help but be driven mad with lust? I’m a bit of a babe in this habit, you know. We fooled him, so he didn’t do what he thought he was going to do – sleeping with this woman rather than me. We can only be condemned for what we do, not what we intend to do, so you can’t kill him on that score. All that is left is that he killed my brother, but then, look, my brother had broken the law, so had it coming anyway.

I really don’t think I would like to have Isabella as my sister, to be honest.

This is a remarkable play. And although I think the plot is so convoluted that there are times it really does strain to keep itself together, the moral dilemmas of some of the characters really do bring us up short at times. Angelo’s self-torment – quite the opposite of what everyone else sees of him – is damned interesting.

There has been lots of talk in the press lately about the slut walks – I’m quite in favour of them (I’ve a preference for dealing with complex issues with both humour and irony if at all possible). However, if anything would prove to that Canadian policeman that ‘if women don’t want to be violated they shouldn’t dress like sluts’ is utter bollocks it is Angelo lusting after Isabella because she is tempting him with her utter purity.

There aren’t really any characters in this play that you can like, either. The Duke seems to have done that favourite Machiavellian ploy of leaving someone unpopular to do the dirty work and then, in exposing his dirty work, gained the benefit of the dirty work while avoiding all of the blame.

Although we might well today disagree with Isabella’s view that her hymen is worth more than her brother’s life – you do need to remember she believed the choice wasn’t just her virginity, but her immortal soul. Nevertheless, she isn’t all that much more forgiving of her brother than Angelo is and so her moral strictness is frankly scary.

Even with all that said, this is an endlessly fascinating play. One that raises lots of questions and presents answers from the characters words and actions that only prompt further thought.

n  . . . for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.n

I hit a reviewing slump in 2021, and this undersung Shakespearean semi-comedy was one of the many books I failed to write anything on. However, as I've made it a point to review every other Shakespeare play I've read since I started picking my way through them chronologically eight years ago, it would be wrong to let this one pass by without a few words—especially since it's one of only six I've given a top rating so far.

While I do count a couple other comedies among my favorites of Will's works—n  A Midsummer Night's Dreamn, n  Much Ado About Nothingn—most of the time it's the Shakespearean genre I get the least excited about. (Yes, even less than the histories.) Once or twice with the disguises and the clowns and the elaborate pranks and the hurricane of archaic puns and innuendos is fun enough, but it starts to feel interchangeable pretty damn fast. No surprise then that I gravitate towards the comedies that eschew that formula somehow; and Measure for Measure, true to its modern designation as a so-called "problem play," is barely a comedy at all.

What it is instead is a serious examination of the interplay between ethics, the law, and sex. A pious deputy (Angelo) has decided to reinstate the death penalty for acts of fornication. To make an example, he arrests and prepares to execute a young man (Claudio) who has impregnated his girlfriend. The young man's sister (Isabella), an equally pious nun-in-training, petitions the deputy for her brother's life, and the deputy, overcome by unholy lust for the nun, offers her what she wants in exchange for sex. Isabella's choice, between her bodily autonomy or her brother's life, is the dramatic and moral crux of the play. Rather than a convoluted love plot of the sort most of the comedies give us, Shakespeare poses a series of ethical questions, with obvious relevance to current conversations about power and consent.

That a Shakespeare play would have Continuing Thematic Relevance is not really surprising; more so, to me at least, is how well he handles those themes here. Much as I love Will's work, I've historically been pretty unconvinced by modern arguments about the supposed underlying progressiveness of his more troubling plays. I think that by the standards of his day Shakespeare was probably about as woke on matters of race or religion or gender inequality as could reasonably be expected; but 400 years down the road I think it's okay to admit that the standards of his day were comparably pretty low.

But for me Measure for Measure really does seem to transcend its time. Though framed in religious rather than feminist terms (the preservation of virginity, the dangers of sin), the play nevertheless takes seriously Isabella's desire for ownership over her own body, even when it means potentially allowing her brother's death. It also recognizes the ways in which men can wield their virtuous reputations as a shield when enacting harm against those with less power: when Isabella threatens to expose Angelo's hypocrisy, he reminds her that no one would ever take her word against his. Even Claudio's premarital sexual relationship, the one that gets him sentenced to death, is depicted as loving and consensual, a realistic and mature alternative to Angelo's hypocritical "celibacy." Though Isabella does become engaged at the play's end (well, in theory—she never actually replies to the proposal), a gesture towards genre convention, she nevertheless differs even from most of Shakespeare's strongest comic heroines in that she doesn't spend the bulk of the drama pursuing or being set up with a man; I didn't even remember for sure if she was paired-off, or who with, until I checked the Wiki synopsis just now.

I'm not trying to claim that this play from 1604 is operating at the same level of nuance as a 21st-century feminist text, or that there's nothing here for a modern reader to take issue with. Isabella is married off, despite her sincere wishes at the play's beginning to be a nun, and it's certainly up for interpretation how much we're actually supposed to sympathize with her valuing her chastity over her brother's life. There's a bed trick in here (that's how Isabella ultimately gets out of her bind without sleeping with Angelo or letting her brother die), and, while it's enacted against a would-be rapist by his spurned fiancée, the whole concept of bed tricks is itself inherently pretty rapey by today's standards.

But to be honest, by the time those sorts of plot points are being wrapped up in the last couple acts the play might as well already be over for me. As the drama comes to a close we're back in fairly conventional, and thus boring, Shakespearean comedy territory: disguises are shed, hidden truths come out, romantic matches are made, and the Duke (whom I haven't mentioned yet, despite his having more lines than anyone else, because he's more of a magical trickster than a human character) takes center-stage and explains to everyone all that we've just seen. The real meat of the play is in the first three acts or so, and that's certainly where we get the most memorable scenes: Isabella's meeting with Angelo (for my money, one of the best dialogues in Shakespeare's catalog), her various anguished back-and-forth conversations with Claudio, and Claudio's Hamletlike meditations on his impending death ("Ay, but to die, and go we know not where . . ."). In the wake of all that, the requisite plot machinations feel like just that, machinations. But the earlier stuff is good enough that I don't begrudge the play its plot requirements, either.

As with all Shakespeare dramas, this one becomes even richer when you compare and contrast it with his other works. The problem-play ambiguity and use of the bed trick make it a twin to n  All's Well That Ends Welln, though this is a far better play than that one. It was probably written around the same time as n  Othellon, and it shares with that work a sort of honesty about pre- or extramarital sexual relationships, as well as a concern about the ways in which sex can be used to justify deadly actions. n  The Merchant of Venicen, another too-troubling-to-be-funny "comedy" with religious overtones and a strong-willed woman protagonist, is another good point of comparison. And this is one of a surprising number of Shakespeare plays with a pirate character, who in this case supplies one of the few Shakespearean comic relief scenes to actually make me laugh while reading it.*

So all in all a surprise favorite for me, a play which I knew nothing about and had no expectations for but ended up liking more than most of the ones that are supposed to be really good. (That's the perk of a completionist project like this. The downside is that you also have to read stuff like n  King Johnn.) Usually I try to rate a work as a cohesive whole, and by those standards I can't honestly say that this is perfect or even near-perfect Shakespeare. I'd hesitate even to recommend it too strongly, because I think readers' mileage will vary quite a bit for a lot of this stuff—presumably there's a reason it's one of Will's more overlooked works. But I don't know, it just really worked for me, and nearly a year later I can say it's stuck with me, too. So why not? Five stars it is.

----
* I looked at the character list again and actually it's not the pirate I'm remembering, it's a prisoner named Barnardine. Well, nevertheless.