honestly, this was fun to read.

some very interesting discussions on moral issues & also some pretty lines.

however, that ending was not it. still unsure if shakespeare intended to create those parallels or it was simply from lack of judgement.

Es una excelente mezcla de lo satírico y lo poético. Una verdadera "obra de teatro problemática" debido a la fina línea que se interpone entre la comedia y la tragedia, lo que hace que el trabajo sea rico y complejo de una manera que no se encuentra en trabajos que se categorizan más fácilmente.
Shakespeare escribe sobre un duque que deja su pueblo en manos de su amigo. El duque sin embargo se queda para ver cómo actúa su amigo con esta nueva responsabilidad. Shakespeare detalla terribles abusos de poder y cómo esos abusos tienen la capacidad de destruir vidas. También se podría encontrar un argumento convincente contra la pena de muerte dentro de esta obra.
Autoridad imperfecta que juzga las imperfecciones de los demás, defectos seculares y deseos protegidos detrás de la autoridad entre otros aspectos son los que tratan esta gran obra.

Me: Is this the most important Shakespeare play in our now?

I: That's a bit of a leap, doesn't it? His histories are such powerful studies of leadership and war -- which seem pretty damn timely -- and what about his tragedies? Caesar? Hamlet? Titus? The Scottish Play (sorry, I'm performing Shakespeare at the moment)? Coriolanus? And the rest? They all seem pretty fucking timely.

Me: Okay. Fair ...

I: But?

Me: But ... the problem plays. Are they less timely? Isn't the very nature of the problem play a millennial-style concern? Are we about tragedies anymore? Or are we about problems? I mean ... Measure for Measure, just look at the ambiguity, at what Vincentio is doing and how he's doing it.

I: Fair point.

Me: Is there a more interesting look at how power interacts with convention than Measure for Measure.

I: Whoa!

Me: "Whoa!" what?

I: I didn't even imagine that until you said it.

Me: Really?

I: Ha! No. I hadn't thought of that. I had thought about ethics, of course. I'd thought about the weight between life and sexual violation, about what it meant then and what it means now, but now about power and convention.

Me: And the sexuality you thought of wasn't enough to raise this play up?

I: But the tragedies are ... well .. tragic.

Me: I find the power of Measure for Measure to be in the lack of tragedy. It's in the process (does that make sense?) rather than the product. The tragedies are all in the product, it seems to me (well ... not really. But they are reduced to that too often), but the problem plays, in particular Measure for Measure, are all about process and ignored because of a lack of bloody product.

I: Perhaps.

Me: Okay, so let me ask you what is more compelling.

I: Go.

Me: A deeply wounded Prince suffering from deaths in the family and a loss of power who vacillates between suicide and self-destruction or a chaste near-Nun embroiled in a plot to expose an inveterate sexual predator to the greater good.

I: Both.

Me: Fuck off. True, but fuck off.

I: They are both amazing.

Me: No argument. But what matters more to our 2017 now?

I: The Nun.

Me: Really?

I: I think so. Maybe.

Me: Then I will rest my case.

2023 Shakespeare Complete works challenge

#23 - Measure for Measure

Read - 8/27/23 - 8/27/23

Rating: 4 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

______________________________

Measure for Measure is a solid and enjoyable play. It reminds me of the saying: n  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.n The theme of power and how it is yielded is my main takeaway from this play. Angelo is put in charge by the Duke who pulls an “undercover boss” to find out what will happen in his absence. Angelo lays down the law strictly but then tries to use his power over Isabella who is trying to save her brother Claudio from execution.

We also get some comic relief with the minor characters - just the name Mistress Overdone for a lady who runs a Viennese brothel is funny. The simple constable, Elbow, was kind of a Barney Fife character.

I’ll probably revisit this play sometime- I enjoyed it.

Up next for my challenge will be Richard III.

I love this play so much. I have read it so many times. It has one of the most fucked up endings in all of Shakespeare. It is one of the most relevant of his plays today. I love how he tackles devotion, capital punishment, hypocrisy, and the plight of women. So much to say.

I can't believe I made it 51 years on this earth without encountering Measure for Measure. Perhaps it's for the best: the mature theme of how to discern and judge justly is weighty with the cycles of human development .. it helps to have a few grey hairs to have lived through the many perspectives that Shakespeare offers through his characters.

Perhaps we shouldn't mark the beginning of modern psychology with Freud. Shakespeare has the best character analysis of any modern thinker I know.

کتاب رو دوسال پیش از طاقچه خووندم.
و ای کاش همون‌موقع که خووندمش ریویوش رو می‌نوشتم، اما الان برای ریویو خیلی دیره و دوباره باید بخوونمش
ولیکن عالی بود، عالـی.
از اون کتابهایی که دوست دارم هدیه بگیرمش.
و به‌نظرم تو کتابخوونه‌ی هرکسی، باید یه شکسپیر باشه و من این کتاب رو انتخاب می‌کنم.
.

The story in Vienna of the disguised Duke and his manipulation of a few of his subjects is amusing, but felt more superficial than As You Like It. Nonetheless, it was very interesting how he left the audience hanging on his proposal to Isabelle.

Fino's Reviews of Shakespeare and Shakespearean Criticism
Comedies
The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593
The Taming of the Shrew (1593-1594)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594-1595)
Love's Labour's Lost (1594-1595)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-1596)
The Merchant of Venice (1596-1597)
Much Ado About Nothing (1598-1599)
As You Like It (1599-1600)
Twelfth Night (1599-1600)
The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600-1601)
All's Well That Ends Well (1602-1603)
Measure for Measure (1604-1605)
Cymbeline (1609-1610)
A Winter's Tale (1610-1611)
The Tempest (1611-1612)
Two Noble Kinsmen (1612-1613)

Histories
Henry VI Part I (1589-1590)
Henry VI Part II (1590-1591)
Henry VI Part III (1590-1591)
Richard III (1593-1594)
Richard II (1595-1596)
King John (1596-1597)
Edward III (1596-1597)
Henry IV Part I (1597-1598)
Henry IV Part II (1597-1598)
Henry V (1598-1599)
Henry VIII (1612-1612)

Tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1592-1593)
Romeo and Juliet (1594-1595)
Julius Caesar (1599-1600)
Hamlet (1600-1601)
Troilus and Cressida (1601-1602)
Othello (1604-1605)
King Lear (1605-1606)
Macbeth (1605-1606)
Anthony and Cleopatra (1606-1607)
Coriolanus (1607-1608)
Timon of Athens (1607-1608)
Pericles (1608-1609)

Shakespearean Criticism
The Wheel of Fire by Wilson Knight
A Natural Perspective by Northrop Frye
Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber
Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background by M W MacCallum
Shakespearean Criticism 1919-1935 compiled by Anne Ridler
Shakespearean Tragedy by A.C. Bradley
Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy by Hugh M. Richmond
Shakespeare: The Comedies by R.P. Draper
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro

Collections of Shakespeare
Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece and Other Poems
Shakespeare's Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint
The Complete Oxford Shakespeare

The end reminded me a lot of Much Ado About Nothing, but it was still very good. Not my favorite Shakespeare, but as great as everything by him.

How to describe ‘Measure for Measure?’ It's certainly one of Shakespeare's more ambiguous outings but I love its strangeness and twisted moral message, where the majority of the characters marry at the play's end as a form of punishment for their beliefs and actions. Happiness is a strange bedfellow in this so-called comedy.

Read for school
Not my favourite, but still enjoyable!

After reading "Of Spousals" in the Treasure Room of the Harvard Law Library, I wrote two Shakespeare Association of America papers on the handshake spousals-marriages in this play, approved by Judge Henry Swinburne of York Minster, whose courtroom still exists.*** Probably more than any other Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure gains immensely from the context in which it appeared. This Ivo Kamps brings to his edition* of MFM with myriad documents from 1604 or thereabouts, such as the Canons of 1604 which established modern marriage--none under age 21 without parental consent.

This play about transition in rule appears during England's transition from Queen Elizabeth (I!) to King James (I).
Probably the best courtroom scene, and the funniest in all literature, features in Act II.1, where Constable Elbow accuses Mr Froth of trying to seduce his wife, but he gets the legal terms wrong, "My wife, whom I detest before Heaven..."[meaning "attest"] Against his accusation, the clown Pompey, servant to the bawd, defends Mr Froth by using the suspect's face as his witness. Pompey asks the Judge (one of three, as usual in England) if he sees any harm in Froth's face. When the response is NO, Pompey asserts, "I'll swear on a book [the Bible], his face is the worst thing about him..." Hilarious defense, and it works, since Elbow has no counter-evidence.
MFM features a substitute ruler who uses his absolute power to pull a Strauss-Kahn or Bill O'Reilly / Cosby (but without the drugs). Angelo, the promoted Deputy, sleeps with a nun who pleads for her condemned brother's life. In delicious plot irony, the brother is condemned for impregnating his girlfriend. Despite the nun's sleeping with him (though a substitute bedmate is supplied, the substitute ruler's former affianced*) the corrupt deputy, Angelo, of angelic exterior, orders the nun's brother executed. But the Good Duke, in disguise as a Friar, saves the brother by substituting the head of a recent prison deceased.
In sum, the supposed puritanical reformer Angelo has feet of clay, like so many TV preachers and US politicians, and he himself breaches the reforms he pretends, so that the return of the Good Duke heralds wiser, more indulgent rule, like that of the new Good King. (Of course, James I proved much less indulgent and wise than Shakespeare portrays the Duke at the beginning of the king's reign.)

*And I thank the editor for citing me in his intro, one of few he cites there.

**Shakespeare could possibly have drawn this "bed-trick" substitution of the betrothed for the lover from Giordano Bruno's Candelaio, where the wife dresses as the lover and substitues herself. I always told my Shakespeare classes that the MFM substitution doesn't say much for Renaissance sex--of course before lighting, evidently even enough to distinguish one woman from another.
*** See https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserR...