“Alack, when once our grace we have forgot,
Nothing goes right; we would and we would not.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure



Let me start this review with a personal bias -- I PREFER it when politicos pretend to be priests, rather than when priests pretend to be politicos. Apparently, Shakespeare is on MY side. "Measure for Measure" is one of Shakespeare's "dark comedies" or "problem plays" like Troilus and Cressida and All's Well That Ends Well. It is certainly dark. It could easily be a funky beer or dark chocolate xocolātl. It feels like Shakespeare has reached that point of his career/life where he just doesn't give an F. He is all elbows and any need to surrender to societal platitudes and moral veneer seem to be fully expunged. He is all about tearing off the scabs of hypocrisy, and popping the boils of false prophets. But as with most of Shakespeare's best, nothing is direct, everything is oblique. Truth comes at you sideways, and even when you catch it, you have to be careful it isn't going to explode.

Oh, oh, also, the names. Mistress Overdone? Pompey Bum? So perfect.

There is a line I love from Philip K Dick that says, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” Shakespeare seems to agree, but it seems the most sane person in "Measure for Measure", the one most adjusted to Shakespeare's Vienna is Barnardine, the ever drunk. So, perhaps, we can re-write PKD's quote (at least remeasure it to read: It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to get sloppy-ass drunk"). In a world where everyone seems to be concerned about death, justice, confinement, authority, sexuality, Barnardine, like Honeybadger, just don't give a shit. I feel you Barnardine. I feel you.

Anyway, the play is unsettling. Shakespeare even makes the play's "happy ending" seem a bit dirty, like climbing out of a polluted pool. There isn't a moist towelette large enough to clean the soiled linen of Vienna. This is a play that, with the right characters, the right amount of alcohol could possibly start a riot. It pushes everyone right to the end and then yanks you back, not to "save you" but to keep the audience unbalanced. While it shares little directly with Crime and Punishment (except for, well, a crime and a punishment), I did keep getting images of Dostoevsky in my head while reading this. Shakespeare isn't as serious as Dostoevsky, but with an absurdity and dark, gallows humor, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure seems just as dangerous as anything Dostoevsky later delivered.

So, perhaps, I'll end with another Dostoevsky thought. Like Hesse's warning to readers of Dostoevsky, I too caution that looking too deep into Shakespeare's problem plays gives the reader both a taste of Western Civilization's decadent decline, and a "glimpse into the havoc". Bottoms up Biatches!

Favorite lines:

― “I had as lief have the foppery of freedom as the morality of imprisonment.” (Act 1, Scene 2).

― “Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.” (Act 1, Scene 4).

― “But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.” (Act 2, Scene 2).

― “The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope:
I have hope to live, and am prepared to die.” (Act 3, Scene 1).

― “To sue to live, I find I seek to die;
And, seeking death, find life.” (Act 3, Scene 1).

horrible news: shakespeare wrote the single most attractive male character (vincentio) in english literature

College read. While not a particular favorite of mine, reading this served as a reminder of how much I like Shakespeare. The man's such a genius of the human psyche. His stuff was written over 400 years ago, set in even more remote times, and we can still absolutely connect with it because it captures fundamental feelings. In Measure for Measure, I was especially interested in the extent to which the characters are true to themselves in what they say and how they act in spite of the potential consequences, and how that reflects in their overall happiness by the end of the play.

In the class I read this for, I wrote a paper on how Shakespeare gives a spin on the Aristotelic hamartia through the emotional depth of his characters. Measure for Measure's not a true "tragic" tragedy, but what with the whole problem-play situation, it contains certain tragedy-like elements.

isabelle rocked my (and angelo’s[…]) world. rlly like the old vs new testament rivalry approach to marriage, morality, and jurisdiction. eye for an eye or turn the other cheek…. unpopular opinion apparently but one of ny favorite parts of reading classics is the complementary essays by scholars at the beginning and end

Bugüne kadar okuduklarım arasında en akıcı ve keyifli bulduğum Shakespeare tiyatrolarından birisiydi. Elbette oynanmak için yazılmış, okunmak için değil. Yine de okuması pek çok Shakespeare tiyatrosuna göre kolaydı yani zihinde canlandırması kolaydı.

"Hem davet eder hem de ondan korkarsın,
İkide bir uyanır, yaşıyor muyum diye sorarsın. Sen kendine yetmezsin, çünkü toprağın ürettiği binlerce tahıldan yalnızca bir zerresin. Mutlu değilsin, çünkü sende olmayana kavuşmak için
Didinir durursun.
Güvenilir değilsin, çünkü gökteki ayın durumuna göre,
Değişir, garip hareketlerde bulunursun.
Zengin olduğunu sansan da yoksulsun,
Çünkü sırtı altın ve gümüşle dolu bir eşek gibi
Bu ağır yükü taşıyarak götürsen bile,
Ölüm o yükü boşaltmasını iyi bilir"

Bunun gibi metinlerinde taşıdığı derin felsefe ile insanı büyüler.

This is the third of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—along with Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well—and I think certainly the greatest. These three plays are given a special category because their genres have proven difficult to pin down. Measure for Measure, like All’s Well that Ends Well, is superficially a comedy; yet it takes place within a world with loose and uncertain values, and often causes us to scratch our heads rather than to laugh or smile.

The plot is flagrantly absurd. Vincentio, the duke of Vienna, decides to go away and leave his power in the hands of an upright judge, Angelo. Then, in secret, the duke disguises himself as a friar and sets about manipulating the other characters of the play. In this he resembles no character more than Iago; yet unlike that villain, Vincentio has no overarching goal, no consistent end. His plans are generally beneficent—arranging several marriages (including his own), and protecting a man’s life—yet still perplexing.

Surely the duke could have effected all of these goals more easily by simply remaining the duke. And, besides, the degree of deceit and trickery involved in his schemes, the blatant emotional manipulation, give us pause. He is willing, for example, to tell the woman he hopes to marry that her brother has died, just so that he can appear all the more heroic when it is revealed that it is not so. Simultaneously, he is willing to counsel the brother to prepare for death, giving him a sort of nihilistic sermon about the futility of life, even when he knows that the brother will not die. In his constant manipulation of the characters’ emotions and actions, he resembles not only Iago, but Shakespeare himself, as a kind of playwright within the play. Yet of course Vincentio’s actions, involving “real” people, are far more damnable.

The issue of morality, or the lack of it, looms large within this play. The central conflict is, apparently, whether laws should be strictly enforced, or altered by circumstances and tempered by human kindness. Yet this philosophical question is eclipsed by the play’s moral chaos—and morality itself is dissolved into a contest of trickery. Angelo tries to trick Isabella, Isabella to trick Angelo, and Vincentio to trick them all. The duke wins, not because of any moral superiority, but because of superior craftiness; and the question of whether he did as he ought becomes entirely irrelevant to the play’s implausible concluding scene.

This strange concoction of ethics and nihilism, of order and chaos, of desire and whim, makes this play genuinely absorbing, even if not wholly satisfying. It is the sort of play that makes us wonder what was happening in Shakespeare’s own life.

FUCK duke vincentio, ALL my homies fucking HATE duke vincentio. isabella should have gotten to kill him after getting to do whatever she wanted to angelo as well (what was that line about taking his eyes out?)

A complete mess of a subplot that periodically hinges on Shakespeare's favorite thing: people misusing words to an antonymic degree, yet I ate this up. The crucial scene between Isabella and Angelo made me audibly gasp. The Duke is literally insane (THAT ENDING????), and has a wonderfully hypocritical God complex. Elbow made me laugh. The fact that Barnardine kind of just outright declines execution, and he, in fact, doesn't get executed? I live. Lucio roasting the Duke within an inch of his life? Lovely. I also just feel like this problem-play is so current. Let's talk about a broken judicial system (or government as a whole) and the ways in which women's narratives are discounted with ease unless a man performs a whole spiel to have her be heard. Let's talk about men who do work against misogyny but have a white knight complex that perpetuates the misogyny they supposedly critique. The whole court scene is lunacy. It's not a funny comedy, and it seems to break down the tropes of a standard Shakesepearean comedy metatextually. The ending is happy in that no one dies, and the conflict is resolved, and there are marriages to be had. But the marriages are punishments. Shakespeare doesn't even allow what is normally his comedies' alleviating force to do what it tends to do, rather it reinforces the broken social mores, codes, and de jure realities that inflict suffering upon us all every day.

angelo when i catch you....

i live for all the biblical allusions in this book. currently studying it for my a level and i'm in love with it

shakespeare writing about sin and vice and hypocrisy but setting it in Vienna so Queen Lizzie doesn't come down too hard on him, iconic.

This is quite an amazing play. Harold Bloom (a fan of Measure for Measure, which he considers his favorite next to Macbeth, in his book on Shakespeare) is right to call this a masterpiece of nihilism, despite its Christian overtones and allusions.

Everyone seems to be unlikable, yet Shakespeare in his genius of representation created a world where everyone can be understood and known, where everyone is human.

I'll need to read the prose comedy more to untangle it. The Duke is the center of the play. And Isabella and Angelo, with their soliloquies, form another kind of center.

It's even darker in some ways than that other problem play Troilus and Cressida, albeit it has more comic trapping. Both plays - amazing plays they are - end in a kind of ambiguity - what will happen next?

Measure for Measure - highly recommended. Think of it as a kind of dark sex comedy with Christian overtones and disguised.

Edit (August 15 2018): I reread this, hopefully I can make a successful stage adaptation of this. I am baffled a little by some of the comedy, yet the “serious” stuff with Isabella and Angelo and Duke Vincentio and Claudio still remains as compelling and poetic as when I first read it a year ago. I am not sure how to feel about the Duke and his plan.

The Duke feels his city went dissolute since everyone’s not being moral, and the play is slanted from his perspective, yet like much of Shakespeare, there’s serious complexity. Is his view right? Should sexuality be regulated by the state (my answer is that, short of preventing rape, no)? Should the State be the guardian of morality? The Duke’s resolution seem to answer affirmatively, yet I am not sure how good a resolution this is, and neither does Shakespeare.

But the Christian resonances throughout are such and of a certain truth, however nihilistic the play can otherwise be, that I can’t help but feel Shakespeare had an authentic Christian spirit in him. This isn’t to say he was a Catholic, but he may have been a kind of crypto-Catholic. I’m not entirely sure. I don’t think we can be resolved on Shakespeare’s religion.

The #MeToo moment has made this play unsettlingly relevant, and that’s no small matter. Needless to say, I think Shakespeare is very much against the sexual harassers and is for the women who are hurt by the powerful abusers.

Definitely one of his darker comedies review to come.