It doesn’t have enough laughs to be a comedy and it’s not considered a tragedy because no one dies. The entire plot of Measure for Measure is directed by the games of one autocrat.
The Duke of Vienna pretends to go away so that he can test whether his deputy Angelo is as upright as he seems, and also to shock his citizens into a stricter morality.
Angelo, bestowed with absolute power, decides to clean up the brothels of the city and convict a fornicating man or two as a warning. He fixes on the unlucky Claudio, who has been meeting his fiancée Julieta on the sly.
Arrested and speedily condemned to death, Claudio has his sister Isabella, a novice at a convent, plead for him with Angelo.
Isabella is so repulsed by her brother’s “crime” that her pleas are at first cold and reluctant. But once she gets going, she is persuasive: “Go to your bosom,” she says to Angelo. “Knock there; and ask your heart what it doth know That’s like my brother’s fault; if it confess A natural guiltiness such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother’s life.” The effect on Angelo is shocking. He concedes that she speaks “such sense that my sense breeds with it”.
That is, he is so turned on by her eloquence and her icy chastity that his own morality falls apart. He suggests she sleep with him in order to free her brother.
That’s why it’s considered a problem play. In her argument with Angelo, Isabella proves herself one of the strongest female characters in all Shakespeare’s works. Portia in The Merchant of Venice is nothing to her. But the emotional core of the play remains the scene in which Isabella tells her brother the deal Angelo has offered.
At first brother and sister agree it would be an impossible act, but Claudio trembles at the thought of his imminent execution. “Ay, but to die, and go we know notwhere; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become a kneaded
clod....” He suggests that Isabella’s sleeping with Angelo would not be such a sin after all. “O faithless coward!” she cries. “O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?” She then declares she would not save him even if she could do it simply by bending down. “I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,” she says.
Though Claudio repents immediately and reconciles himself to death, and though Isabella works to free her brother without compromising her vows, she is strangely resigned when she hears he has been executed after all. She waits for the Duke to return so that she can denounce Angelo and demand justice. In the last scene, when Claudio is discovered alive and unharmed, and Isabella’s accusation of Angelo is vindicated, no lines are spoken between brother and sister. They are only silent witnesses of the end of the Duke’s little charade, and no reunion between them balances their reproachful parting.
When Isabella has declared that Claudio’s life is not worth the loss of her soul, and when Claudio can’t see what Angelo’s indecent proposal would mean to Isabella, is forgiveness possible between brother and sister? Or does the fire in which they were tested leave nothing of their bond but the taste of ashes? Shakespeare leaves us no clue. Perhaps no one has died in this play, but what has broken can never again be mended.
Latha is a writer/editor. Read more of her work at >lathaanantharaman.blogspot.com . Write to her at anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
