Measure for Measure

"It’s not a likeable play, they’re not likeable characters, it’s not a warm play. I think it’s a different side of Shakespeare, writing a philosophical, ideas-driven play. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about it is a sense that it seems like a mash-up. It feels to me as though all the characters are off-cuts from other plays. Claudio, Isabella’s brother who’s imprisoned, wants to be Hamlet. He wants to have big long speeches about death and the unknowability of it. The Duke wants to be in a romantic comedy where he can say at the end, “Hey presto, here we all are and we’re getting married.” Angelo, I think wants to be Brutus, or a tragic figure. And Isabella wants what lots of women in Shakespeare’s comedies want, which is to be independent and not to have a husband. We always know that if that’s what a woman says at the beginning of the play, she is not going to be able to say it at the end. Shakespeare sees a woman who says she doesn’t want to get married as a challenge. He’ll throw the most extraordinary plot at that woman in order to make her marry. It’s about the impossibility of compromise, or people who won’t compromise. In Measure for Measure , Isabella and Angelo are puritanical fundamentalists who deserve each other. That’s a deeply unfeminist thing to say, because she doesn’t want him and he’s an aggressor, I can see that. But the play has got all this sex in it and all these marriages at the end, and the only scenes that could possibly count as courtship scenes of back-and-forth conversation between a man and a women—as we get in comedy—are the interviews between Isabella and Angelo. They’re a really perverse kind of wooing scene. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My academic training is very resistant to the implications of that question. Given that Shakespeare’s plays depict such different things, it’s a category error to think that any one of them tells us what he thinks about a single topic. I think the problem plays are part of a rather bleak moral world view right at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, during the plague, and a sense of corruption that we’re going to see rather interestingly developed in Jacobean plays. It may tell us something about the times rather than about him."