Measure for Measure

There are times when it is difficult to find balance. And to maintain it.

Today, I am deep in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), preparing sessions for A Level Literature students studying OCR and Edexcel specifications, both of which use the play as a set text for external examinations.

Students studying Measure for Measure are assessed on their close reading skills and on their ability to “explore literary texts informed by different interpretations” so my desk is laden with copies of the play alongside critical material in anthologies and study guides. Meanwhile, my computer monitor shows multiple tabs carrying articles on the play from the university library’s digital collection. This is very normal academic multi-tasking. But I am also halfway through filling a basket of kindling, and the washing machine is nearing the end of a cycle. In between all this, I have chopped onions to begin a soup, and sent invoices and Zoom links for forthcoming tutoring sessions. And, at the back of my mind, lurks an urgent paragraph that must go in my PhD ‘Wool’ chapter before I forget the word-sequence that came to me while walking Bruno.

There are certainly moments when I would like to disentangle literature from life so that I can be alone with a text minus the chores. Two of Measure for Measure’s central characters do just this: Isabella withdraws into the chaste environment of a convent “wishing a more strict restraint”, while the Duke shrugs off his civic authority and adopts a disguise. As he explains to Friar Thomas, “… I have ever loved the life removed”, and he requests a monk’s habit so that he can become an observer of state affairs rather than a participant in them.

In contrast, Shakespeare never explains Isabella’s decision to enter a convent so audiences must evaluate whether she is motivated primarily by a desire to leave the gendered pressures of ordinary life, or whether she is hastening towards the purity of spiritual purpose. And - of course - these needs are not binaries. Most of us are simultaneously moving away from and going towards, which is absolutely true of my regular trips to the greenhouse to sew seeds when I am stuck in the middle of a thorny paragraph.

Stepping out of life’s busy dilemmas is problematic, as Measure for Measure investigates. The Duke is always a fake friar who must eventually push back his cowl and resume responsibility for justice and social order. Isabella, on the other hand, is a true member of a religious community and yet no sooner have we met her than she is summoned away from her prayerful existence to petition for her brother’s life, never to return to the convent.

Elsewhere in Vienna, the brothel-keeper Mistress Overdone is having a difficult time without the optional luxury of retreat. Instead she is on the economic frontline as customers blame her establishment for their sexually transmitted diseases and new anti-fornication laws wreck her business, “what with the war, with with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk.”

For Mistress Overdone, prison is the only likely escape from the demands of business. For Juliet, pregnant-outside-marriage, the prospect is not sanctity but being disposed of to ‘some fitter place’ not of her choosing. And Kate Keepdown, mother of Lucio’s illegitimate child, is also anchored to daily life by the practical responsibilities of caring for a baby.

In Measure for Measure, life’s moral hurly-burly pulls even the most reluctant characters away from solitude and into ethical and theatrical action. This play demands that characters function as bodies-in-the-world, with all of the challenges that showing up entails. For me - this afternoon - showing up means that there is still soup to make and kindling to split. I must also finish collecting quotations for a session exploring the play’s representation of leadership, the law, and hypocrisy. As I move through these tasks, Joe Biden is on my mind because today’s news cycle resonates uncomfortably with Measure for Measure and the outgoing president’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter.

With the radio puttering in the background while I move between kitchen and office, political thunder rumbles in headlines and interviews. I hear seasoned journalists explain that in making a fatherly choice, Biden has become a political hypocrite in the face of Trump’s disdain for the proper rule of law. In doing so, they say, he has undermined his personal credibility and his professional legacy after a lifetime of public service.

I find myself a long way from judgement. Instead, I listen to the language of justification and explanation, and notice how difficult it is to be entangled in the details of life. From my desk, I imagine Shakespeare at his desk in 1604, writing Measure for Measure in the year of James I’s coronation. As a member of The King’s Men, Shakespeare received four and a half yards of red cloth for this momentous occasion and Measure was performed in the banqueting hall of the Palace of Whitehall during the Christmas festivities of 1604.

This play’s proximity to power and to the body of the monarch himself gives a sharply political edge to its investigation of authority, responsibility, sin, and punishment. Measure for Measure asks very tough questions about how we engage in the world and about the nature of our interventions, moral and legal. The play evokes all the murky qualities of human vulnerability in order to challenge concepts of balance and appropriate ‘measure’. As the characters struggle to mediate their desires with legal and spiritual constructs, the play demands entanglement. “You have to be a part of this”, Measure insists, despite the temptations of ‘sanctuary’, the difficulty of achieving balance, and the moral mess that we find when we engage with the world.