OK. So this is the third of five lectures approaching Shakespeare this week. I'm talking about measure for measure. What I want to try to do this week is to show that the play insistently demands that we ask what kind of play is it? What genre is it? And as usual, to try and show some of the different ways we can approach that question. What kind of genre of play is measure for measure?
I think I've been trying to say throughout this series that answers to questions about Shakespeare's plays are often less interesting than the questions themselves and that more substantially the fact that we ask those questions is really intrinsic to the play. A part of it's addressed to us, not just an obstacle. We need to get round. However, notwithstanding all that, there is actually quite a simple answer to the question of what kind of genre of play.
Measure for measure is. And that answer comes from the book. We heard about last week the collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. Gathered together by his fellow actors, John Hemming and Henry Kondo in 16 23 as the First Folio. Last week I mentioned that Hemming and Kendall's description of how previously works by Shakespeare had entered print was in fact economically motivated.
It was an attempt to discredit previous publications in order to make the current rather expensive and rather belated volume more saleable. We might read a similar agenda into that place. That book's title, Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, an attempt to use three genres to suggest breadth.
Fun for all the family. But those three genres, which have been established by the title of the First Folio, by its catalogue page, have been one of its lasting bequests to Shakespearean scholarship. The First Folio catalogue, which lists the comedies. Then the histories. Then the tragedies. The First Folio catalogue places measure for measure firmly amongst the comedies.
It snuggled in before comedy of errors and after Merry Wives of Windsor in a place which could hardly be more generically stable. So lecture over what kind of plays measure for measure. Measure for measure is a comedy. Well, OK, let's carry on. Let's think about why this clear attribution of genre. The fact that there is such a simple answer to this question. Why has that been thought insufficient? Like Twelfth Night or Midsummer Night's Dream. Measure for measure ends with marriages like ours.
You like it? Or two gentlemen of Verona. It has themes of disguise, like the comedy of errors. It keeps a day of sex machinea figure for the end to bring about reconciliation. Like The Merchant of Venice. Not everyone is happy at the end. Like much ado about nothing. It deals with highborn families and their interactions with low life, like The Taming of the Shrew. It ends with a woman forced to or at least agreeing to say the opposite of what she previously held dear.
So. Measure for measure in our own ornithological designation looks Quark's and is a duck. Why is this not been the end of the story? In this lecture, I'm going to use Shakespeare's sources, um, productions of his plays. But I'm also going to use some of the critical history to trace the evolution of measure for measure out of the genre of comedy.
Measure for measure wasn't really very comfortably a comedy when Shakespeare got hold of this story, and nor has it really been a comedy since it left is his hands. It's somehow like one of those pop up tents that's always resting out of its packed up shape. Only Shakespeare, it seems, has the knack to jam it into the comedy bag. So. Measure for measure. Before Shakespeare here were in the territory of Bullock's narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, which if you haven't looked at yet.
I really do recommend that you do. There are two kinds of source for measure for measure. The first is a kind of general folkloric one, which appears in many formats and can give us what the formal analysis of myth calls a myth theme or a plot function. This is the kind of source that Shakespeare could have got from any number of places. I'm from it. The play takes contos of its structure and its plot, not the details of language or characterisation.
So the first is that sort of general kind of folk story source. The second is one that's more direct of some kind of version of an Italian story by Jim Theo. The same sources for Othello in the same year. Talk about both these sources. The first kind of source, the folkloric source, is sometimes known as the story of the monstrous bargain, the monstrous bargain. Sleep with me. And X will be saved in most versions of this story before Shakespeare.
The woman does sleep with the governor or the authority figure. And in most cases, this is not enough to save her imprisoned brother or husband. Often these monstrous bargain stories end with an emperor, king or other higher authority coming in and making the bad man marry the woman he has slept with, thus making a sort of reparation for his behaviour. In Cynthia's version of this story, the woman is the central character in the tale. Her 16 year old brother is in prison for raping a woman.
A crime punishable by death. Despite the fact that he has agreed to marry his victim, an acceptable reparation for the crime of rape in many societies, probably including Jacobean in England in Chintu. Then the woman sleeps with the official to save her brother. But then all is revealed. He is forced to marry her, and then she successfully pleads for his life. So we can see in this outline something of Shakespeare's play. But with some important differences.
Firstly, in Chin Theo, the character of the brother is in prison for rape. Shakespeare makes it quite clear or reasonably clear, in fact, that Claudio is not a habitual fornicator. He and Juliet were engaged to be married. They'd even perhaps undergone some kind of civil handfasting, if not a church marriage ceremony. There is some uncertainty about this in the play.
But Juliet, in her interview with The Friar, makes it clear that her pregnancy is the result of mutual and consensual lovemaking, not violence. That seems to be the only point of that scene actually with the Duke and Juliet is to establish that important point. It's the only time she speaks, isn't it? In the play is to say more or less to say I wasn't raped. So Shakespeare's change has made Claudio more sympathetic than he might have been.
Were he guilty of rape and thus makes the severity of Angelo's interpretation of the law seem all the more questionable. If the job of the deputy is to sort out brothels and fornication, he seems to have picked the wrong case. Although, of course, Claudio's familiarity with Mistress Overdone might suggest that he is indeed a part of this underworld.
Secondly, Shakespeare has made his izabella into a nun or at least a novice nun, and the extent of her religious scruples about sleeping with Angelo is a key axis in the play. Can we agree with that strong statement? More than our brother is our chastity? Isabella is not simply a woman of upright moral character. That's to say that one who is about to devote herself to strict religious principles.
Another, therefore, we might think of the extremists who populate this play and another way in which, uncomfortable as it may seem. She and Angelo are rather well suited. Thirdly, Shakespeare develops the character of the Duke in his play. The Duke in the Disguise of a Friar, observes much of what's happening and plots to engineer that rather complicated denouement.
In all the sources, the Duke figure comes in at the end as the classical dair sex machinea a fantastical, authoritative personage who enters the play right at the conclusion to bring about a resolution in measure for measure. Shakespeare makes the Duke want central and marginal to the action, a looker on in Vienna, as he calls him. With all the associations of the techniques of surveillance politicised by Fusco's work on the prison and on the literary criticism which has drawn on those themes.
All three of these changes, the substitution of consensual sex for rape. The making of Isobella into a nun. And the development of the role of the Duke. They could all be said to bring moral questions to the fore in Shakespeare's version of the story. And the evidence that these have been introduced deliberately makes it difficult to explain them away as somehow incidental or irrelevant to the plot were adjacent, I think, to that notion of strategic opacity, strategic opacity.
Stephen Greenblatt's useful term to designate that characteristic manoeuvre of Shakespeare when confronted with simple behavioural narratives and his sources like the question of the Alagoas motivation, which was when we came into contact with this idea before in measure for measure, the strategic opacity seems designed to have complicated the source material in order to bring unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions to the four.
There's one other change to Cynthia's sauce that we might think about. I said that in that story, the woman at the centre is the main character. Now, that does seem interesting for the genre. The question of John, in measure for measure, there's a strong association of comedy, Shakespearean comedy with dominant women characters. The book by the critic Linda Bamber. Comic Women and Tragic Men summarises the gender politics of Shakespeare's genres quite neatly.
Where are Shakespeare's tragedies tend to be structured around male experience in comedies. Women have agency and their story structures the narrative. That's not to say that women are dominant in a quantitative sense. One of the most useful parts of Jonathan Bate Macmillan edition of The Complete Works, which has been marketed as the RISC Shakespeare, is that in front of each play he gives a numerical breakdown of the number of lines spoken by each of the major characters.
From this we can see that no play by Shakespeare is dominated by women either in the sense that a woman speaks the largest number of lines or that women characters collectively carried the majority of lines. Based analysis for the RSG Shakespeare. It's full of surprises in Antony and Cleopatra, for example. Antony has 25 percent of the lines. And Cleopatra. Only 19 percent quite disproportionate. Particularly considering Antony dies at the end of Act four.
At least we might think, given Cleopatra a chance to get a word in edgeways here. The numbers don't really compute with a qualitative sense that Cleopatra tends to be seen as dominant. Similarly, in much ado about nothing, the numbers tell us that not only Benedek, but also Leonardo, Don Pedro and the vapid Claudio all have more lines than Beatrice. But what the numbers do tell us is that in comedies, women talk more than they do in other genres.
Now, Bates figures for measure for measure are as follows the Duke, 30 percent of the lines izabella 15 percent. Lucio 11 percent. Angelo 11 percent. And then the other characters in descending order. So the Duke, 30 percent. Isobella, 15 percent. Lucio eleven. And Angelo, eleven. Isabella speaks half the number of lines of the Duke, but perhaps it's interesting to try to break down these figures.
She speaks much more in the first half of the play that in the second half will work out the figures if you're interested. My sense is she speaks about three quarters of the lines in the first half of the play and only about one quarter in the second, probably the opposite proportions of the Duke. So somewhere we've got we've got a two hander play a plays, which is about two characters. But there who has the upper hand in that it flips, I think, around the middle of the play.
Isabella has the upper hand, the dominant hand in the first half, the Duke in the second half. So what the play somehow seems to dramatise structurally is its own retreat from comedy by moving from a genre at the beginning where women characters are vocal and dramatically powerful. We get to a genre by the end, in measure for measure in which women are virtually silenced, or at least puppets by male characters.
We can see some echoes of this structure, perhaps in the gender distribution of lines in the Winter's Tale or in Macbeth. So I suppose I am suggesting that we might read that much discussed silence of Isabella in response to the Duke's unexpected marriage proposal. Not so much in psychological terms. Will she marry him? Or in social terms? Does she have any choice but in generic ones?
She's been beaten as the play's central character. She has been bested by the Duke and therefore she has nothing else to say here. The gender politics can be layered onto the genre politics of comedy and tragedy. On the one hand, that's to say the marriages at the end of measure for measure are firm one of the traditions of comedy endings. On the other hand, by silencing one of the Joan with most prominent characters, the active woman, the end of the play seems to negate comic expectations.
So both it both endorses them and negates them. What, though, were comic expectations? Well, there is one kind of generic expectation that we might see generated by Shakespeare's own previous plays. Measure for measure is probably the last of the comedies, a genre that Shakespeare has been writing in right since the beginning of his work in London.
Audiences might then have been schooled from the previous plays about what to expect interrupted courtship, disguise, inadvertent humour from lowballed characters marriages. In conclusion, as we've already identified, measure for measure, both does and does not fit into these expectations.
But theatre goers who are ofay with a more contemporary kind of comedy, though, might have been a bit more comfortable with the plays, frankly, unromantic designation of sex within a within an economy of civic transactions. Measure for measure is Shakespeare's closest attempt that a city comedy in the manner of Middleton, Marston and Decker, where a cast of prostitutes, Bordes, young lovers and corrupt patriarchs battle it out in the contemporary city.
Unsurprisingly, the text of measure for measure as we have it almost certainly has some Middleton in it too. And if you want to follow that up, you should look at the Oxford Middleton, the complete complete collected Oxford Middleton, edited by Gary Taylor and John Love. I mean, it's really interesting to look what measure for measure looks like in that context where it's being seen as a middle Tonin play, a Middleton rewrite. So measure for measure.
That's to say may be more problematic in the light of previous Shakespearean comedies than it is in the light of comedies by other writers in the first months of the Jacobean period. So if we go to Shakespeare wanting it to be same old, same old stuff, he's been doing it for years.
Measure for measure may seem problematic if we're going to the theatre to see the latest kind of John, that the latest kind of play, the city comedy politics and the city comedy style of magical measure is likely to seem much less difficult. It may be then that our or our focus on the author as the primary agent of meaning has produced measure for measure as an anomalous comedy.
And if we were to think about chronology or history as the primary agent of meaning, this would look like a comedy very much in keeping with comedies by other people from the same period. Now, when I was talking about a fellow in first week, I mentioned Frederick Jamison on genre theory. Am I going to go back to this idea? Because I think it's helpful for us in thinking about measure for measure.
Jamison, you remember distinguish between two types of genre theory. The first was semantic semantic theories of genre. Jamison argues aim to describe the essence or meaning of a given genre. The spirit of comedy or tragedy. So I take the semantic understanding of genre to be one that often seems instinctive to us, the sense that the comedies are fun, light-hearted and comic, and that therefore tragedies are serious, grave and tragic.
So that's semantic criticism, the kind of the experience, the general spirit of the play. Jamieson's other type of genre criticism is one he calls syntactic syntactic syntactic genre. Criticism focuses on the mechanisms and structure of genres such as comedy to determine its laws and limits. Quite an interesting legalistic definition by Jainism. Quite interesting for the themes of a measured measure itself to determine the law, the law of anger and its limits.
Jamieson argues that semantic criticism focus focuses on what the text conveys, syntactic criticism on how it works. And we can see an example of how syntactic criticism of comedy, a structure based on formal structures and semantic criticism based on the tone, are in conflict. In this, this is an idea about comedy from Northrop Frye. He's writing about the endings of Twelfth Night and as you like it, case here. I think those two versions of genre theory are in in conflict.
Does not Northrop Frye on the end of Twelfth Night. And as you like, the real critical question involved here is trust. Frye does anything that exhibits the structure of a comedy have to be taken as a comedy, regardless of its content and our attitude to that content? So structurally is like a comedy. Does the content matter? And Fry says, no, it doesn't matter. The structure is what counts.
Does anything that exhibits the structure of comedy have to be taken as a comedy, regardless of its content and our attitude to that content? The answer is clearly yes. A comedy is not a play which ends happily. It is a play in which a certain structure is present and works through to its logical end. Whether we or the cast or the author feel happy about it or not, the logical end is festive. Fry writes. But anyones attitude to the festivity may be that of Orlando or of Jay, please.
A comedy is not a play which ends happily. It's nice. It's a nice challenge to a kind of easy, easy construction of what comedy is, Fry says. No. Comedy is not a play which ends happily. It ends according to the structures of comedy. But the emotional content of that ending is irrelevant. So happy ending happily as an emotional semantic version of genre fries talking about structuralist one.
So in a structure, his view of genre that a comedy has a certain structure and works through to its logical end measure for measure is again entirely a comedy. It's only on tonal grounds. It's only because we don't feel happy about it then because it's not a happy ending. Which Frys said, doesn't matter that the play creates comedy. The play creates problems for us. So much of a measure has the syntactic qualities of a comedy.
It ends in multiple marriages, but it has the semantic qualities of something quite different. Maybe even a tragedy, a bleakly existential world which raises and cannot resolve difficult ethical and moral issues. It's interesting in this regard, perhaps this emptiness, the ethical emptiness of this world, that the the friar who is taking confessions from people and bringing them supposedly bringing them comfort in prison is actually just dressed up.
It's kind of completely empty philosophies. And it is a religion which has no which has no ground to it. At the heart of measure for measure is a scene is the scene in which Claudio in prison is urged to prepare himself his imminent execution. Death, says Claudio, is a fearful thing. Isabella replies quickly, unchained life, a hateful. And then Claudio has an amazingly powerful speech, actually, about death. Let's just have that speech now. I want to die and go.
We know not where to lie in cold obstruction and to rot. This sensible war motion to become a needed clod and the delighted spirit to bathe in fiery floods or to reside in thrilling region of thick ribbed ice to be imprisoned in the view Alice winds and blowing with restless violence round about the pendent world. Or to be worse than worst of those that lawless and incertain thought. Imagine howling. Tis too horrible.
The weariest and most low, that worldly life, that age ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death. Claudia's speeches here on the fear of death, completely uncomfort to unconfident and discomfited. Nobody in the play is able to respond to this at all and say it doesn't. It's not like that. It's in the fact that Claudia doesn't die. I don't think in any way it raises the sort of awful bleakness of that of that vision.
Claudio, speeches on his fear of death in the middle of measure for measure, give him momentarily a tragic status reminiscent of Hamlet. It's very like aspects of Hamlet. I think it's quite interesting that the effort of being so tragic seems to exhaust Claudio and he never again speaks in the play. He can't come back. That's to say, as a comic figure, he's had his tragic moment here and he never gets back.
He doesn't have a role to play in the way the play is going to turn out because he's not in. That's not the play. He is in. Here, the players tussle with generic conventions has a kind of fulcrum around the act of cloud, the fate of Claudio in Act three, the fact perhaps that he isn't executed means that comedy lives to fight another day.
And in that it structurally may be the reverse of the same point in Romeo and Juliet, which gives us the murder of McCue show the last hope in that play for comedy and the sign that tragedy is going to take over. Now, one of the ways we've dealt with the problematic disjunction between syntactic and semantic is to it is to turn the disjunction into its own genre. The genre of the problem play. Talk a bit about what problem play might do.
In answer to the question, what kind of play is measure for measure? Firstly, I think it's important to note that we have distorted the original political meaning of problem play when in the 80s 90s, Frederic Blow US identified a category of Shakespearean drama he called Problem Play. He took the term from the drama current. At the time, he was writing the challenging depictions of sexual relations and social mores in didactic drama by Ibsen or George Bernard Shaw for Boaz.
The problem plays well. Measure for measure. All's well that ends well. Troilus and Cressida so far perhaps so familiar and then, more surprisingly, Hamlet. For Boaz, the defining characteristic of the problem play was that it dramatised a moral problem. So it was about a problem rather than being one. The play's the problem plays both argued, introducers into highly artificial societies whose whose civilisation is ripe to rottenness at the close.
Our feeling is neither simple joy nor pain. We are excited, fascinated, perplexed for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome. The issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome. Problem plays, both suggests, are concerned with questions that can only be explored, not resolved. The late 19th century problem plays focussed on almost abstracted philosophical discussion, sometimes to the extent of sacrificing dramatic characterisation or narrative realism.
But in this sense of the term problem play, we might reinterpret Hamlet as focussed on a central moral dilemma. Should the dead to be revenged? And in the case of measure for measure, it becomes easier to see it as a deliberate dramatisation of various moral problems. Our harsh laws. Justified is a woman's chastity worth more than a man's life? How can the problem of sex outside marriage be regulated?
The boss is rather nice designation of the problem plays on rabbi reference to the pioneering social and philosophically committed drama of his own period has got lost by criticism. So we've started to think of problem plays as being problems rather than about problems. Problem play for Boaz is not a term of disapproval, but it very quickly became one. We can see this in John Dover, Wilson's ingenious designation of problem plays.
In 1957, Wilson tells us there are at least two kinds of problem child. First, the genuinely abnormal child whom no effort will ever bring back to normality. And second, the child who is interesting and complex rather than abnormal. APT indeed to be a problem for parents and teachers, but destined to fulfilment in the larger scope of adult life. Now all's well and all's well in measure for measure. Like the first problem child, there is something radically schizophrenic about them.
Hamlet and Troilus and Tresidder alike. The second problem child. Full of interest and complexity, but divided within themselves. Only in the eyes of those who have misjudged them. To put the difference another way, Hamlet and trollers and Tresidder are problem plays because they display interesting problems. All's well in measure for measure because they are problems in the family of plays.
Then these are the ones we don't let out. They, like the Queen's mad cousin, shut up secretly in that asylum in Kent. They are, honestly. Double Wilson's view of the plays is we can see deeply normative. These plays are problems when set against other normal plays. To be schizophrenic is to be difficult. Unaccommodating do not, not, does not, not designated for fulfilment in the scope of adult life.
Perhaps we can get a clue about the lovely blonde haired plays he's thinking about in the title of one of his other books. Shakespeare's happy comedies. So the question of genre is deeply implicated here with an investment in the normal. The idea of the normal, which extends far beyond early modern comedies. And in this, I think Derval Wilson represents the views of his age rather than being exceptional. So what now about the genre of problem plays?
Well, first, we need to acknowledge the massive shift in the term problem within critical discourse in the last 30 or so years. To be problematic is now to be edgy, interesting, a square peg in a round hole. These are all now highly positive terms of differentiation from the implicit blandness of the unproblematic in this critical environment. Measure for measure may seem to have found its place less hoppity scripted than the other comedies.
Not so much in the way of Hey Noni Noni. Not quite so sunny. A strong sense that sex is powerful and savage and damaging rather than cheerfully deferred into Beatrice and Benedict's interminable banter. Just get a room, guys. Or the interchangeable pairs at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream in measure for measure. Things go wrong. That can't be easily put right. The damage to the relationship between Claudio and Isabella, for instance.
And then this the play can seem more grown up and less escapist than the world the comedies have traditionally presented. I talked last week about Henry the Fifth as a fantasy, a historical fantasy, a fantasy of victory over the French [INAUDIBLE] Irish fantasy of the underdog triumphing a fantasy of social hierarchies flattened in military camaraderie and we might think, a fantasy of male relationships free from the complications of women.
Four years later, in measure for measure, the theatre is presenting a very different kind of entertainment. One way of seeing that measure for measures total awkwardness has found its moment in the late 20th century is to see how its difficulties have been projected back onto earlier comedies. To the history of performance of measure for measure in the middle 20th century might have been to try to make measure for measure more like one of those normal comedies in particular.
By jollying up the conclusion Isabella throws her girlish arms around the Jiuquan realises she never wanted to be a nun at all. Claudio and Juliet look down adoringly at their cute baby and even grumpy old Angiulo sex starts to think he hasn't got such a bad deal after all. For a version of this, you could look at the BBC version of the play directed by Desmond Davis in 1979.
This is a kind of production of measure for measure, which also has no truck with generic difficulties and which affirms it very clearly as a comedy. But I think the opposite has now begun to happen. Rather than trying to interpret measure for measure in terms of the happier comedies, some of its darkness seems to have rubbed off on them.
We are more likely to see a production of Twelfth Night Now, which maximises rather than minimises the weirdness of those final marriages where Olivia, as you remember, has married someone she's only just met. We'll see. You know, has a lady boy for his fancies. Queen Antonio looks on sadly from the sidelines, and Malvolio swears revenge on his enemies. We're much more likely to see a version of The Tempest, which stresses Antonios unrepentant.
Another example of an instance of textual silence, which now tends to interpret to be interpreted not so much as tacit agreement with what's been said, but as unreconciled resistance to it. So the silence of Antônio about Prospero's forgiveness rather similar.
An adjacent to the Duke's marriage proposal at the end of Measure for Measure and many of the other comedies, including The Winter's Tale that I'll talk about in a couple of weeks, have undergone a similar theatrical darkening to become less resolved, less happy, more problematic in the manner of measure for measure seen in this light.
Then measure for measure has been central to the redefinition of the comedies are serious and complex rather than as it was in previous critical and theatrical dispensations. The exception to the genre's intrinsic lightness and good humour. One last element I want to try to take on in thinking how we could investigate the question of measure for measure genre is the notion of tragicomedy. Now, tragicomedy is something I'll talk about more in the last lecture of this series on The Winter's Tale.
But it may be that it's useful here to. One last source of Shakespeare is the measure for measure that I haven't yet mentioned. It's a dialogue of plays by George Wetstone. The play is a cold Promus and Cassandra. Wetstone is also drawing on the Italian stories of Chintu, and we think Shakespeare consulted both this English source Wetstone Promise and Cassandra and the Italian.
Although there are debates about how good Shakespeare's Italian was, Wetstone divides the play promicin Cassandra into two parts. The first is a broadly tragic episode in which Promus the governor bargains with Cassandra to have sex with him in order to save her brother from execution. Wetstone gives us a scene in which Cassandra visits her brother in prison, just as Isabella does Claudio. But in Wetstone, the brother persuades Sandra that she must undertake this bargain.
So what happens in Shakespeare is Isabella is not persuaded by Claudia and and leaves him to it, in which then the brother does persuade her that it's the right thing to do, to sleep with the governor, to get his to get his freedom. Having had his way, Promis sends to Cassandra, the head of her brother, in fact, is not the head of her brother. The brother has escaped, but the first part of the play ends with her suicidal grief and promises increasing feelings of guilt.
So the first part of the play. It is it is a tragedy. And it says it's a set. It's separated out as a tragedy. The second part is all about comic restitution. Cassandra approaches the king to intervene. He pardons her brother. He makes promises go through with his promise to marry her. Now, there's lots of interesting things, I think, here in generic terms.
It's that wetstone divides the two sections into a tragic movement and then a comic movement, as if the span of the story is so extreme that it can't be incorporated satisfactorily into a single, aesthetically coherent frame. It's interesting to think whether you whether you feel Shakespeare had succeeded in bringing these two parts together or whether the join shows, I was trying to say I think the joint is this is somewhere in EP three.
Interesting, too, to think about whether that source story, even where Shakespeare has changed it, is somehow imprinted in a ghostly form on measure for measure. I'm thinking in particular of those highly charged interviews between Isabella and Angelo in Act two. In a perverse way, these conversations stand for all the courtships. We don't get in the play and which are usually the stateful plot of romantic comedy. We never see Claudia and Juliet together. We never see Lucy.
Okay, keep down. We never see the Duke and Isabella undergoing this sort of conversation in order that his Angelo and Isabella don't get together. We may feel that Shakespeare has had to work rather hard and that the effort somewhat shows he introduces the Bedrick, the belated figure of Marianna, and stretches the role of the supreme governor Wetstone King across the whole of the play.
Perhaps there is a sense of strain in this play, a sense that the characters are not all fully signed up to the same genre. Angelo, for instance, wants to be in a trip. He wants to be in a tragedy. He, too, is kicking against the play as a comedy. So I've tried to suggest that there's the question of the genre. Is it somehow internal to measure for measure, not just external to our attempts to categorise it?
So perhaps there's a sense of strain in this play, a sense that the characters are not all fully signed up to the same genre and that the syntactically comic ending can only be achieved with some visible strain both within and through the play. So so far, I've talked a lot about Shakespeares sources in order to corroborate rather than answer the question about it, John. What the sources show us is that the question of Shakespeare's Yorick, a measure for measure, is of interest to the play.
And therefore asking the question is what the play demands. I want to end with some tiny version, though, perhaps of a point which relates more specifically to the texts of the play. Spent a lot of time on Henry the Fifth last week talking about the different material texts of that play. There is no quarto text of measure for measure. It's published for the first time, the first and only time in the Folio.
So it isn't a play that's susceptible to the kind of comparative analysis I was trying to show last week when I talked about the fact that the choruses to Henry the Fifth were not present in the quarter. But there still are some things in the Folio text of measure for measure that are interesting and that we tend not to see in our modern edited editions.
And my last point is a single word. In the Folio text, Claudio greets the news of Angelo's terrible proposal to his sister in the exclamation, the Prensky, Angelo, Prinsloo, P, R, E and Z i e. Isabella picks up the same quote a few lines later. Prensa Gods frenzy is a word. We do not have a meaning for some editors who work with the not entirely unreasonable premise that their job is to make Shakespeare's comprehensible as possible. It meant the word.
So we lose a word. We don't know what it means. Frenzy and we get a new word in its place. Usually we get the word precise, a word which in the period is very strongly associated with Puritanism and therefore helps the reading of Angelo's character as religious and hypocritical. Claudius seems to be saying the Puritan Angello has made you has made this bargain to you. You know, that's that's particularly outrageous. But the word in the Folio twice is Prensky.
I think I want to end the lecture with a plea for Prensky as a tiny microcosm of the questions unanswerable that the play throws out. Those are questions which I think we should respect as questions rather than try to replace with answers. Now, next week, I'm going to talk about Macbeth. And my question about Macbeth is going to be, why do the things in this play happen?