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Overview
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691607207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1461 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent
By Darryl J. Gless
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06403-1
CHAPTER 1
The Problem of Kind
Since accurate identification of genre in part determines accurate response to linguistic detail, a valid interpretation of Measure for Measure ought to deal carefully with its usually neglected early scenes. In those scenes, Shakespeare reveals quickly and forcefully that he is writing neither a tragedy nor a satiric comedy like Marston's Malcontent. If we restrict our attention for the moment to large, overt plot elements, we learn in act 1, scene 1 and act 1, scene 3 that Measure for Measure concerns a duke who departs mysteriously only to return as a disguised observer of his substitutes. As every student familiar with the play's sources knows, and as ordinary observers can recognize on their own, the motif belongs generally to folklore, more immediately to the broad genre of romance. The central figure in this romance motif is altogether appropriate, since we can readily foresee that the Duke's social and political stature, and his disguise, confer upon him powers beyond those of ordinary men. They grant him an unnatural degree of freedom from his environment, a seeming omniscience and omnipotence. Although he recognizes (in 1.3) certain limits to his political powers, the Duke's disguise promises new autonomy born of the hidden knowledge to be gained from espionage. At the outset, then, we recognize that the Duke has strong affinities with heroes typical of romance.
Our preliminary generic conception therefore begins to specify a range of possibilities about the category of language to which Measure for Measure belongs. That range is broad indeed, for romance embraces anything from the naive tale in which exciting action is alpha and omega to the somewhat weightier popular narratives Shakespeare found in Italian novellas, to the sophisticated hybrid romance epics of the high Renaissance. Our knowledge of Shakespeare's immediate sources supports the belief that his drama belongs broadly to the same eclectic family of romantic story that authors as diverse as Ariosto, Sidney, and Spenser found so malleable and potent in pleasurably communicating heavy intellectual freight. This generic identity raises expectations of further events that have little in common with what we ordinarily call "realism." Our expectations will of course be modified as the play proceeds, but we are led at the outset to expect that other nonrepresentational motifs may join that of the disguised and spying Duke, motifs such as the substituted bed mate and the comprehensive and unnaturally merciful judgment scene of the conclusion. These expectations are present at first only as part of a provisional guess at the kind of meaning we confront.
Along with the initial plot motif that predicts romance, there appear concurrent indications that the play is to be a comedy — at least of some sort. A startling feature of most Christian-symbolic and of hostile-realistic accounts of the play is their common refusal to acknowledge the play's insistently comic mood. As Arthur Kirsch has pointed out, "one would hardly guess in reading the pages of many of its critics that the play is often funny. The most insistent comedy, of course, occurs in the subplot. ... Before the main action develops, we are introduced to a judgment scene (II,i), the play's first, which is dominated by a mélange of Elbow's malapropisms and Pompey's puns, and a similar mood, broad and usually bawdy, is sustained whenever the low-life characters appear." For the purpose of ascertaining generic expectations, we should note that this mood of broad and bawdy humor appears well before act 2. In the play's second scene, Lucio and his dissipated colleagues regale us with a rapid-fire series of jokes — frowned upon by the graver sort of critics — that turn repeatedly on some especially significant themes: the law, sexual license, and its consequence, the pox. From the beginning of the play, therefore, the serious and potentially tragic tone of Measure for Measure is modulated by long stretches of boisterous and freewheeling comedy. In short, it is manifest — especially in the theater, where narrow prejudgments undergo insistent assault from the art of living actors and the ingenuity of directors as well as from language alone — that uniformity of tone is to be found in neither half of the play. If there is to be tonal consistency in Measure for Measure, we expect from the outset to find it neither in an unvarying comic or an unvarying tragic mood, but rather in a purposeful blend of varying local tones generated by a mixture of styles, high and low, poetic and prosaic. This blend, it is true, becomes increasingly comic as the play moves toward its conclusion, but there is no uniquely abrupt alteration in act 3, scene 1. To require a uniformly comic mood is to demand farce; to hunger for an unmitigated tragic tone is to demand melodrama.
Taken together, the persistence of comic elements in the earliest scenes and the promise of a typical romantic plot imply that interpretations centering on "a very simple and passionate appetite" to watch the impending tragedy of Angelo, Claudio, and Isabella are less than comprehensive. They also — and this is crucial — misconstrue the single characteristic that most powerfully determines the play's intrinsic genre. This characteristic relates Measure forMeasure to a literary kind much broader than the traditional genres, and I incline to call it the mode of the play. By this term I mean the play's rhetorical stance, its peculiar orientation toward the audience — an orientation established by certain characteristic types of syntax, diction, imagery, allusion, and informational lacunae. Properly understood, its rhetorical posture is the trait that chiefly gives Measure for Measure an undeniably artful coherence. In brief, the primary quality of the play's distinguishing mode is a deliberate reticence about key issues, a calculated vagueness that combines with imagery, diction, and allusions of cosmic amplitude to generate implications of immense scope. This combination establishes a relationship with the audience that has little to do with "appetite" of any kind, much less an appetite for tragedy.
A look at the play's first lines will help to clarify my meaning and set us on the right path to discover the literary kind of the play — the generic type of meaning that characterizes the text and helps us assign appropriate meaning to its various parts.
Duke. Escalus.
Esc. My lord.
This is as simple in its way as is the more famous opening gambit of Hamlet, and in both plays simplicity is deceptive. Measure for Measure might appropriately begin with line 3 ("Of government the properties to unfold"), which initiates requisite exposition. But the playwright chooses to direct our attention, before all else, to Duke Vincentio's relationship with one of his deputies, and the nature of this relationship is not explained, it is dramatized — defined as much by silence as by statement. In the absence of all prior knowledge of the Duke, of Escalus, and of their present situation (we wait until line 18 to be told, and then obliquely, that the Duke plans an "absence"), Escalus's curt reply invites interpretation. His "My lord," accompanied no doubt by a reverential gesture, implies obedience — the prompt, usually unquestioning readiness to obey his superior that marks Escalus's behavior throughout the play. And the very brevity of his answer suggests, simultaneously, his reluctance to call attention to that prompt obedience.
On stage this is suggested fleetingly, but its purpose becomes apparent moments later, when a new deputy is called to engage in a parallel ritual of deputation. This time the Duke receives a response considerably more copious:
Ang. Always obedient to your Grace's will, I come to know your pleasure. [1.1.25-26]
Unlike Escalus, Angelo is self-dramatizing; he is eager to have his prompt appearance interpreted as evidence of undeviating loyalty. His opening speech, therefore, because of the tacit contrast with Escalus's, suggests the vainglory that will soon be revealed as one of Angelo's ruling passions. In both cases, minute hints highlighted by an unspoken contrast evoke, or at least seem calculated to evoke, expectations that are fulfilled as the play proceeds.
Though it may at first appear trivial, this point is worth dwelling on yet longer because the presentation of Escalus and of Angelo generates precise expectations about the type of language the play continually employs. This can best be identified by analogy, for Escalus's laconic obedience renders him comparable to one of Western literature's most familiar exemplars of self-abnegating obedience: "God ... said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am" (Gen. 22:1). This analogy is pertinent not because Shakespeare intended an allusion to the biblical story, but because his manner of presenting the relationship between the Duke and Escalus is in significant ways similar to the Elohist's presentation of the relationship of God and Abraham. It will be helpful therefore to recall Eric Auerbach's discussion of the mimetic manner of the Elohist as it contrasts with Homeric mimesis. Unlike Homer's "externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground," the Elohist gives us narrative shorn of all but the essential foreground, and indeed of all temporal and spatial coordinates. Abraham's "here I am" is no indication of space; "the Hebrew word means only something like 'behold me,' and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, who has called to him — Here am I awaiting thy command." The same holds true for temporal details, like the three days' journey that for Abraham begins "early in the morning," itself a detail intended not to indicate actual time, but to symbolize "the resolution, the promptness, the punctual obedience of the sorely tried Abraham." Similarly, of all the instruments, beasts, and characters in the story, only Isaac receives any kind of description: God says, "Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest." Yet this is no description in the usual sense; it is included only "so that it may become apparent how terrible Abraham's temptation is, and that God is fully aware of it." The magnitude of this terrible temptation is of course the central point of the story, but it is not developed in explicit detail. It is left to us, by interpretation of sparse yet significant narrative details, to discover the gravity of the temptation.
This is also true of direct discourse, for although the characters speak, "their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer ... to externalize thoughts — on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. God gives his command in direct discourse, but he leaves his motives and his purpose unexpressed; Abraham, receiving the command, says nothing and does what he has been told to do." In short, it is the dearth of foreground, the suppression of all but the most significant mimetic details, the terse, unexpressive dialogue, that endow the Elohistic text, even in its factual and psychological elements, with an aura of mystery. And this sense of mystery, of hidden depths, positively demands the subtle investigation and interpretation it has received from untold generations of scholars, Rabbinic and Christian.
Drama is by nature more prodigal of detail than is the Elohist's text. But despite our knowledge of the Duke's and of Escalus's spatial relationships, of their physical stature, clothing, voice timbre, and so on, the opening of Measure for Measure is comparable to the story of Abraham in its calculated reticence. Each author deliberately and consistently suppresses linguistic and thematic ligatures and withholds information for which he nonetheless creates an appetite. The suppression of ligatures, both linguistic and thematic, is well illustrated in the contrast between the opening speeches of Escalus and Angelo. Their contrasting characters and their relationship to a developing theme of obedience remain implicit; yet these things are nonetheless clearly revealed through parallels of action, through subtle contrasts in language, and, if we have tenacious memories (or opportunity for a second reading or viewing), through subsequent events.
Perhaps the most apparent informational lacuna of scene ? is that which shrouds Duke Vincentio's departure in unrelieved mystery. Shakespeare allows only a sidelong reference to "our absence," twice tantalizes his audience with the ceremonial conferral of commissions whose contents are given in only the vaguest terms, and concludes with allusions to an affair that demands extreme haste:
of so quick condition
That it prefers itself, and leaves unquestion'd
Matters of needful value.
[1.1.53-55]
Far more than Abraham's Lord, the Duke gives commands and engages in direct discourse aplenty, but his motives and purposes remain altogether unexpressed. And this leaves unquestioned matters we ordinarily think needful at the beginning of a dramatic narrative.
Duke Vincentio's overt behavior is only the most apparent focus for mystery in scene 1. His language itself frequently lapses into an infectious interrogative mood. While they enhance our power to discern the implicit contrast between the deputies, the repeated interrogatives that precede Angelo's entrance help induce an attitude of questioning attentiveness that will soon come to characterize our total response to the play.
Duke. Call hither,
I say, bid come before us Angelo.
What figure of us, think you, he will bear?
For you must know, we have with special soul
Elected him our absence to supply;
Lent him our terror, drest him with our love,
And given his deputation all the organs
Of our own power. What think you of it?
[1.1.14-21]
The Duke's questions solicit our own and ensure that we watch Angelo's behavior with special care. With this speech, we begin to participate in the play's basic, most pervasive and significant thematic activity. We begin to observe characters narrowly, with an eye to assessment; we begin, in short, to judge.
Shakespeare's effort to engage his audience in direct intellectual participation in the play's thematic and dramatic activities is evident not only in the Duke's repeated interrogatives. It appears more generally in the dark suggestiveness of language "fraught with background." Such language is well suited to a figure who remains markedly mysterious throughout the play and whom critics have long recognized as a prime determinant of our overall response. In his role as initiator of the action and contriver of subsequent plots to rectify his subjects' errors, the Duke in large part determines the play's structure, and from the outset it is his conspicuously enigmatic character that feeds, encourages, and provides a focus for our most insistent questions. In terms of traditional comic types, he therefore appears to combine the structural function of contriving eiron and the mood-focusing function of the buffoon.
But the mood he generates is mysterious, not festive, and in the speech quoted above the enigma results largely from diction that gives the character's very opacity a distinctly theological cast. "With special soul," the Duke has "elected" "Angelo," a name heightened in rhetorical force by its odd position at the end of a syntactically distorted sentence. Since the name translates as "angel" and so constitutes a pun that later results in thematically significant wordplay (2.4.16-17), we are encouraged to recognize, at least dimly, the patently theological terminology that accompanies it. The Duke allusively presents himself as an analogue of God, specially electing this Angelo to receive the terrible godlike power and the paternal love proper to absolute monarchy — and to deity.
The imagery of lending and of dressing suggests a sharp disjunction between Angelo's inherent powers and those granted from without. This disjunction is itself introduced by the word "figure" (1.16), which constitutes a metaphor that stresses Angelo's continuing dependence on higher authority and hints that his powers derive altogether from the obedience that is a thematic concern in this scene. The language asks, in short, that we view Angelo from the outset as an image or likeness — a cipher "dressed in a little brief authority" — of an absent power. This, at first, is an interpretive guess. It soon proves valid, since the idea of dependence is reintroduced whenever the other characters name Angelo, as they persistently do, the "deputy" or "substitute" (1.2.146, 171; 3.1.88, 187, 255; 3.2.33, 34; 4.2.76; 4.3.113; 5.1.136, 142). The notion of dependence is further elaborated in scene 1 itself by means of the sententious expostulation with which the Duke greets Angelo:
Thyself and thy belongings
Are not thine own so proper as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd
But to fine issues; nor nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.
[1.1.29-40]
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent by Darryl J. Gless. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xvii
- Introduction. A Note on Method, pg. 1
- Chapter 1. The Problem of Kind, pg. 15
- Chapter 2. The Law and the Convent, pg. 61
- Chapter 3. A Thing Enskied and Sainted, pg. 90
- Chapter 4. Venomous Tongues, pg. 142
- Chapter 5. A Satisfaction and a Benefit, pg. 177
- Chapter 6. Duke Vincentio: The Intermittent Immanence of Godhead, pg. 214
- Appendix, pg. 257
- Bibliography, pg. 265
- Index, pg. 275