All the Bloody Shakespeare - Measure for Measure

 

Measure for Measure and the best joke in Shakespeare

Right let’s get this out of the way, I have never read a Shakespeare play cover to cover and finished it thinking that’s a great read. I’ll read that again for fun. Then I read Measure for Measure. I think I can say without hyperbole that Measure for Measure is Shakespeare’s most relevant play. You can talk about your universal themes in the great tragedies – fate, revenge, ambition, failure but Measure for Measure has specific themes that are so dead on the nose they could have been written a few weeks ago.

Measure for Measure is a play about sexual misconduct and corrupt powerful men. It’s a play about how a legal system becomes corrupt when everyone working in it shares the same corrupt values. It takes those two ideas and tackles them in-depth. 

Mercifully, loads of other people have picked up on this and you can be spared my thoughts on the matter.

If you’re interested just google Measure for Measure #metoo.  

Here’s the best of the articles, comparing it to the Harvey Weinstein case:

 What a lesser-known Shakespeare play can tell us about Harvey Weinstein - Vox

 

There are numerous other articles exploring the idea. And the Isabella / Antonio plot in which a high ranking official tries to exploit sex from a vulnerable woman (who is trying to save her brother) and then says no one will believe her if she reports him writes its own press.

I would argue that there is a global relevance against all legal systems that allow gender, racial and class prejudice and that the play is a damning indictment of all such legal systems – which is, of course, all legal systems.  

But let’s not get bogged down in me explicating the brilliant philosophical polemic against manmade laws and their inevitable tendency towards corruption. What I want to talk about is a character that is barely touched on in studies of the play. Barnardine!

 

 To bring you up to speed, Isabella is the sister of Claudio and Claudio is about to be executed for fornication. Yes, fornication. It’s an interesting point of the play that the woman he knocked up is not in prison for fornication though she is going to have to go through the agony of childbirth so it’s hard to judge proportion on this one.  

Anyway, forget all that main plot guff. What’s most important is a tiny piece of subplot, where the Duke (who could easily free Claudio and on whose orders he’s been imprisoned), disguised as priestly Provost, comes up with a plan to save Claudio by executing someone else and pretending it’s Claudio. Yes, it’s a stupid plan but that’s not on Shakespeare, the play is sending up the idea of the law and the irony of perfectly adhering to a set of rules that have been developed by petty-minded drongos. So, Shakespeare is in the right here.

The problem is, the person they want to swap heads with is Barnardine, a sort of Lebowski meets Bartleby style drunk who has been living at the prison for years. Here’s how Shakespeare describes him:

He will hear none: he hath evermore had the liberty

 of the prison; give him leave to escape hence, he

 would not: drunk many times a day, if not many days

 entirely drunk. We have very oft awaked him, as if

 to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming

 warrant for it: it hath not moved him at all.

And you can almost imagine him in a dressing gown holding a White Russian as he lounges in his cell telling the guards all the things he prefers not to do. 

When the time comes for him to be executed, he refuses because he’s too drunk to be bothered dying. And that ladies and gentlemen, is the best joke in the whole of Shakespeare.

Bernardine refuses to be executed at all. Shakespeare suggests that Bernardine is in prison by choice and has the option to chose consent to the application of the law. Bernardine is Shakespeare’s nod to his audience – corrupt legal systems can only exist with consensus. And you can’t make a point like that without making it funny because when you’re playing to the King he might just kill you for it.  

 

There are lots of other bits to commend Measure for Measure to the hungry reader. There’s a straight criticism of the morality of slavery (again framed as a joke but strongly worded enough to hit its mark). And the guy in charge of executions is constantly trying to convince people that dying is good for them, in one of the best parodies of politician speak ever. Nobody wins at the end, though Claudio stays alive and Isabella stays unmolested, the law admits a mistake but remains the law.

 

 It’s grim, but it’s witty. Overall it’s the sort of thing you might expect from a medieval writer with a reputation for being the greatest playwright in the English language.  

Even the namecheck of the title is handled well.

5/5 – I love this play.  

There, now nobody can say I haven't read all the Shakespeare comedies.  The histories are up next, thankfully there aren't that many of them.