People of a certain age try to keep their brains tuned up with sudoku, crosswords, and even intellectual exercise programs hawked online as anti-Alzheimer’s nostrums. My wife claims her obsessive bridge playing is the equivalent of wrinkle cream for the cerebrum. I take classes for old fuds provided by the local university.
This semester I’ve been enjoying a brisk canter through six Shakespeare comedies. It is a great pleasure to immerse oneself in such material, which has never been better summed up than by the poet-critic Randall Jarrell. He insisted that “art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.”
I find that little sentence of unashamed celebration very moving. If we can walk into a medieval cathedral, stand before a Brueghel, listen to a Bach cello suite or Modern Jazz Quarter blues or sit through a performance of the Tempest and not think, “What a piece of work is a man,” there’s something wrong with us.
As to showing us life itself, our latest play, “Measure for Measure,” is known as a dark comedy or a problem play, which is a way of saying it is too weird for words and fits no obvious genre. It is suitable both for the Age of Trump and for Halloween.
The great critic Northrop Frye said, if we attempt to treat “Measure for Measure” as realism and compare what we see on stage with “actual human behavior…after an act or two we decide that every character is insane.”
In fact, “Measure for Measure” is like an anticipation of Theater of the Absurd. Behind the craziness lies a serious contemplation of the perils of power. The Duke of Vienna, a place where vice has run amok, is called out of town and deputizes Angelo to act in his stead. In fact, the Duke doesn’t leave but dresses up as a Friar and hangs around to see what happens.
What happens is power corrupts the ironically named Angelo, or perhaps reveals the corruption that was always latent in him. Angelo decides to cleanse Vienna by enforcing a puritanical law making sex before marriage a capital offense. He jails Claudio and will put him to death for getting his betrothed pregnant before the vows were taken.
Claudio asks his sister Isabella, a novice nun, to intervene on his behalf. She pleads for mercy and Angelo makes her a counter offer. He will drop the charges against her brother if she will sleep with him. Yikes, Harvey Weinstein is running Vienna.
Then, the Duke as Friar hatches a plan to have Isabella agree to the midnight assignation, but to substitute Mariana to whom Angelo was betrothed before he jilted her because her dowry was inadequate. Once Angelo has unknowingly slept with her, he will have committed the same capital crime as Claudio. We are obviously in strange territory for a “comedy.”
But this odd fantasia on law and justice, sin and mercy does show that Shakespeare, four hundred years ago, knew all the shapes human clay could assume, from the sublime to the despicable, from the puritanical hypocrite to the judgmental saint.
Isabella is meek and mild until pushed, and then looses invective on Angelo suitable for any tyrant: “Proud man/ Dressed in a little brief authority/ Most ignorant of what he’s most assured…like an angry ape/ Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven/ As makes the angels weep…”
The Shakespeare critic Harold C. Goddard regarded “Measure for Measure” as a deep meditation on the risks of unchecked power in the hands of fallible men, and of evil masquerading as virtue. In discussing it, he marshals a number of quotes that resonant in our own time. The first from Robert Ingersol in 1884 is on Abraham Lincoln. “If you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.”
Second, “By skillful and sustained propaganda an entire people can be made to see even heaven as hell and the most miserable life as paradise” that’s from Adolf hitler, the pioneer of the big lie.
The third comes from Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, historian of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, and a resident of Washington during the Gilded Age. He painted that corrupt and compromised era vividly in a little novel that deserves to be better known, ironically called “Democracy.” The quote comes form his autobiography, “The Education of Henry Adams.” He knew whereof he spoke.
“Power is poison. Its effect on presidents has always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction after, but also because no mind is so well-balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit and knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.”
And finally, Goddard himself provided this cautionary note, implicit in the play, about not trusting too much in the idea of a government of laws and not of men. “It sounds august. But there never was, there is not, and there never will be, any such thing. If only laws would construe, administer, and enforce themselves! But until they do, they will rise no nearer justice than the justice in the minds and hearts of their very human agents and instruments.”
Shakespeare, Ingersoll, Hitler, Adams and Goddard would gaze without surprise upon today’s Lords of Misrule, presiding over pandemonium on the Potomac, and wish perhaps they remembered where the title of Shakespeare’s play came from and heeded it’s admonition: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mette, it shal be measured to you again.”