Shakespeare, Forgiveness, and 'Measure for Measure'

by Kirk Woodward

[Following soon after his article on bad directors and directing practices, “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” posted on  25 June, frequent contributor Kirk Woodward’s back on Rick On Theater with an entirely new post, “Shakespeare, Forgiveness, and Measure for Measure.”  As ROTters will know, Kirk’s a very experienced interpreter of the Bard and is intimately familiar with the cannon—as well as a lot of the criticism of the plays. 

[Here, Kirk’s taking a very narrow look at one aspect—which he sees as a motif, even a unifying theme—of Shakespeare’s plays.  Though largely a textual analysis, Kirk’s consideration of this theme, the importance of forgiveness (or its withholding) in Shakespeare’s works, began with a production and his response to it.  As in all instances of Kirk’s examination of a script or a dramatist’s work, “Shakespeare Forgiveness” has direct relevance to performance and production.]

Reading the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is a valuable experience, but seeing a performance of a play of his can show us things about them that we don’t pick up on by reading. I had this experience last fall when I saw a performance of Measure for Measure presented by the St. James Players of Montclair, New Jersey, where the year before I had directed a production of As You Like It.

If you’re not familiar with the story of Measure for Measure, it begins when a Duke, frustrated by lax enforcement of morality laws, puts his assistant Angelo in charge and disappears, supposedly on business but actually in order to disguise himself and see how things go. Angelo immediately seizes Claudio, whose betrothed Juliet is pregnant, and sentences him to death.

Claudio’s sister Isabella, who is just beginning the process of becoming a nun, pleads with Angelo for Claudio’s life, and Angelo offers to spare him if Isabella will have sex with him. She is horrified by the offer, but her brother begs her to accept it. The Duke, disguised as a friar, arranges a trick that leaves Angelo believing he has slept with Isabella, but Angelo nevertheless orders Claudio’s execution. The Duke has a maneuver for this too, and at the end of the play its complications are resolved, not too happily for anyone.

Measure for Measure is often referred to as a “problem play.” That term historically has often referred to a play with a “social issue” – for example, Ghosts (first staged in 1882) by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is often referred to as a play about the disease of syphilis – somewhat misleadingly, since the play concerns a great deal more than one single issue.

There are certainly social issues presented in Measure for Measure, but it is also appropriately called a “problem play” because it is a problem to produce – it is notoriously difficult to stage a successful production of it, because its characters are all to one extent or another morally ambiguous, and because although ostensibly a comedy, none of its characters are very happy when it ends.

The Duke, for example, seems to be the hero of the play, and he ends up with the heroine (Isabella). Or is he, and does he? He manipulates events to a point that seems excessive, even cruel, stretching out the denouement in the fifth act long past the point of reasonableness. And although he proposes to Isabella – whom he barely seems to know – she does not reply to his proposal.   

Certainly morality is a central theme of the play, the difficulty being that there is no obvious moral exemplar among the characters of the play, an observation that one could say can often be made as well about our own daily lives. The director Peter Brook (b. 1925), in his collection of essays The Shifting Point (1987), writes that Shakespeare’s output

is something quite different from any other author’s work. It’s not Shakespeare’s view of the world, it’s something which actually resembles reality. A sign of this is that any single word, line, character or event has not only a large number of interpretations, but an unlimited number. Which is the characteristic of reality. 

Brook’s words apply in particular to Measure for Measure, which poses a particularly difficult interpretive challenge.

The production of Measure for Measure by the St. James Players, however, in one wonderfully staged and acted moment, made me realize that Shakespeare has planted in the last scene of the play a remarkable revelatory moment, which I admit I had completely overlooked when I read the play.

The Duke has revealed himself, Angelo’s treachery has been unmasked, and the Duke has sentenced him to death – the same punishment Angelo had pronounced on Claudio. Mariana, jilted by Angelo and now briefly to be married to him, pleads with the Duke to spare Angelo – “I crave no other, nor no better man,” she says.

The Duke refuses and orders the execution to take place, but Mariana pleads for Angelo again, and then – this is the stunning, brilliant twist – she asks Isabella to plead for Angelo’s life – Isabella, who, since the Duke is still playing his games, at the moment still believes that Angelo did in fact execute her brother. Nevertheless, Mariana asks Isabella to plead for him. Here is how the moment goes:

DUKE. Away with him to death! – [To Lucio] Now, sir, to you.

MARIANA. O, my good lord! – Sweet Isabel, take my part;

Lend me your knees, and all my life to come

I’ll lend you all my life to do you service.

DUKE. Against all sense you do importune her:

Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact,

Her brother’s ghost his paved bed would break,

And take her hence in horror.

MARIANA.                             Isabel,

Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me:

Hold up your hands, say nothing, - I’ll speak all.

They say, best men are moulded out of faults,

And, for the most, become much more the better

For being a little bad: so may my husband.

O, Isabel! Will you not lend a knee?

DUKE. He dies for Claudio’s death.

ISABELLA.                                         Most bounteous sir,

Look, if it please you, on this man condemn’d,

As if my brother lived.

How can Isabella possibly join Mariana in pleading for Angelo’s life? She can’t even provide any sensible reasons! She will work for Isabella? Angelo, “a little bad” – a murderer - may possibly improve a bit as a husband?

In the St. James production (and for all I know in others I haven’t seen), the length of time between the end of the Duke’s line and the beginning of Isabella’s seemed like an eternity. It’s no change in Isabella’s feelings that leads her to ask that Angelo be spared – her feelings appear to remain the same. It’s a change of her mind. Against all odds she wills herself to ask the Duke to forgive Angelo. Even her mind isn’t really convinced – the reasons she gives for her request are pitiful:

                                             I partly think

A due sincerity govern’d his deeds,

Till he did look on me: since it is so,

Let him not die. My brother had but justice,

In that he did the thing for which he died:

For Angelo,      

His act did not o’ertake his bad intent;

And must be buried but as an intent

That perish’d by the way: thoughts are no subjects;

Intents but merely thoughts.

(To which Mariana adds pathetically, “Merely, my lord.”)

But she does plead for her arch-enemy’s life. For me this is the real climax of the play, because it is the moment that brings front and center what I consider Shakespeare’s great theme: forgiveness.

I use the word “forgiveness” in the broadest sense, since it appears in many guises in Shakespeare’s plays. Synonyms for the word, as listed in a Google definition search, include: pardon, absolution, exoneration, remission, dispensation, indulgence, understanding, tolerance, purgation, clemency, mercy, lenience, and quarter.

Shakespeare’s plays contain so much of what real life is like, and we can see these synonyms for forgiveness appearing throughout his plays, as spouses pardon spouses for their faults, misconduct is overlooked, the innocent are cleared, the effects of bad conduct are wiped out, blessings are distributed, and so on. And sometimes, of course, these things do not happen.

I first saw the importance of forgiveness as a theme in Shakespeare’s plays in a terrible production of The Tempest. The production was so bad that I was able to concentrate on the main story of the play, which is, fundamentally, that a man (Prospero) has all his enemies in his hands, and can do whatever he wants to them, and decides to forgive them.

I don’t want to be reductive about this. Forgiveness is obviously a huge and many-faceted topic, as important to us today as at any period of time. It can also be seen as a key to Shakespeare’s plays in general.

For example, one might not think of Shakespeare’s “history plays” in terms of forgiveness, but in fact they very much are. A nation always has a past. In the history plays that past more often than not has to do with kings and nobles, but it also affects the “common people” as well, particularly since they make up a country’s armies.

A nation’s past – any nation’s – is a mix of the glorious and the inglorious, the worthy and the shameful. The past can’t be changed. All that can be done to the present is to come to terms with it – to forgive it – and to deal with the nation in the present.

We are experiencing this very thing in the United States, in the legacies of such historical features as slavery, industrialization, and war. At present it is possible to say that we are not doing well at forgiving ourselves for our history.

Shakespeare’s history plays demonstrate the same thing, although the historic events they focus on tend to involve royal rule and succession, rather than general social conditions.

However, none of what I’ve said here is intended to suggest that forgiveness is an easy, one dimensional subject for Shakespeare, or that he ends every play with an act of forgiveness. A look at the tragedies will show this clearly.

Hamlet and King Lear unquestionably do end with pictures of forgiveness, however imperfect. Hamlet, back in Denmark after whatever has happened to him in England to modify his spirit, says to Laertes

Give me your pardon, sir: I’ve done you wrong;

But pardon ‘t, as you are a gentleman. …

And Cordelia, Lear’s daughter, forgives him in the simplest and most moving way:

KING LEAR. I know you do not love me; for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:

You have some cause, they have not.

CORDELIA.                                        No cause, no cause.

But forgiveness is no panacea in Shakespeare’s plays; it has to be given for its own sake; it does not change the laws of cause and effect. Hamlet, Lear, and Cordelia all die. Macbeth feels he is beyond forgiveness:

I am in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Othello asks forgiveness, or at least understanding, of what he has done, but does not understand his actions himself:

Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely, but too well…

Coriolanus, in the play with his name, who has no understanding of forgiveness at all – it has no place in his mind:

Why did you wish me milder? would you have me

Falst to my nature? Rather say, I play

The man I am.

In a play equally negative on the subject, Timon of Athens has no intention of forgiving anybody – and yet in his last posthumous utterance he talks “on faults forgiven.” Anthony and Cleopatra end their lives in a world of understanding – one of those synonyms for forgiveness – that is beyond recrimination for their many faults.

In other words, while forgiveness may be continually on Shakespeare’s mind, his understanding of it is continually nuanced. No play shows this better than The Merchant of Venice, with its set piece in which Portia asks for mercy, another synonym for forgiveness:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

All well and good, but only moments later, Portia herself is not merciful to Shylock; to her satisfaction, he is ruined in every important way. The entire play poses the question of how it is possible to be merciful at all in a commercial society. Can we be forgiven for the many ways we oppress other people in a structural way?

Shylock represents a money principle at work in society. We all know how unfortunate it is that Shakespeare chose a Jewish man for the role of the Threat – according to scholars the likelihood is that Shakespeare probably never met one in his life – but Shakespeare shows the character of Shylock mercy that the characters in the play do not.

What’s more, all the major characters are surrounded by wealth, and they seem blissfully unaware of its implications – it came from somewhere, someone worked to create that wealth for them. They have no visible interest in “the quality of mercy” where it involves people they don’t know. That Shakespeare knows better, is demonstrated in the subplot of the “caskets” – the gaudy, jewel covered boxes are the wrong choices. But in the play “the quality of mercy” is by no means universal.

Where did Shakespeare’s focus on mercy come from? We know so little about his life besides the bare facts – and the plays and poems – that ideas about why the theme of forgiveness was so important to him can only be speculation.

For example, was he working out personal feelings of guilt – for careless relations with an older woman, for not being home for his children, or for reasons we can only postulate? There is simply no way of knowing. (We do know that he was a figure in his church, as shown by the fact that he is buried inside it.)

Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate that forgiveness is not necessarily a “religious” subject. Religion has next to nothing to do with the history plays; but, as we have noted, forgiveness is very much a presence in them.

Whatever theology – if any – Shakespeare accepted, the subject of forgiveness is a central principle in his plays, where we find it in multiple forms. What we do with that awareness is up to us, just as it is to the characters in his plays, some of whom find or demonstrate it, some of whom do not, and some of whom do not realize its importance.

[Kirk Woodward’s “Shakespeare, Forgiveness, and Measure for Measure” comes right after my own last blog post, a report on Drill (15 July), a collection of installations at the Park Avenue Armory I saw on 4 July.  Following Kirk’s latest contribution to ROT, I expect to be posting another report on a visual art experience; my first visit to MoMA PS1 in Queens.  I plan to publish that write-up on 25 July, so come back and join me for the revelations.]