ricardienne | (no subject)

So, Thanksgiving was very nice.

On Saturday, we went to see Measure for Measure. The Globe all-male "original practices" touring production. It was, in a word, wonderful, amazing, absolutely fantastic. Now I remember why Measure is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.

They didn't play it straight at all. Far from being "like pow'r divine," the duke was a sort of hyperactive, incompetent bumbler. This made a lot of things hang together better, actually, like the really random plot twists and machinations that he instigates. Ultimately, I suppose, this is symptomatic of their playing down the allegory of the play. Because the only other way to make it believable is to go for the completely omniscient benevolent God-figure duke. And he was very funny.

Isabel I wasn't as fond of. She (he, actually -- I'm going to use "he" from now on) was kind of stiff. It mostly worked, but I personally see 'very repressed, uptight, formal, and rigid' as still something more human than automaton, which is how he did it in the first couple scenes. I started to like him better as the play went on, though. The second scene with Angelo was good, though I do wonder if Isabel would realistically be able to shove him across the stage, and he was really really good where she hears about Claudio's "death." (Okay, the pronoun thing is really screwing me up. I'm trying to use "she" when I talk about the character, and "he" when I'm more talking about the actor, but I'm still getting confused!)

Lucio and Pompey were excellent as far as comic relief, Escalus and the Provost were good. Claudio, too.

Which brings me to Angelo. With the duke played to the comic side of the play, it was be up to Angelo (and Isabel, I suppose) to carry the serious side of things -- put the "tragi-" in tragicomedy or the problem in the problem play, if you will. And he did it amazingly well. I admit that I've always seen Angelo as a straight villain: a hypocritical tyrant, or, more *charitably*, a John Ashcroft type. This production (and Liam Brennan in particular) made me completely rethink that. This Angelo was a good person, definitely flawed by pride, self-righteousness, and rigidity, and completely falling from all of his super-high ideals over the course of the play, but not evil. Even as he's digging himself deeper and deeper, and even as he's trying to convince himself that he's justified, he knows that he's going completely wrong: "A lack, when once our grace we have forgot,/
Nothing goes right: we would, and we would not." But he's been so tightly controlled that one slip means he goes into ethical free-fall.

Rereading the play itself, Angelo has become my new favorite Shakespearian character.

Maybe it's particularly due to my reading of ~~and obsession with~~ St. Augustine, but I think understand the idea of the sort of super-strict Christian morality that Angelo embodies at the beginning of the play. (Side-note: was Shakespeare confused about the location of Vienna? Did he think it was writing about Verona, or Venice, or something? Why do all the characters in the play have Italian names? Though, admittedly, Angelo is the perfect name for this character here: all the connotations of angel, angelic, etc. AND it makes all that coinage metaphor in the first scene all the more apt for there being an English coin called an "Angel."(Which brings up another point: did all that imagery come after or before the decision to name the character?))

The play is an allegory of Justice and Mercy, perhaps, but it's also an allegory of fall and redemption. Angelo's fall and redemption. He has set an impossibly high standard, and because he's been able to reach it, he feels himself free to scorn and have no patience for those who fail. He's proud of his morality, and he looks down on anyone whose own doesn't match it. But then he starts to fall short of his own mark, and he can't deal with it at all. Because he allows no middle ground between good and evil, because he has no gray area, he sinks completely. His redemption? -- And here's where we get the Duke-as-Christ/God allegory -- the entire plot is the Duke, by thwarting him, saving him and other from his sins. None of the evil that Angelo tries to do comes to fruition: Claudio lives, Isabel remains a virgin, even the onetime spurned Mariana ends up married and happy (though I suspect he originally rejected her not over the dowery (let alone the 'levity,' obviously) but because he would have considered even marriage as moral stooping, as the Church Fathers largely did). It's amazing, when you think about it: Angelo isn't let to be wicked, once he's repented, all of his sins have been miraculously erased:
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..

'Pow'r divine,' indeed!

And yes, he does repent, is redeemed and forgiven:

I am sorry that such sorrow I procure:
And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart
That I crave death more willingly than mercy;
'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.

And no, he's not just saying it to get off.

And then:

Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well:
Look that you love your wife; her worth worth yours.

Quits: requites, of course: Angelo has been repaid well in spite of the evil he has done, but quits also has the sense of leaves: with repentence and greater realization, he no longer is evil. The second line, too. Mariana's worth is equal to Angelo's. He's as worthy as she. Actually, the phrasing suggests that it's her worth that was in question in the first place, but that, yes, she is worthy of him. (Sexism of this, aside, there was that past issue of him breaking off the pre-contract due to her alleged 'levity.')

Wow. I really need to stop fangirling about Angelo and do my homework