Saturday, August 28, 2010

The End Game of "Measure for Measure"

"Measure for Measure" closes Sunday, Aug. 29, after a two week run at the Stonington Opera House on Deer Isle, but I've been thinking about the show since January, when I enrolled in a Shakespeare class taught by Harvard Professor Gordon Teskey. The class was a survey of Shakespeare's works, but students also learned how the events of Shakespeare's life and times shaped his writing. Teskey is a charismatic teacher. Students have organized a Facebook page for him because they love hearing him read Chaucer. I loved hearing him read Shakespeare, too, and there's no mistaking the actor in him, especially because he's one of the most stylishly dressed members of the academy. (The Harvard Crimson fashion columnist wrote a story about him.) This summer, Teskey was teaching in Venice, but he took a few minutes to answer questions about "Measure for Measure" -- a play I find difficult but that he helped me see more powerfully as a story about self sacrifice and as a demonstration of Shakespeare's progressive sense of structure for comedy and tragedy.
Given Teskey's expertise, I wanted him to help us understand more deeply the final scene of the play in which Shakespeare disconcertingly ties up the ends of a comedy that tipped so dangerously toward tragedy. As we continue to investigate this play, Teskey sets us up to consider how we might see the final scene.

Here's Teskey on the final scene of "Measure for Measure":

The most difficult scene technically is the final one. So much happens in it, and there are so many dramatic reversals. The moment when Mariana begs Isabella to kneel with her and beg the Duke to spare Angelo's life -- this when Isabella still thinks Angelo has murdered her brother -- is deeply moving, because Isabella does so. She is at last moved to pity for someone. But so much else occurs in the scene: the unmuffling of the Duke and the humiliation of Lucio as well as of Angelo, the trick with the head of Ragozine, and so on. It is very hard to stage and to keep up the pace, which should be rapid, without confusing the audience. It is thrilling, a little bewildering, funny, emotionally moving, and at the end (perhaps) a little mysterious.

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