Isabella's decision not to save her brother justified?

This is a very complicated question, with many different answers. On one hand, Isabella is
standing up for her own principles when she refuses to have sexual intercourse with Angelo. On
the other hand, she is essentially condemning her own brother to death. While Isabella claims
that she is acting purely out of religious and moral concerns, she must have some thought for
herself as well. She does not want to have sexual relations with Angelo, and she knows that she
should not have to do that. However, her brother's life is at stake. Perhaps she is right to protect
herself and her principles, especially considering that she believes in an afterlife. But perhaps she
is too cold and selfish.

Isabella says that she would gladly give her life to save Claudio. Do you think this is true?
Why or why not?

Isabella believes that sacrificing her virginity would be a sin, but she claims that she would
gladly give her life instead. Of course, this is not really an option, since Angelo has proposed
only one solution. Remember that Isabella does not really approve of what Claudio did. She
thinks the punishment is just, but hopes that Angelo might show mercy on Claudio. She sees
herself as a virtuous follower of God; otherwise she would not seek to join a nunnery. It is
possible that she would view her life as more valuable than her brother's in the eyes of God
because she has not sinned as he has.

Why does Mariana agree to the Duke's plan?

Angelo has certainly wronged Mariana, and yet she agrees to have sexual intercourse with him
and marry him, not merely trick him. When the Duke condemns him to death, she asks him to
reconsider, though the Duke tells her that she should be thankful her honor has been preserved
and enjoy life as a widow instead. Mariana argues that men have faults and perhaps are even
better for them. This issue is brought up a lot during the play, as the male characters sin and the
female characters forgive them for it.

Why does the Duke lie to Isabella about her brother's death?

Isabella is understandably saddened by the false news of Claudio's death, and it seems
unnecessary for the Duke to lie to her in this way, since he has hidden Claudio. This speaks to
the play's general treatment of its female characters. They are not "in on" the Duke's plan,
probably because he does not trust them to act properly without some manipulation. The Duke
convinces Isabella that her brother is dead in order to make her angry at Angelo, probably
thinking that otherwise she would simply let him be.

Although Measure for Measure's plot is complicated, it could be argued that its characters
are simple. How would you support or refute this statement?

The characters in the play could, in most cases, be described according to single words or
phrases. Isabella is virtuous and chaste; her brother is cowardly; the Duke is wise; Angelo is evil.
Angelo is the only character that seems to have more complexity to his character, since he
appears strict at first and then is shown to be hypocritical and somewhat emotional, allowing
himself to be controlled by desire rather than rationality. The simplicity of the characters is a
justifiable criticism of the play.

Does Isabella function as a symbol of femininity? Why or why not?

At the start of the play, Isabella is pictured as a completely non-sexual being, about to enter a
nunnery and never speak to men again. This adds a twist to her decision, as she is clearly not
desirous of sexual intercourse when Angelo propositions her. Angelo is so taken with her that he
cannot resist asking her to have intercourse with him, despite the laws he is enforcing in Vienna.
Later, the Duke falls in love with Isabella as well. Something about her is clearly very attractive
to men. Lucio describes her as submissive and therefore very convincing. Perhaps it is her naive
nature that attracts both men, who are obviously interested in power, given their government
posts.

Is the play's conclusion satisfying? Why or why not?

The play ends in marriage for Angelo and Mariana, Claudio and Juliet, and the Duke and
Isabella. Even Lucio will probably be forced to marry a prostitute whom he has impregnated.
This is a traditional ending to comedies, and it provides somewhat of a conclusion, at least
suggesting that all the characters are about to embark on another phase in their lives. However, it
is not really a happy solution for Angelo or Lucio, who would rather remain bachelors. Isabella's
willingness to marry is unlikely, since she wanted to be a nun. Perhaps the implication is that
Isabella joined the nunnery only because she could not find a worthy husband, just as Mariana
did not marry because her only candidate left her. This says something about the treatment of
women in the play, and their independence or lack of independence.

Why is marriage a punishment for many of the characters?

Marriage would seem to be a reward rather than a punishment, but in Measure for Measure it
functions as a dreaded state for most of the male characters. In some way, the Duke's proposal to
Isabella is a statement of his approval of the institution of marriage, his desire to give up his own
possibly freewheeling life to settle down. Lucio certainly does not wish to marry. Claudio was
engaged but could not resist engaging in sexual intercourse before the wedding; it is unclear how
certain he was about his decision to take a wife. Angelo certainly does not wish to marry
Mariana, since she has no dowry, but Mariana does want to marry him. Shakespeare was perhaps
satirizing the institution of marriage and the bachelor's desire to avoid it if possible.

How is death treated? What does this say about the relative value placed on people's lives?

Claudio is told to resign himself to death, and both the Duke and Isabella offer him words of
solace and encouragement. He is still frightened by the prospect and asks his sister to save him at
the cost of her perceived virtue. Death is viewed as both a religious passage and the end to the
joys of life, and Claudio is most concerned about his ignorance of what it holds. He is not ready
to die, though he says he is. Even Barnadine, who the provost describes as being unaware of life
or death, refuses to be executed. For Isabella, death is a better alternative than sinful sexual
intercourse. The implication is possibly that no one is really prepared to die, however they try to
convince themselves otherwise.

Does the Duke help Isabella only because he is in love with her?

The Duke offers wisdom and assistance to Isabella, but much of it centers around demonstrating
his own power and intellect. He could easily have disclosed his identity early on, freeing Claudio
and punishing Angelo, yet he chooses to manipulate the situation through a different persona. He
certainly enjoys carrying on his charade, needlessly complicating the decisions to be made and
the solutions to the other characters' problems. Isabella is certainly devoted to the friar, following
his every command. It is only natural that she should transfer her affection to the Duke. The
occurrences of the play could be described as one long courtship ritual, in which the Duke
emerges as a heroic figure by preserving a woman's chastity, tricking a villain, and saving a man
from death.

Prostitution and the Feminist Appropriation of

Measure For Measure on the Stage
by
Michael D. Friedman

Near the end of his well known treatment of transgression and surveillance in
Measure for Measure, Jonathan Dollimore makes an observation about the
world of the play that deserves further consideration by feminist scholars:

the prostitutes, the most exploited group in the

society which the play represents, are absent from it.
Virtually everything that happens presupposes them
yet they have no voice, no presence. And those who
speak for them do so as exploitatively as those who
want to eliminate them. (85-86)

Although Dollimore's comment about the absence of the prostitutes holds true
for the written text of the play, twentieth century theatrical productions of
Measure for Measure have largely tended to fill this void by granting the
prostitutes a concrete physical presence on the stage. It might be argued that, by
giving this neglected and exploited female population a theatrical incarnation, a
performance of the play draws attention to the plight of these women and
thereby accomplishes some aspects of a feminist agenda. However, a detailed
review of the recent Anglo-American stage history of Measure for Measure
reveals that the specific way in which prostitutes are embodied and employed
in a given production determines the extent to which the production constitutes
a feminist appropriation of the text.

The treatment of prostitution in performances of Measure for Measure usually

falls into one of three categories, which I will refer to as the conventional,
lascivious, and adverse portrayals. A conventional presentation depicts the
prostitutes as a generally ragged, vulgar, but appealing crew, the routine comic
tarts of theatrical tradition, long-suffering but relatively untroubled in their
lives of sexual debauchery. By contrast, a lascivious portrayal features an
exhibition of the bodies of the prostitutes, offering the spectacle of their
seductive sexuality for the consumption of audience members. Finally, an
adverse treatment emphasizes the degrading and brutal aspects of the sex trade
in an attempt to foreground the exploitation of women (and sometimes
children) reduced to the bartering of their bodies by economic necessity. This
adverse portrayal most nearly approaches a feminist appropriation of Measure
for Measure, but it also tends to sacrifice the comic tone of the play's
underworld. Can a feminist appropriation of Measure for Measure highlight the
demeaning quality of prostitution without forfeiting the option of a comic
interpretation of the lowlife of Vienna? This paper will address this question by
concluding with a study of one particular production directed by a feminist,
Joan Robbins of the University of Scranton, and her employment of prostitutes
on stage at several key moments in the play's action.

***

Fleeting references to prostitutes (other than Mistress Overdone, the bawd) in

productions of Measure for Measure first begin to appear in reviews of mid-
twentieth-century revivals, such as those directed by Peter Brook at the
Stratford Memorial Theatre (1950) and Margaret Webster at the Old Vic
(1957). For instance, Alice Venezky recalls that "Peter Brook set the action
against a sordid medieval Vienna, with its prostitutes, beggars, cripples, and
degenerates" (75). As he explains in The Empty Space, Brook developed this
background as means to illustrate his theory of the Holy and the Rough:

In Measure for Measure, we have a base world, a

very real world in which the action is firmly rooted.
This is the disgusting, stinking world of medieval
Vienna. The darkness of this world is absolutely
necessary for the meaning of the play ... When so
much is religious in thought, the loud humour of the
brothel is important as a device, because it is
alienating and humanizing ... We must animate all
this stretch of the play, not as fantasy, but as the
roughest comedy we can make. (88)

Clearly, Brook chose to animate the prostitutes for a primarily comic purpose,
as is borne out by a production photograph depicting a nattily dressed Mistress
Overdone, backed by two of her women, lamenting the closing of the brothels
in 1.2. A strikingly similar photo of the same scene in Margaret Webster's
production depicts two prostitutes with loose, straight hair wearing gowns with
stereotypically low-cut bodices, posed with their hands perched on their hips.
These two photographs appear in Kittredge (108-9) and Clarke (n. p.)
respectively. In both cases, the punks serve merely to swell the scene as a
comical backdrop, and little attention is paid to the sordid nature of their
function.

In a comparable way, the 1978 BBC-TV production directed by Desmond

Davis also portrayed the prostitutes, in the words of Graham Nicholls, as "the
raddled Cockneyfied harridans of stage convention" (87). However, Davis
intensified the impact of the arrest of Mistress Overdone and her whores in 3.2
by treating it as a separate scene occurring within the brothel itself. While
Mistress Overdone pleads with Escalus in the foreground, behind them,
prostitutes in white nightclothes are dragged kicking and screaming down the
stairs "with some Jacobean-style invective [added] for the furious girls"
(Nicholls 62). This additional emphasis may provide the prostitutes with some
of the voice and presence whose lack Dollimore bemoans, but again, the
essentially humorous nature of this treatment precludes the expression of any
feminist point through the expansion of the prostitutes' role. Curiously, even
John Barton's production at Stratford-upon-Avon (1970), widely regarded as
the first feminist version of the play (because Isabella did not clearly accept the
Duke's proposal of marriage), did not interrogate prostitution from a feminist
standpoint. According to Penny Gay, although spectators saw "whores, pimps,
and criminals on the stage," reviewers "complained that Barton's 'underworld'
was far too clean and cheery" (129).

Certain North American productions of Measure for Measure have also been
content to characterize prostitution lightheartedly. John Houseman and Jack
Landau's 1956 effort at Stratford, Connecticut set in the nineteenth century
offered "a gaudy parade of petty crooks, trollops, woeful lovers and dishonest
officials" ("Stratford" 161). A Life magazine review of this production features,
under the caption "FRIAR AND FLOOZY ... MEET IN PRISON ..." a
photograph of the disguised Duke approached by a seductively smiling
prostitute costumed as a wild west saloon girl, flanked by two other beaming
hussies. This portrayal represents a combination of the conventional and
lascivious treatment of prostitution, for the revealing nature of the central
prostitute's costume puts her sexual allure on display for the audience as well as
for the Duke. In 1985, at Stratford, Ontario, under Michael Bogdanov's
direction,

The whole theatre was turned into a kind of brothel-

nightclub. An extended, suggestive and quite
unwarranted prologue, involving a frenzied sexual
dance, culminated in a circle closing in on the club's
number-one patron--Duke Vincentio himself ... who
gradually subsided to the floor amidst a rhythmically
attentive knot of whores and transvestites. (Dawson
74)

Similarly, the 1987 Shakespeare and Company production at the Oxford Court
Theatre in Lenox, MA began with "a prescene in which punks and pimps and
prostitutes dance sensuous dances on the central platforms and recline on a
luxurious satin bed" (Nelson 96). While such sequences usefully establish the
atmosphere of sexual corruption in Vienna, they also invite viewers to derive
salacious pleasure from the sensuous dances of the prostitutes rather than to
consider the exploitative nature of prostitution itself.

By contrast, the tone of one recent American production's treatment of

prostitution was not essentially comic, but such a portrayal does not guarantee
that the overall effect of the staging will constitute a feminist appropriation.
Director Barry Kyle's 1996 revival at New York's Theater for a New Audience
offers a sobering rendition of the scene featuring the arrest of the prostitutes
handled so humorously in the BBC version. As reviewer Ben Brantley
describes,

The rounding up of the bawds and whores is

especially brutal, with the comic constable Elbow ...
turned into a sadistic thug who whacks his prisoners
with a night-stick. And those under arrest are made
to strip down to full frontal exposure before donning
concentration-camp style uniforms.

Although Kyle's rendering of this segment unflinchingly represents the

violence and degradation suffered by Mistress Overdone's women, this
brutality is portrayed as a quality inherent to the officers under Angelo's
authority rather than specifically to a life of prostitution. Moreover, the
gratuitous choice of stripping the prostitutes down to full frontal nudity
threatens to arouse a sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure in the audience that may
work against the sympathy evoked for the victimized participants in the sex
trade.

However, three RSC versions of Measure for Measure produced within the last
15 years have made concerted attempts to present prostitution itself in an
adverse light. Nicholas Shrimpton, after commenting on the strength of the
female bond established between Isabella and Mariana in Adrian Noble's 1983
production, observes,

This subtly feminist shading went hand in hand with

a distinctly hostile attitude to the play's low life ...
[T]he pimps and punters were played to frighten
rather than to charm us. The human warmth and
realism of Pompey's "they will to't" [2.1.230] were
here excluded by a sense of the threat posed to
women by prostitution, pornography, and sexual
harassment. (204)

As Shrimpton points out, Noble's "feminist shading" eschews the option of a

"charming" portrayal of the prostitutes, but such a choice also seems, perhaps
unavoidably, to exclude the "human warmth" generated by a comic portrayal of
the lowlife characters. For an equally startling alternative to the conventional
stage prostitute, we may consult the reminiscences of Roger Allam, who played
the Duke for director Nicholas Hytner in 1987:

Most of our whores were rent-boys, run by Pompey,

working a gents' toilet that rose from the floor. This
was our attempt to de-anaesthetize the clich‚d
presentation of prostitutes in Shakespeare's plays,
and thus shock and awaken our audience anew to the
meaning of the scene. (27)

Depending on the nature of one's own understanding of feminism, the decision

to substitute young boys for women as Pompey's charges may or may not
constitute a feminist appropriation of the text. While some might argue that
Hytner's choice panders to an assumed homophobia in his audience and even
co-opts prostitution as a primarily male activity, others might reply that
feminist concerns extend to the exploitation of children of both sexes and that
forcing spectators merely to confront the existence of homosexual prostitution
can also serve a feminist agenda.

Most recently, Steven Pimlott's production, which opened in 1994, announced

both its feminist stance and its adverse treatment of prostitution before the
show began through materials included in the playbill. Along with selections
from Marilyn French's Shakespeare's Division of Experience, the program
featured "two pages of horrific excerpts from journalist Nick Davies' report ...
on prostitution and drug dealing among the young homeless in contemporary
London" and "an anonymous essay on the history of prostitution in Southwark"
(Geckle 13). In 1.2, Pimlott introduced Mistress Overdone as "a wrecked
Marlene Dietrich clone, bound by her sciatica to a wheelchair" (Jackson 357)
and her girls as "mini-skirted, heavily rouged whores in flaming wigs" (Maguin
106). But according to reviewer George Geckle,

The shocking element in this scene, however, is the

arrival of the Child (not in Shakespeare's text), a
young girl of about ten years, a new addition to "the
service" [1.2.102], as Pompey terms Mistress
 Overdone's trade. This stage business ties in with the
excerpts from Davies in the program, but nothing
more is done with it in the production, which makes
it ... an obtrusive bit of editorializing. (13)

For Geckle, Pimlott's interpolation of the novice whore seemed too overtly
polemical because it was not well integrated with the rest of the production.
Similarly, Russell Jackson writes, "it seemed gratuitous that ... Pompey should
bring on a prepubescent girl for Overdone's approval, suggesting that
pedophilia was among the vices catered to in the suburbs" (357). but the fact
remains that the shocking quality of this performance choice prodded the
reviewer into further contemplation of the horrific details of child prostitution
in contemporary London, thereby appropriating Shakespeare's text for a
modern feminist purpose. And yet, by choosing to portray his underworld
characters in an unconventional and "sleazy" fashion (Geckle 14), Pimlott also
relinquished much of the comic tone of those sections of the play. As Russell
Jackson recalls, "by refusing to make these characters or their occupation
picturesque, the production suggested that the portion of his realm that the
Duke knew nothing about was complex, sinister, and (to many of his subjects)
commonplace" (357).

An equally sinister link between prostitution and the sexual abuse of children
appeared in the 1994 production of Measure for Measure by the Shakespeare
Repertory in Chicago, directed by Barbara Gaines. As reviewer Justin Shaltz
remembers,

Garishly made-up prostitutes and transvestites dance

a raucous Parisian can-can in the play's early
moments, accompanied by piano and hoots and
hollers from their clientele. Brightly footlit, the
dancers' colorful costumes and heavily painted faces
seem grotesque and distorted, their lurid appearance
inspired by the Post-Impressionist art of D‚gas and
Toulouse-Lautrec. The prostitutes pantomime
explicit sexual acts with a slew of customers ... A
darker aspect of sexual licentiousness is a fleeting--
but quite disturbing--image of a priest molesting a
young boy, then quickly walking away while the
kneeling child contorts in shame and horror. (24)
Like Bogdanov, Gaines begins her performance with an explicitly sexual dance
of whores and transvestites, but the "grotesque" and "lurid" appearance of these
figures differentiates this adverse portrayal from Bogdanov's lascivious
treatment of prostitution. Gaines' further juxtaposition of the pantomimed
sexual acts of the prostitutes with the image of a priest sexually molesting a
young boy demonizes by association all forms of sexual licentiousness, and
therefore also inhibits a comic depiction of the play's underworld. As Shaltz
points out, "Gaines' emphases on sexual decadence and the abuse of authority
tend to overwhelm the few moments of humor in the play" (25). Thus, it
remains to be seen whether a production that aims to retain a predominantly
comic attitude towards its lowlife characters can still address a feminist agenda
on the subject of prostitution.

***

Yes, it's an appropriation. I think when you do

Shakespeare in 1996, you have to appropriate it.
Why do it otherwise?

Joan Robbins, Director of Theater at the University of Scranton, thinks of

herself as a liberal feminist. Despite the fact that she does not begin her
directorial projects with the primary goal of creating feminist appropriations,
she believes that her political orientation inevitably colors the performance
choices made in her productions, which thereby address some of the concerns
of feminism. For example, Robbins chose to include Measure for Measure in
her 1995-96 season largely because it deals with current issues like sexual
harassment and unwed motherhood relevant to contemporary women.
Furthermore, as in all of Shakespeare's plays, the female characters of Measure
for Measure are to a disturbing degree restricted and manipulated by their male
counterparts, a situation Robbins intended to make manifest to her audience.
However, as Robbins explains, these feminist concerns were subordinate to her
sense of the spine, or through-line, of the production:

My basic metaphor for Measure for Measure was

that Vienna was a world out of balance, and that in
 such a world, people subscribe to forms of
extremism. That, for me, became a clear idea about
the action of the play and how everyone fits into this
world. The extreme choices of the underworld
characters are dictated to them by the urgent
necessity to survive. So, I needed the underworld to
be there; I needed to create it in the flesh, and part of
this underworld was prostitution, the trade of sex,
which traditionally has been carried out mostly by
women. The prostitutes, then, had to be personified.
All quotations from Joan Robbins are taken from a
personal interview conducted by the author and are
reproduced in an edited form with Robbins'
permission and oversight.

Like the directors of recent RSC productions, Robbins felt the need to give the
play's prostitutes a physical embodiment on stage in order to interrogate their
profession as a crucial element of Viennese society, but unlike the adverse
treatments of prostitution surveyed earlier in this paper, her version did not
strive to portray the underworld as an entirely sinister subculture:

Vienna possesses different worlds within it. For

instance, there's the underworld, which has this raw
energy; it's full of the life force, full of color, but it's
also full of illicit sex and crime. The polar opposite
of that world is inhabited by the people who are as
cold as ice: Isabella, who is entering the nunnery,
and Angelo, who has led a restrained, Puritanical
life. Despite the fact that the underworld is plagued
with syphilis, ridden with vice, and saddled with
babies no one wants to support, there is a positive
side to it, an aspect that is more human than the
world of Angelo and Isabella. Through the comic
vivacity of the low characters, Shakespeare was
suggesting that there's a middle ground that needs to
be found. There's got to be a sense of measure to
everything.

Like Peter Brook, who sees "the loud humour of the brothel" as "humanizing,"
Robbins insists on an acknowledgement of the positive aspects of the play's
lowlife community, but unlike Brook, she also accepts the challenge to employ
the prostitutes in such a way that her production expresses a feminist point.

In order to examine how Robbins' production attempted to achieve this goal,

we must look at certain critical moments in the performance during which
prostitutes appeared on the stage. The play began with a Prologue, which
Robbins describes as follows:

We have three minutes of mimed activity,

underscored at the start with a very romantic tango,
during which Claudio and Juliet come dancing out,
very much in love, innocently at first, but getting
more and more carried away with each other
sexually on a park bench. At that point, a new, racier
piece of music begins, and the underworld characters
climb out of a couple of traps in the stage floor. So
we see these sleazy citizens of the underworld
literally crawling up out of the sewers, ready to ply
their trade, and at first, they're this very energized,
fun-loving group of people. What eventually
emerges is a financial hierarchy by which the
prostitutes sell their wares to the clients, Pompey
takes money from the prostitutes, a pickpocket takes
money from Pompey, and a criminal takes money
from the pickpocket. Also, there is a gradual increase
in the darkness of this street life: with another
change in the music, the stylized sexual activity
escalates into violence against the prostitutes;
Pompey slaps one around when she tries to hide
money from him. There's a sense that this world is
full of life, but it's also extremely rough; the criminal
violently murders the pickpocket at the end of the
sequence. What we were trying to establish, of
course, was the reason why the Duke was leaving:
there's a life force in Vienna that's completely out of
control, turning against itself, and he needs to deal
with it.
Typically, Robbins develops her pre-scene chiefly as a means to exhibit the
"world out of balance" so crucial to her conception of the spine of the play, and
yet her stage manifestation of this world does not conventionalize or trivialize
the hazardous lives of the prostitutes. Their sexual acts and the violence against
them by their pimp are prominently portrayed, but in a stylized fashion, so that
the audience perceives these events as part of a slightly unreal, nightmarish
vision of the Duke. Indeed, the fact that the segment ends with the murder of
the pickpocket draws some of the focus away from the treatment of prostitution
carried on in the rest of the sequence. As Robbins comments, "If we had
wanted to make a feminist statement as our primary goal with the Prologue, we
might have concluded with some sort of violence against women as the climax
of the action. That's a very interesting choice, but we didn't make it."

During the play proper, the first time the prostitutes appear is in 1.2, which
Robbins set in Mistress Overdone's brothel. While Lucio and his cohorts drink
at a table center stage, several women of the house tempt these gentlemen,
negotiate transactions with other clients, or lounge on a circular staircase
exhibiting their wares in a manner reminiscent of the stylized movements of the
Prologue. Particularly on display in this scene are the expressive costumes of
the prostitutes:

In the course of her research, [costume designer

Helen Ju] found this exotic, draped look, which I
really liked because it was vivacious and very
colorful, and those were things that I wanted to
communicate about the underworld. The hats were
particularly unusual, with sequins and feathers that
gave the women a sort of peacock-like quality. They
also wore partial masks that symbolized the fact that,
when they were prostitutes, they were playing a role
that society had dictated to them: woman as sexual
object. That's who a prostitute is, right? The man
doesn't want to know her as an individual, he just
wants to have her. We also blocked some of the
prostitutes on the circular staircase peering through
the railing like caged birds, which we emphasized by
placing a real birdcage on stage as well. We tried to
show that the whores were just objects, in an
animalistic way, for the men's pleasure.
Although Robbins legitimately defends the design of the prostitutes' costumes
as a tool for feminist appropriation, in another sense, the alluring qualities of
these outfits may have tended to glamorize prostitution itself and thereby to
achieve the opposite effect for which a feminist production might strive. When
asked to comment on this possibility, Robbins responded,

I do think that we had a contradiction in the

production because, in some ways, we pursued a
feminist agenda, but we also clothed the prostitutes
in vivid, beautiful colors, which accentuated their
energy and their capacity for pleasure and a colorful
life. But I ask myself, what would have been the
alternative? Should we have put them in more
Brechtian costumes? Beggar's Opera stuff? Filthy
dresses with hems falling out, and holes in their
stockings? It is worth noting that in Noble's
production, which featured a hostile attitude towards
prostitution, "the whores and bawds vaguely recalled
The Beggar's Opera" (Warren 456). That would
have been closer to a naturalistic statement about the
social problem of prostitution, but then again, could
we then have established the comedy in those scenes
as well? If we had implied that the prostitutes were
poor, dirty, and hungry, that their lives were tougher
than we portrayed them, we would have sent a more
negative message than we did about the underworld
of the play. And for me, what was interesting was
that, inasmuch as Isabella and Angelo are upstanding
people, the underworld has its positive aspects as
well.

Robbins' remarks here cut straight to the problem. While a full-fledged feminist
appropriation of Measure for Measure seems to demand "a naturalistic
statement about the social problem of prostitution," such a treatment also
makes it difficult to establish the comedy of the brothel scenes necessary to a
balanced view of the underworld's virtues and shortcomings. To the extent that
the full spectrum of Shakespeare's portrayal of the play's lowlife characters is
given equal prominence, a feminist appropriation becomes more problematic.
Another moment of tension between feminist appropriation and comic tone
occurs near the end of Robbins' production. Like some other recent directors,
Robbins' chose to embody the only prostitute specifically named in the play,
Kate Keep-down, and to highlight her presence at those points at which other
characters speak of her. Kate Keep-down has also appeared in productions
directed by Trevor Nunn at the RSC's The Other Place in 1991 and Michael
Kahn at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 1992 (see Smallwood
356 and Johnson-Haddad 467). For example, during her arrest, Mistress
Overdone says of Lucio, "Mistress Kate Keep-down was with child by him in
the Duke's time, he promised her marriage. His child is a year and a quarter old
come Philip and Jacob. I have kept it myself; and see how he goes about to
abuse me" (3.2.193-97). In Robbins' version of this scene, the bawd and her
whores are being dragged off to prison by Escalus and the Provost; as she
speaks, Mistress Overdone and the other prostitutes turn meaningfully to Kate,
who hangs her head in sorrow at Lucio's mistreatment. This short segment
prepared spectators for a climactic moment in the production, when the Duke
announces,

Proclaim it, Provost, round about the city,

If any woman wrong'd by this lewd fellow,
--As I have heard him swear himself there's one
Whom he begot with child--let her appear,
And he shall marry her. (5.1.506-10)

Robbins describes the ensuing action as follows:

Our set has three levels, and the upper level is used
by the crowd observing the Duke's return in Act 5.
Kate's been standing up there the entire act, and she's
extremely conspicuous because she's the only one
dressed as a prostitute. When the Duke makes his
announcement, Kate screams with delight that she's
being allowed (ordered I should say), to marry this
guy, and she comes racing down to join Lucio, who,
of course, reacts with great distress at the prospect of
marrying her.
Night after night, this sequence provoked the biggest laughs in the show, but as
Robbins explains, the hilarity of the moment, to some extent, conflicted with
the feminist point the staging was also intended to express:

Kate, like Juliet, has had a child out of wedlock; she

therefore represents the problem of illegitimacy at
the lower end of the social scale. She isn't able to
care for her child, and the father is unwilling to take
responsibility for it, so emphasizing that moment in
the play provides a degree of social commentary, the
notion that one of the problems caused in this society
by sexuality out of control is children without
homes. In a way, the Duke addresses this problem by
mandating that Lucio marry Kate, which implies that
he will also be responsible for his offspring. In our
production, it's performed as a moment of levity, no
question, and I don't think that a feminist idea is
foremost in a spectator's mind at that point. It may
even be a choice that pokes fun at a woman who has
had to sell herself for a living, but I think the
audience is laughing more at Lucio than at Kate.

If Robbins is correct that the humor of this sequence is directed, not at the
prostitute, but at the man who has deserted her, then perhaps this staging
represents an acceptable balance between feminist appropriation and comic
tone. Although the dignity of the wronged woman does not emerge absolutely
unscathed, the fact that the audience sides with Kate in her desire to make
Lucio pay for his exploitative acts can be viewed as a feminist victory. Feminist
appropriations of Shakespeare and comedy do not appear to be entirely
compatible, at least with reference to a tonally problematic play like Measure
for Measure, but with inventive choices, a director who is cognizant of this
friction may be able to strike an appropriate compromise between the two
goals.

Works Cited

Allam, Roger. "The Duke in Measure for Measure." In PLAYERS of

Shakespeare 3: Further essays in Shakespearean performance by players with
the Royal Shakespeare Company. Ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 21-41.

Brantley, Ben. "Shakespearean Vienna With Modern Tensions." New York

Times 22 Jan. 1996: C14.

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Clarke, Mary. Shakespeare at the Old Vic 1957-8. New York: Macmillan,
1958.

Dawson, Anthony B. Watching Shakespeare: A Playgoer's Guide. New York:

St. Martin's, 1988.