Shakespeare (5): Real Vice and Vice in Name Only

We learn that Claudio is to be beheaded for getting his fiancee pregnant from the Madam of a brothel, Mistress Overdone, who complains that her business is bad:

What with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk.

Pompey, her tapster, then enters and gives her even worse news: "All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down."

But then he reassures her: "Come; fear you not: good counsellors lack no
clients: though you change your place, you need not change your trade." 

Pompey is confident that prostitution can outlawed but never eliminated. In Act II, Scene i, he says so to Escalus:

ESCALUS 

How would you live, Pompey? by being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? is it a lawful trade?

POMPEY

If the law would allow it, sir.

ESCALUS

But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.

POMPEY

Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?

ESCALUS

No, Pompey.

POMPEY Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to't then.

In Act III, Scene ii, Lucio says more or less the same thing to the Duke in his disguise as a friar:

LUCIO

A little more lenity to lechery would do no harm in [Angelo]: something too crabbed that way, friar.

DUKE VINCENTIO

It is too general a vice, and severity must cure it.

LUCIO
     Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great kindred; it is well allied: but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down.

I believe that this is Shakespeare's opinion, and at the end of the play we see severity applied correctly. Unlike Claudio, who fully intended to marry Julietta, Lucio has fathered a child with one of Mistress Overdone's sex workers, and he has no intention of marrying her until he is forced to do so:

DUKE VINCENTIO

Is 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: the nuptial finish'd,
Let him be whipt and hang'd.

LUCIO

I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore.

Four marriages are about to take place at the end of the comedy. Claudio, spared, will marry Julietta, Angelo, reprimanded, will marry the woman he jilted, Lucio will be forced to marry a woman of ill repute, whom he wronged, and Vicentio intends to marry the virtuous Isabella, whom he has also wronged by toying with her emotions and allowing her to believe her brother is dead - but this is acceptable within the conventions of Elizabethan theater.

Why We Should Look for Ideas in "Measure for Measure" - Shakespeare (4)

Shakespeare was fortunate to live early in the age of freedom of information and able to educate himself by reading plenty of printed books. A century earlier, printed books were scarce, and two centuries before that, there were none at all.
In any society, what counts as true information is determined by institutions such as universities. In medieval Europe, the universities belonged to the church, and education, in the sense of book learning - theology, law, medicine - was essentially an ecclesiastical monopoly. Other kinds of practical education were in the hands of craftsmen, who imparted their knowledge and skill to apprentices. In medieval Europe, probably the only prestigious knowledge aside from university studies was the military training of the aristocracy.
During the Renaissance, the church and its universities lost their uncontested power to determine what an educated person should know and what was true. An intelligent, literate person like Shakespeare could educate himself outside of the universities, and his plays provide abundant evidence that he did so. He knew British and ancient history, classical mythology, and literature. He was familiar with the ideas under discussion in his time and put them in the mouths of his characters:

Look at Angelo's argument to Isabella, who has come to plead for her brother's life, in Act II, Scene ii:

Condemn the fault and not the actor of it?
Why, every fault's condemn'd ere it be done:
Mine were the very cipher of a function,
To fine the faults whose fine stands in record,
And let go by the actor.

Or Vicentio's effort to persuade Claudio that life is worthless in Act III, Scene i:

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still. 

But, more importantly, ideas are at issue in the very action of the play, and I plan to discuss them.

Measure for Measure Again - Shakespeare (3)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
The Warrior (Fantasy Portrait), c. 1770
Oil on canvas
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

When I saw this painting on my recent visit to the Berkshires, I was immediately reminded of the character of Lucio, who appears right after the dignified trio of Vicentio, Escalus, and Angelo leave the stage.
This painting of a type (Lucio is called "a fantastic" in the list of dramatis personae), reminds me that we are all, viewed in a certain fashion, types. If an author were to model a character on us, she would classify us to help her readers understand who we were and then, if she is talented, show how we deviate from our type. If we weren't types, in real life as well as in fiction, we would be totally opaque to one another.
Shakespeare's characters, especially in the comedies, are also types, though, because of his genius, even his types have psychological depth.
As for Lucio, like the far from angelic Angelo, he bears an inappropriate name (meaning "light"), contrary to his dark character. We encounter him bantering with two unnamed gentlemen until Mistress Overdone (labeled "a bawd"), whom Lucio refers to as "Madam Mitigation," enters with news:

MISTRESS OVERDONE

Well, well; there's one yonder arrested and carried
to prison was worth five thousand of you all.

Second Gentleman

Who's that, I pray thee?

MISTRESS OVERDONE

Marry, sir, that's Claudio, Signior Claudio.

First Gentleman

Claudio to prison? 'tis not so.

MISTRESS OVERDONE

Nay, but I know 'tis so: I saw him arrested, saw
him carried away; and, which is more, within these
three days his head to be chopped off.

LUCIO

But, after all this fooling, I would not have it so.
Art thou sure of this?

MISTRESS OVERDONE I am too sure of it: and it is for getting Madam
Julietta with child.

Claudio's plight provides the motivating force of the plot, and the news of it comes as a shock both to the characters on stage and to the audience of this comedy after Lucio's frivolous talk with the two gentlemen, especially since it is borne by a totally disreputable character.
Significantly, in accordance with the genre of comedy, the play is full of unapologetic low characters like Mistress Overdone, representatives of the pleasure instinct, and, equally significantly, their response to Claudio's plight, unlike that of the rigid Angelo, is humane. Mistress Overdone says Claudio is worth "five thousand of you all," and the superficial Lucio is appalled: "After all this fooling, I would not have it so."

* * *

A note of explanation.

Why am I filling up this blog with comments on Measure for Measure?

Having gone somewhat beyond the halfway point in the Complete Works, I decided it was time to take stock, and a lot of ideas bubbled up in my mind while reading Measure for Measure. After all, I do have a doctorate in Comparative Literature, and I did concentrate on the late Renaissance, so I'm connecting with things that mattered a great deal to me when I was much younger.

Shakespeare (2) - More on "Measure for Measure," a Very Puzzling Play

Shakespeare's language is hard for us, not only because of the vocabulary, but also because of the syntax. Look at the Vicentio's first speech:

Of government the properties to unfold,
Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse;
Since I am put to know that your own science
Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice
My strength can give you:

Vicentio is telling Escalus, his trusted minister, that he has nothing to tell him about government, which is an odd way to begin a comedy - and Measure for Measure is, in form, a comedy. Is Shakespeare telling us that, in this play, he intends to unfold the properties of government? Is that what this play is going to be about? Can a play about sex and hypocrisy also be about law and government? These questions will  perturb the audience (and the virtual audience, the readers) almost until the end.

As usual in Shakespeare, things get moving very fast in the first act. Vincentio summons Angelo and praises him for leading a virtuous life:

There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to the observer doth thy history
Fully unfold.

Those of us who have seen or read the play already know that Angelo, aside from his despicable behavior in the play itself, has also jilted a woman because her dowry was lost at sea, and we know that Vicentio knows it. So why does he have such a high opinion of Angelo? In Vicentio's opinion, is it acceptable to treat one's fiancee that way? According to the norms of Elizabethan England, is this proper? Or, is the entire business that Vincentio sets in motion and directs mainly intended to show Angelo up?

In any event, he appoints Angelo to replace him while he is absent from Vienna: "In our remove be thou at full ourself," He then admonishes him:

Mortality and mercy in Vienna
Live in thy tongue and heart.

Which is precisely the opposite of what will happen.

Reading Shakespeare (1)

I tend to give myself projects, to give my life some direction.
I downloaded a free version of the complete works of Shakespeare to my tablet, and over the past months - I can't remember exactly when I began - I've been making my way through them (stopping between plays to read other things).
The poetry appeared at the beginning of the file, so I started with it: the Sonnets, the Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis. The language is often hard, and I haven't been using an annotated edition, so I just plow through passages that I don't completely understand.
I am covering familiar ground, much of it familiar to me personally, since I read a lot of Shakespeare (but not all) when I was a student, and I have seen quite a few productions of Shakespeare in the intervening years, and all of it familiar in a general, cultural sense: scholars have been combing Shakespeare intensely for centuries, as have theater directors, actors, and serious readers. So it's hard to imagine having an idea about Shakespeare or an insight that hasn't appeared hundreds of times in the literature. Nevertheless, one responds to what one reads, and the response is new and important to the reader.
Just last night I finished reading Measure for Measure, which I had read several times, decades ago, and on this reading I was struck by the oddity of the play, just as, when I read King Lear a week or so ago, I was struck by Shakespeare's sudden and astonishing leap from the occasionally tedious facts of British dynastic history to a nightmarish pre-Christian setting, and MacBeth, with its witches and ghosts, MacBeth's insomnia and his wife's sleepwalking.
The action of Measure for Measure is set in motion by the Duke's eccentric behavior, delegating his power to the misnamed Angelo and hiding behind the scenes to see what happens, a Viennese (!) Haroun al-Rashid. The spectator is supposed to like and admire the Duke, though his behavior is cruelly manipulative.
A truly humane person would have stopped the action immediately, stopping in to prevent Claudio's unjust execution and removing Angelo from office before he did any more harm. But instead he allows Claudio to suffer in expectation of decapitation and makes Isabel think that her brother is dead. Of course, if the Duke had acted ethically, there would have been no play.
This of course led me to think of all the manipulative characters I could remember in Shakespeare. Schemers who try to control the action appear in almost every play. Some are successful, like the Duke and Prospero, some are tragically unsuccessful, despite good intentions, like Lear, some are downright evil, like Iago and Lady MacBeth, and some are hard to judge, like Cassius in Julius Caesar.
These manipulators are projections of the author, because theater is a highly manipulative art form. The author creates characters and puts them through trying plots, the director tells the actors how to deliver their lines, the actors recite words that are not their own and perform or mimic actions that they would not ordinarily do, and the whole complex machinery of author, director, actors, stage and costume designers, and so on all work together to manipulate the emotions of the spectator, who is essentially trapped in his or her seat, forced to undergo the drama.
The oddity of Measure for Measure has to do with its being a comedy in form, though not in content, with the mixture of low characters with the highborn - a grotesque sub-plot based on the themes of the main story - and with the sophistical way the Duke and other characters convincingly advance contradictory arguments.
In general I am in favor of reading works of literature, especially old ones, with as much awareness as possible of their oddity.
To be continued, perhaps.

India Impressions, Second Installment

I am writing this in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, about as far away from India as possible, in every sense.
On February 16, I wrote in my notebook:
Today is our seventh day in India. The previous six days have been so full that my feeling for time is faulty. It feels more like a month than a mere week. I'm a bit used to being here, less out of whack, almost used to the heavily spiced food. We're at a kind of bungalow colony not far from the city of Bhuj, in Gujurat, in a rural, almost wild landscape, quiet for a change.
We were fortunate to be traveling with three Indian women, who could hardly have been more different from one another. Durga, our guide, is a tall, dignified Tamil; Natasha, originally from Manipur, now from Delhi, is vivacious, informal, and self-confident, an entrepreneur in the clothing business; Aliya, who celebrated her 24th birthday with us, is a lovely, quiet Ismaili Muslim from Mumbai who writes for a jewelry trade magazine. All three of them have been helpful in making India a bit more understandable for us.
For me, the best part of this tour has been meeting the craftspeople and others, being in people's homes, seeing where and how they work. The cleanliness and order of their homes is unexpected in the garbage-strewn, unpaved villages where they live. We were given two or three meals in the homes of these textile craftspeople, and we had no hesitation in eating the food - correctly, because it didn't make any of us sick.
We've met Muslim fabric printers, Hindu silk weavers, and Harijan quilters. We've seen the most beautiful, elaborate crafts produced in dusty courtyards, brilliant colors in monochrome surroundings, fantastic creativity in traditional surroundings. It reminded us of the fantastic weaving we saw in Peru, and, astonishingly, in one village, with unpaved streets, etc., we met a weaver who had been sent to Peru to meet the weavers there! With my patronizing attitudes (as much as I try to dismiss them), I would have thought that the man hadn't been more than a few miles from his native village.
Others have been to the huge craft fair in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
"Kada Ber" is the name of the traditional weaver's costume that one of our hosts was wearing, a thick, white cotton set of garments. He man wearing it told me he had made it himself. Mainly the Indian men wear Western clothes, crisply pressed shirts, as opposed to the colorful drapery of the women, but here and there you see someone dressed in an old-fashioned way.
I've been playing the Indian flute that I bought, usually not for more than a quarter of an hour a day. It's an adjustment. The bore is wider than a European flute, so the low notes are full and solid, if you can play them. The finger holes are big and far apart, hard to cover. It's tuned like a Western flute, in that it sounds a concert G when I finger it like a G, but you can only get accidentals by covering the holes partially. So meanwhile I'm playing things in the key of D major.
The following day was mainly spent driving from Bhuj to the Rann of Kutch, a large salt flat.
The drive was long and boring, though, because it was a Hindu holiday connected with Shiva (Durga told us that no one sleeps the night before the festival), the roads were full of people on the move: ten people in a jeep that seats five at most, legs dangling out the back and the rear door swinging; whole families on motor scooters; tiny auto-rickshaws, designed for a driver and at most three passengers, packed with more people than you could count when you passed them. The disregard for personal safety is appalling, but you know these people can't afford to travel more safely.
That night we stayed in a better maintained bungalow colony (each room was a small round building with a thatched roof, similar to the peasant houses), and the next day we were driven in jeeps through impoverished villages to a bird and wild ass sanctuary. At the end of the day we went out on the salt flat, close to the border with Pakistan, and saw the sun set on hundreds of local tourists.
The next day we parted company with Durga, Natasha, and Aliya and flew to Mumbai.
The rest of our trip to India was much more standard tourism: guided tours in Mumbai and excursions to the caves near Aurangabad to see the art. So this is a good place to pause.
How odd it is to think that we have recently been to a place so exotic, for us, that we couldn't imagine what we would encounter next, and now we are in the landscape we grew up in, the Northeast United States, where almost nothing is surprising to us.

Indian Impressions - First Installment

I'm gradually transcribing a selection of the stuff I wrote in my notebook while we were in India. 

With very little knowledge, one tries hard to understand what one experiences, to fit it into what one does know.

February 10, 2015

Mumbai.

The very name resonates. A vast city. Twenty-million people, all of them out in the street at the same time – or so it appears: selling and buying. The traffic noise is oppressive: constant honking, like birds jockeying for position in the branches of a tree, here I am!

We ran into India's cumbersome bureaucracy upon arrival. I applied for our visas on line and apparently reversed the last 2 digits of Judith's passport number. It took two hours and a phone call to Delhi, and a dozen or more officials, to figure out how to let her in. So we got to the hotel at 12:30 instead of 10:30. After lunch in a very ordinary local restaurant, not catering to tourists, we walked down the main avenue of the Fort neighborhood: Dadabhai Naoroji Road (which people call DN Road), past dozens and dozens of people selling good from tables or blankets spread on the sidewalk. What kind of a living can they make like that?

On the drive in from the airport I was thrilled by the commotion in the street, but as we drove past dilapidated apartment blocks with laundry drying on the railings, I wondered, who lives there? How? Do they have toilets, showers, adequate electricity?

There was an art fair in the Kalaghoda neighborhood, just down the road, and we happened on a free cooking demonstration in the Westside Department Store. Suddenly we were out of the noise, dirt, hustle, and in a totally Western setting, except for women in saris and a surplus of salespeople and guards: wages are low, people are plentiful. The cooking demonstration was in delightful Indian English, with words like “capsicum.”

Later on I wrote a kind of poem about it:

Capsicum, with so little information.

Before the cooking demonstration

In the clean Mumbai department store

In the Indian English it took getting used to

I didn't know what a capsicum was

Pleasant to sit in air-conditioning

Among well-behaved, wealthy people,

And taste samples

Away from streets teeming with the poor

Who always want to sell you something

The word “capsicum” keeps slipping from my mind

Making me suspect incipient dementia

Two charming women who own a trendy restaurant

In a part of Mumbai we never got to

(I wouldn't mind living in Mumbai for a couple of months,

Trying to get a handle on the city)

Cooked and spoke encouraging words

To plump women in silk saris

Who apparently were afraid to cook

They probably have servants in the kitchen

Help is cheap in Mumbai

I got bored with the cookery

And I hate department stores

Privileged tourist that I was,

I walked through the guarded entrance

Unimpeded. Would they let someone in

Who didn't look as if he could afford to buy?

I lingered in the street and bought

A short bansuri from a peddler

*

I can't place the people I see. What caste are they? Are they Hindus? What ethnic group do they belong to? What language are they speaking?

Since many of them speak English well, we could tell each other who we are, if we had enough information and curiosity to ask and answer the right questions.

February 12

After a day in Mumbai:

Too much stimulation.

Too much noise.

Too many smells.

Too many people, too much traffic, too much to look at.

Now we're in Ahmedabad (they pronounce it “Amdabad”) after an uncomfortable overnight train ride. I shared a compartment with three Indian gentlemen and had an open and enjoyable conversation in English, though two of them kept slipping into Gujurati, no help to me or to the Kannada speaker from Bangalore, a fat Muslim engineer.

All three of the men agreed that corruption is the worst problem India faces.

How long would you have to live her to know what to expect when you step out into the street? On the way to the textile museum in Ahmedabad we passed two elephants. Our guide in the textile museum was a severe little woman with a strapped on loudspeaker who rushed us through and treated us like elementary school pupils. I suspect she didn't know English all that well, so she went through her memorized spiel without giving us leeway for questions.

At dinner I told our guide, Durga, a dignified, intelligent woman, whose English is better than perfect, that everyone in India seemed eccentric to me – an impertinent thing to say after only a couple of days in the country – and she took it as a compliment.

It's tempting to look at India as a tangle of problems so severe and snarled that they can never be solved, or to look at India as a creative jumble of improvised and uncoordinated efforts to deal with life as it comes. To the outsider it appears that people accept things as they are (an observation that comes from reading and films more than from the little I've experienced). But under the acquiescence there is intense, energetic striving, immediately visible.

*

We visited Gandhi's ashram. I had not been aware of the severity of his asceticism or of the intense religiosity of his movement. I imagine Britain would have liberated India after World War II whether or not Gandhi had been so influential, because the war depleted her so thoroughly. But that doesn't detract from Gandhi's spiritual stature or from his vision for the nation.

The ashram was full of tourists, almost all of them Indian.

*

On Friday night we went to services at the Magen Abraham synagogue in Ahmedabad.

Until that morning we had no idea there were any Jews there, but our Muslim guide on a tour of the disintegrating old city told us about it when he heard we were from Israel. The large, unsplendid synagogue is directly across the street from a Parsi fire temple, and we were told that nearby are a mosque, a Hindu temple, and a church – a uniquely situated Jewish house of worship. When the synagogue was built in 1934, the community must have been prosperous and hopeful. Now about forty families are left.

*

Our tour is focused on textile arts: weaving, dying, printing, embroidery, and quilting – traditional handicrafts that must find a way to survive in a modernizing society (one weaver told us proudly that his son was studying electrical engineering).