Returning to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (by way of Joyce Carol Oates)

THIS PAST SUMMER I HAD THE PLEASURE OF RETURNING TO SHAKESPEARE’S MEASURE FOR MEASURE. It was the first Shakespeare play that I taught as a graduate student, and it featured prominently in my first scholarly publication. The occasion for my return to Measure for Measure was an invitation from Politics and Prose Bookstore to teach a class in anticipation of Folger Theatre’s fall production. Not knowing how director Psalmayene 24 and his creative team would stage the play, I designed my class around what is familiar and unfamiliar about Measure for Measure. Shakespeare’s play makes clear that abuse of authority, sexual coercion, hypocrisy, and zealotry are not new. Yet the world in which we encounter these societal ills changes. Even as students asked questions about the Renaissance world that Shakespeare represents, they brought modern sensibilities and recent history to bear on their interpretations of the play.

Measure for Measure wields a unique power to return us with difference to enduring ethical quandaries. This power comes, in part, from the significant role of return in the plot. The action is instigated by the departure of the Duke of Vienna from his vice-ridden city-state, and it concludes with his return. However, his departure is merely feigned. The Duke remains in Vienna in disguise to observe the behavior of his supposedly virtuous deputy, Angelo. Angelo’s hypocrisy leads to a boomerang-like return of violence, as his strict enforcement of Vienna’s laws condemns him too. Yet his life is spared when characters, whom he thought to have raped and executed, return with maidenhead and noggin still attached. These returns smooth the way to pardons, reunions, and marriages—that is, the expected resolution of Shakespearean comedy.

Midway through Measure for Measure, however, death and loss of virginity threaten to become points of no return. Intent on entering a convent, Isabella returns to the world to help secure a pardon for her brother Claudio, whom Angelo has sentenced to death for violating Vienna’s laws against premarital sex. Isabella pleads for mercy with persuasive rhetoric and erudite arguments. Rather than yield to compassion and reason, Angelo gives in to his carnal desire. He proposes a quid pro quo: if Isabella has sex with him, he will pardon her brother. She refuses and believes that Claudio will share her outrage and her decision. She is partly right. When she tells Claudio of Angelo’s corruption, he rails against the deputy’s hypocrisy but then begs his sister to sacrifice her virginity in exchange for his life. Anticipating Hamlet’s “dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns,” Claudio speculates what happens when we die:

In comparison to this terrifying afterlife, “The weariest and most loathèd worldly life … is a paradise.” Claudio presumably includes sexual assault among suffering preferable to death. Isabella’s “Alas, alas!” registers her surprise, disappointment, and eventually disgust with her brother. While moved emotionally, Isabella remains fixed in her choice: “More than our brother is our chastity.”

The members of my Politics and Prose class hotly debated both Isabella’s decision and Claudio’s response. Many of them approached Isabella’s choice in 21st-century terms of self-determination and a right to bodily integrity rather than a dilemma of faith. This approach led us to ask not only “What’s Isabella’s reasoning, and is it ethical?” but also “Whose ethical gauge are we using, anyway?” So too, Claudio’s response required us to return to Shakespeare’s imagined Renaissance Vienna. While Claudio’s offense of premarital sex—with his fiancée, no less—is a nonissue in parts of today’s world, it is technically a crime in the world of the play. Should he not accept his sentence? And can his fear of death’s eternal torment outweigh the realities of rape’s manifold and enduring pain? This last question, at least, led to a definitive and unanimous response: No, it cannot.

Together we plumbed Shakespeare’s language for points of entry to and routes through these quandaries. I offered cultural and historical contexts, such as early modern English laws and norms around sex, and Catholicism in England during and after the period of religious upheaval known as the Reformation. Members of the class also shared their knowledge of literature, history, and theology, along with their lived experiences of political and social movements in the United States.

For our final session, I decided to return us to Measure for Measure by way of Joyce Carol Oates’s “In the Region of Ice.” Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1965 and reproduced in 1970 in Oates’s The Wheel of Love, “In the Region of Ice” won the O. Henry Award in 1967. Its title comes from Claudio’s litany of horrors possibly awaiting him after death: “or to reside / In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice.” In Oates’s story, Claudio’s speech is quoted in full in a letter written by the brilliant but unstable Weinstein to Sister Irene, his Shakespeare teacher at a Jesuit university. This textual allusion framed our exploration of the two literary works together. “In the Region of Ice” returns to the dilemma of Measure for Measure: A woman, a religious woman no less, is asked to sacrifice herself to atone for a man’s sins. Should she allow her social death so he can avoid physical death?

Oates begins her stunning work of psychological realism with Sister Irene’s confusion and ambivalence about the new world beyond the walls of her classroom and her convent. These feelings may have rung true for many of Oates’s original readers. According to historian James T. Patterson, 1965 in America was a transformational year. Between the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and President Johnson’s Great Society, the country found itself on the “eve of destruction.” No less than the reality of such societal changes, Weinstein’s belief in humanist ideas unsettles Sister Irene. At first, she is afraid of a relationship that demands she commit fully to the principles of Christianity. But when Weinstein writes to her, using Shakespeare to hint at his suicidal ideations, Sister Irene feels moved to act, to intervene, to sacrifice as did her savior. In this moment, like Shakespeare’s Isabella, Sister Irene commits wholly to her identity as a servant of Christ. So too, as in Measure for Measure, her religious zeal proves no match for patriarchal privilege and chauvinistic presumption.

In my class, I make a point of no spoilers. So, I will refrain here from revealing the final third of Oates’s short story. But I will share that it ends with Sister Irene ruminating on her choice; not only if she makes the right choice but also if she ever had a choice. “In the Region of Ice” thus gives voice to one way of thinking about Isabella’s choice—or, more precisely, one way of thinking about how Isabella might think about her choice. Returning to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure by way of Joyce Carol Oates, my students and I arrived at new understandings of these characters and their choices. And, perhaps, our own, as both play and short story highlight all-too-familiar constraints on women’s autonomy as sexual, spiritual, and social beings. Reading Shakespeare outside the conventional classroom and in relation with a great modern author prompts us to return to the enduring challenge of upholding ideas against often harsh realities.

About the author

Marissa Greenberg is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches a variety of classes on early modern English literature. In addition to her long-standing fascination with processional performance, her current research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century women’s adaptations of the writings of William Shakespeare and John Milton.