Measure for Measure

Context:

The June 17 post asked questions of three plays: The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. In that post I responded to the Shrew and Merchant questions.

This is the question about Measure for Measure: Why does Isabella say nothing at the end of MEASURE--is the Duke her true match or is she being misused?

Response:

All plays cast lifestuff into storytelling form. The form gives meaning to and communicates the stuff. The playwright is ever concerned with how to stay true to the realities of lifestuff while accommodating the conventions of story form. Part of the continuing engagement of the audience with a play is their experience of the interaction between truth to lifestuff and the requirements of story form. How far is the audience willing to let Truth to Life strain in order to get the most theatrical engagement from Story Form?

With parts of Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, truth to lifestuff and the conventions of story find an uneasy balance. But Shakespeare mines gold from such seeming problems; for example, the fairytale silliness of the caskets codicil in Signiore Belmont’s will dramatizes something about wealth and entitlement in a play where mercantilism and privilege play significant roles.

Some critics think that by the time he wrote Measure for Measure, Shakespeare had outgrown the form of romantic comedy epitomized by Twelfth Night and As You Like It; that perhaps with M4M he wanted to demonstrate the shortcomings of the form. We happily celebrate the partnerings at the finales of Twelfth Night and As You Like It because the stories of these plays are about the rocky paths to love and because the form demands that the characters end the play in couples. But the story of M4M is not about the difficulties of coupling, except literally and even then only legally. It is not a romantic comedy. And yet it ends with the romantic comedy coupling convention. Uneasy fit.

But I think it’s best to embrace the so-called problems with this play and see where they might lead. If form is meaning, perhaps those problems and the uneasiness between Life and Story are part of its meaning.

M4M is a genius example of Life asserting itself against Form and Form pushing back to give meaning to Life. It dramatizes the struggle between the power of sex and the force of legal restraint, both secular and religious. Society must make laws that regulate the citizenry and those laws often regulate sexual behavior; but the earth must be peopled and that rule is enforced by the irresistible complex driving force of sex.

Measure for Measure says (pace Michael Crichton) “Sex finds a way”.

Almost all critical attention on this play is devoted to the Duke/Angelo/Isabella story and most of the performing interest is with Angelo and Isabella: I want to do Measure for Measure—you know, Angelo and Isabella and okay the Duke too, but then, rats, I have to include all that Pompey/Overdone/Elbow/Abhorson/Barnardine/Froth/Lucio stuff, though of course, I can cut a lot of that since it’s just comic relief with old jokes that nobody gets anyway.
We thus run the risk of concluding that the real play, the real meaning, happens only in the grave scenes of dark corners. But what the whole play is dramatizing includes the roisterous comedy subplot that takes more stage time and has more characters than such plots in any of the other comedies. Why is this? If it were just for the comedy, just to give the clowns in the company something to entertain the groundlings with, the play would need much less of it.
We avoid this substory, I think, because we don’t think it’s funny and because productions create with these scenes not comedy but tedium. Too often actors present detailed characterizations that demonstrate how inventive the actors can be when Shakespeare asks only for single-stroke clowns who focus on the situation and not on character complexity. Too often we get clever, charming Alfred Doolittles when Shakespeare asks for simple Elbows and unimaginative Pompeys.

Alvina Krause’s description of the mechanicals in her discussions of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream applies to the clowns of M4M (See blog posts for May 20 and May 22). And Beyond the Fringe, the comedy review that introduced Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook to the world, offers two wonderful tracks: So That’s the Way You Like It is a brilliant parody of Shakespeare, attention to which can yield insights into creating the several aspects of Shakespearean production, including clown characters. Sitting on the Bench is a hilarious monologue by a simple, literal, unimaginative working class man—a Shakespeare clown. 

Then into the mix of clowns toss Lucio the fool with his lordly blinders on, let him stir things up, and you get raunchy hilarious comedy.

With a point.

As Lucio and Pompey both say, Execute those who have sex outside of marriage and you will soon have an empty town. 
When the Provost offers Pompey the Tapster Bawd a chance to become Abhorson the Executioner’s Helper (too many executions recently for one man to handle), he says If it keeps me out of prison, I’ll happily take the morally upstanding legal profession of Executioner of Human Life over the venal illegal one of Procurer of Human Sex. 
Barnardine, the drunken criminal long forgotten by the criminal justice system, refuses to be executed at just anybody’s whim.

And Froth, the gentleman who may have done something untoward with/to Constable Elbow’s wife. Or maybe not.
And all the characters who don’t actually appear--Master Rash, Master Caper, young Dizzy, Master Shoe-tie, and more—all of whose stories multiply the sense of life lived with vigor in Vienna beneath, beyond, around the rules.

Religion and Government create rules of clear, clean absolutes and humanity is expected to live within those artificial moral and legal grids. But in the streets of M4M’s Vienna, life is messier than the law can ever order. Each comic scene makes an implicit comment on the serious scenes that surround it—a sort of yes, but you’ve forgotten something. It all adds up to a teeming, complex human society with life and sex lived energetically outside the box, outside the lines, all over the grid. No laws either secular or religious can contain the sheer inventive vitality of the power of sex in human life.

Try to stifle that power within yourself as the Duke and Angelo and Isabella have done and it will assert itself aggressively (see Euripides’ Hippolytus) as these three discover publicly by the end of the play.

The Law versus Human Sexual Behavior opposition exists along a continuum from Complete License on one end to Stifling Restraint on the other with Responsible Freedom somewhere at the midpoint. In M4M, the Duke, having allowed society to move into Complete License, is trying to find a way to get things closer to Stifling Restraint by having his deputy Angelo step in to enforce strict, rigid laws he has let go slack. The plan is then for him to return to rule without having seemed to waffle. He makes no mention of Responsible Freedom.

The Duke goes undercover to observe the governing and the governed but soon finds himself working behind the scenes not only to keep his government functioning but to prevent Angelo from abusing it, and eventually publicly to reveal Angelo’s moral duplicity.

The story form of the ruler secretly moving among his people must needs end with the ruler learning lessons from the people and, armed with insights, setting everything to rights, which in the conventions of romantic comedy includes the ultimate partnering of the main characters. M4M’s Duke has a lot to learn about people and how they truly behave. He’s no Prospero and Vienna isn’t an enchanted island under his magical sway. At every turn people assert themselves and subvert the Duke’s plans—even as he improvises on-the-spot solutions to breaking crises. In their determined vitality, the characters threaten to subvert the very conventional givens of the story form they find themselves in. Be absolute for death, the Duke/Friar tells a receptive Claudio, but the moment Claudio senses the surest chance of living, he chucks the Friar’s counsel and begs his sister to give up her virginity for his life. Once Angelo thinks he’s bedded Isabella, the Duke assures the Provost that he, Angelo, will pardon Claudio. That’s the way the story should go; but Angelo doesn’t play by the rules, so the Duke improvises a decision to execute the criminal Barnardine in Claudio’s place (a grotesque mirroring of the conventional bed trick the Duke employs to deal with the Angelo and Isabella dilemma), but Barnardine simply refuses: he’s hung over and he’s not dying today.

And throughout it all Lucio, the gadfly in the Duke/Friar’s plotting ointment, buzzes about to keep things from ever settling into predictability.

For a play that dramatizes the power of sexuality (resistance is futile), Shakespeare chooses as his main protagonists a head of government who has a complete bosom (a protected heart) that the dribbling dart of love cannot pierce; a young woman who avoids life and sex by entering a strict religious order whose law she wishes had a more strict restraint upon the sisterhood; a deputy who has repressed his sexual urges and turned his blood to ice water and who doth rebate and blunt his natural edge/With profits of the mind: study and fast.

But sex finds a way.

The icicley deputy cracks first because, while previous experience may have prompted his carnal retreat, it also etched a fault line in his defenses.

Both Angelo and Isabella begin their interview with formal, passionless interchanges. Isabella can’t even say the words for sexual activity. And were she here alone, she would leave after Angelo’s first refusal and Claudio would die. But boundaryless Lucio urges her on. She gets more aggressive. Angelo remains cold and civil. Isabel retreats. But Lucio urges, insists, infuses her with energy and finally her passion asserts itself. She speaks fervently, moves forcefully, eventually perhaps a lock of hair comes loose from beneath her wimple. Her chest heaves with her breathing. She falls to her knees, her hands clasped in prayer to the high heavens. When she says Go to your bosom, she may be close enough to him to lay her flat hand on his chest.

Even Lucio is impressed.

And after she leaves, the upright bloodless deputy has been knocked off balance: What’s happening to me? And am I responsible? or is she?

Ohmygod, what is it that I am thinking?

Angelo finds himself overwhelmed by sexual need--Now I give my sensual race the rein--and he gives Isabella the utimatum:  fuck me and save your brother; refuse and he dies.
 

At the jail, why, after counseling Claudio to accept death, does the Duke stay and eavesdrop on Isabella’s conference with him? How interesting that the Duke makes a point of calling the Provost in just so that he can tell him to leave him here. And the first thing he says to Isabella after the Provost leaves is that she is beautiful (to a near-nun). Then he adds that she is good. Did he stay out of simple curiosity or has something about Isabella intrigued him? 

How might a production communicate this?

And such a production might stage Isabella’s passionate outburst with Claudio so that it mirrors her outburst with Angelo, linking the two in the audience’s imaginations and suggesting a similarity between her effect on Angelo and, in a subtler and as yet nonconscious way, on the Duke.

In a flash the Duke comes up with the bed trick as the best way to trap Angelo. Story form indeed.

And Isabella agrees to it—something the Isabella who asked for more restraints from Sister Francesca would not do.

Eventually this all leads to the scene outside the jail when, learning that Claudio has been executed, Isabella weeps and I think falls, even if only momentarily, into the Duke/Friar’s arms. Something happens here. To both of them. With Angelo she falls to her knees, perhaps touches him. Here she falls into the Friar’s arms and sobs.

Is this the first time such a thing has happened to the Duke of dark corners? To Isabella?

And what an image of novice and friar.

Over the course of the play, Isabella and the Duke share more intimacy with the each other than either has ever shared with anyone. By the time of the public meeting of Act V both have been changed by their immersion in the messy complexities of life, especially of sex.

Of course, the critic may write in authoritative conceptual terms, but the theatre practitioner must ask: What will communicate this to the audience? What cumulative sequences of experiences will take the audience meaningfully from Isabella’s There is a vice that most I do abhor to her shouting out in the public square Virgin-violator! Fornication! Concupiscible intemperate lust!

What photo-op moments will lead the audience experientially from the Duke’s I have ever lov’d the life removed… I love the people,/But do not like to stage me to their eyes to For your lovely sake, give me your hand, and say you will be mine before all his people present in the public square?

The public finale begins with Isabella’s passionate denunciation of Angelo and the Duke’s feigned refusal to believe her. Then comes Mariana and her seemingly unsuccessful charge against Angelo. Then the Duke hands questioning over to Escalus as he, the Duke, “must leave for a while”—at which, surely the audience laughs, being as it is a confidante in the working out of the story. The sequent unmasking of the Friar/Duke leads to Angelo’s wish for speedy execution and the Duke’s ruling that Angelo must marry Mariana. Then he says to Isabella, I am still attorneyed to your service, and she replies with a deference that indicates how all respond to their sovereign ruler in this formal public setting: O, give me pardon,/That I, your vassal, have employ’d and pain’d/Your unknown sovereignty!

So far so good.

But still the Duke pretends that Claudio is dead. He’s got a great Claudio reveal moment planned. Why does he push executing Angelo as “measure for measure” with the execution of Claudio when Claudio is alive? (I love that in the situation that is the only mention of the title there is actually no equitable measure for measure.) Mariana begs Isabella to intercede. The Duke ups the ante. Mariana presses and Isabella does the passionate, Grace-full thing, both of them reminding us of Lucio and Isabella in Angelo’s chamber. And Isabella raises herself above everyone else in the play for generosity of spirit, of Grace, of forgivingness.

Something big, I think, happens to the Duke in response to Isabella as something earlier had happened to Angelo. And I think the Duke has been pushing for it even if he’s not quite certain what “it” actually will be.

(And as always the theatre practitioner within me asks of the critic, And how is this dramatized and communicated in production?)

What I find more intriguing than Isabella’s silence here is the Duke’s decision outside the jail to tell her that Claudio has been beheaded with the rationale that she’ll be so much happier when she finds out that it’s not true. At this moment Lifestuff and Story Form merge. As the one who’s making all this happen, the Duke practically addresses the audience directly, practically says: It’ll make such a great climax to hold off telling her and keep the genie in the bottle a little longer; I’ll get a bigger payoff from her reaction when she finally finds out. And so will you. The play would fail as a story if the Duke were to reveal the truth to Isabella at the jail, even if truth to lifestuff suggests that that is when it would happen. The audience delights in their confederacy manipulating lifestuff for the promise of greater story delight to come. And when in this final public scene the Duke pretends still that Claudio is dead, delaying the reveal even further, the audience is still his collaborator, heightening the anticipation of Isabella’s response.

When finally it comes, it is wordless.

In Shakespeare.

The Claudio reveal astonishes everyone, not just Isabella. The scene is alive with gasps and movement and vocalizations. But no poetry, no words. The play gives her no opportunity to speak with Claudio, as the Duke immediately tops in with his proposal.

I think the Duke is nearly as surprised as Isabel is at his voicing his proposal to her at this precise moment. And it’s that mutual surprise, rather than some sensed negative response from Isabella, that prompts his But fitter time for that.

Another way of imagining this moment: What happens during the close-up on Isabella after the Duke’s proposal? I think the answer is: Not much. For the instant after Claudio is unhooded her attention is on him, her mind reeling with all that has led to this moment. The Duke says what he says. Cut to a close-up of Isabella whose focus goes to the Duke as she registers what the Duke is saying. Then BAM a close-up on the Duke as he also hears himself saying it and registers his own surprise. And then perhaps a shared understanding from which comes But fitter time for that.

Just as this is not the occasion for Isabella to speak with Claudio--they will have lots to say to each other after this public gathering, whose central figure of absolute authority is the Duke--so it is not the time for so personal an interchange between her and the Duke. While it may be the occasion for passionate public denunciation of Angelo and a passionate plea for saving his life, this is not the place for intimate exchange. The Duke acknowledges as much with his But fitter time for that and moments later if you’ll a willing ear incline.

I think audiences who are experiencing the play in performance have less difficulty with Isabella's silence than do play readers and theatre practitioners. In production, the impact of the “problem” of Isabella’s lack of a response depends upon how the play has led up to that moment and how the last section of the play is performed.

I do think, however, that it’s ill-advised to make a definitive statement about “why Isabella is silent” and to provide a clear indication of what Isabella’s full response to the Duke is. At this moment, she surely doesn’t have a full and absolute response. And the Duke is right there with her. This will take some further offstage post-finale discussion.

From here til the end, the play is whirlwindy enough for the production to focus the audience on the fun of wrapping up the story form rather than on further psychologizing the characters. It’s not until now that, having resumed being the Duke, this man has any chance at all of imposing order on the vital chaos of all the lives he governs. He proceeds to the fun of dealing with Lucio, who in this scene practically literalizes the idea that some human passions will not conform to plan.

The final cataloguing of the mandatory couplings functions in the same way that a symphony lets its audience know the music is ending. And the audience freely goes along. There is some reason for the Duke to hope that Angelo and Mariana can make a go of it. His perception of a “quickening” in Angelo when it is revealed that Claudio is alive suggests a bit of joy in the possibility of life and his Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well might suggest that Angelo has indeed softened a bit through his ordeal and perhaps is returning to a former kinder, gentler Angelo; Lucio should do right by the woman he impregnated, though one quick response from him can tell us what the likelihood of that is; the Duke and Isabella have experienced intimacy with each other and as Friar and Novice have discovered compatibility.

But….

While Shakespeare's other comedies end with a promise of a future new world order of love, happiness and stability, Act V of Measure for Measure ends with the promise of an Act VI that will be rambunctious and surprising and just as unwilling to conform to artificial rules and patterns and forms as the rest of the play has been.

Perhaps the uncomfortable fit in this play between Lifestuff and Story Form is part of what’s being dramatized. Perhaps the play is dramatizing the impossibility of making definitive statements/predictions about human behavior as the all-too-pat partnerings at the end of romantic comedy prescribe. Perhaps it’s dramatizing the necessary, constant, continuing struggle between the human need for order, rules, restraint and the relentlessness of Lifestuff’s drives. And perhaps it is dramatizing the futility of assuming that there can ever be anything more than a temporary peace in that struggle.

Life will find a way.

Shrew, Merchant, Measure

Question:

My questions would be with the endings of any of three of Shakespeare's comedies: SHREW, MERCHANT, MEASURE, all viewed as problematic. Why does Isabella say nothing at the end of MEASURE--is the Duke her true match or is she being misused? Is Kate's final speech in this day and age chauvinistic or incredibly well-balanced, mature, and thoughtful? And what's with Portia's demand that Shylock turn Christian? I don't see the quality of mercy there--and then having to go back to Belmont in the fifth act and care about their silly lives...

I would love to hear any of these addressed if they strike your fancy. But truly the blog puts me in touch with something it is very easy to lose sight of--why theatre is something to devote yourself to that has nothing to do with the culture of entertainment.

Response:

Thanks for the generous comment about the blog.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the phrase “culture of entertainment” (“a fertile ground where one keeps hold among”) applied to how Sophocles keeps hold on his audiences as well as it does to the latest appeal to the shallowest of human needs for engagement?

Your questions articulate the essential problematic issue of each of these plays. And they are questions that probably will never find fully satisfying answers. I won’t try to be definitive in my responses since I don’t think that’s possible. Rather, I’ll jot down some ideas and perhaps they’ll provoke some thoughtful comments.

Shrew and Merchant in this post. Measure in the next one.

The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice

More obviously so than with other works of art, I think, plays exist in two time/places at once: they are real fragments of their past time of creation and they are also living reflections of their present time of production. The older the play, the more I think its “pastness” is part of its meaning and should be embraced in contemporary production.

With The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, the young playwright Shakespeare was showing off his wares with his takes on popular story forms. The shrewish woman went back to the mystery plays (Noah’s wife) and was still popular in Shakespeare’s time (the lost Taming of a Shrew) and the Jewish villain had found the spotlight with Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. In our time, "The Woman Question" goes back to the Nineteenth Century and continues to morph with the times and "The Jewish Question" must forever root itself in the horrors of the Twentieth Century Holocaust.

Where we are with each of these two “Questions” is what we bring to the pastness of these two plays in production.

The Taming of the Shrew

I think it’s unhelpful to view The Taming of the Shrew as a comedy in the form of As You Like It or Twelfth Night or even Much Ado about Nothing, all of which imply more complex characters and relationships than the plays Shrew is more like: A Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Also, the induction scene moves it one story telling step further from “reality”, presenting the story of Kate and Petruchio as a play within a play.

It’s a farce rooted in commedia traditions.

That means focus is on the situation and not the characters and that no character is ever in danger of being really hurt—slapstick. That means it requires two excitingly acrobatic actors animating their Kate and Petruchio masks.

More Punch and Judy than Benedick and Beatrice. Or perhaps Benedick and Beatrice a la Punch and Judy--energized, even elevated, by Shakespeare’s wit and language.

So, yes, Kate and P are equal matches for each other in wit, in vitality, intellect, sense of humor and comedy. Each is indeed what the other seeks in a mate.

Keep the focus on their mutual joy in the contest. If Petruchio’s fight is aimed at getting a wild and determined Kate to see and to value him without the need for macho posturing and if Kate’s fight is to keep him off-balance while she discovers if he’s worth her time, the play can work. It might help to remember that Kate was written for a male to play. I think the implication for the actress today is to focus her sexual and gender energies on the physical, carnival, farcical aspects of the part. If you create a rambunctious, circus-y, even gymnastic, play-within-a-play atmosphere, the play works.

But then there’s Kate’s last speech.

Doing the speech straightforwardly—even in a farce—I think won’t cut it today. We bring more than a century of concern over the relationship of the female to male-centric society, of women to men.

And for the same reason, if you’ve tried to create a character comedy with this speech as a thoughtful final note--disaster.

Not to mention that in the past decades we have become a culture that has even criminalized the kinds of physical interactions that Kate and Petruchio engage in.

The answer for Lynne Fontanne in her 1935 performance with husband Alfred Lunt still makes some sense: Play it with a subtext suggesting that this is just a pause in their tussle meant to placate Petruchio, who may perhaps then let his guard down so that, off stage, Kate can come back full force for another round. In effect, the conflict hasn’t been resolved. It will continue to be a joyful, farcical, on-going match.

It’s likely that however engaging and, yes, entertaining this play continues to be, any production will include aspects that rankle some contemporary sensibilities.

The Merchant of Venice

Merchant has two story forms in one play: the fairy tale romance and the folk tale turned into social, courtroom drama. The two stories come together with Portia as the bridge.

To take sides and to make absolute villains and heroes in this play is, I think, to miss something vital to its dramatic life. A production that makes “the Christians” as wicked as other productions make “the Jews” hasn’t done anything more to explore the lifestuff of the play. It’s subtler than that and more complex.

*First scene:

We get involved with the vitality and the gusto and the camaraderie of the boys of Venice and the older merchant who delights in their company. Love and Money. Friendship intertwined with Commerce.

*Second scene:

Vitality, laughter, excess and bigotry in the wealthy gated community of Belmont. And a romantic future controlled by secular contract.

*Third scene:

The Outsider confronts The Entitled.  Drama confronts Comedy. The Judaic Them and the Christian Us engage each other in the arena of secular law.

I think we are meant to find the Christians attractive, generous, life-loving people who are both consciously and unconsciously chauvinistic and racist and jingoist and xenophobic.

But no more so than everybody in the audience is.

It’s just another mirror held up to nature.

Merchant assumes the inevitability of such bigotry in the sustaining of any social group. Societies exist as much in relationship to what they are not as to what they are. There must always be those who are “in” (Us) and those who are “out” (Them) and there will always be tension when the “ins” and the “outs” must deal with one another. In the world of The Merchant of Venice that conflict reaches conclusive arbitration in the secular court of law, where the play says the dominant cultural group will always prevail. Antonio, the merchant of Venice, is of that group and will therefore prevail; Shylock, the Jew of Venice, is not and therefore will not.

What is being dramatized in the first Belmont scene with Portia and Nerissa?

Too often we get actresses way too old for the characters, which turns Portia into a proper, slightly stuffy, early middle-aged woman with just a hint of humor and Nerissa into her proper middle-aged gentlewoman in waiting. If, however, we imagine two young sorority sisters (one weathy and privileged, the other a scholarship student from a working class family) cracking each other up and laughing and poking fun at the fraternity jerks and townies that one of them has to deal with while the other eggs her on--we get a better idea of the comedic tone of the scene. It really is great comedy; it’s funny. The audience should be laughing, not just smiling in that tolerant bemused way typical of contemporary productions of Shakespeare.

Portia says, In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but he!…. and we laugh and become confederates in making fun of The Other: the English, the French, the German, the Neopolitan. The Other.

(If the play were written today, who might Portia include in the list? Who would you want to put on it?)

The subsequent casket scenes heighten the comedy of ridiculing The Other and also intensify our confederacy in the racism. When the Moroccan fails in his suit and leaves Belmont, Portia tosses off, Let all of his complexion choose me so. And, yes, we laugh.

The gold, silver, lead casket arrangement asks the suitors to conduct courtship in terms of wealth and contracts and riches and laws, which is common social currency in this world. So in their turns, both Bassanio and Portia woo in legal, contractual language. The ring device is Portia taking Bassanio’s legalistic language of courtship to its extreme just as in the law court she counters Shylock by taking his legal literalism to its extreme.

Love and Commerce and Bigotry and The Law.

We delight in the exuberant joy of living embraced by the boys of Venice and the girls of Belmont. We become involved in a world structured by the legal language of commerce in which a fairy tale romance is cast in the terms of a wacky legal construct set up by Portia’s father. At Belmont, the beautiful mount occupying the place in a Shakespeare comedy that is usually a refuge from the harsh realities of the court, everyone engages in bigotry and legalese in matters of life and love. And in Venice, Launcelot the clown even gets us to laugh with him as he ridicules his old blind father.

It’s funny and it’s harmless, right?

Then Portia goes to Venice and confronts the legal world of Us versus Them.

The trial scene should build in horror and suspense, but too often it flatlines because it focuses so much on Shylock the character (actors can’t resist it) that it steals focus from the terror of what Shylock is actually doing. The few minutes during which Shylock presses to extract his pound of flesh right there in court should have the excruciating tension of the best of melodramas; say, the last minutes of North by Northwest as Cary Grant hangs on to Eva Marie Saint with one hand and the edge of Mount Rushmore with the other as Martin Landau presses his foot onto Grant’s knuckles. Although we know how Grant gets out of it, the suspense of the scene still manages to grip even today. What could a production of Merchant learn from Hitchcock about the generating of suspense for the trial scene, especially the last minutes leading to Portia’s Tarry a little, which is akin to the gunshot on Mt. Rushmore?

There’s probably a courtroom scene in some film that illustrates this more felicitously than North by Northwest or lots of thrillers where the villain gets perilously close to cutting the heart out of the hero in a particularly intimate, graphic way, but I just couldn’t resist Hitchcock’s genius techniques for creating suspense.

You ask: What’s with Portia’s demand that Shylock turn Christian? I don’t see the quality of mercy there.

Let’s review the exact sequence of how that judgment comes about:

By the way, Portia says to Shylock, now that you’ve lost the case, the law stipulates that anyone seeking the death of one of Us can be executed. And then half your wealth goes to him and the other half to the state.

Mercifully, effortlessly, the Duke rescinds the death penalty. It's almost shocking how easily he can do it. He then gives Antonio half of Shylock’s wealth and decides that the state will collect only a fine rather than its entire other half. It reminds me of the court in Saint Joan that tells her in its mercy it won’t execute her; she’ll just spend the rest of her life in prison.

Shylock, like Joan, says You might just as well kill me.

In response, Portia asks Antonio what mercy he can show Shylock.

Antonio offers to turn down his half of Shylock’s wealth and asks the Duke to rescind the fine as well so long as Shylock agrees to put the other half of his wealth in trust for Lorenzo.

What Antonio wants in return for this mercy is for Shylock immediately to convert to Christianity and that upon his death, his whole estate should devolve to Lorenzo and Jessica.

The Duke tells Shylock to accept the offer or die.

Portia asks Shylock to respond.

I am content, he says. Do you mind if I leave now? I am not well.

I wish I knew how Shakespeare’s audience would have reacted were Antonio’s only stipulation the one naming Lorenzo Shylock’s heir. Why did Shakespeare need to make Antonio force conversion on Shylock? And without the slightest question from Portia or the Duke?

I think it has to do with Shylock’s brazen stepping out of his place as The Other in Our Society. And doing it in order to use the laws of the secular court for his own Old Testament purposes. He says if he doesn’t get his bond exactly as stipulated, he’ll bring the whole system down. After all, We, Antonio’s people, devise those laws and Shylock has stepped presumptuously way over what We think of as that Other’s line.

It’s true that most of the non-Jewish merchants of our Venices and the inhabitants of our Belmonts today—the perceived audience for the play--no longer live with a line drawn so absolutely between them and The Jew. It doesn’t mean that such inexorable lines no longer exist; it just means that they separate Us from different Thems now.

Still, there are today audiences of good people who have no trouble seeing the Duke’s and Antonio’s and Portia’s actions as merciful and soul-saving for Shylock. They approve the Christian magnanimity.

And there are those who see those actions as actually unconscious, though undeniable, bigotry.

And there are those who view it as the crowning proof that the play is out and out anti-Semitic.

I find similarity, though admittedly not quite analogy, in the attitude of some of American society today toward the push for same-sex marriage. Something is perceived as dangerously fractious and over-stepping and violating about The Homosexual Other presuming to push out the boundaries of secular and religious laws that We have created to define Our Healthy Society.

I don’t think Shylock is being punished for being a Jew; he’s being purged of the trappings that motivated him to threaten the majority society. And I think it’s being done more to neutralize him than mercifully to save him.

The external “social drama” story line ends with the trial, after which Portia (and we) flee the social realities of Venice for the fairy tale romance of Belmont and where, as you say in your question, things are “silly” by contrast. But we don’t forget Shylock when we’re at Belmont even if the Belmontians do. We don’t forget that it was Portia who spoke so eloquently as she articulated things about mercy that she had never before had to think about; and that it is she who subsequently makes no mention of Shylock to his daughter and who now re-engages in the fun of the ring deception (another wacky legal contract dictating personal relationships) as fully as previously she presided over the horrific trial.

Jessica has fled Shylock’s house (The man that hath no music in himself...Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils) for the freedom and frivolities of Belmont. But she is still The Other. Or at least The Outsider.

I live in a working class Latin neighborhood in Los Angeles where, I have jokingly remarked, Bullets is our second language. People have been gunned down only a few blocks from my house. 

I get in my car and twentyish minutes later I’m at a house party given by friends around the pool where the concerns are by comparison “silly” and where I am reminded of the first scene between Portia and Nerissa:

By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world says the beautiful young woman with the gorgeous clothes and hair and jewels; to which her companion responds, That would be understandable if you were as miserable as in reality you are truly fortunate.

A look from her beautiful friend and she adds: But I guess if you’re glutted with too much you can be just as unhappy as those who are starving and have nothing. Moderation in all things, eh?

And the lovely lively young rich girl replies, I know, I know, but it’s hard to live moderately when you have so much.

The Belmontians should be delightful and gregarious and fun and we should find ourselves giving over to their sillinesses. Each episode of this final movement of the play, however, should, I think, end with a close-up on Jessica.

My friend’s Mexican housekeeper was invited to one of those poolside parties and she came with her husband and teenage son. They sat like Jessicas and said little, even when they were actively included in conversations. But when one of the partygoers chided her boyfriend for losing that money clip she bought him and when she, yes, pushed him fully clothed into the pool and everyone laughed, who at the party thought to look to the housekeeper and her family to see how they were responding to the antics?

Productions that keep Jessica on the outside looking in throughout the act—even ending the play with her alone on stage holding the deed from "the rich Jew"—make sense, I think.

Play Shylock’s closed, musicless, calculating nature fully. And when he gets a chance to exact revenge, play him fearlessly as the Ultimate Other. But create a world that gladly treats him that way and in fact will keep him that way through its social mores as well as its laws. He devises his diabolical bond only after Antonio smacks him with his and after this is over, I’ll go right back to spitting on you.

And when The Other hammers at the system that keeps it all humming along, the system neutralizes him.

Play Portia’s vitality and her grace, her intellect and wit, her sense of humor and her great generosity, but play her bigotry and her spoiled-rich-girlness too. One does not preclude the other.

Play Antonio’s anti-Semitic hatred of Shylock as fully as you play his bountiful generosity to Bassanio. One does not preclude the other.

While there is no necessity to play Antonio’s love for Bassanio as a wholly out older gay man’s obsession with a young man who freely takes advantage of that obsession (productions, for example, that set the Venice scenes in a gay bath house), there is also no reason to underplay the otherwise irrational intensity of Antonio’s love.

The ambiguity is the point.

The play starts with ambiguity: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. A few minutes later, when Bassanio lays it all out for Antonio and Antonio pledges to borrow money to help him, we have a good inkling why, even if Antonio knows not why.

And after all the couplings at the finale of the play, Antonio the Merchant of Venice is left the lone outsider.

Perhaps Jessica isn’t the last to leave the stage.

That Shakespeare was a transcendent genius who saw things in his world that his contemporaries didn’t doesn’t mean he therefore saw the world as we see it, though it’s easy for us to wish it were so.

Perhaps he saw deeper than either his world or ours sees things.

In order to write a play dramatizing the inevitable if unfortunate necessity of bigotry and racism, the necessity of creating The Other to contrast The English, he was a man of his time and so he created The Jew, the heathen, the joyless money-lender, who gets hoist with the legal system. If today he were writing for an audience of The West he might create The Muslim, the jihadist, the soulless terrorist (How dare we afford them legal rights?), however narrow and bigoted--and uninformed by firsthand experience--both of these depictions may necessarily be.

If he were writing today with the American Evangelical Christian Right as his audience, he might easily dramatize The Homosexual as The Other and The Homosexual Other would surely get his comeuppance. Rather than stoning him to death, the merciful Christian judge might send him to a Gay Cure camp, after which he might profitably be Christianized.

You might try this one with The Abortion Doctor as The Other.

Or try these:  
If the Orthodox Jewish Communities of Urban America were the audience (Us) for such a play, then who might be The Other?

If extreme Tea Partiers are the Us?

PFLAG?

I think the play knows that the basic questions it asks have no absolute answers and that that, in fact, is part of what’s being dramatized. I think a major concern of the play is that to sustain any culture or social polity we must of necessity exclude some people and define ourselves against them; that there must always be people we think of as somehow less worthy because they are not like us. So long as we all keep our place, everything’s okay. Behind it all is a concern about a world in which, because other traditional systems have failed, issues of love and family and religion must be framed in, and can only be satisfactorily worked out in, the language and the logic of secular law courts.

Or perhaps all this is only what I think the present production moment can bring to the past creation as a way of keeping this play alive today.

Staying in Character

Question:

The first time I heard a story about an actor staying in character in between takes on a film set, I rolled my eyes. But the first time I performed in a short film, I suddenly saw some sense in the procedure. It was incredibly challenging to summon the intensity to deliver a good take. In theater, you know when you're going to have to act –curtain to curtain – but on a film set, there's no telling when they'll need you in front of the camera.

What do you think about the whole "staying in character at all times" business? Is it overkill? Is it simply necessary for some actors? Is it self-important nonsense? Or is it something else entirely?

Response:

The easy response is that I think for some actors it is overkill; for some it is necessary; for some it’s self-important nonsense; and for others, it is something else entirely.

What many (perhaps most) people really mean by “staying in character”—especially when talking about television and film-- is “maintaining an emotional state”.  And most film and television actors tend to maintain the appropriate emotional state between takes, though at a lower intensity than the scene usually asks for.  Depending on what that state is, then, it might mean staying aloof between takes or it might mean staying in off-camera situations compatible with the emotional situation of the take. Of course, if the actor is simply doing his well-honed shtick, then there is no need to stay in any state, because if he’s alive he’s already in character.

But let’s not go for the easy answer. Let’s look at something more interesting.

If by character you mean habitual kinds of behavior not the actor’s own; if you mean ways of responding to environment and situation different from the actor’s; patterns of human action as expressions of deep driving passions determined by biology and circumstance that are not the actor’s, then you’re in the realm of film actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep.

Daniel Day-Lewis 

Surely does the “staying in character” thing—some say obsessively so.

My Left Foot

He was always in a wheel chair and had the crew feed him. 
This makes sense to me: He wanted some muscles and limbs to stay unresponsive and inactive so that he could be free to respond while in scene without concern about them. 

Character.

In the Name of the Father

He spent three days and nights in a small jail cell without food and water preparing for the interrogation scene. I think I remember reading at the time that he had the director subject him to harsh abusive interrogations as well, but I can’t now find specific references to this. 

Whether or not this seems obsessive or whether the ole tale about Olivier’s response to Dustin Hoffman’s running himself to near exhaustion before filming a scene for Marathon Man is apposite, the character of Gerry Conlin is true and complex and detailed. And the interrogation scene is pretty harrowing.

Helen Mirren

The Queen

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

I know nothing of Mirren’s creative process, but in these two films alone she creates two utterly different characters and with each, you can’t tell where the actor ends and the character begins. You could easily believe she was type cast in both films. 

Great Characterization.

Meryl Streep 

There is no actor working in film today, it seems to me, who has created more characters more definitively than Meryl Streep. 

I'm not going to parse her individual characterizations nor compare their relative successes. When she’s good she’s very good; when she’s not, it shows. But of what artist can that not be said? I admire her courage and her reach. 

 Julie and Julia

Streep is 5’ 6” ish and curvy. We perceive her Julia Child as over 6 feet and angular—it’s a determining part of her character, her way of looking at life, the kinds of decisions she has made, etc., not just the external physical behavioral quirks of a real person.  And it was not accomplished simply with wardrobe or by standing on boxes.

To create Julia, Streep says she also channeled her own mother’s love of life.

This Julia is not just a crafty imitation of a real person; she’s an embodiment that gives perspective and meaning to the character of the real person.

It’s an artistic creation.

The Devil Wears Prada

I’m fascinated by what the screenplay expected and what Streep created. If you listen to the screenplay carefully, you sense that the writer intended Miranda Priestly to be a shrill, shrieking harridan, loud and overbearing. (Is that true to the novella? I don’t know, I haven’t read it. Perhaps someone can clarify.) 

Streep told David Letterman that all the people in power that she knew never raised their voice because they didn’t have to. Then she added: “Of course, they were all men.”

Miranda Priestly is a character for a purpose.

Doubt

Yes, there’s an accent.  But it’s not simply external surface mimicry. It’s the vocal expression of a parochial mind, of a person of limited experience. 

It’s her character.

Creating a Character That You Can Stay In 

Begin with your self. 

First: What’s important to the character?

Then: What stimuli in your own life can activate the “you behavior” that you share with this deepest driving force of the character?

If you’re an actor wanting to animate the Hamlet “you stuff” in you, you may wish to recreate an experience that animates the you that deeply wants life to be good and honorable and rooted in unassailable principles; then smack it right up against the reality that life is a lot dirtier than you hoped, a lot more corrupt than you were led to believe.

Some Americans are having Hamlet moments with the clash between the purity and clarity of the Obama campaign message and his perceived capitulation to the political realities of Washington life. 

If you were dancing and singing in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 because the Cheney/Bush nightmare was over and you believed “Yes We Can”, recreate that elated you and then confront that you with the recent realities of a favorite political situation. Progressives who saw the public option disappear from the health care bill have experienced Hamlet sucker punches. And there are people having Hamlet smack downs over the handling of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal process.

If you are among those who think the Bush White House was salvation from the years of Clinton corruption, then you can go there to animate your own Hamlet self. 
The world has no shortage of corruption to touch off your "you Hamlet stuff".

The Gulf oil spill practically literalizes the metaphor of pollution corrupting the world regardless of how true and admirable their leader’s passions may be. There’s something rotten at the heart of Western Civilization. Oil. The very thing that runs our civilization is the source of its greatest corruption. Pure classic tragedy.

And it’s global. It’s almost too theatrically perfect that the BP CEO is British. That the rig was built by a Korean company. That it was licensed in some little island in the Pacific because its regulatory measures are so lax. 

It is an unweeded garden. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

If you care about your country, you can find your way to creating a Hamlet through your responses to today’s political world. 

I stress this public aspect of Hamlet because it is routinely short-changed by actors who would rather plunge into Hamlet’s family life (and I suspect their own private emotional pools)—which always threatens to make of him something of a whining adolescent stamping his foot in rage at mom and step-dad (granted, step-dad did kill dad) rather than a young man facing the tragedy of the corruption of culture and society.

Where were we? Oh yes, Begin with Yourself.

Streep and Mirren had to begin with themselves in order to create great characterizations of Julia and Elizabeth. I won’t presume knowledge of their private creative processes, but take a look at Streep’s Emmy acceptance speech for Angels in America and you get a glimpse of the Streep who loves acting that can be turned into the Julia who loves cooking.

Actors who don’t know themselves and who haven’t learned how to bring the self to character don’t know how to let themselves respond simply, directly, truly. So they act qualities, ideas about a human being, etc. They try to create emotional and behavioral effects that they think will represent the truth their intellects grasp in general conceptual terms.

And so their teachers work hard to get them to understand their "selfs" from the point of view of acting; i.e., in terms of actual direct sensory response to specific stimuli. 

All good acting teaching/learning must address this basic concern. At its core, the Meisner repetition exercise aims at getting actors to discover the answer to the question: Who am I in terms of actual behavioral response? Who am I in terms of literal authentic response to what I see/hear/sense directly before me? Who is the essential, fundamental me and what’s it like when I let that me respond freely and honestly?

Most television and film work hardly asks that of actors and rarely ever more than that. Perhaps those actors need never learn more than that, and truth be told that’s a lot to learn. 

Perhaps they need not concern themselves with dramatic  characterization.

Teachers facing actors who work only for effect and who don't respond authentically may go so far as to declare that character doesn’t even exist. That seems extreme to me, but the reality is that film and television mostly expect actors to “bring themselves" to the script. If character is suggested, it is rarely with more than the most generalized traits.

In television, when a show has a long run, writers change the character over time by writing to the individual actors’ personalities and performing strengths. 
What "character"?

But you aren’t Hamlet and neither is any of those Grant Park revelers.  

Streep isn’t Julia or Miranda Priestly. 

Mirren isn’t Queen Elizabeth or Mrs. Stone. 

The “you stuff” you and they activate is the life stuff that still must be worked into becoming the character.
(This might be an opportunity to mention the moment in Hamlet performance history when Daniel Day-Lewis walked off the stage because he became convinced that he was talking with the ghost of his own father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis.)

Life studies can help.

Where is the Hamlet in President Obama? Take a look at the 2005 convention speech. Look at the bright gleam of possibility in Obama’s eyes. Listen to the forward-looking power of his voice. Now take a look at recent photos. What do the eyes reveal? Listen to the recent press conference about the gulf oil spill. What do you hear in his voice?

He believed Hamlet-like that he could change Washington, bring transparency to politics, create a climate of bipartisanship aimed at improving America—all worthy Hamlet-like goals. 

But there’s something rotten in the District of Columbia. 

An actor with true empathy can absorb Obama behavior and it will deepen his understanding/creation of his own Hamlet.

For Queen Elizabeth and Julia Child, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep had life studies indeed to help turn their own “life stuff” into Julia and Elizabeth. Their major task as artists in this regard was to select only the most revelatory behavior and to incorporate it into their characterizations. 
When it works, life model behavior becomes absorbed by muscles and senses with true comprehension; when it doesn’t work, it is at best mimicry of external behavior without understanding. 
In the examples of Queen Elizabeth and Julia Child, it works indeed.

And I love that Streep added her mother’s joy in living. And for Miranda Priestly, there were those men in power.

Note: Streep perceived, absorbed, stored up experiential images of her mother and the men in power throughout her life--perhaps largely unconsciously. And then when she needed those stored-up experiences to create with, they were there. 

What does the actor create with?

Imagination:

Metaphor can clarify and help you to create with objectivity.

Hamlet:

Become a young eagle who has learned to use the muscles of his expansive wings to mount into the skies. Spot a rabbit and dive with accuracy; grasp it with sharp strong talons. Soar, ride the wind currents high above your domain. Sense freedom and power in your entire body.

Then: You're caught in a net, you're thrown into a darkened room. Try to walk, to fly. Bump into a wall.  Stumble into--what is that? Try to find a way out. Try to lift your wings. To find the light.
What’s an eaglet to do?

Note: You’re still you. The eagle images help you to become you if you were the young eagle Hamlet caught in a mad maze of traps.

Julia: 

There’s something of a fish out of water about Julia Child in the kitchen. Or a bony walrus standing upright and miraculously doing a graceful ballet with pots and pans and knives and spoons. Bon appetit! Why is it anomalous for Julia Child to triumph in the kitchen? What should a walrus be doing? 

Elizabeth: 

You try this one.

Photos and paintings and novels and biographies:

Hamlet is an Elizabethan Prince. He’s a poet; he's a scholar; a fencer. He wears clothes that create behavior different from what clothes have asked of the Western male body for the past hundred years or so. What does any actor today do to incorporate these elements? Besides avoiding them by playing the play in contemporary clothes.

Julia is a woman who emerged from a certain time and place in America. Give specific examples to illustrate. What would Mirren have to do to be able to create that American woman besides work with a dialect coach?

Elizabeth is contemporary British royalty. What would Streep have to do to be able to embody this with true understanding in her human totality?

It's true that good casting does most of the director’s work. Especially in television and film, cast an actor with the essential qualities needed for the role and much of the actor’s creative work is done.

In his last years, Jimmy Stewart said that his first question to a director who wanted to cast him was Why do you want Jimmy Stewart? Why couldn’t you use any other old actor? What makes this a Jimmy Stewart role?  If the part didn’t need Jimmy Stewart, if the director wanted him only because of his name, then Stewart declined.

Jimmy Stewart wasn’t asked to create a character; he was asked to bring the recognizable Jimmy Stewart brand to the role. (Yes, even for Vertigo.)

Most television and film actors aren’t asked to create characters; they are asked to play their recognizable characterization affect in various situations.

We expect certain things from such actors as, for example, George Clooney or Julia Roberts. Character creation is not one of them. 

Test it: You can interchange characterizations among the films. Clooney in this film for Clooney in that one. Roberts in this one for Roberts in that one. What accounts for any difference in “character“ is a difference in the emotional or attitudinal state of the Clooney and Roberts brand. 

But you can’t imagine Miranda Priestly singing on a Greek island with Pierce Brosnan or Queen Elizabeth undressing in an automobile to have sex with a young gigolo.

All of which is not to judge either kind of actor as more or less valid or worthy. Their work situations are just utterly different with utterly different expectations of what the actor’s role should be.

And it does suggest something about how deceptively simple the phrase “staying in character” actually is.

Post Script:

I wanted to write about this--and perhaps way too loosely--because I’m hoping readers will post comments, anecdotes, side bars, etc. This topic can be expanded and altered in many ways. So how about trying it?