|
|
ABOUT MEASURE FOR MEASURE: "We are all frail, Isabella" is Angelo's self-defining line in Shakespeare's late play. Ostensibly a play about the effects of legislating morality by making sex illegal, it is much more than that. It is about that moment in life when everything becomes clear, when all surfaces melt away, when truth is revealed; it is the moment when stone becomes as translucent as glass. It is like the drawings of Leonardo, when the child within a womb is suddenly revealed in a drawing, and to science. This moment of "seeing" is pivotal, not only to the characters, but also to the entire structure of the play. The play embodies, in its ethos, the transition from the Medieval to the Renaissance mind. Like a Medieval altarpiece (two-dimensional, linear, stacked) the structure of the play in the first four acts pushes through, like a difficult birth, to come alive – intentionally so – to remind us of what life is like in darkness before one comes alive in three dimensions. Also like the Medieval world, death and damnation are all pervasive in this text. . . "To die and go we know not where, this warm flesh to rot and become a kneaded clod" . . . we are entombed in "Measure for Measure's" darkness for an interminable amount of time, only to make the moment of enlightenment even brighter. Dawn comes in act five. Isabella, in a single act of forgiveness, brings redemption and humanism to this world. Like figures in a stained-glass window, she falls to her knees, publicly absolving the man who tried to murder her brother and force himself upon her. In this moment, Divine light irradiates through the characters and banishes darkness and ignorance. Written just before "King Lear", it is one of the most radical moments in all dramatic literature, and to me, not rivaled for two hundred years – until Mozart's final notes for "The Marriage of Figaro". |