Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…In that play, Bertram is much more obviously deserving of what he gets at the end. It’s a sort of twin. It’s written about the same time as Measure for Measure. As you say, the plots are very similar. But in that play, although the marriage is imposed upon Bertram, and he doesn’t want it, he then behaves so badly that even those critics like Samuel Johnson, who just find the play too much, and they don’t like it, they say, “I’ll just never reconcile myself to Bertram. He’s so bad.” There’s a sense in which there is actually a bit more justice at the end of that play, and maybe they could become happy. I don’t think Shakespeare leaves us with that at the end of Measure for Measure. Now, let me give you my third and least literal reading, which I’m not convinced was ever in the mind of Shakespeare—not necessarily his intent, but it’s the one I like best, and it’s what makes the play, for me, genius. That we’re in the society where the norm is there’s much more prostitution than what we’re used to, and also a lot of affairs. Bastardy and cuckoldry—they’re almost everywhere. Throughout the play, there’re so many references to brother and sister when people are not, in fact, literal brothers and sisters, but you’re led to wonder, are they maybe half-brothers, half-sisters? Because we’re in this strange world where people are just going crazy with illegitimate births and couplings. It’s really about, if there’s that much sex and procreation in a society, is not a form of incest everywhere? How do people negotiate this in their lives and in politics, since incest is one of the greatest sins? When Isabella so refuses to sleep with Claudio—which is often seen as an implausible decision by some critics—that she won’t even consider it, that she is the most aware character in the story. She knows the society she is based in has, in a sense, incest everywhere. She may not think Claudio is literally her half-brother, but she can’t stand the notion that she’s being asked to do this and already wanted to retreat from it altogether into the convent. She does actually make a comparison to incest at one point, as well.…

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