Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think, basically, it picks up where The Merchant of Venice leaves off. It takes the problem of mercy. You remember Portia says, “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” In this play, the quality of mercy is very strained, and it does not drop like the gentle rain. It is a contrivance of human government. The question is, “Can we actually have mercy?” There’s a wonderful bit at the end of The Merchant of Venice, when Portia and Nerissa come back to Belmont, and Portia has those famous lines: “That light we see is burning in my hall. How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” Measure for Measure is the naughty world. And Nerissa says to Portia, “When the moon shone, we did not see the candle,” and she replies, “So doth the greater glory dim the less. A substitute shines brightly as a king, unto the king be by, and then his state empties itself, as doth an inland brook into the main of waters.” That basically is the plot, isn’t it? Angelo shines like a king until the real Duke comes back, and then his authority is immediately drained away. We see him for what he really is, and those lines are echoed at the beginning when the Duke says that our virtues go forwards from us like lights, and if they didn’t, there would be no point in having them. The way I read it is, Portia has been a great hypocrite in The Merchant of Venice. She tells Shylock to show mercy, and then she breaks him because he’s a Jew. In this play, Angelo is the great hypocrite, but in fact, they all have problems being consistent with their principles. Merchant is saying the Christian state can’t really be consistent with its own ideas. Measure for Measure is saying no individual can be consistent with their own ideas, and Isabella makes a point of that again and again. “We cannot weigh our brother with ourself.” The whole, I think, point of the play is to say you must weigh yourself in the balance. That’s a very difficult thing to do, and it’s not going to work very well, and there’ll be some arbitrary law imposed on you at the end, but spouting off these abstract principles—where does that get you? You’re going to be a hypocrite. You’re going to have these inconsistencies. We’re just going to have to make it work. So, I see it as a great work of pragmatism in that sense. I have several takes. Let me start with the first literal one. I think this is quite a feminist play. I hesitate to use that now much-overused word, but the title is ironic. Measure for Measure—that’s a reference, of course, to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Everyone gets something back from what they gave, but the final deal is just terrible for Isabella, whose expectations are violated in every way. She can’t join the convent. Toward the end of the play, she has to confront the ruler of her society, which must be a very stressful thing to do. For a while, she thinks her brother is being, or has been, executed. That must be a horrible feeling to have. Then, at the end, the Duke is taking her as his own without any of her consent. Likely, that’s a form of rape or, even worse, enslavement, whatever. She’s not having a lot of property rights in this relationship. She gets a terrible outcome in all regards. If you look at Angelo, he doesn’t get what he wants, so he has to marry Mariana, whom he views as a strumpet. He had a fling with her five years ago. You could say, in some very loose manner, he’s being raped. He doesn’t want to marry her, but it’s not that terrible for him compared to what Isabella has to go through. Just that difference, that when you dole out justice according to this Christian standard, you can do so literally. The women just get these terrible outcomes. I think that’s one way to read the play, that it’s, if not anti-Christian, highly skeptical about Christianity. I think it’s skeptical about the ability of a secular authority to actually impose these rules in a world where men have many masters of vice. We must remember that on the South Bank of the river, where the playhouse was, the main institutions were pubs, brothels, and bishops’ residences. I think that’s reflected in the inability of the law to work in this play. Shakespeare says, “Well, we’re all living in a London where these laws cannot be implemented at all. We all know it’s wrong.” He’s trying to bring that to the fore.…

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