**4.** *Measure for Measure* **and the Attraction to Substitution**

Stitching together variant word forms may be what Shakespeare does all the time as a poet; his ability to play with words is not singular to *Measure for Measure* by any means; however, he is investing a lot into those repetitive structures in the play on the micro-level, and when we couple that with the logic of substitution that dominates the play and criticism about the play, the draw to substitution seems inevitable. There are really two kinds of substitution happening, one within the context of the play and one without. In the context of the play, the first substitution is Angelo for the Duke, the second is Isabella's chastity for her brother's freedom, the third is Mariana for Isabella in the bed trick that lures Angelo to sleep with his rightful bride and tricks him into thinking he's violated Isabella.<sup>9</sup> The fourth major substitution within the play is the triple swap of Claudio for Barnardine for Ragozine. Perhaps the most influential essay on the substitution is Alexander Leggatt's 1988 piece in *Shakespeare Quarterly*, which argued that there is a kind of "gremlin of substitution" that haunts the play. Leggatt articulates more thoroughly than any critic the substitutions happening within the play, spending the most time on the substitution of Mariana for Isabella, as the only successful substitution in the play in the sense that it at least "rights the wrong" committed by Angelo when he broke off his engagement to Mariana. However, Leggatt ultimately concludes that all the substitutions are inadequate, and he resolves that Shakespeare's comic turn in *Measure for Measure* was to write an imperfect play. He writes that Shakespeare "faced the gap between conception and embodiment, his imagination generated

<sup>9</sup> See especially Aebischer and Kamaralli who argue that Angelo is the one character in the play who is "technically raped" (Kamaralli 2016, p. 401).

image after image of representations that are vivid, but not quite adequate" (Leggatt 1988, p. 359), and earlier in the essay he claims that scholars have a hard time rendering the play as anything more than a morality drama (Leggatt 1988, p. 357). Leggatt's essay is important because it articulates the discomfort with a simple binary substitution.

The play has long invited this kind of analogical thinking, especially in terms of finding God in the play. In 1974, Richard Levin published an essay in PMLA on *Measure for Measure* entitled, "On Fluellen's Figures, Christ Figures, and James Figures." Aligning the character traits from a character in *Henry V* with scholarship on *Measure for Measure*, Levin uses Fluellen's penchant for seeing comparisons and figures in all things to flog fellow critics for looking for Christ Figures in the play. Levin, grumpily, fails to acknowledge in any conventional way the critics who attempt to find Biblical parallels in the play. He simply enumerates, critic # 1, # 2 and so on—in doing so, of course Levin de-values the work of many admirable critics: G Wilson Knight, who saw the Duke as a figure of God; Roy Battenhouse, who read the play as a commenting on the Christian idea of atonement and anticipated a criticism of Lousie Schleiner's reading of the play in the context of the parables.<sup>10</sup> The problem with Levin's biting criticism is that it corrals and dismisses the deeply complicated work of analyzing Shakespeare's plays; of course they are never simply correlative constructions. Shakespeare was generating work to be read and appreciated on the stage by an audience with living, breathing actors whose very embodiment would change the nature of the productions and performances every single time. However, the limitation of Levin's criticism, and the reason even more essays have been generated trying to locate Shakespeare's religious iconography and underpinnings of the play is that *Measure* as we have seen in the proliferation of repetitive rhetorical structures, and in the multiplicity of substitutions always seems to be generative and repetitive at the same time. Levin's frustration suggests something deeper about the religious iconography in the play, and by refusing to name these critics he accumulates more repetitive structures.

Taking the idea of proliferating or generating substitutions, Huston Diehl suggests that the play's flaws are actually part of a strategy to represent the religious controversies of the time. Diehl finds that the play leans towards the Calvinist sentiments that were defining James' church, arguing with those who find more in common in the play with Catholic notions of atonement and with the somewhat positive representations of monks and nuns. But he pushes his analysis of the play in a direction that I think is very helpful in terms of recognizing the play's investment in substitution and embodiment. For Diehl, the play constructs a thematic understanding of these substitutions that corresponds to Calvinist distrust of idolatry, and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Diehl reframes Angelo's succumbing to desire for Isabella from a lapse into sin, but rather a confusion of loving virtue and the divine with carnal, idolatrous love. Diehl writes, "The bed-trick does not only trap Angelo in his own perverse lust, hypocrisy, and betrayal; it also reveals his central epistemological error, an error that he is in danger of repeating endlessly: mistaking his limited power for absolute power and confusing his asceticism with perfection, as well as desiring Isabella in place of God" (Diehl 1998, p. 401). Diehl's historicist reading of the play leads him to conclude that the unsatisfactory substitutions are a fault of not knowing. However, this reading portrays Angelo's response to Isabella as a theological problem that seems disembodied, and potentially leaving Isabella unfairly responsible for Angelo's behavior. It also leaves Isabella playing a substitute for God, which Diehl acknowledges she avoids, when she refuses to sacrifice her maidenhead for her brother's life.

Recent readings of the theological/political arguments in the play acknowledge the overflowing nature of the significations in the play. In Matthew Smith's search for a common example of religious experience in the play as a "world-making or socializing institution," he finds that religion in the play is both "within and beyond the law" and that Isabella seeks a "moral identity beyond the law" (Smith 2018, p. 16). Bethany Besteman's analysis of the play also demonstrates the collapse of a binary

<sup>10</sup> (Levin 1974; Schleiner 1982; Knight 2001; Battenhouse 1946).

system, explaining, "Reformed belief in the limitations of the human will point to the collapse of the theory of the King's two bodies," (Besteman 2019, p. 1). Perhaps the most relevant analysis for the way I am thinking about how the Cheek by Jowl performance interacts with the play text of *Measure for Measure* is an article by Devin Byker on the intercessory language of the play. Like so many critics, Byker's analysis is driven by a dissatisfaction with substitution in the play; "In *Measure for Measure*, the conceptual tool of substitution alone fails to elucidate the complex extension and retention of self upon which intercessory speech and action hinge" (Byker 2016, p. 406). Byker argues that the play is structured on intercessory speech (one character pleads for another), and Byker's reading of the play ultimately addresses the difference between Catholic and Protestant approaches to intercession and posits Angelo and Isabella on competing sides of substitutionary logic. By claiming a mode of speech for the play that uses triadic logic—the first person pleads on behalf of the second to the third—Byker exposes that substitutions in the play always invite a third term that is not always directly present, but hovers over the exchange.<sup>11</sup>

The other strain of "substitution" criticism on the play looks to correlatives outside the context of the play. When Debra Shuger wrote *Political Theologies* on *Measure for Measure*, Linda Tripp was wiretapping Monica Lewinsky, and more recently when Brett Kavanaugh was confronted by Christine Blasey Ford, Twitter recognized the way Angelo and Isabella's story fits squarely in the #Metoo movement. https://twitter.com/MaeSChaplin/status/1079295162533072896 https://twitter.com/wtsfan/ status/1053964110432333824.

When Angelo presents his diabolical plan to Isabella that he will free her brother in exchange for her chastity, she responds:

Isabella: Little honor to be much believed, And most pernicious purpose! Seeming, seeming! I will proclaim thee, Angelo, look for't. Sign me a present pardon for my brother, Or with an outstretched throat, I'll tell the world aloud What man thou art. Angelo: Who will believe thee Isabel? My unsoiled name, th'austereness of my life, My vouch against you, and my place I'the state Will so your accusation overweigh, That you shall stifle in your own report And smell of calumny.

3.1.146–156.

The series of threats and exchanges:—Isabella's chastity for her brother's life, Claudio's pardon for Isabella's silence—are perverse scales of justice. In tweets about the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, "Who will believe thee, Isabel?" became a kind of rallying cry. The idea that the psychosexual power dynamics of four hundred years ago would be unfurling in the Congress in 2018 drew people to the play. But the play also always invites comparisons; I believe the logic of the substitutions is that the repetitive structures spill over in excess in the play. This kind of energy imbues the play with a power that sustains it beyond its own historical moment and speaks to the kind of combustion discussed earlier.

At the beginning of my discussion of substitutions, I mentioned the first one which really inaugurates the triadic logic in the play: Angelo for the Duke. That first substitution is carefully constructed by Shakespeare not to be an even exchange, but a triumvirate. The Duke's first lines are not to the man replacing him, but to Escalus, explaining that he knows Escalus is so well-versed in government that he can give no advice. The Duke tells Escalus: "Then no more remains/But that

<sup>11</sup> Though I am thinking primarily of exchange and substitution in relation to triads and the Trinity, many critics have looked at the play in terms of other exchanges, gendered, legal, and economic. See for example, (Gillen 2017) and (Meyler 2019)

to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,/And let them work. The nature of our people,/our city's institutions and the terms/For common justice, you're as pregnant in/ As art and practice hath enriched any/That we remember" (1.1.7–13). From the audience's perspective it seems that Escalus is being handed control of the government. The question that follows about Angelo must come as a surprise to Escalus and to Angelo; if Escalus has already been given the commission to govern and is "pregnant" with his knowledge and understanding of Vienna and common justice—what do we need Angelo for? The Duke explains to Escalus: "For you must know, we have with special soul/Elected him our absence to supply,/Lent him our terror, dressed him with our love/And given his deputation all the organs/Of our own power" (1.1.17–21). The slipperiness of the substitutions begins from the first lines of the play. Who is really "replacing" the Duke and why does there seem to be a kind of false equivalency—Escalus is already "sufficient" and Angelo is being "lent" terror and being "dressed in love"? Angelo is supplying an absence, but he seems to be lacking himself. This is clearly a triumvirate of leadership. Angelo is being put to the test more than he is functioning as a substitute. He is not in the place of the Duke; rather, he is being tested to be in the role of the Duke. This three-headed government constructed by the Duke also mirrors the structure of the theatrical performance of the play. At the end of the introduction to the play in the *Norton Shakespeare*, Brett Gamboa adds a performance note, "Productions of *Measure for Measure* can convince audiences that any of the play's three leads—the Duke of Vienna, Isabella, or Angelo—occupies its central position and each role can be played so as to deserve sympathy or condemnation, so performances can feel revelatory even to those who know the play" (Shakespeare 2016, p. 276). In a performance that pull of the triad is felt, with different balances depending on the performance. In an essay on *Twelfth Night*, Paul Dean argues that Shakespeare uses triads to reveal the Trinity, responding to both Plato and Augustine. Dean demonstrates that many critics have looked to his poetry to convey a triadic and ultimately Trinitarian reading of love (Dean 2001, pp. 501–2). The love triangles in *Twelfth Night* always resolve two into one, as do triadic renderings in the poetry.

At the end of Isabella's first scene of pleading her case to Angelo to save her brother, she explicitly invokes the Trinity:

Alas, alas,

Why all the souls that were were forfeit once, And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. How would you be If he, which is the top of judgment should But judge you as you are? Oh, think on that And then mercy then will breath within your lips, Like man-new made.

#### 2.2.75.

The language here of "forfeit" or debt of remedy or healing, of judgment, of mercy, of breath and of a man "new made" opens up the play to seeing the Trinity. The judgement of the Father—which Angelo is called upon to rise to, but at which he will fail; the sacrificial nature of atonement by Christ, the Spirit breathing life into the newly created man. Isabella is asking him to imagine himself relationally like the Trinity. This moment corresponds to the way Augustine describes the Trinity as a relationship, not a substance. Augustine writes that God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are known and understood in relation to each other (Augustine and McKenna 2002, p. 236). In Book 9 of his treatise on the Trinity, Augustine teases out the metaphor of three gold rings, made of the same substance, but individual in characteristics, writing, "It is just as if you were to make three similar rings from one and the same gold, yet they are related to one another in that they are similar, for *everything similar is similar to something*" (Augustine and McKenna 2002, p. 277, emphasis mine). Here Augustine anticipates C.S. Peirce's description of a triadic sign system where the sign requires interpretation and that we can only understand the system by means of mediating structures of signification. Angelo explicitly rejects Isabella's claim to the Trinity, asking him to imagine himself in a triadic relationship where he might

be able to look inward to interrogate his cruelty towards Claudio. He says, "Be you content, Fair maid. It is the law, not I" (2.2.79–80) and there, Angelo sidesteps the role she wants him to adopt. It is the law, not I. Isabella always complicates the substitutions that Angelo would like to make when she almost anticipates his bargain: "We cannot weigh our brother with ourself" (2.2.126).<sup>12</sup> Isabella rejects any false equivalence to judge others, whereas Angelo seems comfortable in that role.

While Isabella rejects this philosophical exchange early on in the play, she accepts the morally questionable bed trick later, allowing Mariana to stand in for her with Angelo, and this is ultimately an unsatisfying exchange because Angelo does not stop her brother's execution but only hastens it. In Philip Lorenz's reading of the play, the issue of the bed-trick is put in the context of the trope of bodily exchange. Lorenz's interpretation of the play links these bodily exchanges to the ideas of transplantation and transfer. He writes that the play works as "a representational paradigm of theologico-political sovereignty in which the 'absence' created by the departed sign creates an institutional desire that can only be satisfied by the substitution of another sign" (p. 65). Lorenz argues that the play depends on the movement of metaphor from "the proper to something else" (p. 74). His articulation of the way substitutions work in the play as creating an institutional desire corresponds to the way I see the logic of the Trinity working on the play, and which Cheek by Jowl's production incorporates.

## **5. The Lure of Three**

In Cheek by Jowl's production, the character of Barnardine, played by Igor Teplov surfaces in an extra-textual way as he haunts the Duke (Alexander Arsentyev) dressed as a convict. In this image from the performance, he hangs on the Duke in a parasitical clasp. https://www.cheekbyjowl. com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-16. Donnellan's use of Barnardine in this production responds to Shakespeare's creation of important triads in the play, the three heads, three deaths, and three executions. When the exchange of Mariana's body (as Isabella) fails to elicit the release of Claudio, the Duke has to supply another head to satisfy Angelo's order. The sacrifice of these three "convicts" (Claudio, Barnardine, and Ragozine) recalls the three crucifixions on Mount Golgotha, with Christ flanked by two thieves. To complicate this simple substitution of one convict's head for another, Shakespeare presents us with the comic moment of Barnardine—a convicted murderer too drunk to agree to die. Barnardine has been languishing in the prison for nine years, spending most of it in a stupor, with very little interest in ever leaving the confines of the prison. The Provost describes Barnardine in a comic way reminiscent of Puttenham's tranlacer, "A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep: careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality and desperately mortal" (4.2.140–144). When the Duke tells Barnardine that he will hear his last confession, Barnardine cannot stomach it: "I have been drinking all night—I am not fitted for it" (4.3.42–43). Surprisingly, the Duke agrees: "A creature unprepared, unmeet for death;/And to transport him in the mind he is were damnable" (pp. 66–68). To save Claudio, the Provost of the prison comes up with a third head—one Ragozine who happened to have died that morning of a fever. They agree that Ragozine even bears a closer resemblance to Claudio. The storyline of Barnardine is completely superfluous as it turns out, and critics are divided as to why Shakespeare included it, many arriving at the comedy of the moment as its true instigator. Stephen Greenblatt, in *Shakespeare's Freedom*, sees Barnardine as an emblem of autonomy—his willful refusal to be directed into death symbolizes, for Greenblatt, Shakespeare's desire for artistic freedom (Greenblatt 2012, pp. 7–16). However, I see more echoes in the story of Barrabas and narratives of releasing a prisoner or even more importantly in the drive of the play to have three substitutions. Like the triumvirate of the Duke, Escalus and Angelo at the beginning of the play, Shakespeare gives us the three convicts—Claudio, Ragozine and Barnardine. In his essay on substitutions, Leggatt points out that "God acts on humanity

<sup>12</sup> Byker describes Angelo's position as an "anti-representational stance" (Byker 2016, p. 419).

through a series of substitutions: the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the Priesthood" (p. 340), but Leggatt ultimately does not see the Trinity as a driving force in the play.

Beyond the visual representation of threes in the CBJ production, the textual creation of triads in the play, and the substitutions that always seem unsatisfying, there is finally an inescapable draw in the production to triads that the audience can see in the movement of the characters. The resolution of three in the performance often reveals itself in the way the company constitutes presence on the stage. Cormac Power's book on presence in the theatre provides a useful way to think about how Cheek by Jowl's approach to the playtext invites triadic logic and the Trinity. Power explains that "Theatre affirms *its* presence by making its 'presence' enigmatic" (Power 2008, p. 14). In the performance of *Measure for Measure* by CBJ, there are several moments when presence is made enigmatic in a way that signals the compensatory logic of the triad. First, in Isabella's first scene with Angelo, the Provost hovers on the edges of the scene, ostensibly involved in paperwork. When Angelo tells her "Your brother dies tomorrow. Be content," Isabella falls to her knees, facing the audience, saying the "Our Father." Angelo, discomfited, but attracted to her faith and/or her innocence or an inexplicable pull, drops to his knees next to her. The Provost slightly shifts standing above them; Angelo looks to him, and in a comic moment, the Provost slowly descends to his knees until the three of them stare out silently praying in front of the audience. This pull of the Provost to join the prayer seems inescapable, and is also a turning point for Angelo, as his attention to Isabella shifts at that point. He had barely noticed her, prior to this moment. There is an enigmatic presence that pulls the actors into three. When Isabella returns to plead for her brother's life, the production enacts another moment of an absent presence that demonstrates again how the logic of the triad—not just substitution—fuels the sense of liveness and tension in the play. Prior to Isabella's entrance to their next scene together, Angelo prowls agitatedly around the stage. Isabella, ignorant of his change in tone and energy, kisses his hand to beg for her brother's life, and it is as if she ignites a powder keg. He pushes her back to the table and gropes her. In this image you can see her anguish as he asserts power over her both physically violent, and chillingly abusive. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-11. Just after this moment, he takes off her shoes and sucks on her toes. Part of her body stands in for the whole, as he possesses and caresses her foot while gazing under her skirt. He grabs her to force himself on her, but she bites him, stopping the attack. He leaves her with the unholy bargain that she rejects. When she leaves, Angelo sniffs and caresses her chair in a haunting, possessive way that signals the surging desire for the absent presence that courses through the play. The chair becomes a representation of Isabella, and the kind of shifting signifying from actor's bodies, to set pieces and back again is energized. Later, when Isabella tells Claudio of the bargain, and he tentatively suggests that she might agree to it, Donnellan and the company choose to stage an attempted assault on Isabella by her own brother, recalling, as Birksted-Breen notes, an enactment of Isabella's suggestion that this is a kind of incest on his part. These two images show the way the production stages substitutions in a triadic way. In the first image, the company holds Claudio (Petr Rykov) aloft over Isabella. https://www. cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-23. And when this assault is disrupted by the company, Claudio turns violently to play the bass fiddle, replacing the body with the instrument, https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-18. These moments trade on the triadic logic of the theatre's signifying system that reveal the danger in the instability of the substitutions. The chair and the bass fiddle as the erotic substitutions for Isabella in the production demonstrate the objectification and dehumanization of Isabella. The constant use of substitutions and exchanges, coupled with the repeated gesturing to the audience inviting them into the performance, as mob, as the people, as witnesses, and as judges gives the production its dynamism and its terror.

Finally, I come to the most striking moment of all which draws us into the Christology of the play in a decidedly secular production. Barnardine, the prisoner who is too drunk to die, who is, as I have mentioned, the doppelganger of this Duke, stalks the Duke, and he dances a dance of death with him. The bare-chested, thin, dirt-covered Barnardine is almost a stand-in for

the Duke, physically. They are similar in height and stature, but Barnardine is the completely unaccommodated man. Shorn of his hair and most of his clothing, he is the most basic of human beings. When the Duke pardons him, after a tense waltz/drunken dance, Barnardine collapses onto the lap of the Duke. For a moment, the two freeze under a spotlight and they become a framed, theatrical pieta. Barnardine is draped across the Duke, cradled by the him like Christ, in Mary's arms. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-38.

In the fifth act of the production, the Duke strolls forward with Angelo and Escalus on the red carpet; they cross the single red carpet and join at the singular microphone, but the image of the three politicians is backlit so that three shadows loom forward. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/ measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-36.

This image brings together what the play sets out in the beginning, the triad of male leaders. I want to suggest that even in a production that seeks the explicitly political themes in the play, the Christian imagery, and especially the iconography of the Trinity finds a way in because it really is underpinning the logic of the play through the signifying system of triadic logic. Theresa Coletti, in her book, *Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England* writes that Christian Drama in the West begins with the recognition of a lost body.... accounts of the Marys who seek, but do not find, the body of Christ at the tomb" (Coletti et al. 2004, p. 190). That Barnardine becomes an image of Christ in this production is disconcerting, but also on some level absolutely right. If the play hinges on the logic that repetition (and therefore, performance) cannot be about a dead imitation, but a lively variation, then taking Barnardine, synonymous with one of the thieves on Golgotha, and transforming him into a Christ figure upends and fulfills the triad. In an essay on mercy and the creative process in the play, Dayton Haskin articulates the ethical implications of the way the play invites the Trinity in: "To imagine the needy brother as an *Alter Christus* presupposes a basic respect for and gratitude to Christ himself" (Haskin 1977, p. 358). Though not a theatre company invested in Christian iconography, Cheek by Jowl, in its articulation of empathy, the ability to imagine another person's perspective, allows Barnardine to "act in God's eye what in God's eye he is—Christ," as Hopkins wrote.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


Bradizza, Luigi. 2018. Christian Ethics and Political Moderation in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. In *The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom*. Edited by Khalil M. Habib and L. Joseph Hebert. Lexington: Lexington Books, Available online: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1880314 (accessed on 16 February 2020).

Brown, Penelope. 1999. Repetition. *Journal of Linguistic Anthropology* 9: 223–26. [CrossRef]


Goss, Erin M. 2011. 'Almost Unmade': Hopkins and the Body Apocalyptic. *Victorian Poetry* 49: 83–103. [CrossRef] Greenblatt, Stephen. 2012. *Shakespeare's Freedom*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Kamaralli, Anna. 2016. Putting on the Destined Livery: Isabella, Cressida, and Our Virgin/Whore Obsession. In *A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare*. Edited by Dympna Callaghan. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, Available online: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4453722 (accessed on 16 February 2020).

Kirwan, Peter. 2020. *Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl*. London: Bloomsbury Arden.


Levin, Richard. 1974. On Fluellen's Figures, Christ Figures, and James Figures. *PMLA* 89: 302–11. [CrossRef]


© 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
