**Emily Bryan**

Department of Languages and Literatures, Sacred Heart University, 5151 Park Avenue, Fairfield, CT 06825, USA; bryane@sacredheart.edu

Received: 19 January 2020; Accepted: 19 February 2020; Published: 22 February 2020

**Abstract:** Reading *Measure for Measure* through the logic of substitution has been a long-standing critical tradition; the play seems to invite topical, political, and religious parallels at every turn. What if the logic of substitution in the play goes beyond exchange and seeks out a triadic logic instead? This insistent searching for the triad appears most notably in the performance of *Measure for Measure* by Cheek by Jowl (2013–2019). Cheek By Jowl's strategies of touring, simplicity, movement, and liberation create a dynamic and ever-evolving performance. This article puts Cheek by Jowl's performance of *Measure for Measure* in conversation with C.S. Peirce's (and subsequent theorists) explorations of triadic logic with Puttenham's rhetoric of traductio (repetition with variation, and "tranlacing"), in addition to critical work on substitutions in the play. Tracing the superfluity of substitutions in rhetoric and performance of the play allows us to see how the play refuses binaries, and energizes triadic logic as a means to liveness in performance. Both Shakespeare's play and the Cheek By Jowl production use a triadic structure which suggests the Trinity, foregrounding the body as a site of mediation and liveness.

**Keywords:** Measure for Measure; Cheek By Jowl; performance; the body; the trinity; Christology; rhetoric; repetition; triadic logic; semiotics

I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire."

Life is mysterious and transcends logic, so the living thing can never be fully analysed, taught or learned. But those things that apparently cut out life or seem to conceal or block it, are not nearly so mysterious as they pretend. These 'things' are bound by logic and may be analysed, isolated and destroyed. The doctor may explain why the patient is dead, but never why the patient is alive.
