Notes from the Dramaturg

By Colin Hogan

First performed in 1604 and then published in 1623 in the First Folio, Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, a special category for a few scripts that don’t neatly fit the generic conventions of tragedy, comedy, or history. According to Frederick S. Boas, the Shakespeare scholar who coined the term, the problem plays transport their audiences “along dim untrodden paths.” At the end of these plays, we do not feel “simple joy nor pain.” Instead, “we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome” (345). If Shakespeare’s tragedies end in death, his comedies in marriage, and his histories in the reordering of political power, his problem plays incite our emotions in order to get us thinking about the social problems of the day. They pose messy questions rather than providing neat answers.

In Measure for Measure, the problem that Shakespeare dramatizes relates to sex, marriage, and reproduction. At the beginning of the play, the Duke worries about the moral probity of his community as Vienna has become a hotbed of licentious behavior–lots of drinking, lots of sex, and lots of debauchery. To regulate this behavior, he cedes control of the city to Angelo whose first official act is to order the execution of a man, Claudio, who has gotten his fiancée, Juliet, pregnant. 

Claudio and other characters are shocked by the severity of this punishment, but so too would have been an Elizabethan audience. Sex before marriage was prohibited by Christian doctrine, but according to Shakespeare scholar Victoria Hayne, the long courtship rituals common during this time made this prohibition fuzzy. An engagement began with a brief period of wooing, which sometimes involved others in the community but could be private between the couple. A ritual acknowledgment of the engagement, often in the form of a handfasting ceremony during which the couple’s hands were bound together with ribbon to symbolize their union, then followed. After this ceremony, the banns of marriage were publicly announced for three successive Sundays in the couple’s parish, and finally, the couple was married in a formal church ceremony (Hayne 3-4). 

These several steps took time. Once the engagement was started, however, many couples believed that they were as good as wed, which made sex before the ceremony acceptable. As Claudio argues in Act 1, Scene 2, “She is fast my wife, / Save that we do the denunciation lack / Of outward order.” Indeed, Claudio and Juliet’s situation was common during the period: 31% of Elizabethan brides were pregnant at their church ceremonies (Hayne 5). Furthermore, the punishment for this moral infraction was far from death. In a 1591 court case from Essex very similar to that of Claudio and Juliet, the couple was ordered to confess their guilt to 10 fellow parishioners (Hayne 6). Such a confession might be shameful or awkward, but the consequence of the couple’s action is far milder than it is on stage.

This contrast between reality and drama is why Measure for Measure is a problem play. It asks the audience these questions: If religious morality insists that sex wait until marriage, what should be the social response to those who don’t wait? Does Claudio deserve death? If not, what does he deserve, and does the answer change if Claudio is your family, friend, neighbor, or drinking buddy? 

To complicate these questions, Shakespeare also includes two other couples who have not yet arrived at the altar. Ironically, one couple includes Angelo, who ditched his fiancée Mariana after her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. The other couple involves Lucio, who reneged on his promise to marry Kate Keepdown even after she bears his child. In general, Shakespeare’s plays work through the complexities of human relationships and romances, but in this problem play, the comparison of these three couples invites the audience to judge whether they all deserve the same punishment or whether each couple’s circumstances merit different treatment. 

The creative team’s decision to set this production of Measure for Measure in the 1920s was in part to embrace the era in which the Salisbury House was built, but the team also found echoes of the play’s problems in the decade’s prohibition politics. Like Shakespeare’s Vienna, moral anxiety became law throughout the United States in response to decades of advocacy by temperance organizations. 

The 18th Amendment, which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation” of alcohol, was officially ratified in 1919, but it was the result of decades of advocacy by temperance organizations. The Prohibition Party was officially founded in 1869, but it was reform organizations that propelled the issue to national prominence. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union first earned headlines in 1874 for its Women’s Crusades, a coordinated protest movement outside of bars during which women prayed against the evils of alcohol, but the organization later broadened its focus to other political issues, such as women’s suffrage, public health, and sexual purity campaigns (The Social Welfare History Project). The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, lobbied exclusively for prohibition at state and federal levels. Together, these organizations turned temperance from a moral reform movement into a powerful national campaign for legal prohibition.

“The saloon must go!” was the motto of the Anti-Saloon League, which highlights how prohibition sought to eliminate not just alcohol but the social spaces where it was sold. Although temperance organizations had legitimate concerns about addiction and domestic violence, prohibition as policy also threatened the communities that gathered in saloons. For many immigrant and working-class men, especially Irish, Italian, and German-Americans, the saloon was a neighborhood institution where people socialized and exchanged news. In some cities, saloons were the only place where people of different races could mix, even if segregation still limited how freely Black Americans could circulate, and some saloons even welcomed the open expression of queer and gender non-conforming folk (Chauncey 34-35). In this sense, prohibition served as a campaign against the kinds of community and pleasure that reformers found threatening.

Set within the era of prohibition, this production of Measure for Measure brings the problem play to an American setting. While the script says Vienna, the change reminds us of the dangers during these moments in American history when moral conviction takes the form of law. In both worlds, law turns virtue into a test of who belongs.