Introduction

Summary

Almost four centuries after its first performance, 1994 was the year of Measure for Measure. In Britain, two major theatre companies, the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose privileged cultural status is indicated by its name, and the more alternative, adventurous Cheek by Jowl, both staged major productions, while a third version of the play was filmed and broadcast by the BBC. This surge of interest in Shakespeare's play proved timely. Although the productions must all have been planned long before, they actually reached the public domain at a moment when the Conservative government in Britain was attempting - with, as it turned out, little success - to increase its popularity by means of the so-called back-to-basics campaign, involving a new focus on personal morality, defined essentially as sexual morality, as the foundation of social order. In modern politics and in Measure for Measure alike, the sexual is made into the touchstone of morality by the forces of secular power. Through the events that unfold in this play, Shakespeare exposes the problems and complications that attend the interaction of politics and sexuality on the social stage.

Reviewers of these 1994 productions repeatedly pointed out the extraordinary relevance of the play to the contemporary political scene. Some even went so far as to offer interpretations of the play as a kind of prophetic allegory, suggesting which members of the government might most appropriately play the central roles. But these issues are not merely of domestic, British interest. By a richly suggestive coincidence, it was also in late October 1994, just as the Royal Shakespeare Company's Measure for Measure was opening at Stratford-upon-Avon and the BBC was screening David Thacker's production, that on the other side of the Atlantic a previously obscure young woman called Paula Jones was first bringing charges of sexual harassment against US President Bill Clinton. It doesn't seem quite right to claim Paula Jones as an Isabella for our times. Nevertheless, her accusations vividly demonstrate the complex intertwining of sex and power, and among their repercussions was an international public debate about precisely those questions of truth and testimony, justice and authority, religion and politics that are explored in Measure for Measure.