4 - Tortured into a Comedy

Summary

Measure for Measure, along with some other Shakespeare plays that date from the first few years of the seventeenth century, is often referred to as a ‘problem play': All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida are the other plays most often included in this curious category. At times, this designation seems to indicate little more than a desire to tidy away Shakespeare's plays into neatly classified and labelled boxes - a desire that is frustrated by the diversity of the plays, and by the complex and inventive ways in which Shakespeare experimented with dramatic genre. But it is also a label that can be very revealing about changing attitudes to this strange and fascinating play, and in particular about the shifts in readers’ and audiences’ responses to its handling of the central, controversial issues of power, justice, sexuality, and the relation between religious principle and social practice.

The term ‘problem play’ is a modern one, which would have been entirely unfamiliar to Shakespeare, yet a century after it was first applied to Measure for Measure and a few other plays it has become so familiar that it is taken for granted. It may therefore be useful to look at it afresh, setting it in historical context in order to indicate what it means and how it came into use. In the mid-twentieth century, there was a widespread notion that Shakespeare wrote the so-called problem plays during a period of his life when he was experiencing some kind of personal turmoil, which found expression in the bitter, misanthropic nature of his work. More often, though, the ‘problem’ has been located in the structure or content of the plays themselves. The plays were first described in this way by the scholar Frederick S. Boas in 1896:

throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome…. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theater of today and class them together as Shakspere's [sic] problem-plays.