What Shakespeare thought of death, and New Labour
PAUL JOHNSON 1 t is a mark of Shakespeare's genius that even his secondary plays may be worth a fresh voyage of discovery and often have powerful relevance to our times. Measure for Measure was first performed in 1604, so it comes after Hamlet (and the best of his historical treatments, Hemy/V), but before the other great tragedies. It is punctuated by arresting lines, and includes what many regard as his finest song, 'Take, take those lips away'. I recall seeing it many years ago with the young Helen Mirren giving the role of Isabella a strange sinister beauty, so that afterwards in El Vino's I said, 'That girl will go far,' to which Philip Hope-Wallace added, 'Too far.'
Reading it the other day I realised it was a disturbing commentary on New Labour Britain, indeed on the whole world of the early 21st century. That is, it contrasts the high ideals of our puritanical rulers on equality, sex, racial harmony, human rights and decency with the actual reality of corruption, depravity and licence, cruelty and slaughter, peerages sold for cash, the hatred and eye-gouging of politicians at the top, and the leering cynicism which characterises every institution we are told to honour, especially the House of Commons and the United Nations. Disturbing? I recall J.B. Priestley asking angrily, 'Why should we use "disturbing" as a term of praise? I find what we need from a work of art is reassurance.' But New Labour is reassuring us all the time. It is a word they use more than any other, the leitmotif of their colossal con-trick. Gordon Brown, the impatient heir-apparent, is setting himself up as the kilted Moloch of Reassurance, preparatory to stretching us out on the tax-rack until we scream in agony. The day for reassurance is past. What we need and want is truth.
Measure for Measure tells us truth, in a sense. The Duke of Vienna (i.e., London) retires from power for a time, putting his self-righteous nephew Angelo in charge. It is rather as if God created the world and then sat back to see what humanity would make of it. Angelo decides to enforce the laws against sexual promiscuity, and has young Claudio sentenced to death for seduction. Then, overcome with lust for Claudio's sister Isabella, he tells him his life will be spared if he procures the girl. The play is a series of shocks administered to man's high opinion of himself, and concludes with the Duke himself returning and snatching Isabella from the jaws of a convent.
In a sense the play is about sex, both its potency and impotence. Shakespeare seems to be saying that if you try to create a virtuous world by law you will wreck the ship of state on the rocks of the incorrigible animal instincts of men — and women. On the other hand, he also implies that sex itself is powerless against the vicissitudes of life. His brothel madame, Mistress Overdone, complains, 'What with the war, what with the sweat [plague], what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk.' Amazing she didn't bring in global warming too. We hear a lot about whores, pimps, disease, and the carnal exchange between the sexes at its crudest and most mercenary level. Everyone believes in morals in theory, and no one practises them or does so at his or her peril. And everyone plays tricks. Angelo gets into bed with the woman he thinks is Isabella. But actually it is his rejected girlfriend, Mariana. And anyway he reneges on his deal with Claudio. Nothing is what it seems. Everyone behaves badly. All have their price, and try to cheat when exacting or paying it. It is as though the characters are all sitting round a New Labour Cabinet table, eyeing each other with a mixture of suspicion, hatred and fraternal flattery. The moral is that half a virtuous loaf is better than no bread. Or, don't wash your dirty linen in public: send it to the laundry where, in the famous phrase of Prince Charles to Diana, they 'are paid to do it'.
The play is also about death, just as politics is about general elections, which come no one knows exactly when, but with awful inevitability to shuffle the pack, discard the thumbed and greasy court-cards and turn up surprising jokers. Death, like sex, is discussed more often than in any other of Shakespeare's plays. It is the only time, I think, that Shakespeare lowers his guard about extinction and the next life, and lays bare a little of what he really thinks. A little — not much. The Duke, in his role as God, puts the case for what Shakespeare, in Hamlet, had already called The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns.
He says: Be absolute for death; either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep.
Shakespeare was evidently a troubled man when he wrote this uneasy play, thinking life now the good old Queen was dead and the tiresome Scotch ideologue James I on the throne (or the pleasant Mr Blair about to be elbowed out by the gruesome Gordon) was scarcely worth bearing: If thou art rich, thou'rt poor; For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, And death unloads thee.
However, being Shakespeare, he puts the other side of the argument, giving it to the eager young Claudio, the only person in the play actually threatened by death, who loves life so much that he is prepared to have his sister debauched to save it. Death, he says, 'is a fearful thing . . . [to] go we know where', To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world ...
It is `too horrible', and the distraught young man concludes: The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death.
So Shakespeare, the great judge, sums up and gives us the choice. And we all have to consider the merits of death and life. Just as, at a lower level, we look around the troubled world and observe there are worse things, perhaps, than life under New Labour, even with the Brown Bomber in charge.
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