Part II

A couple of years after my participation in a production of Measure For Measure at the Royal Exchange Theatre, I was in New York. One sultry afternoon I was wandering my way through a long line of second hand books in a store when I came across a book which excited my imagination. It was titled Soundings. The illustration on the jacket was striking: an exquisite photograph of David Smith’s sculpture called "Star Cage," an arrangement of various metals welded and painted dark blue. Its curves and contours, triangles and ellipses were perfectly proportioned, a beautiful geometrical pattern, mounted on a marble pyramid. The whole thing looked like an impromptu union of commercial signals and discs.

I would have bought the book for the jacket alone (jackets, like good furniture, appeal to me) but it turned out to be the latest work of Albert Cook, the eminent literary critic whose observations on Measure For Measure had impressed me a lot. The added attraction was that, within only a year of its publication, the original price of the book had been reduced from $18.90 to a mere $2.

Years ago, I had read an analytical essay on Measure by Albert Cook. He had pointed out that Angelo, the surrogate Duke of Vienna, is both unplebian and unaristocratic in temperament, who talks continually in metaphors of the counting house. This, he thought, was most appropriate in an age dominated by Protestantism and Capitalism. I was much stuck with this observation and would have mentioned it to Braham Murray, one of the most clear-headed directors I have ever worked with, but he was aware of all such implications and was already moving towards making his Angelo (a seeming angelo) into a dry, hardworking cabinet member motivated by commercial interests.

Read the first part: Shakespeare in measure

The interworkings of the plot of Measure are complex. In a society, where fornication is a capital offence, bawdiness is rampant and there is an illicit commerce between religion, sex and government. The Duke, out of pride in his own virtue, decides that he has to take some measures to put things right. He appoints his most trusted deputy, Angelo, a man known for his staunch integrity, "to mind your city’s institutions in and terms for common justice" while he goes on a mission abroad. Actually, the Duke remains in the garb of a priest throughout the play.

I mentioned earlier, that Isabella goes to Angelo to plead for her brother’s pardon. The virtuous Angelo is a so infatuated by her that he proposes to trade a pardon for her virginity. Angelo is spurned. He is filled with self-lathing, but he cannot help himself. It is left to the real Duke to resolve the problems which he does, towards the end of the play, by manipulating multiple marriages, putting an end to sexual rampancy (by forbidding prostitution) and pardoning Claudio. Angelo, who pleads for death penalty for himself, is forgiven and made to marry Mariana, a girl to whom he had been betrothed, but had rejected because she had no dowry to speak of. Everyone is happy except Mistress Overdone (the bawd), because she has no place to go to.

In his analysis, Albert Cook had made two astute observations: that the problem of sex is central to the play; and that all the action in the play is mitigated by the Duke, the idealised ruler (like Prospero) who unites in his persons the themes of the play. It is he who engineers to reveal all the disguises (including his own), successfully, in order that "Measure is meted for Measure".

It was, therefore, with a high sense of expectation that I sat down to read Soundings. Flicking through the pages -- I never read a book of literary criticism from page one -- I saw headings like The Continued Synergies of Pound and Williams, Prophecy and Preconditions of Poetry and Some Observations on Shakespeare and the Incommensurability of Interpretative Strategies, an awesome title, if ever there was one. I chose to start with this essay in the hope that it might lead me to that poignant reality which is the staff of art. I decided to leave The Synergies of Pound… for another day.

The essay, I discovered after a couple of pages, was about Coriolanus, one of the contentious plays the Bard had written. I found myself plunged into the deep end of Cook’s philosophical prose: "It would be wrong to interpret Coriolanus as though his character were a tribune in disguise." At last I thought, I was going to get to the nub. Nothing of the sort. The lines I read sent me reeling:

"Philosophical aporiae", (pray note that he chooses to spell the word aporiae with an e, my italics) "in these cases and many others, can all too easily be adduced as bromides through a false implied extension of the law of contradiction to complex areas that cannot be shrunk to series of true-false alternatives. Even the fundamental contradictions under which all discourse operates, between some form of radical objectivity and demonstrated possibility of communication, can be approached from the psychoanalytic or from the side of social conditioning, or some combination of that, to arrest interpretations; in the key of that particular mode of course, the puzzle of how communication between writer and reader-viewer is effectuated itself enters an endless regress.

If he is trying to tell me that a work can be interpreted in so many ways and from so many points of views, he has taken a rather circuitous route. Albert Cook was then a professor of Classics at Brown University. Could it be that his predilection for abstruseness has got the better of him? Undaunted, I ploughed on and reached the passage where he discussed Goldberg’s view that Coriolanus "is the study of the relationship between power and language." This is what was in store for me:

"Neither the Freudian nor the Lancanian, in turn, is exactly on a par with a Foucault episteme which as a code, is neutral towards codes within it, subsuming those it inspects, including the Freudian and therefore the Lancanian. And it cannot really be put into a combination with other systems as a hermaneutics, though of course they can be used in loose connection as honorific modern methods -- a use that is oddly both taken for granted and nodally situated in Foucault’s own reading of what he offers as the pattern Resistance painting Velasquez’s Las Meninas …"

Enough. Such convoluted, prolixious prose, neither illuminates nor excites my imagination; it deadens it and, in my case, disillusions. Albert Cook wrote the piece on Measure for Measure in the 1950s. It was clear that time had taken its toll.