Q: What do you do when the sex drive of your Dukedom goes into overdrive?

A: Put someone else in charge and dress up as a friar.

I kid you not, this is the premise of Measure for Measure. Who’d have guessed that from what must be one of the least appealing titles ever created?

Summary

The Duke is concerned that Vienna, his city, doesn’t really care about his leadership anymore, and are kinda just doing what they want. He puts Angelo in charge, whose puritanical instincts make him want to shut down the sexual freedom of Vienna. Under Angelo’s rule, Claudio is sentenced to death for getting his gal Julietta pregnant outside of marriage. His sister, Isabella, goes to plead for him, but unwittingly arouses Angelo with her sweet words. Angelo basically offers to spare Claudio if Isabella will sleep with him.

Poor Isabella we think, until she tells Claudio that he should ‘Die, perish!’ because she would rather he died by the law than her getting pregnant outside of it. The Duke at this point is wandering around in a Friar’s outfit (a wonderful way to spend a sabbatical) and tells Isabella that she should get Mariana, who was abandoned by Angelo after her brother and dowry got shipwrecked, to sleep with Angelo instead. The Duke also chats to some randomers in disguise and gets inadvertently insulted by a guy called Lucio.

“What do you do when the sex drive of your Dukedom goes into overdrive?”

Despite the Mariana bed-trick being agreed to, Angelo decides that he will execute Claudio anyway because he’s slightly sadistic, and he wants Claudio’s head as a souvenir. The Duke, however, will not be deterred in his bid to undermine the guy he has put in charge. First, he tries to persuade Barnardine, a drunk guy on death row, to shift his execution time a bit earlier so that they can use his head instead. Barnardine is hungover, grouchy, and not having any of it. Fortunately, another prisoner, Ragozine, died of a fever the night before, so they chop his head off and send it to Angelo. The Duke tells Isabella that Claudio was executed, seemingly just to leave the plot revelations until the end, or as he puts it, to make her feel ‘heavenly comforts of despair’ (a weak justification if ever I’ve heard one) but as we know, the Duke does what he wants. Mariana sleeps with Angelo the evening after this has happened, though why she likes a guy who wants heads Deliveroo-ed to him I cannot fathom.

The Duke changes back into his Duke outfit and summons all the characters together so that he can tie the plot back together. He pretends that Isabella’s account of her encounter with Angelo means that she is mad and arrests her. She names the Duke-Friar (Lodowick) as a witness, and Lucio puts his foot in again and says he doesn’t like Friar Lodowick. Another Friar (Peter) who had provided the outfit for the Duke, has the Duke’s back and pretends that the Duke-Friar is ill. Mariana corroborates Isabella’s side of the story. The Duke quickly changes back into his Friar outfit but is unhooded by Lucio quite violently and all is revealed. Angelo marries Mariana. Isabella, brought back from her brief arrest, decides to plead for mercy for Angelo, yes the guy who she thinks executed her brother, because of some Puritanical fervour in him that she admires and because she feels sorry for Mariana who still likes him. Claudio is revealed as alive. Lucio’s punishment for being insulting is to marry an unspecified woman whom he impregnated, then be whipped and hanged, but then the Duke in a moment of kindness decides that is a bit extreme, and just makes him get married. Then the Duke proposes to Isabella, because why not, although we don’t hear her reaction either to that or the fact that her brother is alive. And that was all in one scene.

Bard in Brief: Cymbeline

Backstage

Marriages: 2, maybe 3, depending on Isabella.

Deaths: 1

Best line: Provost – reading Angelo’s letter ‘For my better satisfaction, let me have Claudio’s head sent me by five’

Rating: 6/10