A Dreame of Passion

Barbara Everett on the peculiar comedy of ‘Measure for Measure’

About fifty or sixty years ago, at the end of a century or more of unenthusiasm, Measure for Measure came into its own. A largely moral or metaphysical explanation of its quality helped it to enjoy, like the uncles in Larkin’s wedding-poem, ‘success so huge and wholly farcical’. That critical moment has passed, like the Modernism which contributed to it. Measure for Measure isn’t invariably now thought to be a great play. Perhaps our own more political and literalistic culture has made it harder to sustain that kind of response to the arts, and has brought with it a certain withdrawal of intensity of attention. The play is most often found interesting but deeply flawed, sometimes described as profound but more or less always called ‘broken-backed’. It isn’t with much conviction experienced as a comedy (Dantesque or not). Above all, in the loss of a critical agreement, of a sense of what it is that is ‘flawed’, the work seems to strike readers and audiences as strange, even bewildering.