Shakespeare's Measure for Measure | The New Thinkery Ep. 5

Welcome back to the New Thinkery. I'm David Barr from Washington, DC. And Washington, DC with me as always is my good friend Alex Priu. How are you, Alex?

I'm all right, David. How are you doing? Good. And where are you?

I'm in Boulder, Colorado, as always, since COVID has made leaving my apartment to perilous. That's right. And just across from you is Greg, right? Hi, David and Alex.

I'm coming to you from the world headquarters of Nice People, National Ohio. That's actually our city's motto. Is it really? It is.

It decreased a little bit when I got here for capital, but it is the world headquarters of Nice People. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's nice. So today we are, oh, you know, I always forget this part of things.

If you like what you hear on the podcast, we've really been enjoying ourselves, you know, parenthetically, please do subscribe, rate and review us. Go to our website at the new thinkery.com and follow us on Twitter at the new thinkery. And I always mess something up. Oh, yeah, leave us emails at the new thinkery at gmail.com.

Did I say that already, Alex? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Okay.

So today we are talking about Shakespeare, one plan in particular, measure for measure, which is a favorite of mine. I think three of us enjoy this play, but we're going to give kind of a general summary of measure for measure first. It's a complex play. We want listeners who've never read it or not read it recently to follow along.

So I'll go first and then turn to Greg and Alex to shade in kind of the rest. And if I get anything wrong, send me an email. Can we take a step back though real quick? Sure.

This is our first play of Shakespeare's and measure for measure is certainly not the best known or the most renowned or most beloved, nor even maybe the most political. So, you know, for those of you who want to know how the sausage is made, David selected this play. David's a great lover of Shakespeare. And he, you know, is widely read in it.

And we asked him, Hey, let's do Shakespeare. Let's do something that you like in your, sort of in your wheelhouse. And he's selected for measure and I never read it. And it strikes me as an odd choice.

I have my suspicions of why David chose it. There's lots of body language. Why is it your favorite? You said it's your favorite.

Just to finish that. Just to finish that thought, I think Greg, that David's trying to get us fired by having us touch upon such a loose subject matter, especially you and such a good Christian American heartland. It's really hard. I felt reading it, by the way.

I put the book down several times. I was blushing. It was very sad. You fainted, didn't you?

So David, you have to defend yourself. Well, Alex, all I can say is this is autobiographical. And that's why I selected it to know myself that much better. But I love Shakespeare.

I think that he belongs. I think implicit in your question is why are we treating Shakespeare on a podcast devoted to political philosophy? And I think that a case can be made most strongly for Shakespeare, I guess, more than Dante, any other kind of literary figure to be included in the canon of political philosophers. He writes plays, but they're like dialogues, like a platonic dialogue almost, different structurally.

But a lot of the same elements are there. His plays deal exclusively with political matters, though he does treat metaphysics in some of his plays. Every human type shows up in his works. It's amazing.

And I think just the depth which he writes is the primary reason I would include him in the canon. And I think that there's slow evidence that he is being recognized outside of English departments, maybe especially outside of English departments since Shakespeare is he's on the no fly list with the Wokeys. I just want to say more generally, I don't know if this is sort of humble or boasting, I'm not sure, but on our first podcast, we talked about how we want to treat things outside of the canon of political philosophy. And while I think David, there's an argument to me that Shakespeare is a political theorist, a political philosopher in some sense.

Even if he's not, we were sort of making the argument, you guys push or push back on me or see if something's going on. But in my view, it almost doesn't matter. We were making the argument that somehow the study of political philosophy has helped us to sort of understand things or help us to see things that may not even properly fall within the scope of the history. Yeah, I agree with that.

And let me also say quickly, sorry, Alex, I don't mean to interrupt you. No, no, go ahead. Before I forget that you can mark, well, I'm going to get out of my depth quickly here, but Shakespeare's as a subject matter worthy of study by professional political scientists really happened because of two men, Alan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, who were both students of Leo Strauss. Prior to, I think those two political scientists, political theorists, Shakespeare, you'd have to go back decades and decades, about 100 years before you found, I think, scholars, well, I guess political science departments didn't really exist.

So maybe they are the first to kind of inaugurate it. But so Jaffa and Bloom published a slight volume on shakes. I think it's called Shakespeare in politics or something like that. And that just kind of kicks, it kicks the doors open.

And now many people write on him. So yeah, I think that's that's a good case. I'm a little bit concerned, David, that you're avoiding the question of why you chose such a filthy play. I said it was autobiographical.

Okay, fair enough. But what is this? Your therapy session? Come on.

I guess it is in the way. But I don't see the play as filthy. You know, that that well compared to your private life, sure. Right, exactly.

Yeah. But I think the subject matter is interesting because while it does have, I'm being obviously a bit silly here, I do think the subject matter fixes man's lower desires and baser actions, private actions, especially within a larger political context, not just of creating a harmonious society between these, you know, these Puritans and these, you know, these religious types and these, you know, these corrupted individuals, but also the effects that have that might have with respect to foreign policy, David, you mentioned some of the background. Maybe this is a good time actually to go into the backdrop of the play, the political backdrop and the plot, that you are sure. Yeah, I'll try and keep it fairly quick.

So here's what I think you need to know, at least from a top line level. So the setting is Vienna. The time is during the Holy Roman Empire. So I think Habsburg's Charles the fifth, I think early 16th century, Shakespeare himself is writing not even a hundred years after these events.

But the dramatic events of the play take place over the course of a few days. The issues that set the action into motion are a few years in the making as we'll discuss. The characters in the play have mostly Italian names. That's peculiar, giving the setting of Vienna.

We'll probably talk about that. But for the moment, I want you to remember the following. Vienna is ruled by a man named Duke Encentio. He appears to have been empowered nearly two decades.

We don't hear about any other rulers or nobles in Vienna. So the buck starts and stops effectively with the Duke. We also have another man to keep in mind, Angelo. He's a judge.

He's a bit of a moralist. Early in the play, Angelo is deputized by Encentio to take over the legal affairs of the city, while Encentio disguises himself as a friar. The Duke hopes that by going undercover, he can gain insight into and eventually rectify the moral extremes plaguing Vienna. So what are these extremes?

The city has kind of lost its balance. Like all healthy cities have a balance. This one is lopsided. People are either reside in a nunnery or they sleep in horouses.

Marriage, I guess a marriage hasn't taken place in Vienna for over a decade. This means the familial bonds that make up the best cities that we think about don't exist in the Vienna this time. There's also talk in the background that Hungary might invade. So that's what's going on generally.

More specifically, Encentio is like Prospero. He's a retiring kind of ruler. His head is deep in the study of liberal arts. He's an intellectual, kind of like a philosopher.

At one point Vienna was ruled strictly, maybe even severely with laws enacted toward Christian virtue. So the Duke, we hear eases up on the enforcement of these strict laws. But a decade or so into this easement of the laws, characters with names like Mistress Overdone and her pimp named Pompey run around the town openly. So this is what I'm talking about this lopsidedness.

You have a pimp named Pompey running around with Mistress Overdone and then you have these people attacking in the exact opposite direction. So the Duke needs to get people to start following the law, right? That's impossible because the populace is simply too unaccustomed to law abidingness. So he had to just plan to get Angelo to start the enforcement.

He doesn't want to start the enforcement. He thinks the people resent him. So he deputizes Angelo. And the first person, this is how the play begins essentially.

The first person to be made an example is Claudio, who's a young gentleman. His fault is impregnating a woman, Juliet out of wedlock. The punishment is death. So as you can, sorry, we can just tell him- Yeah, not just out of wedlock, but he's betrothed to her.

So one thing you've brought out nicely, right? So you do have these prudish types like Angelo, like Isabella. I like those ones. And then the dissolute types like- David Barr.

Yeah, David Barr, Pompey, right? Mistress Overdone, all these types. And there's not really many families, right? Or really any at all, aside from these pregnancies, Lucio and Claudio happen to be friends as well.

So there's also this kind of nascent, but untapped into desire for reproduction and maybe even family life that's lurking in there as well, right? Yes, I agree. 100%. So Claudio, just really quick, I'm almost done.

Claudio is imprisoned. Punishment is death. Everyone in Vienna is freaking out, except for the undercover Duke. And sort of the story of how Claudio is saved.

Angelo is punished. And Vienna made healthy and new is what comes next. Like all Shakespeare's plays, they're plots within plots, especially this one. There are also a number of themes to discuss.

I think one big one to have in the back of your mind is the nature of Shakespeare's critique of Christian rulership. And so Shakespeare's a kind of political philosopher. We made this case earlier, a kind of political philosopher poet. And in his plays, along with every human type imaginable, you're confronted with every sort of regime.

So Vienna, under Angelo, looks different than a regime under Pompey, the pimp looks different under the restored Duke. So you get the picture. So I think that's to start, you know, Alex and Greg, what did I miss? How do you want to launch into this?

Yeah, I think that's good. I think one thing you said to me when we were discussing this beforehand was you mentioned the political background with Hungary, right, that comes up briefly. That might be important in understanding, if we spell that out a bit more, I think that might be helpful in understanding why this is so urgent for the Duke to solve, right? Yeah, that's good.

So we only get kind of hints at what's happening. There's a, so I've had this question from the outset, why now? Why does the Duke decide after we're given incidentally two different periods of time for how long this licentiousness has been allowed to kind of continue? It's like 17 years and then 14 years or something.

It's 19 and 14. I believe the Duke says 14, but Angela says 19. I might have that backwards. Yeah, but in any event, so why now?

So why now with this kind of bizarre plan? And I think that's because of the threat of foreign invasion. Lucio, who you brought up earlier as a soldier, there are other soldiers in the street, we read a conversation between a few of them where they hint about Hungary. And so I think that's what necessitates, that's what's really necessitating this this pomel strategy that takes place over the course of just a few days.

And one thing I'll add to that is that there's a kind of Machiavelli backdrop to this. Machiavelli says that's ways to invade a country or state, mostly easily, and take it over is to turn its factions against itself. So and this is, it looks like Vienna is right for this sort of thing, right? There's various factions that don't jibe with one another, that one would happily, happily allow for an invader, I think, to get rid of the other, especially somebody like Angelo.

And so that needs to be tamed somewhat. On the Machiavelli backdrop, there's obviously, there's been comparisons, and we won't go into too much detail about this. Maybe Greg can jump and explain this, but there's obviously the backdrop of Machiavelli's description of Chesapeake Borgia in chapter seven of the Prince. That would be one point of comparison.

And maybe Greg can go into that, but I'll just just quote one line from the very first page of the book. When the Duke gives Angelo power, he says, this is, I think, you know, Act 1, scene one lines 18 on, he says, to ask this, you must know we have a special soul elected him that is Angelo, our absence to supply, lent him our terror, dressed him with our love, and given his deputation, all the organs of our own power. So this reference to terror and love, fear and love is obviously a big question that Machiavelli poses in the Prince, right, whether it is better to be feared or loved. And it underlies his critique or his discussion of cruelty and mercy, which is also a theme that runs throughout it, right, excessive cruelty of Angelo in his punitive desires and the lack of mercy and the desire for mercy, but also the excessive mercy of the Duke in allowing the stuff to go rampant.

But maybe Greg, you can go into the stuff about Machiavelli here. And really quick, Alex, I do think, I think that's the reason he gives these Viennese Italian names. I think it's kind of, that's just a little bit of joke. That's a very good point.

It's just a little joke. And Shakespeare also, I cannot recall which play it is where he uses the expression he calls somebody a Machiavel. Henry the fifth, but I think it's really great. Yeah, during the introduction, the very start of the play, maybe take one and take Machiavelli to set Machiavelli to school, he says.

Okay, so Shakespeare's aware. And so that's why I've been pounding my head trying to understand why everybody has these I got lost in thought maybe if Vienna was an Italy, I've just known geography wrong my entire life. That's right. Yeah, right.

So what's the illusion of Machiavelli? It's interesting. Yeah. So, so one is the Chase Wright Borgen, Messer, Meridorco example that Alex alluded to is the most obvious one that stuck out to me that a ruler, sort of a prudent ruler will put in place a man to do his dirty deeds for him and then get rid of him.

No, no, tell us this. Tell us the story. Oh, this one. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. That's right. So, oh gosh. And then see if you can parallel it to what's going on now.

Sure. I'll circle back around and say I don't think the example is perfectly analogous. But any about the story of the Prince, this is in the Prince chapter seven, we've clearly begun to descend in the Prince Machiavelli's descending to lesser examples. And he talks about Chase Wright Borgen who had some issues and he puts forth Chase Wright Borgen as the model to be imitated by modern princes.

Now I think that ultimately Machialli is going to back off of that. I don't think Chase Wright Borgen is actually a model for him. But in any event, the problem with Borgen is that he inherited his rule from his father, who happens to have been a pope. And so he doesn't begin by his own virtue.

In any event, he becomes more virtuous. Machialli says, look, Chase Wright Borgen lucked out. That's how he got his rule. But he realized that he began to improve.

And he learned that he had to rely on his own arms, and he learned that he had to start doing tricks. And then Machialli says, in fact, as a minor digression, I'm going to give you an example of his newfound virtue. And he says, look, Chase Wright Borgen conquered this town in Romagna. And it was sort of things where you're out of control there.

And he wanted to give them good governance. But he couldn't. So he put a man in there and charged a man named Messerimiro d'orco who had a reputation for being cruel and Messerimiro dorco in short order, whipped this town into shape. Now, how would you imagine Machialli would reward a dutiful captain?

Well, Machialli's hero in this example, Chase Wright Borgen, has Messerimiro d'orco cut into half and put on display in the city's town. And with two, with... Because people complained, right? That's right.

So the people complain about his first rule. And so Chase Wright Borgen hasn't cut in half. And beside him is a knife, implied, I suppose, that it was used to cut him in half, which would be awfully gruesome. And a piece of wood, just a small piece of wood, I have some thoughts as to what that piece of wood might represent.

It might actually, I suppose, be a crucifix of my best guess. In any event, the little trick works. Messerimiro d'orco and Messerimiro d'orco actually whipped the town into shape. Chase Wright Borgen is able to sort of have a well-governed town and avoid the reputation for cruelty that Messerimiro d'orco has.

And by the way, Chase Wright Borgen put sort of executive in charge of the city. He made a sort of legislative body with representatives that would come speak to him and he put a judiciary in place. So all the makings that we would say for republic. And my, my, my, Greg, what happens to measure for measure?

So a similar kind of thing. I guess this is why I'm not sure the analogy holds so well. Well, it's not perfect. No, of course, of course, not.

But I mean, I think so the problem, by the way, Chase Wright Borgen ultimately meets his end and he's not successful and the biggest reason he's unsuccessful is because he defers to religious authorities. This is what explicitly what Machiaise says. Like, I couldn't think of a single thing to criticize him for, but he deferred to spiritual powers. And here, it seems to me that our hero, the Duke, avoids, by the way, gosh, I can't believe I didn't mention this.

Chase Wright Borgen was known as Duke Valentino by the Volga. And so in both cases, we have dukes in the Shakespeare play measure. We have the Duke and in the Prince. We have a Duke.

So in this play, you're absolutely right, David. The Duke puts someone in charge, Angela, who has a certain reputation. And that guy sort of tries to whip things in the shape. And then after he has sort of, I don't know if he's actually done it, but he tries to whip the city into shape.

And then the Duke sweeps back in and sort of moderates the harshness of his temporary vice-wife. So it is very, very similar in that regard. And I guess the readers listeners will know, Angela doesn't get cut in half and displayed in the town. So he has to marry, which maybe that's a better or worse shape.

I don't know, let her listeners decide. I hope your wife doesn't listen to this. She doesn't listen to my podcast. My wife actually, she's out some of our listeners may know on Twitter, I've been building a shed out back for a purpose of a study on future recording.

She's literally out there breaking stuff right now, my sweet, sweet wife is still, it's nine o'clock at night. She's still working on that. Be careful. She's she'd be careful.

She's not getting a knife in a woodblock. All right. So I think that's a one small point. Sorry.

Last thing. I actually heard, I know you guys both mentioned the Prince. I'm somewhat familiar with the play. I've taught several times in Machiavelli's called the mandragula.

And gosh, I can't tell you how much the measure for measure seems to me like Machiavelli's famous comedy mandragula. So many ties. Yes, their aspects. That's great, Greg.

Look, the there's the evidence just mounts that Machiavelli was Shakespeare's touchdown. The disguise is the switcheroo's. I mean, so much. What's the switcheroo?

You're referring to, Greg. I want to hear it. You say it. You want to hear me say it?

Well, no, no, no. We'll get into it. Yeah. Thank you.

You know, it's, we'll get into it. We might as well just launch into a theme. I think Alex, if you could lay out, that's fine. I think if you could lay out the Duke strategy, so we've been talking kind of in generalities about what's going on in the play.

Let's get specific. What is this? What is this trick that we know the political issue, right? The threat of foreign invasion.

We know domestically what's happening. This lopsidedness in the polity and the soil of the polity. It needs to be evened out and balanced. Some kind of health metaphorically, but also seriously with the virial diseases, needs to be restored to the city.

So what does Angelo come up with, Alex? And then we can talk about how it's executed. Sorry, Angel, I meant the Duke. What does the Duke come up with?

How is it executed? And then I think it might just be interesting to talk about what we get out of this. Is it one of the big questions I had about this play is what is, is it just a cute plot device that the Duke comes up with? Shakespeare comes up with?

Or is there a kind of political wisdom in measure for measure that can be reproduced? And if there is, what is it? Yeah. So, I mean, so one problem I have with trying to even understand what the Duke is up to is, it's obviously changing, right?

The whole Claudio Isabella element, that's incidentally. He wants Angelo obviously to go over the top, but that Claudio is the one who gets punished. It's not clear why that is other than maybe it's something he's heard of. And therefore Isabella in the eventual proposal, he makes the Isabella, that's not necessarily stood out from the beginning.

Another question I have is, the Duke was, ostensibly so far as we know, Duke when the laws started to lapse. Was he responsible for it? Did he engineer this dissolution and this faction? So as to create a situation of tension that could then be resolved in the way it is resolved?

That's another question we have to try to figure out and every reader has to face whenever they're trying to understand what the Duke is actually up to. Another question or aspect of this is, is Lucio, right? Lucio is aware of the political circumstances. We actually learn about it.

Some of it from him. He's also very much adept at rhetoric. I personally think that he has figured out the Duke for the second season that he's dressed as a friar. He seems to harp on this quite a bit and he seems to be also in control.

And to be manipulating Isabella, maybe even the Duke as well along the way. So figuring out what the Duke's plan is very difficult. But I think at a minimum, what we can say is going on in this play is that the Duke is trying to bring various factions into a court. There's a Catholic faction, which we see by the friars and by Isabella, who's a novice in a, you know, trying to become a nun.

There's also a puritanical faction, it seems like, which is led by Angelo. And there's also all these prostitutes, these bods and, you know, Pompey, the son of a bod as well. And he has to try to find a way to bring them all together. And he does that through marriage.

Marriage seems to be an institution and family seems to be an institution that makes concessions both to moral restraint as symbolized in the puritanical and Catholic factions, as well as to sort of private sexual desire, which you see obviously with the bods. And it offers a kind of legitimization of that desire through that sort of moral restraint. And it seems like that's the solution, reviving or instituting that institution, not merely as a parallel institution, but as in a way the institution replacing the other ones. I think it's very telling that Isabella is to leave the nunnery, right?

She's to become queen now or Duchess, I suppose. And likewise, Angelo has given up on his moral stringence, right? There's a kind of tendency towards a more moderate position, which the extremes are given up is not merely a reconciliation then, maybe that's not even the right word, but a new founding or a re-founding or something of a regime change or regime alteration. That's a minimum we can say is going on in this plan.

How exactly how it works, how much is planned from the beginning, that's I think is still open to question, right? Yeah, really quick, Greg. Sorry. Can I just point something out really quick?

A lot of the background has taken place already in the past. We don't quite know the answer to the question of whether or not the Duke himself allowed Vienna to fall apart. We do early on in the play when he's talking to where it's actually later on in the play, he's the Duke's having a conversation with the friar. He says, my holy sir, none better knows than you how I've ever loved the life removed.

And so it could be the case that the Duke had an education kind of akin to Prospero late in the game, or it's not an education, what am I trying to say? He's waking up to a political reality that he hadn't seen forming around him because he had been spending too much time in the theoretical life up in the New Thinkery. And now it's all hitting. Sorry, Greg.

I know that was the question I was going to ask. To what extent do we know about his education and I was thinking, was he like Prospero? Yeah. If we want to stay with this tack for just a moment, I suppose one of the things that I read it was, things surely seem to work out well for the Duke.

I mean, it seems very critical, I might say, gosh, that seems like things fortunately work out in his favor. I mean, how does he know that maybe it's deep psychology and learning? But how does he know what, I guess we do know something a little bit about Angelo's background. So maybe he can't anticipate the kind of person he is, but maybe the kind of person that's extremely morally austere has a certain psychology that that can be sort of foreseen and sort of understood and you can sort of expect how to connect.

I mean, the way that things unfold, gosh, it sort of seems like luck, after luck, after luck. Sure. I mean, and he responds to changes of fortune, right? Pretty well.

One thing just on the Prospero question. So on Angelo, just that point that he brought up, Greg, he does know prior to the place starting that he's had this sort of fair, yeah, maybe a fair, but he was betrothed and he gave up his wedding right to Mariana as because of a lost dowry, which is a very kind of nasty thing to do. And then he blamed her, right? He said, well, there's rumors about her, right?

So he's obviously got more, less than Christian desires at play, though he dresses them up pretty nice. And there's, there's all these talk about seeming in reality and connection with Angelo. And the Ducata better option to put in place, ostensibly 41 was something that grew well, right? Escalas is said to have noticed signs of politics.

And in fact, Escalas is his second in command. And yet he makes him second to Angelo. So he breaks the ranks somewhat for the purpose of this. On Prospero, one thing I would say is I think he's a little bit obviously there's a similarity because there's a kind of intellectual leaning and study of the liberal arts, whatever that might be.

Obviously, there isn't magic in the same way with the Duke, the way that Prospero has it, but also is set in this magical island, the Tempest is. But one thing I'd say is at one point, when the Duke dressed up as the friar is consoling Claudio, he makes the following comment about statecraft and connection with Angelo, just kind of coming up with a reason. But I think it reveals his understanding of statecraft. He says, Angelo have made an essay or a test of her that is Isabelle's virtue.

So he's made a test of her virtue to practice his judgment with the disposition of natures. So he seems to view statecraft as a sort of psychologizing understanding the various psychological dispositions within a community and being able to work with them, but also as a kind of test and an attempt, right, not necessarily knowing how things are going to come out. So I do think you're right, Greg, that there's a lot of luck. But I think this is part of his understanding of statesmanship as it's revealed kind of passingly in this line.

Yeah, that's good. I think there are limits to the Prospero parallel anyway. Prospero isn't tested. You're right.

It all takes place. Holy contrived artifice with Ariel. We'll see what happens when he gets back to Italy. Yeah, here it's different.

So should we go on? You go ahead. No, no, no, no. I was just going to say the one point I wanted to make is I was struck at any point, the Duke stays so close to the action of the play that while Greg, I think you are correct that it seems like chance event after chance event fall in his favor, he can call the whole thing off at any time.

There also seem to be an indication that he has helpers in the matter. Escalist, remember, is informing him of everything that he is not present for. And I do think there's a case for Lucio, who is a figure I think Alex, you should talk about. I think one of the most interesting characters in the play who is if not a counselor, a secret, this is the theory of our mind, Alex, I think shares it as a secret counselor to the Duke or certainly friendly, but more than certainly aware of who the Duke is.

He's the only one beside Escalist. I get no, no, he's the only one simply that isn't buying the disguise. Escalist is told a bit. That's right.

Now, people wrestle with this. I looked a little bit of what people said and they, so there's a problem, right? On the one hand, he seems to identify the Duke. On the other hand, he gets punished at the end.

So, which is it? Is he perceptive? Is he on the Duke's level? Or is he not?

And there's two ways to do that either to reconcile this. Either it was unwitting and when he makes these comments when he identifies the friars, the Duke, these sort of playful linguistic illusions are ironic on Shakespeare's part, or the second question would be perhaps he's fainting the punishment, which is where I would inclined to. One thing I'll point out is Lucio's name, obviously, is a sort of play on Lucifer. I think that makes him a foil to Angela, which is obviously a play on Angel.

I think the irony is obvious. Angela, the Angel is not so angelic after all. And Lucio, the devil, is not so evil after all, right? He's trying to save his friend, Claudio.

He is very happy for his friend that his friend is having a child. He coaches Isabella in dealing with Angela to try to save her brother. And he seems very concerned with the fate of Vienna as well at certain points. So, you know, they're kind of moral counterpoints, a kind of evil guy, or at least fallen angel who's finding some sort of affinity for community, and then a kind of angelic guy who's all pretense and deep down he has these other less than pretty desires.

Yeah, it's all played is about dichotomies. There is the Christian polity on the one hand, and the opposite of what that looks like on the other. And in the end, there's a happy resolution. Therefore, I think for marriages, Vienna seems to be saved.

That may not be the proper word, but everything is there's a nice little bow tied on the end of this play. But I keep coming back to this question on what it is, what's the political mess? So when we read a text of political philosophy, just to take this back to a real media level, it's like, what are we getting out of it? What do you learn from Plato's Republic?

It's easy to give an account, I think, of what you learn in the so many things in that book. But I think it's easy to kind of bullet point the wisdom that in here is in Plato's Republic. So what's the wisdom here in measure for measure? It's not just a stratagem that's cute by to cute by half.

That's too easy, I think. So what are the deep, what's the deeper point of this play? Greg, I mean, Greg, do you have any? I didn't mean to sound you out.

Drown you out. I mean, he's done. I was just a job at him in a different trap. So I don't mean to play about that.

No, I think we wanted to talk about Lucio. We can take a step back and then return to him. No, I was just, maybe this does feed into the more. Oh, yeah.

So Lucio, I didn't mean to cut that off. No, no, it was a small point. Just how I was just pointing out that Angelo and you spent Lucio seemed to be opposites, but they seemed to be brought more and more toward him. And I just wonder if that was in general, I wonder if part of what's going on here in this play isn't the sort of, I don't know the right word is, but there might be a tendency in certain readings of Christianity to see the world in overly mannequie in terms.

And so to try and bring Lucio to the good and to try to bring Angelo to the bad might be, I don't know, maybe this is part of what's going on. You already mentioned several times that the place seems to be having a moderating effect. I wonder if the sex isn't the standard for something else we can focus on the sex right now, but I wonder if just in general morality, let me try this in the following way. Political communities seem to need morality to survive, to do well to flourish, but there are two opposing tendencies with respect to morality that are equally, but in different ways, pernicious to political community.

One is, and this is sort of strange to the phenomenon probably, but people who take morality much too seriously. You wouldn't think this is a problem from the moral point of view, but Shakespeare seems to be implying that there is a serious problem with overly moral people. The more obvious problem, of course, is with people who are completely immoral. What we may fail to see in their case, though, is why immoral people are good.

So this is a little bit complicated. Why a political community might actually need less stringent morality or people who have easy morals to do well. So that was a strange jump in. Yeah.

So one thing I would just, just not to counteracting, I'd say, but a finer point on it, David said something to me the other day that all the bonds are being punished by nature. They all have these venereal diseases. And there's all these jokes about the very complex remedies, which sounds like something to get at some holistic health place, like boiling yourself with turnips. I don't even remember them because there were so many.

So they're punished by nature. I think you could say the same thing, though, for the overly moral types, right, Greg? That Isabella is going to be a nun. She'll never have children.

Angelo's so ascetic that he's never going to have children. And so in both situations, you get nature rebuking it. If everybody goes to the puritanical side, it's not clear that you'll have families, right? That'll keep reproducing because the desire itself is so sinful.

But then if you indulge the desire entirely, then you don't have families. And all you have is a city full of Pompey is right, Pompey, born of a prostitute and who's utterly ridiculous and hasn't been educated and raised in the proper way so that the family turns out to be this necessary point by which education and the furtherance of the community is possible. That would just be to me to put a final point on why sex is focused on so much. So you mentioned all things nature.

Nature is going to rephrase what you said in the NASA question. So nature seems to be pushing human beings toward some kind of a moderate sort of reading this in an Aristotelian fashion. There's a meme with respect to sex, yes? And nature provides that.

Obviously, there's something wrong with just sort of engaging in it. Willy, nilly, unlimited fornication, there seems to be a problem with this system. We can't reproduce these kind of things. This one of them.

Greg, willy, nilly means willing unwilling. What does it mean? That's not what you're talking about, right? Really, really?

Yeah, that's what it means. People think it means like without any kind of standard. But you're talking about having sex willingly or unwillingly. I don't think that's decent for this process.

But you just mentioned in the play for shameful, actually. I know, I know. But I guess the question I had to just to turn back and you know that was you gave the standards nature. The title of the book and the overarching action of the book inclines me to the view that nature may not be the standard by which this play is encouraging, maybe it is, but at least officially, the standard is not nature.

That's yeah. Well, yeah. So let's put the final point on that too, right? So it's borrowed from the Bible, right?

And there's this idea of divine punishment. So how do we know that? What's borrowed from the Bible? The title, right?

Right. That's right. That's right. I do.

I do. I do. I do. I do.

Yes, you do. You hit it. You hit it. laid out.

So Jesus is no, but maybe three, actually, that's repeated in the Mark and Matthew. But in Luke, it's most it's laid out most clearly. But in Matthew, it's in chapter seven. That's right.

So in Luke, like that you like that. Very good. You guys are glad you're picking up on these things. This is Luke chapter six, verse 37 and following Jesus says, judge not and you shall not be judged, condemn not and you shall not be condemned, forgiven, you shall be forgiven, give and it should be given unto you.

Good measure, press down and shaken together and running over shall men give into your bosom for with the same measure that you meet with all that shall be measured to you again. And I was reading the King James Version, of course. So let me just say one thing on the title. Jesus is saying, don't judge.

Am I wrong in thinking that the Duke? That's exactly what he does. He judges the entire time. Or he's building up.

He's setting things up so that he can execute his judgments at the end of the play. So one thing I would add to that is that when the Duke comes in to start judging people and you have this kind of court, this word terror comes up again and he's not being merciful. So he's playing a little bit of the Angelo, but then finally he says, Oh, I'm in a mood of what is it remittance or something like that? I'm in the mood to pardon people, right?

Or to forgive people. So it seems like he starts judging and then he starts moving towards greater mercy, right, as he's going through. One thing I'll say is that aside is since we're on the subject of Christianity and measure, Greg has been getting some of his Christian friends to help him with his shed projects, right? Can I correct you slightly on that, Alex?

Yeah, sure. It's not that Greg is working side by side toiling alongside his Christian brothers. It's he is employing them as veritable slaves to construct his his thinkery. I am a fair wage.

Oh, is that in knowledge or some kind of joke? I brought them some water earlier and some crackers. Yeah. Yeah.

Hopefully their savior can turn it into wine and then they can partake of the Sabbath. So anyways, but yeah, so the Christian backdrop and specifically this backdrop of Judge Nautilus, you be judged, I think in this overarching mercy that that's absolutely there. But then so you have that that part on the one hand. But then you also have the Duke, he's not getting his mercy from the scripture so far as we can tell.

He seems, I think Esquis at one point says that he devotes himself to knowing himself, right, the self knowledge he's studying the liberal arts or something like that, it looks like. So whether the overarching principle is a kind of rational enterprise or rational statecraft or a kind of divine providence is an interesting point or an interesting question that we should think about, right? Yeah, it's interesting. Also that the that this play is as much about if you step back, it strikes me as much about the Duke's salve, so I don't want to use that word about the fucking says much about the Duke's salvation as it is the salvation of Vienna, because he does get married probably to the jewel, the jewel of the city, right?

Isabelle is beautiful and she's smart. She's a little corrupted along the way thanks to the Duke. So he's kind of getting damaged goods, but maybe that's what maybe that's what it takes. Yeah, on her possible corruption on the two things.

So people, I think rightly, make a big deal about the fact that Isabella is so silent at the proposal. I think twice suggests marriage. There's no stage direction. Obviously, we have no idea what it's how she reacts.

Is she horrified? Is she, you know, interested in this? So obviously lots of feminist readings will make a, you know, quite a bit of hay and more than one tenure will be earned on this sort of silence. But I think there's some interesting moments earlier in the play that are quite revealing of her character.

When she's going back and forth with Angela at one point, she says, Oh, well, if I were in your place, I would show greater mercy to Claudia, right? So she envisions herself at one point as in power, what she would do. In addition, when she and Angelo or I think she's talking to her brother at one point about whether or maybe it's to Angela, it's an actor he's seen one around line 212. When she's trying to decide whether to sleep with Angelo and therefore save her brother's life, or and therefore, you know, earn eternal damnation on the one hand, or to refuse and therefore her brother dies, she says, I'd rather my brother die by the law than my son should I unlawfully born.

I think that was an interesting moment where she sort of implicitly admits that she might be interested in having a child she doesn't talk about losing her chastity or her virginity, right? She only talks about her something unlawfully born, which maybe reveals an inclination to marriage that hasn't been revealed. She certainly taken by her own rhetorical powers. So I do think while she is maybe corrupted along the way, I do think there are these desires within her as there are desires within Angela.

Wait, wait, wait, did she say that in the in I can't recall she say that in front of the Duke, but prior to the mayor is asking her exactly act five is where there's the so that solves another political problem for the Duke. Yes, well, that kingdom has to he's the he's the ruler. There's no one else. There's no succession plans when I'm saying.

Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

So he and he's and she's obviously capable and they kind of bond as the fire, right? And as and she's, you know, a novice, they kind of bond in their their political machinations, right? With the whole mariano plot that substitution. So yeah, on her corruption, I think there's a case that she has corrupted or case that she achieves a kind of, you know, an actualization of her potential.

Claudio immediately identifies her as rhetorically powerful before you've even met her. And this is obviously something that she's quite well suited, perhaps to being an effective queen. Yeah. So that'll be one point I bring in.

And Greg, you wanted to say something more about Christianity? Yeah, I guess I'm still, you know, the title sort of implies, at least to me, that this is one of Shakespeare's more Christian plays or at least a play where he's addressing the Christian themes most directly. And so I can't help but think about the Christian view of love and marriage or sex. I mean, I'll just mention a few things in passing that sort of spin through my mind.

If memory serves in the Septuagint, which is the Hebrew, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, I think arrows, the Greek word for love is only mentioned once and it's in a disparaging way. So the Hebrew Bible is notoriously opposed to erotic love. And I was also, as I was reading measure from measure, I was struck by Paul's letter to the Corinthians, sorry, he keeps saying scripture to you guys, but Paul says in his letters to the Corinthians, it is not noble or beautiful for a human being to touch a woman, like do not touch women. And so there's this, there is a sort of tendency, at least in Christianity to sort of see things in, you know, sex is bad, sex is it's not beautiful, you should leave people alone.

And Paul even says it's best, it's best not to marry. Now that seems to be in some tension with other parts of the Bible, sort of God's command to Adam to go forth and multiply, for example, in some of the other pastors of the Hebrew Bible. And so I don't know what Shakespeare's doing. Alex and I were in Dabor text about this earlier, but is this an anti-Christian play?

I don't think that's quite right. Is it somehow trying to moderate some of the extremes within Christianity? I'm not really sure what I want to say there, but I see Alex trying to jump in. So jump on.

Can we rule out that it's, sorry, Alex, I apologize. No, you go ahead. Really quick. I mean, it seems like we can rule out that it's a pro-Christian play simply.

Why? Because the most quote unquote pious person of the play is a bellow with standing is Angelo, and he's revealed to be unethical. Well, why is he pied? So maybe he's law abiding.

Is Pied too strong of a word? Well, he's a judge. So it could be that we're being, maybe they're different from other kinds of piedies. Maybe they're different kinds of people.

I mean, there's a strange, that's right. He's not a priest. Yeah, he's not a priest, right? And there seems to be a certain type of, maybe there seems to be a certain type of pious person who is at war with himself, so that there are desires that have to be combated or something like this.

I guess what I would say is, I mean, Isabella does strike me as genuinely pious, whereas Angelo strikes me as less clearly so. I don't know why I would say that. I think you're right. No, I think you're right.

I mean, Angelo is deceptive about his true goodness. And he's more than once maligned or threatened to malign reputation for the sake of that. I think if you really want to get his assessment of Christianity, you have to go by one of the most admirable figures in the play. And it's Isabella, right?

I think Isabella is merciful. She's judicious. She's very much pious. There's no sense of a lack of piety, right?

When somebody comes to visit the enemy, she's very careful about overstepping bounds, knowing the rules and all that sort of thing. At the same time, she's given to great anger. Absolute. She's absolute inner piety, which is a kind of defect.

And so if you take such an admirable figure, but you still present them as flawed in a way, and then it's kind of coming to realize their flaws and then maybe embracing a more moderate lifestyle, that might be a more substantive critique of, I would say this, if the critique of Christianity is an angel, it would be a strong man argument, right? It has to go through Isabella. That's really the harder case to prove. Yeah, and certainly it's not anti-Christian.

I mean, it's not Nietzsche, right? Or it's not even Machiavelli. I mean, you read that metric and mention the mandragal. I mean, it's so much more openly hostile to it, at least to the Catholic Church, right?

I mean, here, there's, seems to be more ambivalence. I mean, it's maybe this is why Shakespeare has remained so successful. I mean, it seems to, I don't think, I don't think a Christian, or at least I don't know how this has been received, but my impression is that Christians see this play, have read this play, and don't come away with it with this is an overtly hostile play. But maybe I'm wrong.

I'm just trying, you know, my own mind, I'm trying to figure this out. He seems to be looking at this from the 10,000 foot level looking down and I don't know, trying to figure out what's good about Christianity. So for example, Christianity does encourage family domestic life, right? On one hand, my quotation to Paul and I was standing.

And so there are these elements, and then it just gets to Alice's question. To what extent do the natural standards overlap with some of these other standards? That's right. Yeah.

And I mean, if it's a critique of Christianity, it's a critique of the most literal understanding of the life lived like Christ, right? That kind of purity is quite literally super human, right? According to Christianity itself, but that desire to be Christ-like, even though you're fallen, right? Even though you're born and sin and all that stuff, I think that has its limits Christianity acknowledges.

But yet there are people like Isabella or Angelo, who live that way, whether honestly or dishonestly, and who struggle with it. And that perhaps then, you know, a strong institution of marriage is to be there. But this idea that all sin or even extramarital sex is to be condemned as, as you know, sort of inviolable or sort of unredeemable sin or something like that. I think the chicks are certainly pushing against that.

And this is where I think Lucio really comes in. Lucio, I personally think that he's identified the Duke from the get-go. I think that he's engineered his own punishment of marriage and that he needs it to be portrayed as a punishment for it to be socially legitimate. He promised to marry right, her name is Kate Keita, right?

And he promised to marry her and then he didn't follow through with it. And yet he's put himself in the position to be punished by this merciful yet judicious Duke. And so Lucio might be an example of a kind of mercy that wants to have legitimation of the law. He wants to do right by this woman or to give his child a sort of decent upbringing.

But he can't do it outside the law. He needs the law to push him towards it to punish him with it. I think that explains a lot of his actions around the Duke, why he provokes him to punish him. Fair to say that the teaching, one of the teachings of this play is that the real problem with extramarital sex is the problem of children, so illegitimate children.

And so there's, I'm not sure if this is, and so the real task is trying to figure out the legal method for people to satisfy their natural impulses, it seems to me. So yeah. That's right. No, that's right.

Keep going. Okay, well, I'm not really sure. But like there is this, I mean, obviously there's this natural desire. Let me try this very simply.

The Shakespearean teaching regarding premarital sex is don't do it. Right. The best, the best political situation is to have sex within the confines of the family unit. Now, now, now to be fair, I think Shakespeare with a wink and a nod says, if you don't have a childhood of wedlock, and I've read in books that you can have sex without having moved out making babies, that that seems to not be a big problem for what it's worth.

But by and large, there's this compromise position between instinct and strict morality and let's codify, let's provide legal outlets for people to satisfy these things. The even, even, sorry, I don't want to down me, but so Angela comes in and shuts down all the four houses with the exception of some in town. Wait, which is an interesting fact. But I was just going to say the wish we had more Duke says the Duke doesn't shut them down when he comes back to power.

So I mean, there seems even there never shut down. Okay, exactly. So there seems to be a kind of tolerance. It has to be in the red light district.

It has to be locked away. You know, not on a site, but like we there has to be some accommodation to man's animal or face or longings. This is where I don't actually read Greg's about to start preaching his social politics. We should probably move on.

You put that in somebody else's veins, Greg. So I want to quote a line from Lucia that he says about Claudia. Where are you? I mean, give me a second.

Act one, scene three lines that I know, right? Measure the lines, measure them. You and me, Lucia is talking to Isabella. Lucia is talking to Isabella telling her why Claudia is in jail.

And he says, she says, all right, so Lucia says, your brother kindly greets you not to be weary with you. He's in prison. And Isabel says, well, me for what? Lucia says, for that which, if myself might be his judge, right?

So this is Lucia's own opinion, his standard, if myself might be his judge, he should receive his punishment in thanks. He got his friend with a child. So I think this is an indication one that Lucia is quite happy to have had a child with somebody he was romantically inclined towards. And also that he's willing to see a kind of punishment as thanks, right?

But I think the fact this is an affirmation, I think of Greg's point, right, that even those who might have children out of wedlock, right, like Claudia, even out of wedlock and with the prostitute, like Lucio, they might be able to find some kind of redemption in so far as the children are made legitimate. And again, I'll point to the, you know, the cartoonish illegitimate child of the play, Pompey, right? That's what's to be avoided. What's to be, you know, wished for is ultimately this, this reconciliation, right, or this legitimization of the, of the child, right?

I think that's a good, I think that's a good note to end on. Greg, unless you wanted to, I didn't. I actually have a couple of small questions and then a big question. Yeah, let's do it.

Maybe tell us the last question, not so you're ready when I ask it. Why is this your favorite play? But a couple of small questions are I'll build to that big question. One is one that I found perplexing and confusing is a lot of the plot depends upon this other woman.

I don't think we've even mentioned her so far, maybe you did. I'm sorry, Alif did. Marianna, Marianna, who is still in love with Angelo and is willing to be a part of this switcheroo and to sleep with Angelo, but pretend like she's a developer. And then so then Angelo and, excuse me, Angelo and Marianna, Mary, then the play.

A puzzle for me is why is Marianna still in love with Angelo? A second part, this is a small question. What maybe that's just a plot device that I don't understand? A slightly bigger question.

One of the themes I get to touch on is something that we've talked about on this podcast before. In Christianity, there seems to be this construction that not only deeds are punishable, so not just laws, but that thoughts or beliefs or desires are also punishable. So if you've committed adultery in your heart, you've just said to me, this is a big thing. I thought the play and I thought it was really important.

And I want to say that I think this is another one of the things that Duke seems to try to moderate this idea that you should be punished for certain desires or afford for because Angelo, he seems to know that Angelo has these desires and to try and to fan the flames of those desires. I don't know if somebody wants to jump in on that one. Yeah, can we align? Yeah.

Can we align that Isabella gives about this? Can you tell me a lot? This one, no, because I just searched for this on the free version. What a Euro.

You're a real fan. Yeah, this is Isabella talking with the Duke in Mariana or Mariana or whatever her name is. She says, sorry, I'm reminded of David's caricature of Machiavelli. Isabella says, for Angelo, his act did not or take his bad intent and must be buried.

But as an intent that perished by the way, thoughts are no subjects, that is they can't be ruled, intense, but nearly thoughts. Right? That was exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, this is Act Five. Right? This is when she's Yeah, she's beseeching the Duke on Mariana Street. Mariana's asked for her help.