For some unconnected reason it inspired me to do something I'd been wanting to get around to since I was the age of seventeen. Way back then I was studying Shakespeare's Measure For Measure and in the midst of the research for the exam I would ultimately fail, I read about an adaptation of the play from the late 1600s which mixed in elements of Much Ado About Nothing. It's something that's intrigued me all these years and so today I finally did some research and managed to identify both what it was called and where I could find a copy. The hybrid goes by the apt title, The Law Against Lovers and was written by Sir William Davenport in 1662.
I found a facsimile of the play in a local library published in the 1970s by Cornmarket Press. As a facsimile it was a bugger to read with these modern eyes, with the letter 's' randomly substituted for an 'f' and other mad punctuation due to what amounted as printing technology back then. The play was written and first presented at the newly established Duke of York's theatre in its early days and did not go down well with most critics. According to the introduction Samuel Pepys thought it 'good play, well performed' but another with the kind of acid tongue you'd expect from someone like Lyn Gardener in The Guardian said that the author was 'a far better cook than a poet' mixing 'two good plays to make one bad'.
Without hopefully getting ahead of myself, they're not wrong. The rational isn't that awful but it does have a ring of poor fan fiction to it. Walking in from Much Ado Benedick is made Angelo's brother and Beatrice becomes the stand-in ruler's ward. If you're not familiar with either play, have a quick look at the wikipedia entries. It does look like a stretch doesn't it? Especially if you want to keep any of the really important stuff like the language. Essentially what happens is that Beatrice and Benedick are plotting against Angelo instead of Claudio towards the end of the play and to make room for the them the 'low comedy' scenes with the likes of Mistress Overdone are chopped out taking away the class dimension and turning the play into something more courtly.
It's a Frankenstain of text with Shakespeare's material from both wedged together regardless of the fact that textually they're tonally very different. Benedick is given dialogue from the likes of Escalus so that he can participate in the action from Measure for Measure, whilst at the same time sharing the familiar banter with Beatrice. The other authorial voice, Davenport tries his best to pastiche the bard's work but he's simply a blander writer and like those moments on old BBC programmes when someone would indoors and the picture quality would shift from film to video, Davenport is simply a blander writer and his work looks like an intrusion, especially when he's rewritten Shakespeare's words to try and cover the joins, the rhythm of some lines becoming corrupted.
Generally it's like watching the last three Sorkinless seasons of The West Wing -- the characters seem the same and their speech is sometimes similar or even identical but there's always the nagging feeling that something isn't quite right. The horrifying apogee of this is a new third scene between Angelo and Isabella at the climax of the new Act IV. In the original Measure for Measure, the first two scenes are real powerhouses of drama filled with double meaning, moralistic meditation and high emotion. In the first Isabella, the nun, pleads with Angelo to spare her brother whom he has condemned under a newly re-enforced law regarding sex out of wedlock. In the second, after a great speech in which he admits to himself he's fallen for Isabella's passion and has no clue how to deal with it, Angelo says he'll let her brother live if she'll sleep with him.
In Davenport's version that self-realisation is missing and in this new scene we find out why. It's revealed that actually he had no intention of killed Claudio - it was all a ruse so that he could test her virtue and that by not succumbing she passed his test. Then we find out what he was up to:
"But since you fully have endur'd the test.Yeah, thanks mate. What he essentially seems to be saying there is that since she passed his test and wouldn't sleep with him when he'd condemned her brother to death, he thinks she an alright gal and would happily sleep with or marry her now. Not only does this make Angelo an even bigger creep but it desecrates the integrity of the character, the cold man unable to control his new feelings and venting them in completely the wrong way. Instead, he was apparently in control of the situation all along which makes the Duke's masquerade as the friar deeply inconsistent too - Mariana, the wife he would have wed in the closing act and Isabella's get out clause is omitted altogether.
And are not only good, but brave, the best
Of all you sex, submissively I soo
To be your lover, and your husband too.'
None of which should suggest that my disappointed opinion couldn't change should I see a really good production if anyone wanted to give it a try. There is probably a range of character business which I totally missed reading from the printed page. As with all theatre, it simply isn't given a chance to work properly until it's performed or at least attempted. But reading this text at least demonstrates that even after sixty years people were looking for new ways into Shakespeare, to interpret his work. As now, sometimes it won't always work, but it all adds the to mystique, the question of why those works endure and the magical quality that makes the best of them what they are. And I do consider Measure for Measure to be one of the best, even if its performance regularity and lack of a recent filmed version suggest otherwise.
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