Angelo sentences Claudio to death for fornication — then offers his sister Isabella, a novice nun, her brother’s life for her body. A “comedy” by Folio classification; a moral pressure-cooker by experience.
This is the darkest of the so-called problem plays, and Isabella–Angelo scenes are among the most electric two-handers Shakespeare wrote. The ending resolves the plot and resolves nothing else; directors have been arguing with its final silence for a century.
Which edition?
1Arden Shakespeare, Third Series
Ed. A. R. Braunmuller & Robert N. Watson · Bloomsbury
The edition that finally treats the Duke as the problem rather than the solution.
2Oxford World’s Classics
Ed. N. W. Bawcutt · Oxford University Press
Bawcutt is the soundest guide to the play’s Jacobean politics.
3The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Ed. Brian Gibbons · Cambridge University Press
Gibbons is very good on the silence Isabella is left in at the end.
4Folger Shakespeare LibraryFirst read? Start here
Ed. Barbara Mowat & Paul Werstine · Simon & Schuster
A play about coercion, read best without anyone telling you what to think.
Measure for Measure on stage
Measure for Measure on screen
1Measure for Measure (1979)
TV film · dir. Desmond Davis
BBC Television Shakespeare
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Reading Measure for Measure this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.