Vincentio

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About Mark Rylance

Mark trained at RADA and at The Chrysalis Theatre School. He is the Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe and Phoebus’ Cart Theatre Company. He is also an Associate Artist of the RSC. The Citizen's Theatre (Glasgow) gave him his first job in 1980 and since then he has worked with the RSC, Royal National Theatre, Royal Opera House, Scottish Ballet, Shared Experience, Bush Theatre, Tricycle Theatre and London Theatre of the Imagination. After Thelma Holt's production of Much Ado About Nothing, he received the Olivier Award for Best Actor. In the Globe's Prologue Season in 1996 he played Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In 1997 Mark played Henry V in the Globe's Opening Season. In 1998 he played Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice and Hippolito in Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore. The 400th Anniversary 1999 Season saw Mark as Master of Play for Julius Caesar as well as playing Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. For the 2000 season he played the titular role in Hamlet and appeared in The Antipodes, and in 2001 he played Posthumous/Cloten in Cymbeline. Mark received an Olivier nomination for his performance as Olivia in Twelfth Night (2002 season), and last season he played the titular role in Richard II. Film credits include Prospero's Books, Angels and Insects, Hearts of Fire and Intimacy.

Rehearsal notes 1

  • The Duke
  • Casting
  • Preparations
  • A matter of life and death
  • Connections
  • Voice
  • Lack & opposition
  • Objectives
  • Notes
  • ’Seemers’
  • Direction

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

The Duke

I thought he was such a mystery. I didn’t quite know how he could be played, so that intrigued me. He also reminds me of Prospero at times which is fascinating. In the early 1990’s, I did a weekend residential workshop with some friends at a farmhouse in Warwickshire: we worked on Saturday then went to an RSC production of Measure for Measure, and worked again on Sunday. I remember thinking that weekend ‘I’d love to play the Duke sometime’ - there's something very particular about him. Also it seemed to fit somehow; I’m Artistic Director and perhaps there is a certain perception of that role that would fit with the character of the Duke as a figure of authority. It would make sense to use that impression of me which may be in the shadow of the audience's acceptance of the character. Perhaps behind the Duke's character there’ll be a sense of recognition ‘Ah, that's the Artistic Director.’ So that's good to have me play a Duke or a Duchess or play someone with authority in the play.

Casting

In my case, the casting decision was made long after the plays were chosen. I haven’t picked a season because there are parts that I wanted to play. Last year was a good time to do Richard II – I told Tim I wouldn’t mind playing that, but I didn’t pick the play for the role. I think The Golden Ass was the last time there was a project that was there because I particularly wanted to play a part but even then, if it would have been better for someone else to play that part, it would have fine.

After I’ve chosen the plays, I place myself in the best place that I can be: if John Dove had wanted me to play Angelo then that's what would have happened. At one point we were talking with Derek Jacobi about whether he would come. If he had agreed to come, then he probably would have taken the part of the Duke. Casting a company is a bit like picking players for sports team where you want to make the best of their individual strengths within the context of a collective group. That's what we’re thinking about in the auditioning process and the same principles govern my roles.

Preparations

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve writing down a lot of things Vincentio says – his lines and the things people say about him. I’ve been watching different films that I thought might give me some clues; for instance, I watched North by Northwest [dir. Alfred Hitchcock] because there's something exquisitely romantic about the story in Measure for Measure that reminds me of a quality in Cary Grant's early films – those ones with love affairs involving an obstacle that prevents two people being together. The love scenes in Cary Grant films are also intriguing. They’re so understated, very proper and reserved, and his characters combine enormous class and bearing with a kind of wit and speed.

I’ve gone along to some AA meetings as well – the Duke has been played as an alcoholic [Robert Glenister in Michael Boyd's 1999 RSC production] and that idea interested me. When I first read the play, I was a little curious about whether Vincentio was dying and if so, whether he knew that he was dying; I wanted to explain why he suddenly embarks on this plan to go and find out what's happening in his kingdom. But lately I’ve been feeling his actions don’t need that kind of justification; there's enough for him to discover without something like that which would clearly be an addition. In a way, I feel that it is his soul rather than his physical body which is dying. He's reached a place where he's not contented with his life.

A matter of life and death

Having said that the idea of death doesn’t have to be in terms of the physical body, that's another possibility that I explored more fully after I watched a film called Living (Ikiru) by Akira Kurosawa. It's a beautiful film about Mr. Wakasi, a civil servant who finds out that he is dying and goes out to explore the world in a very positive and curious way. Mr. Wakasi reminded me of him, the way at a certain point when he is dying, he decides to go out and do something about the world. That reminded me a bit of the Duke: why does he need to test Angelo? Does he need a replacement? It's all about testing Angelo and Escalus because he knows he's only got six months; he must satisfy himself that it will be okay to hand over his power to these men. That would mean at the end he is giving Isabella not himself, but his dowry – his kingdom. Perhaps she would become the Duchess because she deserves it. But that's not really in the text, so I would worry about imposing something like that. I might just take it on secretly. Another guy I know has a debilitating disease at the moment, which requires him to use a stick. I wondered about that. I wrote, ‘Perhaps everybody dies and is reborn somewhere in the play. How alone/lonely is he? How much does he want to know about himself by knowing his society?’ He talks about the law as ‘being like an overgrown lion in a cave that goes not out to prey.’ Is that an animal analogous to him and his debilitated state? Could he impose the law if he wanted to or is he stuck in his cave?

Connections

I tend to carry the play around with me always and watch out for connections. For instance I watched a program about very wealthy young Americans called ‘The Hamptons’. One of the young people had made a film about his friends - they were all people who led protected lives and something of their situation reminded me of the Duke. I think it was the combination of enormous luxury and a very solitary and difficult existence. They try to really feel connected - particularly the young man who was making the film, who tried to find out about the world by asking people their opinions – but they find it terribly hard. I thought there was something of that in the Duke's desire to go out and discover a connection with the world. I’ve also been reading and thinking a little bit about King James, and just the whole idea that the author might be trying to say something to this new king about the correct behaviour for a ruler in his play. Critics have suggested several possible points of contact between King James and Vincentio – I’m not sure how far I’ll pursue that.

Voice

I’ve been the Master of Voice for the Red Company [performingRomeo and Juliet], so I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about my voice. In my role as Artistic Director, I’ve been talking to a few directors about next season, and it's been interesting to notice how modern directors in other theatres talk about needing to fill the whole space. What they mean is to fill the theatre with scenery and so on. Then I realised that you do want to fill this whole theatre, but you need to fill it with sound, not with matter. The space is marvellous for sound, and our culture wants to take anything that's empty and fill it. Fill it with food, fill it with sensation – it's very difficult to let an undeveloped plot stay undeveloped, or a moment of time to remain free from the pressures of a timetable or an activity. So I’ve been thinking of experimenting with character detail through my vocal work rather than through the sort of physical alteration after Olivier, say. I’ve been thinking ‘How much can I alter my voice?’ The Duke is a very difficult part in that sense: I’ve thought of all kinds of things I might do, different dialects and things. But it feels such a very human part too. Here is someone who wants to try and get to his centre by going out into his kingdom, to find out about himself as well his land and his people. I also think there's something kind of ambiguous and neutral to him. He always pretends – he's hiding and shy. How do you inflect your voice with those nuances?

Lack and opposition

John Dove said of Measure for Measure that ‘Everyone is miscast for the task that they face in the story, and everyone lacks something at the beginning of the story.’ I said, rather stupidly, ‘Well, what does that Duke lack?’ and he said, ‘Well, a partner.’ Of course, the final, inconclusive moment of the play pivots on his offer to Isabel: he asks if she will be his wife and we don’t know what she says or does. It's one of those endings that Shakespeare leaves marvellously open and enigmatic. The idea of a lack made me think perhaps I should start off as lonely and solitary, and isolated and shy, or like those rich young people from ‘The Hamptons’ – someone who has enough money that everything can be controlled. He can have the best shoes, the best clothes. He can absolutely have exactly the right food at exactly the right time at exactly the right temperature. Everything can be perfect, yet he's unsatisfied. He finds that it's all at odds.

Vincentio loves to bring up the oddness of things. He has a wonderful speech that begins

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter
[III.1.5-6]

He elaborates on the theme of oppositions:

[…] Merely thou art death's fool
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
Yet thou run’st toward him still.
[III.1.11-3]

Later on in the same speech he says ‘If thou art rich, thou’rt poor.’ So there is a kind of double perspective, and at the end he says ‘Yet death we fear, / That makes these odds all even.’ Even as he tries to grapple with some kind of balance, he sees oppositions and contradictions.

Even with Isabella, he’ll say things like ‘The hand that hath made you fair, hath made you good.’ He recognises that the very thing which made her beautiful enough to awake Angelo's lust has also made her good enough to withstand that lust. How curious that those two things were given to you. It's something I feel he wonders at. At another point he’ll say, ‘Provost a word with you,’ and the Provost will say, ‘What's your will?’ He’ll say, ‘Now you are come, you will be gone.’ He has a funny mind – he loves to see the opposition in things and how nature puts those things together, not unlike Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, who remarks how a little poison-flower also has a seed of good in it. Shakespeare seems to like to cure or balance things by putting them next to their opposite.

Shakespeare certainly makes Claudio stand face to face with his death [III.1], even when it's not necessary – a bit like when they pretended to execute Dostoevsky and then didn’t. He seems to feel that it would be good for the person to have a closeness with death. From what little I know of indigenous societies, this seems to be common. Young men, if they’re not going to be involved in an actual war, need the Jimmy Dean factor. They need the race to the cliff and experience some closeness with death, to get a sense of proportion about life. It can seem very cruel. There's also the feeling that the Duke's treatment of Isabella is unnecessarily cruel: there's no need for him to let her reside in a belief that her brother has been executed, but he brings her that way in order to see if she can give mercy to Angelo, even whilst she stands in the belief that he has killed her brother. The Duke is like a chess player; he's a few moves ahead of everyone and he seems to be involved in a solitary game. What I’m going to find interesting is seeking out his vulnerability or his particular shadow, because I don’t want him to appear just like a teacher. He needs to be going through something himself… actually I think he's very, very close to the author. Isabella's very close to the author, too. They all are in some ways, but this technique of using illusion in order to bring out the truth is very familiar as Shakespeare.

Objectives

At the moment, one of the things I’m doing is asking questions ‘What's the objective? What's the need of this person?’ And I wrote in my notes ‘To bring people to a place where they can know the truth without blocking it … truth is like love, it needs to be felt to be known.’ It's no good to just tell people the truth. They have to be in just the right place for them to really hear it. Do you ever have that sensation where you feel like you’ve told someone something five or ten times, and then suddenly you tell them and they go ‘That's brilliant! Why did you never say that before?’ It's just that they didn’t feel it before. So the Duke has realised that it's very important that people feel the truth and the truth is that the world is held, I think, in a kind of love – a great, primal energy that moves things forward. That emotion leads thought; thought doesn’t lead emotion. The Duke is trying to work on the emotional life of the people. We’ve linked with Samaritans, and that's been my initiative, so I’ve been reading a lot about the present society in England and I’m thinking that the Duke could be concerned about a similar situation.

Notes

Other little notes I’ve made to myself – none of these are necessarily true, by the way. I just write things down. ‘Everything he says is about himself, his own dilemma. So even when he's advising someone else – ‘Be absolute for death’ –it's slightly easier to understand if he's seen to be taking on their problem and connecting with it. He's not advising so much as thinking ‘If I were you I would be absolute for death.’ Or maybe ‘We should all be absolute for death.’ I’ve been trying to wrap the lines in that kind of idea rather than delivering them like a lecture. I also think he is parentless and an only child. Though there's one thing he says in that ‘Be absolute for death’ speech about how even your children curse you, or rather they curse ‘the serpico, doubt, and rheum for ending you no sooner.’ [III.1] I don’t know if he has children and whether that is something he has actually experienced or just observed, but he does seem pretty much isolated in the play. If he's based a bit on King James, did he experience the kind of violence King James did? King James had a very, very violent youth – comparable to being high up in a mafia family or something. The amount of killing that was going on around him was extraordinary. You just get a sense of this incredible mind that is very isolated and I’m trying to think about the reasons why this might be.

‘Seemers’

Is he angry that his duty to maintain royal appearances prevents him from falling in love? Is this why he hates ‘seemers’?

[…] Hence we shall see
If power change purpose, what our seemers be
[I.3.53-4]

I was thinking a bit of Prince Charles, too, and the pressure of having to seem to do the right thing. Vincentio seems to be so angry with people who are not what they appear to be. I have a friend who at one time was one of the top ten most powerful industrialists in America. He said it was a nightmare – it was impossible, absolutely impossible to get the truth of what was happening around you because, he said, ‘I didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t overwhelmed by the possibilities of my supporting their agenda. I had so much power in a room that it was very difficult to get the truth.’ Obviously, seeming becomes a very important concern for people who have power. One forgets how it all balances – a very powerful position can sometimes mean that you’re more vulnerable because you can’t get an impartial view that will protect you and your interests.

Working with John Dove

John [Dove, Master of Play] and I have been working quite closely together. He's a very, very experienced director of new plays but this is his first time doing Shakespeare so we’ve been talking a lot about the play and I was present at casting, though that's totally John's decision. I wanted him to be aware of the former players and I was keen to share what I’ve learnt about their qualities as I know them: I helped provide some information. We also met with a good friend and advisor of mine, Peter Dawkins, and had a very good day talking through the issues of justice and mercy in the play, and why the characters are named as they’re named and those kind of things. I’ve done that kind of work. There's a lot still to do but all in all, I’m pleased with the way things are going.

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Rehearsal notes 2

  • Finding spontaneity
  • Solving the puzzle
  • Getting through it
  • Lucio & the Duke
  • Avoiding adulation
  • Language & syntax
  • Timing
  • Research: friars
  • Absolute against death
  • Justice & mercy
  • ‘Craft against Vice’
  • Putting it together

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Finding spontaneity

The Duke certainly is an outsider. He moves from being a very distant ruler to somebody who goes amongst his people in order to see the affects of the justice of Angelo. Along the way, I’ve found that he is prepared for many things, but also some things do go wrong and as a result he has to improvise – he has to come up with solutions on the spur of the moment. When you look at a play like Measure for Measure, it can seem as if everything's predetermined because it's written down, but nothing is predetermined from a character's point of view. Many different things could happen, so in rehearsals we’ve been trying to find as many of those places as possible. That uncovers a sense of unpredictability and spontaneity in the playing.

There are a lot of those moments in Act IV. Even when the Duke first arrives at the prison and has his conversation with Juliet, she's ahead of him already. She answers all of his questions very well and does not avoid her responsibility, so right away you have a case where there isn’t any need for her to be punished further. Then it's a matter of trying to find a way to make Claudio aware of the position that he put Juliet in by being impatient – getting her pregnant outside of wedlock instead of waiting until their marriage had been ordered properly in that society. I think the Duke introduces Claudio to the idea of his death and the limitations of life, partly in order to awaken in him more care for life and more care for the effects of his actions, but even in that instance, Vincentio is not prepared. He doesn’t know what he’ll find, and often what he does find is radically different from what he suspected. Of course, he makes the major discovery that Angelo is just as corrupt as he is. It's interesting that once he has made that discovery, the Duke doesn’t just unmask himself and go to put Angelo in prison; instead he's trying to create the circumstances under which people will become conscious and take responsibility for their own lives. I think he's trying to find a place where they can develop a bit more compassion for each other.

To encourage people to take responsibility and develop compassion, the Duke sets them on what seems like a cruel path. He makes it seem like they’ve lost something that's precious to them. It's as if all the people executed in those countries with the death penalty were not really executed but just looked as if they had been, then were woken up and told ‘We’re going to give you a second chance. You’ve seen what life is, you’ve felt yourself how much you value your life.’ I think the Duke is trying to instruct people to make better lives for themselves – take the mercy that you’ve been given and make something better of it. How do you do that? How can you be certain that someone won’t just re-offend? They have to experience some real remorse or some real connection with who they are and what they’ve done for that kind of policy to work.

Solving the puzzle

At the moment, I don’t actually feel I can talk about the Duke because the character is all in pieces. It's not hanging together. We’re at that point in the rehearsal process where what one's doing just doesn’t make sense. You often get that working on these plays because you work on specific scenes separately and then you put them together; things might not fit at first. Something that's right for one scene isn’t right for another scene. It's very disheartening and worrying at a certain stage. Then something new will come out of it. Right now it is a bit like a puzzle where you’ve done the prow of the boat or maybe you’ve done the steeple of the church because you could identify those features, but you’re left with the sea to do, or the red cloak that's made up of a hundred and fifty pieces that are just red – how do they fit together? It's like that, really, working on a play, particularly as you learn it, because it's not just learning it by rote. You’ve got to learn it so that you can say it in a believable way, so people believe you’re saying it and you’re meaning it. You become very aware of the bits that don’t make sense at all to you, particularly with an author like Shakespeare, because his thinking and his wit are so subtle and advanced that it's very difficult to keep up with him sometimes, to see what he means.

Getting through it

What John [Dove, Master of Play] has been saying, and I think he's right, is to rely on the story. Play the story, find what you need to do in terms of the story, and then you won’t go wrong. That's the basic thing. So you come back to that; you also try to hold onto that on the days when scenes go well. You can start to hold on like a person holding on to somebody's clothes when the other person is gone, talking to the clothes as if the person is there, but he's not there at all. Likewise in a scene, you can get attached to the outer clothing of the acting of it without connecting to the inner need of the person to do whatever they’re doing. So you go back to that need, that's always a good thing. It's always very difficult when you start, and also at the end of a rehearsal period, to have a lot of people come and give different impressions. One just does what one is doing, but then it gets very complicated when you get a lot of people telling you what to do, so you have to build up some confidence in your own instinct and hold to that too.

How do you make those character choices? I don’t know; you sense in yourself what feels right and what doesn’t feel right, and you just keep trying things until it does feel right. Sometimes things feel right for a while, for quite a while, and then suddenly they don’t feel right anymore. Then it changes and you’ve got to change and let go, but mostly if you come back to the story, if you come back to answer the questions ‘Why is the character there? What do they want? What are they expecting to happen? What do they need to happen?’ then those things will always yield good results, particularly with someone like Shakespeare. Maybe the results would not be as useful with writers who aren’t so good with plot, but Shakespeare's stories are always well-imagined and credible.

Lucio and the Duke

One person the Duke cannot be merciful towards is Lucio. He's like a reporter. If it was a modern-dress production, I would probably imagine him as an investigative reporter from a low-calibre newspaper. He has a very odd ability to know all about something that's just been said. For instance, in Act IV when the Duke disguised as the Friar says to Isabella, ‘The Duke comes home tomorrow – nay, dry your eyes’ [IV.3.125]. This is not something he has planned to say in advance; he moves his plans forward because she is so upset. He thinks ‘I must get back even quicker than I thought’ because in the previous scene he tells the Provost that the Duke will be here in ‘two days’. There's no way anyone else could know he's changed his plans but then Lucio comes in and says ‘But they say the Duke will be here tomorrow’ [IV.3.153].

There's no rational reason for Lucio to know that, except that he has enough instinct; he often says things that are very near to the truth, and he makes up all kinds of other things that are very slanderous. That's one thing the Duke says he cannot forgive. I think Francis Bacon wrote the plays, and slander was actually what Bacon believed to be the most offensive thing: to strike at the good name of a person was what he considered the worst crime of all, curiously enough. That seems to be the case in this play: whenever the Duke has a soliloquy, he seems to go on and on about the false reports that people make against you and ‘What king so strong / Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?’ [III.1.444-5] He's very concerned with calumny and people – I think he's rather shocked to find that there is a character like Lucio who makes up things about other people, and they’re close enough to truth to be believable.

Avoiding adulation

I went and heard the Dalai Lama speak last week, and it was interesting how much he was really trying to deflate, puncture, and move aside the adulation that was flowing towards him from the thousand people or so who were there to listen. He was making fun of himself to try and prevent people clapping or standing up. He works to keep the ego out of things, to avoid getting caught by pride or grandiosity, and the Duke has some work to do in that area, it seems. Also, very shy people who keep very much to themselves can develop a sense of control over their lives. When you go out into the world, though, you can’t control what other people think or say about you any more than you can control the weather. So perhaps that feeds into the Duke's concern about false report. We’ve been working on Act V quite recently, too, which is very, very complicated: there are so many layers, so many plates he's spinning. It's been quite difficult because there's a lot to learn and you have to be the centre of so much.

Language and syntax

I’m enjoying the language of the play very much; it has a very unusual syntax. It has the curious syntax of a solicitor or a lawyer. When you read legal documents, there are so many clauses within a sentence that it's quite difficult to follow the thread and the Duke has a lot of phrasing like that. I think it's a little bit old fashioned, so I’ve been listening to lots of tapes of people speaking like that in the last century, in the 1930s and 1940s, just to try and find a character that speaks a little more self-consciously or with a little more grandeur, perhaps. When the Greeks taught people to speak, the first thing they had to learn was clarity; clarity was the first principle and everything else depended on that. The second principle was grandeur, and sometimes grandeur involves a lack of clarity, a kind of obfuscation and a longer route round to a conclusion. ‘Go and pick an orange from that bush’ would be a clear command. ‘If I were you and valued my life, with a lightness of heart and a bright eye, I would think it not unfit to go and reach me now an orange from that plant’ – there's a bit of grandeur about that, but you think at first ‘What's this person talking about?’ It's not clear and yet it has a grand swoop to it.

Timing

I’m thinking of the Duke as someone whose time would be very strictly regulated. Think about a day in the life of a member of the Royal Family; Prince Charles’ time, all his day, I would imagine, would be regulated – he mustn’t be late. When you’re in any position of power, you have to be more responsible for time. It's quite interesting because increasingly in the play the Duke will say ‘Has anybody called here of late for me? Much upon this time, I promised here to meet’ or ‘Who hath called here of late?’ He's late –of course, if you don’t have a car with eight policemen to drive you through London, if you’ve got to get the tube then a bus instead, it's much more complicated. That's something he would be totally unfamiliar with in the physical world. As the Friar, he can’t get to places in the same amount of time, so he's always running behind. In a sense, as a Duke, he's elevated into world clear of physical concerns. His toothpaste is put on his brush for him – he doesn’t have to put the toothpaste on. That's the kind of life he has led.

Research: Friars

I’ve been reading a bit more on Friar Francis and the amazing life of those friars dedicated to absolute poverty. There's a report in England that people got together and built the friars a little stone house. They came back a couple of days later and the friars had knocked it all down and made a mud hut because they were always trying to live at the most basic level possible. In London they moved into some road called Stinking Drain or Stinking Lane – they really were always trying to subject themselves to the worst conditions that human beings were living in. The friars’ outfit, which I hadn’t understood before, is beggar's clothing. Jenny Tiramani [Director of Theatre Design, Master of Clothing] found a picture of Friar Francis of Assisi's gown, which is all patchwork. I’ve been thinking about that and thinking, well, he's barefoot and of course to walk barefoot through a city. If you’ve not done that for many years, after a while your feet will harden up, but for someone like the Duke, his feet will just be a mess after one day. So I’ve been putting that in as well, that his feet are very bloody, just to show he finds moving through all this very foreign to him and difficult. Those are some things that I’ve been working on recently.

Absolute against death

I’ve discarded the idea that the Duke might be dying. I was attracted to that idea for a while, the idea that he was coughing blood or had noticed some signs of a condition passed down genetically in his family, something that he would be able to recognise ‘It's coming’ or ‘This happened to my father, I know I’ve got about a year or two.’ I was quite attracted to that idea as an explanation for his testing of Angelo and testing the government to see if they would be able to take over for him. I thought maybe that was why he offered marriage to Isabelle, so that she would become a duchess. But I’ve discarded it now – I don’t think it's the right idea because it's a bit tragic, and the play is written as a comedy. I think I just have to swallow hard and offer my hand to her as a proper offer of marriage; the reason is that I’ve fallen in love with her. That is a huge thing for the Duke, and though I think that is the right way to go, so that it has a romantic ending, I don’t know how to play it at all yet. It's completely hidden: when he's on his own, he doesn’t talk about Isabelle, he talks about himself. Unless those lines relate to her in some way but I hadn’t thought about them like that. It must be a kind of passion or a love that I guess we’ll only read in looks and touches and things like that. In a way, maybe what Angelo's feeling for her, the Duke is also feeling exactly the same thing but he doesn’t say it. Then it suddenly comes out at the end and it's so surprising. At a very, very untimely moment, too.

Justice and Mercy

John [Dove, Master of Play] told me a good thing Friar Francis did. There was a very shy stutterer, an aristocrat who came to join him, and he told this aristocrat, ‘Right, you’ve got to go into the town and stand in the pulpit in the market square and give this sermon.’ The man said ‘No, I ca-ca-ca-ca-ca-can’t do that, Friar Francis,’ and he said ‘Right. Now you need to go and do it in your underwear,’ and the man went and did it. The public were all unruly at first, and then they came round, but Francis apparently came up afterwards and said ‘That is the nearest thing you’ll see to the crucifixion.’ So he would set these very harsh tests for people, and there's something of the Duke in that. But he's so clever, the Duke, and I just don’t feel like I’m clever enough. He holds so much in his head. The main thing with these plays is that it would be very easy just to play it as someone who's prepared everything and knows exactly how it's going happen, but I don’t think that's how it's meant, and I think it would be very tedious then. You’ve always got to find what is planned and what isn’t planned, and play them accordingly. I don’t think he can be certain that Isabelle will forgive Angelo at the end, for example. I think he hopes that she will and he sees in her the potential that she will, but it may well be that she won’t. Indeed, he's throwing as many obstacles in her way as possible, and then when she does forgive Angelo, the Duke does a very, very interesting thing and brings forth a man called Barnardine, forgiving him first of all. Why does he do that? It seems like he's trying to teach people something because he says to Barnardine:

Sir, you are said to have a stubborn soul
That apprehends no further than this world,
And squarest thy life accordingly. Thou art condemned,
But, for those earthly faults, I quit them all.
[V.1.484-7]

To say that in front of Angelo and Isabelle, it seems like he's wants them to see that you can’t punish each person in the same manner because people have different consciousnesses. It's something to do with ‘you should know better’, the idea that perhaps mercy needs to be applied in different ways to different people.

‘Craft against vice’

It's a very, very interesting play. Very different than any of the other plays of his that I’ve been in, very different, but definitely a comedy and with a very wonderful plot, almost as exciting as The Comedy of Errors or something like that. Very much still based in misunderstandings. Another thing Francis Bacon wrote about that time was an essay on dissimilitude, and the Duke is very often talking about this – that leaders sometimes do need to dissemble in order to reveal something at the right time.

… If you think to carry this as you may, the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof.
[III.1.257-9]

That's an essential thing and not necessarily a bad thing. So you have examples in this play, of people like Angelo who dissemble for a bad purpose, and then other instances that meet dissembling with dissembling in order to do good – this is the Friar's case. He says at the end of Act III ‘Craft against vice I must apply.’ Maybe those are the two different kinds of dissembling, craft and vice, which I must apply.

Craft against vice I must apply:
With Angelo tonight shall lie
His old betrothed, but despised;
So disguise shall by the disguised
Pay with falsehood false exacting,
And perform an old contracting.
[III.2.277-82]

The Duke has a certain interesting idea: good people sometimes have to meet falsehood to a certain sense with falsehood, with craft. It's a difficult argument because elsewhere in Shakespeare you get the distinct feeling that you can’t justify the means by the end, that the means will become the end if you’re not careful, but in this play he's searching for a good end through false means, through disguise.

It's not unlike Viola [Twelfth Night], of course, or Rosalind [As You Like It], who also get very worried about disguise in the middle of their adventures, but ultimately bring forth a new harmony in the states that they’re working in – Illyria and Arden – through disguise. Just like in those two plays, there's a great danger that in Act V of Measure for Measure, that the characters who have been fooled will be very angry and cross about it and it won’t work out… in that way it's like a chemical experiment that might explode or might distil into something at the very end of the process of heating, cooling, watering, and separating. When you put things back together in Act V, it might just explode, or it might congeal into some new substance that's made up of all the individual elements you put in. You have to have that sense in the play too: Act IV particularly should really go as far as possible towards an end that looks disastrous so the light of Act V and the happy ending is offset and not expected.

Putting it together

So we’ve been working on individual scenes, and we’re now putting the acts together. John [Dove, Master of Play] is doing a very nice thing which is to run the acts so you have a sense of the shape and movement of the five acts. Like the five beats in a line, each act has a passive and an active quality to it. Then by the end of this week we’ll put all those acts together into the whole thing, into the whole line of the play. So it's a very crucial stage, as I always find at this point.

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Rehearsal notes 3

  • Opening night
  • Making the story clear
  • Act V
  • Dance

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Opening night

On first night, our opening night, I was quite nervous. There were a number of people in the Company who had not played the Globe before, and they were nervous too. As a result, we were a little static and careful, but nevertheless the audience still laughed a lot and enjoyed the performance. Playing Measure for Measure as a comedy was a bit of a risk; over the last fifty years, the play's tragedy has been emphasised more frequently than the humour, but we thought ‘It's been written down as a comedy, so maybe we should just trust that that's what Shakespeare wanted it to be.’ So in our production Isabella doesn’t slap the Duke or storm out angrily at the end, which is something that happens quite often now. Instead we tried to play the story as a thriller, full of well-laid plans that go slightly awry but come good eventually. The audience enjoyed the comedy on first night and they’ve carried on enjoying it. Once we got such a positive response from them, we felt more confident to carry on down the path we had set out on. I think that confidence has helped us improve since the first night.

Making the story clear

We rehearse in a vacuum, separate from any kind of audience. Everyone in the rehearsal room is familiar with what's happening in the story, so there's no element of surprise. When we get out in front of an audience, they teach us where we need to make corrections and changes. Their reaction will let us know when we’re telling the story well and when we’re not being as clear enough. For example, there was a moment in the Duke's second scene [I.3] when the audience didn’t understand what was happening. Vincentio turns up at Friar Thomas's monastery and asks for secret harbour: to be kept secretly, to be given a friar's outfit and instruction on how to behave like a friar, so he can go out into the world and watch what happens there. I had the idea that the Duke might have hidden himself in a laundry basket to escape from the Court to Friar Thomas – that way people wouldn’t know that he never went to Poland (as he said he would). So a basket was brought onstage and Friar Thomas opened it, then I got out from the laundry. The first thing I have to say is:

No; holy father, throw away that thought
Believe not that the dribbling dart of love
Can pierce a complete bosom.
[I.3.1-2]

So what's the Duke saying there? He's saying that the Friar assumes that he's come to the monastery because of some problem with love: that ‘the dribbling dart of love’ has pierced his bosom so he's gone into hiding. That's why we chose the basket particularly: in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a character called Falstaff hides in a laundry basket to prevent getting caught with another man's wife when her husband comes home. We hoped that the basket might prompt the connection with love and intrigue, and my getting out of the basket would suggest to the audience that, no, the Duke wasn’t coming to the Friar because ‘the dribbling dart of love’ had got me into a sticky situation. However, that didn’t read very clearly onstage; I thought we could make it clearer if I had more underwear – corsets and women's underwear – in the basket with me, and I threw these down when I got out of the basket. The Friar could look at the underwear, then he would look at me, and I would say the ‘No; holy father’ lines.

We tried that and the audience laughed. They understood what the lines meant, but it was difficult to know whether they would or not until we actually tried it out with them. That's the kind of detail that we’ve been adjusting during the previews and we’ll keep on making little changes until we’re sure that the audience understands the particular things we do.

Act V

Last time I spoke with you, I wasn’t at all happy with the last Act. I didn’t know my lines. When I got on top of the lines, things seemed much easier. The Duke is like a juggler who has to keep eight or nine plates spinning through Act five, and all kinds of things could go wrong. It was very important for me to know my lines and to play them very quickly, as quickly as possible, jumping from one plate to another and keeping them all in the air. There were lots of moments where I kept thinking ‘Oh, that person must say something’ in response to the Duke's revelations, but there just isn’t chance for that if one's going at great speed. People are so surprised – the last act is like an explosion of fireworks. That idea helped me a lot. I was also struggling with the particular problem of asking Isabella for her hand in marriage in front of everybody: we came upon the idea of that question being an aside, a private question. If one asks a woman to be one's wife in public, in front of a lot of people, it's very embarrassing for the woman to say yes or no because everyone is watching. That, as I saw it, was the main difficulty; if I took Isabella aside privately and just said ‘Will you be mine?’ then that moment felt much better. We tried playing it that way, and it worked very well.

Dance

I’m enjoying the dances. There is a short jig between each of the first three acts, in the style of the ‘passagio’ which Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] tells us is a form of promenade dance related to fool's capers, antimasque dances and the Greek choric tradition. They’re fun and they also help to tell the story. They describe the world in which the play is taking place and comment on the action as it unfolds. The last dance at the end of Act five is especially useful because Isabella and I get to dance together and gradually to move towards a sense of enjoyment. We don’t answer questions about whether Isabella accepts the Duke's proposal of marriage (I don’t know the answer either), but the audience does see the two of them dancing with each other at least, in a formal way, and enjoying that. After the ‘dance of love’, the music speeds up and we dive into the final jig.

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