A COMEDY AT THE END OF THE TRAGEDY—MEASURE FOR MEASURE. While Shakespeare’s audiences may have been comfortable with the jig at the end of a tragedy, there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with an overt shifting of gears from serious to comic. MEASURE FOR MEASURE is considered a “problem play†because it changes genre. It begins with Claudio being given a tragic choice between his sister’s honor and his own death. Claudio’s words about death have haunted me since I read them in college: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; / This sensible warm motion to become/ A kneaded clod….†And then the gears shift. The character of the Duke labors and contrives to produce a happy ending with multiple marriages. I think audiences today have trouble with the abrupt change in mood and the turning away from the terrible choices which have been presented.
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Orson Scott Card handles this very well because as opposed to the atmosphere of Shakespeare, where the audience is a fixed objective point, Card affixes the lens to two or three protagonists and follows them as needed. Therefore he is able to craft seemingly unsolvable situations, and then as the main characters discover more necessary information a solution becomes suddenly possible. The key is that this sudden revelation will fit with all of the previously given information.
Interestingly, I remember doing that Claudio monologue for my Shakespeare class with Dan Kelly.
As an aspiring author, I have always found it fascinating how Card creates these seemingly unsolvable puzzles and then has his characters solve them. It’s one of the most satisfying things about reading his novels. However, it never occurred to me that the multiple points of view helps him achieve this. Thanks for the observation! I have to mull this over.