(Bear with me as I attempt to apply a moral lesson from one play to another play four hundred years its predecessor. When you’re sick in bed and cloudy with Sudafed, these are the kinds of connections that you make.)
A Monster Calls was a breathtaking, visually interesting spectacle about a thirteen-year-old boy named Conor O’Malley who tries to cope with his mother’s imminent death to cancer. He is visited at 12:07 am – later, we learn that this is the time his mother will pass away – by the Yew tree in his backyard, a Monster that vows to tell him three stories. The fourth story must be told by Conor, and it must be the truth.
Though I was absolutely captivated by the performance and the story itself, I am left several days later with a line lingering in my head, spoken by the Monster to Conor: “There is not always a good guy and nor is there always a bad one ... most people are somewhere in between.” Looking back through my notes on Measure for Measure from this past Monday, I find that I read them differently with this line in mind.
And now, I have a question.
Is Angelo a bad guy?
Allow me to clarify: the version of Angelo that we saw at the CLF Art Café, decked out with tiny opaque glasses and veritable physical prowess, a lack of likability and a fairly creepy essence, was quite plainly not a good person. The production that we saw made him out to be wholly reproachable. (Insert: The whole production was, in my opinion, quite creepy overall – I’ll never understand the need for clown makeup in any performance of anything beyond a personification of my own nightmares.)
Yet, I don’t know if the Angelo of Shakespeare’s text is necessarily evil. He’s given power in the beginning of the play by the Duke: “In our remove be thou at full ourself; / Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue and heart” (Act I, scene i, lines 50-52). The Duke recognizes Angelo’s virtues and feels confident leaving Angelo in charge as he leaves the city on the grounds of a diplomatic mission. Lucio later describes Angelo as “a man whose blood / Is very snow-broth.” He’s logical, mechanical, and lawfully-minded.
Basically, Angelo is a nerdy government official who is granted full power to enforce the laws of Vienna.
This, here, is why I’ve been wondering if he’s necessarily a bad person. The basic idea behind the law (that those who impregnate women before marriage should be put to death) is that people should not have sex before marriage at all – a religious ideal upheld by the wannabe nun Isabella – but this law would have also protected against women being raped. Obviously, the death penalty is extreme, and killing the baby’s father would bastard it regardless of whether or not he married the mother, but wouldn’t this law have enforced the protection of the city’s women? Certainly, public humiliation or community service (insert: or literally anything but death or torture) would have been more appropriate a sentence, but at the very least, Angelo is (perhaps inadvertently) protecting the women in his jurisdiction.
According to A Monster Calls, Angelo would fall somewhere in between good and bad – certainly not all that much closer to good, as he bribes Isabella, rejects Mariana because she isn’t wealthy enough, and calls for Claudio’s head even after allegedly taking his sister’s virginity – on the grounds that he’s a person. People can’t be just one or the other.
In the end, Angelo is forced to marry Mariana, who loves him and clearly wants to be his wife despite all of the messed-up things that he’s done to her and other people. In the final scene, the Duke first condemns him “to the very block / Where Claudio stoop’d to death” in a show of his own renewed prowess, to which Mariana exclaims, “I hope you will not mock me with a husband” (Act V, scene i). Though eventually Angelo’s life is spared, it is suggested that Lucio will die after the play has ended because of his blasphemes against the Duke while the Duke was still dressed as a friar; he is to be “Whipt first… and hanged after” (Act V, scene i, line 506).
While I’m on the topic of people who are considered bad actually being partially good, I may as well address the people who are considered good actually being partially bad.
I think that there’s an argument, then, that the Duke is just as bad as Angelo. He sentences Lucio to death for a crime not worse than Claudio’s, only Lucio didn’t intend on marrying the woman he impregnated before the play’s action (and is also a bit more raucous, blasphemous, and sassier). In the end, Angelo technically didn’t even kill anyone, as the head he called for ended up being that of a pirate who died in prison. The Duke, however, has been cruel to Mariana, has lied to Isabella, and has made light of the life/death of Claudio. On top off all of that, he’s the one who orchestrated the whole ruse in the first place, never once coming back in as his own true self to tell Angelo to calm down, choosing instead to plan bed tricks and schemes. And then he deems it necessary to propose to Isabella, who would so obviously be much happier as a nun than with any man, an offer that she likely cannot refuse as he’s the Duke and he could still technically sentence her brother to death.
If I’m placing characters on a spectrum, I may even put the Duke closer to the “bad” side than Angelo. I’m with the Monster here. Most people – even the people who somewhat save the day at the end of the play – are “somewhere in between.”
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