I saw a student production of Measure for Measure as an undergraduate, starring Ian Shuttleworth as the Duke, and with most of the bits with Lucio, Pompey and Elbow cut. Only one thing, to be revealed later, about the production stayed in my mind, so this was basically new territory for me.
The Duke of Vienna takes some time off, leaving the government in the hands of his deputies, Escalus and Angelo. They enforce the sexual purity laws which had fallen into disuse; the brothels all close (leading to much grumbling from former staff and clients) and one Claudio is condemned to death for impregnating his girlfriend. Claudio’s sister Isabella pleads for his life: Angelo promises to spare him in return for sexual favours from her. The Duke, who actually hasn’t gone away at all but is hanging around disguised as a monk, persuades Isabella to go along with the plan but finds Angelo’s brutally dumped ex-fiancee to take her place in his bed. There is a grand final scene in which All Is Revealed, Angelo is forced to marry his ex, Claudio is released and the Duke gets to marry Isabella.
I imagine that in its original environment, this worked rather well: the Duke is an enlightened ruler who exposes his deputy’s flaws, rights an old wrong, and ameliorates the effects of bad laws. To today’s audience, it’s a much more difficult sell: the Duke is a manipulative bastard who could actually have resolved it all by Act 2, but instead humiliates pretty much everyone else in sight in order to assert his authority. The enforced marriage of Angelo to his old flame also works less well today. It would be interesting to see this done with the Duke deliberately portrayed as the villain. The Cambridge student production I saw didn’t do that but did end with Isabella bluntly though silently rejecting him.
Arkangel take a difficult script and do it well, with Roger Allam, one of their star performers, as the Duke, Simon Russell Beale as Angelo, and Claudia Gonet, a new name to me, as Isabella; the veteran Christopher Benjamin (Inferno / Talons of Weng Chiang / The Unicorn and the Wasp) is Escalus.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
It’s a good point. I’m prepared to cut some slack for authors who could not have known better and whose work has been overtaken by later discoveries. That doesn’t excuse later authors failing to get their settings up to date, though. On the other hand I am very dubious of the claim that scrupulous attention to scientific detail makes great literature; that seems to me to miss the point of what literature is about.