The Modernity of Measure for Measure

The Politics of Spinning Shakespeare

Abstract

This paper looks at two twentieth-century rewritings of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: one by Bertolt Brecht, who in 1933 wrote a parable-play on contemporary German social politics entitled Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (The Roundheads and the Peakheads), and one by Charles Marowitz, who in 1975 finished his Variations on Measure for Measure, a play re-written after, and partly as a reaction to, his unjust arrest for shoplifting and vagrancy. As the contexts of their birth also indicate, both plays called upon Measure for Measure to reflect on the nature of justice and its relation to politics, but, aside from their political stance, the two dramas differ largely in the way they work with Shakespeare’s text. Indeed, one could argue that if we take the “fidelity to Shakespeare’s text” as the gauge of our imaginary spectrum of adaptations, they, at first glance, seem to occupy almost the opposite ends: while Brecht distances himself from the original almost completely, Marowitz relies on the play’s text closely, only to concoct from its pieces a surprisingly different ending. However, this essay wishes to argue that, in spite of their different textual approaches, the two Measure for Measure spinoffs are alike in several aspects.