Measure For Measure - Directors Note

(I wrote this as a junior at Georgetown, directing my first full-length play. It’s interesting to think about what the world looked like back then, especially to a Foreign Service undergrad on the DC Hilltop)

In 1995, we cannot stage Measure for Measure as Shakespeare did. We are not under the constraints he was, nor do we have the same values as his audience. Why, then, do we continue to stage his works, and why do they still possess the power to move us? I think Measure for Measure answers this question brilliantly: Shakespeare understood human beings, and the essence of humanity is timeless. We cannot restrict that understanding to our time any more than Shakespeare could restrict it to his.

Measure for Measure is such a multi-layered piece, so open to interpretation that I believe it to be the most under-rated piece of theatre in Shakespeare's repertoire. It may not be the favorite piece of many scholars, or even considered a masterpiece on the level of King Lear or Hamlet. But as an honest portrayal of people, it need not have garnered such accolades. However, if we are to attempt to make this story into some sort of a fairy tale, or a treatise on government, or a diatribe on the decay of morality (all of which are certainly valid interpretations), I feel I would have been denying the beautiful, pure understanding of the human spirit imbued in this play. The story of Measure for Measure presents questions to which there are no easy, or even right, answers, and that is the essential problem with which the people in the story must come to terms. Perhaps now, more than any other time in history, we know that one cannot approximate the truth by judging the story to be black or white; the world is almost always more complex than that. The people in Measure for Measure live in a world of shades of grey, and so do we.

What such a world demands is courage and strength. Such traits are in short supply, and understandably so. To look at ourselves for what we are, and to try to understand what other people feel and why they feel it are noble and mighty tasks. Some of us are too weak to do it, some of us will never try, and none of us can do it all the time. We are human, and we make mistakes. We can all identify with people who make the wrong decision; we understand what it feels like. Sometimes, we try to forgive and move on. Measure for Measure is about real people like you and me, and the choices they make when confronting their own weaknesses.

Thank you very much for coming, and enjoy the show.

—Jack Shay (SFS '97)