Measure for Measure is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s most perplexing plays. ‘The old fantastical Duke of dark corners’, as Vincentio is described by one of the other characters, appears to be as guilty as his Viennese subjects in allowing the city to fall into corruption and decay, and his surreptitious attempts to impose a form of moral order upon proceedings often smack of a certain capriciousness. At the same time, Vincentio can often appear almost omniscient in the control he exists over the destiny of his people, and he is responsible for one of the most startling of Shakespeare’s monologues, ‘Be absolute for death …’.

With it’s central theme of surveillance, The play often makes me think of the Panopticon, the 18th century prison system imagined by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The concept of Bentham’s design was to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they were being watched. The architecture of the Panopticon consisted of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. From the centre, the manager of the institution was able to watch the inmates.

The descent of a religious society into decadence and moral turpitude is another dominant theme of the play, and I imagine a reconfiguration of the Panopticon as peepshow. The performance area is the floor of the peepshow, and behind the various windows that look on to the semicircular space sit the Duke and the other characters. Thus, the performers become both actors and audience of their own drama, all of them manipulated by the ever present Duke. The Duke himself is manager of the peepshow. And a much as he would seem to want to purge his society of the delinquency and licentiousness which defines it’s existence, he is a creature of his own making in a world order marked out by power, hypocrisy and corruption.

Dan Jemmett

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