Chapter Fifteen

Measure for Measure

“My beard! Is it on straight?” Number 7 asked earnestly.

“Yes, but you’ve forgotten this.” He reached forward and removed from the young man’s hand the signet that he had, as the Duke, just entrusted to Angelo. “You’re Claudio now. Remember to whine.”

“The theater’s full? I’ve been up on the roof, with 28.”

“All the seats are filled, except the two we had predicted: Number 1 and 2 declined their invitations. What of the balloon?”

Number 7 edged toward the wings. The brothel scene had opened, and Mistress Overdone (Number 33) was entering, swathed in an entire rummage sale of tattered indelicacies. “It’s inflating,” he said absently.

“The wind?”

“Is seaward.” As his tongue licked nervously at the horsehair fringe pasted beneath his nose, he reviewed withabbreviated gestures the blocking of his next scene. In proportion as he neared the stage, the play’s success concerned him more than the progress of the escape.

In the brothel the First Gentleman asked Mistress Overdone:“How now! Which of your hips has the most pro-found sciatica?”

And Number 33:“Well, well; there’s one yonder arrested and carried to prison was worth five thousand ofyou all.”

“Who’s that, I pray thee?”

“Marry, sir, that’s Claudio, Signior Claudio.”

“Claudio to prison? Tis not so.”

“Nay,”she replied, fluttering scraps of lingerie at the spotlight,“but I know tis so. I saw him arrested, saw him carried away, and, which is more, within these three dayshis head to be chopped off.”

Number 7, having added the whiskers and stripped to the tights that made him Claudio, smiled just such a smile as the condemned dandy, overhearing this, might have smiled, an expression at once bright and miserable, com­pounded of insatiable vanity and a dying, desperate faith in the power of his own boyish charm still to prevent the worst. In the first scene, as Angelo, Number 7 had had to act; to portray Claudio nothing more seemed to be needed than that he remember to be himself.


The red beacon winked its patient message of on and off, on and off, from the spire of the church, a spike of black­ness thrust against the lesser blackness of the hazed night sky. Farther away, squatting on its artificial hill, the unfenestrated mass of the administration building glowed in aperpetual twilight of mercury vapor lamps. The Village streets wove serpentine patterns of light across the nether blackness of the earth, but the cottages along these streets were uniformly dark. Even in the neutralizing darkness and from this altitude, he could not regard the place as the pic­ture postcard it tried so hard to be: it remained the same inimical caricature he’d seen on that first taxi ride through its streets.

Behind him on the gravelled roof, the blue plastic, filling with helium, bulged and popped and lurched toward its one-time sphericity under the attentive supervision of Number 28.

On the ledge a makeshift speaker crackled the pentame­ters of Act III, Scene 1, a prison in Vienna.

A figure emerged from behind the swelling balloon and approached him. Shimmers of dark rayon in the darkness, slither of rayon on gravel.

“I came up to see how the work was progressing,” he said. “It occurred to me that you might be here too.”

“It’s progressing,” she said, “and I am here.”

“All this time? People were beginning to worry.”

“Since the start of Act II. I told Isabella–the doctor–that I was feeling queasy. She said I needed air. Once I was here I couldn’t tear myself away. It’s a kind of torture to watch it. Growing so slowly. I can’t believe it will be all round and floating in the air in time.”

“If I’d paced the first two acts any slower, the audience would never have stayed in their seats. There’s not one archaic pun or proofreader’s error cut from the script.”

“Yes, you’ve done wonders drawing it out. It just goes on and on and on.”

Her voice trailed off into a vacancy, which was filled by Number 14’s–Isabella now–thin, wavering declamation:


“There spake my brother: there my father’s grave

Did utter forth a voice. Yes, thou must die:

Thou art too noble to . . .”


“And on,” he said. “At least no one can accuse me of having done this for art’s sake.”

“For mine then? I’m grateful. Did I say before that I was grateful?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Because I didn’t believe, till now, that it wasn’t all an elaborate trap. I’ve been waiting each day for the bite of its teeth. I shouldn’t let myself believe itnow . I look at this absurd plastic beast, and try to imagine myself lifted up by it, and carried off, and it’s like . . .”

The speaker:“. . . a pond as deep as hell . . .”

“It’s like the first time my mother explained to me where babies come from. I couldn’t believe that such elab­orate machinery was needed to produce such a simple-seeming result. Being brought here between sleeping and waking, then leaving likethis –I shall never believe, if I do get away, that I was here at all. And you . . .” She took one of his hands between hers, lifted it, like a housewife trying to estimate whether the weight stamped on a package was to be credited: was thisreally a full pound and a half of hamburger?

“You findme no more probable than the rest of this?”

“If anything, Number 6, somewhat less. I’ve always suspected that there were dragons in the world, but todiscover, after I’ve been chained to the dragon’s rock, that there is a Perseus as well–it’s too providential. I owe you—” She paused, still weighing his hands in hers, doing cal­culations, reluctant to name the exact sum of her debt.

Fifty feet below, Isabella, in the chaste passion of her indignation, shook the bars of her brother’s cell, a sound reduced by the speaker to the merest rattling of a die.

“Dost thou think, Claudio,

If I would yield him my virginity,

Thou mightest be freed.”

Claudio, answering, had difficulty concealing the hope that surges beneath his pious protest:

“O heavens! it cannot be.”

And Isabella:


“Yes, he would give’t thee, from this rank offense,

So to offend him still. This night’s the time

That I should do what I abhor to name,

Or else thou diest tomorrow.’


“Isn’t it time you returned to them?” she asked. The sudden thaw was, as suddenly, starred with frost. “If the Duke is to enter on cue.”

“There’s a moment yet, and I’d rather spend it here. We won’t be alone again, you and I, expect for an instant on stage, for . . .”

“Forever. Isn’t that what I said? And what you’ve agreed to? I don’t remember now how that came about. What my reasons could have been. It seemed logical then. Wouldn’tyou feel, if you were to run into me again, out there, as if this prison had breathed on you? All my talk aboutdistrust –you must, if you’ve not been trying todeceive me, feel just the same thing toward me. The samedistrust. The same reluctance.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“Yet you would be willing, despite that—

“To see you again, out there. Yes. I’dwant to.”

She turned away from him to look across the darkenedVillage at the gray, gleaming planes of the administrationbuilding. “Where?”

“Wherever you like.”

“Westminster Bridge?”

“That’s as good a place as any.”

“On the side by Big Ben. I’ll go there once a week.What day?”

“Saturday, or any other.”

“Saturday, then, at one o’clock in the afternoon. Do youbelieve me when I say. I really hope you’ll be there?”

“We must try to stop asking each other, Liora, how much we believe of what we say to each other. Soon enough,that will be put to the test. And for now—” He opened the door to the stairwell.

They listened, attentively, to Claudio, as he sank terror-stricken into a new vice.

“Sweet sister, let me live.

What sin you do to save a brother’s life,

Nature dispenses with the deed so far

That it becomes a virtue.”

“Now the god must run downstairs to tend his machine, I know. Oh! one last thing, Number 6.”

He turned, silhouetted by the fluorescence streaming from the stairwell, the hooded figure of a Franciscan monk.

“What I tried to say before, what it is I owe you.” Again she hesitated at the sum, and he had time to notice that herface, in this peculiar incidence of light, with its heavy the­atrical makeup, was not a face he would easily have recog­nized. Even the self-defeated smile belonged more to Mariana than to either the Liora he remembered of the Lorna she claimed to be.

She averted her eyes. “An apology,” she said.

“Don’t mention it.”

He raced down the stairs, taking each flight at two bounds, the friar’s robe bundled about his waist. He paused two beats outside the exit to let the robe fall into place and reached the wings at Claudio’s cue:

“O hear me, Isabella.”

As he stepped into the light (the judgment chamber of the second act had become, by adding indigo filters to the overhead spots and modifying their amperage, by replac­ing doors with grates, by scattering a bit of straw about, the dungeon of Act III), he reminded himself that he was no longer who he had been a moment before: he was now a Duke who is impersonating a friar; who pretends to encounter as though by chance a beautiful young nun in the condemned cell of a Viennese prison; who, bending his head, says to her in a near whisper:

“Vouchsafe a word, young sister, but one word.”

Tears trembled at the corners of the brown eye and the blue, but she allowed no pain to be audible in her cold, conventionally reverent reply:“What is your will?”

(This fleeting thought: Sheis an actress!)

Then, he was inside the play again, he was the Duke devising Machiavellian schemes to honor clandestine virtue and expose guilts veiled by fair appearance. Till the curtain went down on the third act he could think nothought of his own. Mariana’s cottage was being wheeled into position for the opening ofACT IV.

The lighting now (and throughout the play) bore out his contention that this was the blackest of Shakespeare’s comedies. The audience would have difficulty, from more than a few rows back, to distinguish this crumb of decayed gingerbread from the dark prison walls just visi­ble behind it.

He felt a hand in his and gave a reassuring squeeze before he realized it was the Doctor–Isabella–Number 14.

“How am I doing?” she asked.

He mustered a smile. “Innocence was never threatened so magnificently.” And let go of her hand.

Another hand: on his shoulder: Number 7, wearing scraps of the elegance Claudio had preened at his entrance in Act I. He whispered into the monk’s cowl: “It sprang a leak.”

This was (he thought) the instant of treachery he had been waiting for all this time. His fist clenched (he did not think) around the golden tatters.

“It’s fixed!” Number 7 cried aloud. “For God’s sake, don’thit me!”

The stage manager, in the wings opposite them, made frantic hand-signals: The curtain? The curtain?

“Where is Liora?” he demanded.

Number 41is on the set–waiting, like all the rest of us, for thecurtain to go up,” he answered reproachfully. “The intermission has lasted fifteen minutes. If you hold things up much longer, you’ll have the entire theaterwondering . I’ve never seen you like this, Number 6.”

He signaled back to the stage manager. As the curtainrose, a snare drum trembled in the pit; then, in unison, tenor recorder and horn d’amour, in their lowest registers, sounded the slow triads of Mariana’s song. The simple melody swelled, ebbed, faded back into the knife-edge rolling of the drum, across which Liora’s piercing, flawed soprano traced the same mournful pattern:

“Take, O take those lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn . . .”

His hand still gripped the ragged collar, and he shook Number 7 back and forth to the rhythm of his words, the rhythm of Mariana’s song: “Now tell me, again, and coher­ently, whathappened up there?”

“Nothing. Really. A false alarm.” He writhed and grov­eled, whined and smiled, never departing from the charac­ter of Claudio. “Number 28 is fixing it now. He’sfinished fixing it. Just alittle leak. The balloon’s already in theair .”

“How long a delay will this mean?”

“And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn . . .”

“Five minutes at most, he says. But it will be ready at the curtain call, and you can’t go up to the roof till then, in any case. It doesn’t change a thing.”

“It means that she’ll panic.”

“So? You needn’t tell her. It’s not the delay that upsets you, is it? You thought I’d sabotaged your project. Admit it.”

“Damn.” And, on reconsideration: “Damn!”

At the refrain, recorder and horn again joined the song, moving first in opposition to the soprano’s ascending melody, then, as though she could not resist their downward impulse, uniting with it in a slow decline to silence:

“But my kisses bring again, bring again,

Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain.”

“That’s your cue,” Number 7 said.

It was. It was his cue.


“What wasthat all about?” the doctor asked her brother, as soon as the Duke had begun to deliver his lines.

“A little game, a bit of amusement.”

“We shouldn’t go out of our way, you know, to worry him,” she said, worriedly. “Didit have a leak?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why on earth—”

“Don’t raise your voice,” he said loudly. (With his sis­ter he seemed to prefer to take the role of Angelo.) “He’ll hear you.”

“It will only make him moreanxious to get up there the minute the curtain comes down–and that much harder forme .”

“I’ve told you that that’s already taken care of. Don’t, don’t, don’tfret! Stop acting like yourself, and act like Isabella. You’reon , in seconds. Good lord, you can’t col­lapsenow . This is the crucial moment of our own little play, symbolically: this is where it’s arranged for you and Mariana to exchange places. Get out there, darling–and break your leg.Now!

The doctor stumbled in the wings; Isabella walked gravely on to the stage, a symbolic moment that was, after all, only one among many.


Shortly afterward, it was another woman who stood with Number 7.

“Can they see us from where they are?” he asked.

“No. I tried to all through my song. You were soloud –you nearly ruined it.”

“Does that matter?We won’t be here to read the reviews.”

She stood on tiptoes, waiting.

“You’resure they can’t see us?” he asked teasingly.

“I wish theycould .”

He kissed her: the exchange had been completed.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“Loveyou? ” she asked incredulously. “Don’t be silly–I love him.”

“Then shouldn’t you save your kisses, my dear Judas, for him?”

“I save a special kind for him. Doyou loveme ?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “I love . . .” He had to stop and consider.

Meanwhile, before the painted door of the canvas cot­tage, Isabella was explaining, to the disguised Duke, the arrangement she had made for her night in Angelo’s bed, an appointment which the Duke would then have to per­suade Mariana (who had been, years before, compromised and abandoned by that same villain, when her dowry had been lost at sea) to keep in her stead. By such devious means (the false friar assured her) would virtue emerge not only triumphant but unscathed.

Reluctantly, as though she still were not fully persuaded that virtue could be so oblique, she repeated Angelo’s instructions:

“He hath a garden circummur’d with brick,

Whose western side is with a vineyard back’d;

And to that vineyard is a planched gate,

That makes his opening with this bigger key.


This other doth command a little door

Which from the vineyard to the garden leads.

There have I made my promise,

Upon the heavy middle of the night,

To call upon him.”