Measure for Measure--1 (an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both)

I have to face the very real possibility that blogging actually makes my life more boring. I took a post-Hamlet break and things exploded. The store where I work has the big store where people come in and shop, but then also a storage building where some of the books we sell online are stored. This second building is a block away and also serves as my boss's apartment, where he lives in semi-squalor with two cats.

So, when the boss is on vacation, as he has been for the past two weeks, my first job in the morning is to go to this other store and collect whatever books we've sold online the night before. So one day this week I go over there, notice the lights are off and won't turn on. No big deal, must have blown a fuse. I start walking around, looking for the fuse box, notice the computer is missing. Hmmm--I think--why have they moved the computer into another room, and why have they thrown books all over the floor? Finally, why have my coworkers busted in a window, thrown couch cushions everywhere, and smeared their blood all over the place? At this point, the realization that something was wrong slowly started trickling into my consciousness.

So, the place was robbed. The geniuses broke in through a window, stole a mediocre computer, left a lot of money in books on the shelf, left credit cards on a table, smeared their blood all over the place, and, most strange: took the television, VCR, and DVD player onto the roof and left them there.

So I called the owner, eventually called the cops, and went back to work to wait for the cops. While we (others have come into work by now) are waiting for the cops, a pedestrian gets hit by a car in front of the store. He's just broken an arm, but we cart him into the store and call 911. So, while we're waiting for the cops to come for our burglary, we get firemen and paramedics in the store for something completely different. It was a crazy, Shakespeare and blogging free day.

Then Jackie's parents came to town and I saw Lebron James score 55 points against the poor Bucks. And I started Measure for Measure. Measure for Measure is a really strange play. You could say that it's about an unjust, totalitarian society. Not sure about that. The play's Vienna has a law against fornication. The Duke pretends to leave town (he really disguises himself as a friar and sticks around giving everyone bad advice) so that his deputy can start enforcing the law against fornication for the first time. Of course the law is broken by lots of people. The third act is a kind of parade of minor characters being sentenced to death for sex.

Many of the characters are insane. Isabella, the nun and sister of the doomed Claudio, is a chastity-fundamentalist. The Duke is just plain old fashioned nuts. Angelo (the duke's deputy) is the dangerous kind of crazy, sentencing everyone to death for a bad law, even as he breaks the law himself.

I don't want to interpret it as a moral or a political play, though you could certainly do both. What's so strange about it is that the dominant theme of the play is varieties of destructive, negative, almost-nihilistic madness, and yet it is a kind of comedy and a few of the characters are even very funny. The classic designation of "Problem Play" certainly makes sense.