Measure for Measure
Measure for measure
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Walter Elder
Live Link
A live link will be made available each night of the shows run. The link goes live at 6:45pm CST and the performance begins at 7:00pm CST.
Click the button below to be directed to the Panapto live stream. This is open to all (no login required).
Recorded Video
If you can't tune in live to our performances, no need to fret. The performance is available for your enjoyment anytime at the link below.
Click the button below to be directed to the Panapto recorded video of the show. This is open to all (no login required)
In person
This performance is only open to specifically invited Saint Mary's classes and Theatre majors. Thank you for your understanding as we slowly welcome individuals back into the Page Theatre.
Cast List
Measure for Measure
By William Shakespeare
Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine
with Michael Poston and Rebecca Niles
Folger Shakespeare Library
https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/measure-for-measure/
Created on Apr 23, 2016, from FDT version 0.9.2.
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode
Modifications were made to the original text for this performance adaptation.
Walter Elder, M.F.A.
Walter is an Equity member and Assistant Professor of Acting and Directing in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. He received his BFA in Musical Theatre from Carnegie Mellon and his MFA in Directing from the University of Oklahoma. He has taught at Interlochen Arts Academy, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Charles Sturt University in Australia, and RADA in London. He has worked as an actor, director, fight choreographer, and dialect coach on over a hundred productions throughout the United States and abroad including national tours with the American Shakespeare Center and the National Shakespeare Company.
A note from our director
“Women – help, heaven – men their creation mar in profiting by them.”
Measure for Measure takes place in Vienna. Vice and morality laws and the severe penalties for breaking them have been on the books but unenforced for nineteen years. In the first scene, the Duke leaves his position of power over the state, abdicating his authority and responsibility to his people, appointing Angelo, “a man of stricture and firm abstinence” to govern in his place. Angelo immediately begins governing according to his personal view of the world, sentencing Claudio to death for getting his fiancé pregnant. This causes his sister Isabella to implore Angelo for her brother’s release which Angelo agrees to…if she have sex with him.
“O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”
Constantly alternating between the comic and dramatic, the play is interwoven throughout with philosophical, theological, moral, and ethical debate. Measure for Measure is ultimately about Justice. Not what is fair, but what is right. It is that which when applied tempers and mitigates the opposing positions of the Law or Mercy, Punishment or Forgiveness, Guilt or Innocence. It is the greyer reality of our world inside systems and ways of thinking that are polarizing. Today we struggle with the same questions and situations posed in the play as we see the effects of systemic power structures in action. We are struggling with injustice right now, every day, in our palaces, courtrooms, prisons, and streets, in our places of worship, our schools, and in our homes.
“Go to your bosom, knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know that’s like my brother’s fault.”
The story of the play is a test of each character’s character, a theological debate between the Old Testament and the New, between God’s Law and man’s laws. It is about corruption, the abuse of power, the effect of tyranny on the guilty and innocent alike, and the extraordinary power of forgiveness.
Even Mistress Overdone, the prostitute in the play, laments the circumstances of her world:
“Thus what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom shrunk.”
Conflict. Covid. Death. Economic crisis. Our world. Of course the play is a comedy.
“But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep…”