Day 16: My last veil story for now

Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare.

(My library has the BBC Ambrose Video which is like watching a play that is filmed, rather than watching a film, but it still a great experience.)

I have been going to the Shakespeare theatre on Navy Pier as a season subscriber for 10 years, and though I was taught in my childhood religious instruction that drama was an off-limits story-telling method for a Christian (I can now say the opposite--that it is the greatest story-telling method on earth), and though I did my best back then to enjoy Shakespeare just by reading him, I now say that it is impossible to really make sense of everything unless you see it all acted out. The language is complex, lots of English vocabulary meanings have changed over time, and what is more, there are so many double meanings to things that you need the face and body language of a good actor to catch more of the meaning. I personally need about five viewings and going back to my Bevington Complete Works book and reading all the footnotes and viewing it again while I read along. See the plays, watch the films! Don't miss out on these totally awesome stories!

So Measure for Measure. Studied it in college and I didn't get that thrilled about it. So from my first introduction as a kid to the popular Shakespeare stories (comic-style abridged versions), Merchant of Venice was my first favorite, then it was As You Like It.
When Much Ado About Nothing came out on film in 1993, that became my new favorite. And then in the mid 2000s I saw Measure for Measure at Navy Pier and it is now my top of the list of favorite Shakespeare plays.
And of course, lots of delayed recognition. I have to come back to this one later too I guess, now that I'm trying to group the stories a bit into sub-topics.

You'll just have to go watch it if you want a summary, because there are a lot of parts to it. But I'm talking about veils.

Angelo, like Jacob and Judah and Claudio in my other favorite veil stories, needs to recognize a few things about life and needs to have his hypocrisy exposed publicly. The wise people in his life (well, yes, ultimately the wise author) decide that exposure and recognition will best happen through a trick of the veil.

A temporarily-placed-in-charge government official named Angelo wants to whip his lawless town into shape, and has sentenced a man to death for public example and crime deterrent. The man's sister, Isabella, comes to him to beg for mercy for her brother. He agrees to pardon the brother Claudio on one condition, if she sneak to his house some night and have sex with him. Never mind that Angelo is already engaged to another lady that he has sort of dumped, or that he is executing Claudio for the offense of getting his own fiance pregnant before they were technically married, or that Isabella is a nun and has made vows of celibacy.

Angelo feels pretty bad about realizing that he is giving in to tempation, but not bad enough to change his mind. He welcomes a veiled woman to his room at night, and the next day decides not to pardon Claudio after all. But he should have looked more closely and lifted the veil. It was not the nun, it was Mariana, the fiance he had dumped. There is a lot more to the story of course and I'll be coming back to this one, but the veil trick was a big part of bringing this story to a resolution called comedy. Mariana reminds us why it is worth spending a little time and effort to bring hypocrites (those blind to their own reliance on pretense) through the crisis of apocalypse that happens when masks and veils are donned and lifted: "They say best men are molded out of faults, and, for the most, become much more the better for being a little bad." Hypocrites love the right and hate the wrong, they have that going for them, they just don't see that they are in the wrong as much as everyone they are pointing fingers at. Once they recognize reality, they can finally experience what it is to beg for and receive mercy.