Performing the Fantastic in Measure for Measure

Performing the Fantastic in Measure for Measure R.D. Bedford It has often been noticed that the Duke and Lucio in Measurefor Measure seem at times locked in some kind of emblematic or allegorical rivalry, and further that the play's dramaturgy underlines this rivalry. Teasing out exactly what kind of opposition lies between them—beyond the obvious one of the moralist and ascetic versus the irresponsible hedonist, or the high-minded ruler versus the low-minded lecher—is rendered difficult because neither 'character' will stay still, both of them capable at one moment of occupying the moral high ground and the next moment of provoking serious misgivings in the audience about their motives, integrity or even intelligence; both addicted to dressing up, or down, Lucio with his fashionable clothes and hairpiece ('piled as thou art piled for a French velvet', 1.2.33-4), the Duke with his friar's hood; and both of them, from an actor's or director's point of view, requiring crucial decisions to be made about how they might, or should, in any particular realisation of the play, be played. A further peculiarity which they share, and one which I want to concentrate on here, is that both are associated with the word 'fantastique.' The word and its cognates occur several times in the play, and attention is specifically drawn to the term, and the matrix of ideas it might signify, in the Folio's dramatis personae where Lucio is listed (whether by Shakespeare or Ralph Crane or somebody else) as 'a fantastique', a soubriquet which provides some evidence about the character, how he was conceived of, and how he should be played. So what might an actor understand about his role when he sees he is d o w n to play 'a fantastique'? P A R E R G O N ns 16.1 (July 1998) 48 R D Bedford The word is usually glossed as 'someone w h o is odd or extravagant in speech or dress' (Bawcutt) or 'odd, irrational, crazy' (as Alan Brissenden glosses the word in As You Like It).1 Sir Thomas Overbury predictably has a 'character' called a fantastic w h o matches this, and Samuel Butler describes such a person as 'one that wears his Feather on the Inside of his Head'.2 'Fop' is attractive but anachronistic, since that sense of the word does not occur until later in the seventeenth century, but a kind of Restoration foppishness seems to be close enough—certainly for m a n y modern ways of playing Lucio. Extravagance of dress with Lucio is nowhere specifically referred to in the play's text—Lucio and the gentlemen talking about English kersey and French velvet early on are talking about venereal diseases not fashions-but the role might well tempt the company to get something really flashy from the wardrobe: 'In daylight theatre, gaudily painted, gaudy clothes were the equivalent of the modern lighting system', says Muriel Bradbrook (though the earliest recorded production of Measure for Measure—but not necessarily the first—was by the King's company indoors in the banqueting hall at Whitehall). Bradbrook also points to a firm popular tradition that 'gaudy clothes were the sign of a fop or a gull, and that plain attire indicated honest worth', so that the Duke's rough friar's habit both renders him visually and physically inconspicuous and also might hope to define him morally in contrast to Lucio.3 There seems to be every encouragement to bag Lucio up with unsavoury characters like Osric: for Bradbrook, for instance, he is 'the Vice of the play' and 'is uncased in the very act of uncasing the supposed friar');4 and for both of the play's most recent editors, Brian Gibbons (New Cambridge) and N.W. Bawcutt (Oxford), Lucio is a malicious and inveterate liar and his accusations against the Duke merely ludicrous. Although Lucio is a comic figure he is not a Clown. There is already a Clown in the play: the Folio dramatis personae lists 'Clown, named Pompey', and it was the role of Pompey rather than Lucio that attracted leading comic actors in the...