Taboo they may be in the saloon bars of the nation but they are meat and drink to the RSC’s latest Measure for Measure
Isabella, the convent novice heroine of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, is the second most famous Austrian trainee nun in the theatrical canon (the first being the hill-skipping postulant in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound Of Music). And, while the sisters famously sang about how to solve a problem like Maria, Isabella has also long proved problematic for directors and actors.
The biggest difficulty is the queasiness, in a play that has the form and frequent tone of comedy, of the would-be nun being told that she can save the life of her brother, who is due to be executed, by surrendering her virginity to the cruel ruler, Angelo. He, in another plot-line hard to make ring theatrically true, is the interim leader of Vienna, after Duke Vincentio pretended to go on a sabbatical, although actually remaining to spy on his successor while disguised as a monk.
Isabella’s vow survives, through the most unpleasant of the signature Shakespearean plot-device of the “bed trick”, in which the woman who succumbs to Angelo in the dark is not Isabella, but a former fiancée to whom he breached his promise. Thus, a woman who wanted to sleep with Angelo but didn’t preserves the virtue of one who could have done but didn’t want to. What is presented as a double justice doesn’t, however, survive for long because the nun is forced, at the finale, to marry the duke.