Visual Aids and the Scopic Dimension(s) of Measure for Measure in Three Film Adaptations of the Play
p. 253-271
Texte intégral
Adapting the scopic issues of Measure for Measure
1In act 3 scene 1 of Measure for Measure, Isabella tells her brother Claudio that Angelo has agreed to cancel his death sentence on a condition she cannot accept. Rather than speaking plainly to reveal that Angelo demands to sleep with her in exchange for her brother’s right to live, Isabella uses contorted phrases. She thus causes a fretting Claudio to ask her to come to the point at last (3.1.72). The rhetorical quality of her speech, which she uses to convince Claudio that the terms of Angelo’s bargain are outrageous, is apparent in her words. It is evinced, for instance, in her resorting to paradox, when she states that her brother’s freedom to live would fetter him till death (3.1.66). Isabella’s rhetoricism is also characterised by appositive clauses that are sometimes more enigmatic than explanatory. Such is the case for her description of the “perpetual durance” her brother would endure, were she to act on Angelo’s desires. To Isabella, life confinement, is “a restraint,/Though all the world’s vastidity you had,/To a determin’d scope” (3.1.67-9).
2Mysterious as it is, Isabella’s convoluted image exploits an analogy that recurs in the play, so that its global aim is constructed jointly with several other occurrences. According to J. W. Lever, Isabella’s personal and figurative definition of a life sentence associates the restrictions imposed on someone’s freedom with their privation of the right to choose their perspective on existence, and to act on this existential standpoint1. The parallelism is condensed in the word “scope,” whose etymology contains the link between vision and power that is one of the play’s main issues2. Because of its origin, “scope” correlates a range of action to a range of vision, and elaborates the assumption that extended visual perception can magnify power. Measure for Measure seems designed to prove this hypothesis. In the play, Shakespeare mostly uses the term “scope” in the meaning of “extent” or “room to act” (1.2.119-20), or to refer to the range of action of those in command and to their ability to turn their views into truths (1.1.64-66; 1.3.35-37). In all those cases, the notion relates to justice, as epitomised in Angelo’s plea for objective judgement at 5.1.233-4. Throughout Measure for Measure, “scope” thus embodies one of the play’s main tensions. On the one hand, the word encapsulates the power of humans to judge and punish. On the other hand, it points to its divine equivalent, the supervision of God to which the characters often refer. This ambiguity is summarised in the phrasing of Angelo’s admission of defeat to the Duke at 5.1.367-8: “I perceive your Grace, like power divine,/Hath looked upon my passes.”
3This analysis of the occurrences of “scope” shows that the term conditions assessment and judgement to obtaining visual data. This association informs the contents of the play, and even its overall structure. Indeed, thus resorting to etymology would seem far-fetched if Shakespeare did not almost systematically employ the vocabulary of vision to associate it with notions of evaluation and control. The word “look,” for instance, conveys the ideas of introspection (1.1.78) and prevision (2.2.95-96). It is used as a mild form of order (2.1.269-70; 5.1.294), and even as a threat (2.4.150). Shakespeare uses the word “eye” more than ten times in the play, to enhance, in a verbal way, the atmosphere of constant observation surrounding the characters (1.1.67-68; 4.1.60-61). The verb “to see” is often used in its prospective meaning to give an order (2.1.33-34), while the occurrences of “sight” often reflect an implicit association with terror (1.3.23-27). Finally, the words “glass” and “glassy” oppose the naive perception of appearances by human beings to the clear-sightedness of the divine, as in Isabella’s famous exposure of men:
But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d –
His glassy essence – like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal (2.2.118-24).
The visual component in Isabella’s speech creates a change of perspective that is doubly degrading. First, her words induce a Theatrum Mundi perspective, to present men as actors watched from above. Second, and more crucially for the specificity of Measure for Measure in the canon, the notion of human power, exerted by men on their fellow citizens, falls down to the status of a mere illusion. The downfall comes from a comparison with the divine authority of an entity that sees everything.
4It follows from this sketchy presentation of the optical stakes in Measure for Measure that its anatomy of the complex relationship between visual perception and power is, rather than a mere theme, the keystone of its ethical, political and aesthetical issues. The structural importance of vision imparts a specific role to filmic adaptations of Measure for Measure, which I have chosen as the topic of this article after working specifically on the significance of surveillance issues in the play3. In that study, I proposed that the Duke’s dominant spectatorial position places him at the threshold between the world and the stage. This creates a mise-en-abyme pattern that stands out in the canon through its implicit comparison of the scopic regime4 of surveillance with the visual apparatus of the theatre. This leads me to the conclusion that, by combining diegetic and extradiegetic watching patterns, Measure for Measure suggests that theatrical representation apes God’s creation, but also exposes the scopic regime of drama as a perversion of divine surveillance.
5The scopic questions treated in Measure for Measure concern the specific perspective on reality that the dramatic apparatus produces. As a result, adaptations of the play are likely to fall into two categories. In the first case, filmic treatment of the play provides it with new dimensions and with heightened realism. The camera, although it restrains the world’s vastidity to a determined scope, can show much more than may appear on stage during the few hours’traffic of a play. It can therefore adapt the plot to the viewing conventions of contemporary cinema, to make the spectators susceptible to its meaning by providing them with the kind of product they are used to watching. Another option for adapters of the play is to take the risk of translating the complexity of the entanglements between vision and power that characterise Measure for Measure. The directors belonging to this second category believe their adaptation strategy will not harm the efficacy of the plot, and that it may extract more from the play than Shakespeare originally put in it. Indeed, vision and power may be more connected now than they used to be in the early modern age – or at least, more people are now aware of the link between the two, notably due to the pioneering work of Michel Foucault on the topic. This suggests that the switch to a mediated regime of vision that occurs when a play is adapted to film or television alters the nature of power as it is presented in Measure for Measure. In other words, the visual aid brought in by the cinematic apparatus changes the nature of watching a play in performance, with necessary consequences on all the ingredients making up the play. In Measure for Measure, those components unite to study the specific issue of visual power, which is treated on both the diegetic and the extradiegetic level. Under such circumstances, changing the medium for telling the story alters the nature of the divide between reality and fiction, which in turn necessarily affects the essence of the play.
6What follows is an assessment of various filmic versions of Measure for Measure, gauged by their ability to translate, enrich or analyse the scopic nature of the play. For reasons that will be obvious after the above presentation of what I consider the play’s specificity in the canon, I will only briefly refer to two films that belong to the first category of adaptations: the version by Desmond Davis for the BBC (1979), and Bob Komar’s filmic version, released in 2007. Conversely, I will devote most of this paper to a detailed analysis of another adaptation for the BBC, directed by David Thacker (1995). In Thacker’s film, the change of scopic regime from dramatic to cinematic becomes the bedrock for a re-examination of the play’s concern with power through vision. In that case, a re-assessment brings out the items among the play’s analytical lines that apply to the screen societies in which the spectators are steeped.
A play within the film? Davis’s paradoxical approach of Measure for Measure
7There is little more to write about the version by Desmond Davis for the BBC than can be read in the introduction to the Oxford edition of Measure for Measure, edited by N. W. Bawcutt5. The author mentions all the features that define Davis’s adaptation strategy, which does not much stray from the form of respectful classicism that has characterised the BBC versions for many years6. For this reason, I will merely mention here two of the features in the Davis version that Bawcutt notes, and use them to assess how much further the Thacker version goes in similar directions. The first one is Davis’s regular use of close-ups to deal with soliloquies and asides. Those cinematic devices endow the film with a more intimate approach, but also treat the camera as the ideal go-between connecting the world of the play to its audience. One of my main contentions about the play is that the nature of visual communication is crucial to its meaning. Therefore, embracing mediated vision is a minimal step towards a cinematic translation of the play’s main stakes, especially compared to the audacious quality of the Thacker adaptation. The second interesting remark featured in Bawcutt’s introduction regards the treatment of act 5 as “a kind of play within the play7”. The final act of Measure for Measure is indeed the climax and compendium of the numerous mise-en-abyme patterns scattered over the first four acts. Given this consistency, treating the final act as a play within the play is a directorial decision that the text makes almost compulsory. There is, however, a contradiction in treating the final act as a play in a filmic version. The scopic regime of film being obviously different from that of drama, the specularity of the source work can only be transposed through patterns that take into account that the narrative medium employed to handle the plot is cinematic rather than dramatic. As I will demonstrate below, Thacker implements such an adaptive strategy, and his version consequently derives heightened relevance to contemporary times, but also to the reflexive patterns of the play.
Bob Komar’s Measure for Measure, or, the power of the blind
8For his adaptation of the play, Bob Komar operates a few changes to its contents. The entire film takes place within the context of the British military. This follows from an attempt to endow the play with a contemporary political meaning, as exemplified at the film’s beginning when soldiers burn the Union Jack. This symbolic expression of rampant chaos is completed by a scene in which members of the British Army party in a pub. Among them is the Duke, who is now a ranked officer. Apart from his change of status, the character is treated from a different standpoint than in the play. Rather than just doubting the efficiency of his rulership, the Duke indulges in permissive actions, thereby proving right Lucio’s innuendo about his possibly loose living at 3.2.118-36. During the party on which the film opens, the Duke, shown in the toilet with a female soldier, is disturbed in the act of pre-sexual intercourse by a subordinate. The disorder that prevails in the barracks seems permitted, or even encouraged, by his behaviour. The film thus focuses on the Duke’s flawed exemplarity rather than on the loopholes in his rulership. Consistently with this presentation of the character of the Duke, the character of Angelo becomes a representative of soldierlike order and repressiveness. His authority follows the code of military practice, whether official or officious. For instance, before he is sent to prison, Claudio has to do push-ups in front of his fellow soldiers, in a sequence that treats being tossed in a blanket as one of the rules of barracks life.
9A blatant evolution from the treatment implemented by Davis lies in the change from a straightforward scopic regime to a more visibly cinematic one. Komar often resorts to hand-held cameras, and thereby endows his film with a documentary style that is in keeping with the investigative quality of the play. Because the camera moves with the one who carries it, its presence refers to a watcher directing his or her eye at the characters. Complementarily, the spectator is constantly reminded of the mediating presence of the camera in shots that include bars through which the characters are seen. As obstacles, the bars prevent a more realistic treatment of the screen as a window. Komar’s focus on watching also stems from the locations in which he shoots and from a few striking camera angles. Throughout the film, religious statues stand close to the characters, seemingly eavesdropping on their conversation or gazing down upon them, as if to remind them of God’s supervising presence. The bird’s eye shots featured in the film, indicating the presence of a heavenly observer, pursue the same goal.
10Komar also uses auditive metaphors to translate the different levels of spectator or character information featured in the play. A few soldiers listen to the first conversation between Angelo and Isabella from the other side of the door. Unawares of their presence, Angelo almost rapes Isabella on the desk featured in the room. This is a distortion of the plot, in which Angelo is deterred from acting by the presence of a witness. Later in the film, the Duke delivers his “be absolute for death” speech over the phone, and uses the appliance to overhear the conversation between Claudio and Isabella in the prison cell. After his conversation with the Duke, Claudio left the receiver off the hook, thereby allowing the Duke to hear his subsequent conversation with Isabella without seeing the characters. This switch from a mainly visual regime to a strictly auditive one is not consistent throughout the film. Komar sometimes connects vision to knowledge, for instance when flashbacks of Angelo’s past with Mariana or a flash-forward of the bed-trick scene provide the spectators with privileged information. Centring on oral transmission, however, is a debatable choice considering the play’s strong focus on visual matters. The feeling that the director may have misunderstood the play is heightened by the Duke’s decision to dress up as a blind friar to spy on the other characters.
11In Measure for Measure, the Duke acts as a centre of surveillance. He spies on an all the layers of the Viennese society, with an eye on the inside of brothels as well as on the seat of authority. Considering that his plan consists of attempting to see and know everything, his disguising as a blind man is a puzzling strategy. Pretending blindness is a useful trick to see without being seen, for the obvious reason that the blind cannot be suspected of spying, at least in the strictly visual meaning of the word. To some extent, one can read the Duke’s blindness as an inverted equivalent of Hamlet’s antic disposition, which enables the Prince of Denmark to conduct his investigation without fearing the surveillant gaze of King Claudius. Additionally, it is an ironic translation of the Duke’s superior position as ubiquitous observer, which endows him with the hypervision allowing him to keep the events of the play under his control. Komar, however, does not exploit the Duke’s fake blindness with sufficient consistency for this addition to work. On a pragmatic level, the friar’s blindness entails that he needs a guide to go somewhere, which unavoidably restricts his range of action and the scope of his visual perception. Consequently, the blindness trick soon reveals its limits, and leads the Duke to disclose his true identity earlier than in the play. On a psychological level, it turns the friar into an object of solicitude, arousing feelings of sympathy that the Duke uses for his own advantage. Such is the case, for instance, when his supposed disability helps him fool Isabella into confessing to him in a physically intimate way. This suggests he may be as attracted to her as Angelo is, and as eager as his substitute to indulge in devious tricks in order to obtain her favours.
12As a result, the visual regime of the play, which was at the source of its narrative organisation, is now complicated by contradictory lines of reflexivity: blindness and oral information. Komar disconnects themes from the play from their significance as ways of investigating the scopic regime of drama. He insufficiently recontextualises them for the precious interplay of the diegetic with the extradiegetic that they construct in the source work to endure. The DVD cover advertises the film by warning the spectators they should “prepare to be judged,” an interesting programme that Komar falls short of fulfilling. At the end of the film, only Angelo is judged, which is a significant demise from the play’s intricate network of characters assessing each other according to visual criteria. Komar thus fails to preserve the richness of Shakespeare’s invitation for the spectators to measure the morality and ruling qualities of various characters, including the Duke him-self. The play has an experimental property, leading it to expose and analyse the links between vision and power. The film loses this investigative facet. Komar’s version provides a perfect example of how recontextualisation started in accordance with the main issues of the play may lead to virtual misunderstandings, for lack of constant reconnection to the contents of the source work.
Magnifying the scopic dimension of power: David Thacker’s Measure for Measure
A film set within a specific context
13Contrary to Komar’s version, Thacker’s adaptation for the BBC operates successful recontextualisation from beginning to end. One of the main reasons for the achievement lies in the constant attention paid to the interaction between diegetic and extradiegetic vision that is at the core of the play. Thacker’s adaptation for the BBC was broadcast in 1995, a few years after a dramatic wave of riots in the United Kingdom sometimes referred to as the “summer on the estates” riots. The concentration of violent episodes led to heightened police occupation and to an increased use of surveillance techniques, specifically of video cameras8.
14The opening of Thacker’s adaptation connects the Duke’s behaviour at the beginning of the play to this specific context. The film starts with a high-angle view of Vincentio’s sitting room (Figure 1). The angle of the shot allows the spectators to have wide scope over the room and to notice the numerous books scattered on items of furniture. Additionally, it conjures up the shooting style of CCTV cameras, and treats the Duke as both object and subject of surveillance practices. As a matter of fact, the Duke appears sitting in a sofa, with his back to the camera. The structure of the shot leads the spectators to focus on the gigantic screen that the occupier of the room is watching. Thacker introduces the Duke indirectly, via his main pursuit in the play and in the film: taking advantage of his position as ubiquitous watcher to exert power over the characters. In this liminal moment, Thacker displaces the ubiquity that characterises the character of the Duke to the object facing him. The screen occupies most of the TV frame. It is split into nine units, some of which bear the same pictures, and the Duke can bring any of them to full size by merely pressing a button on his remote controller.
Figure 1

15The beginning of the opening sequence thus implements an ambiguous introduction of the Duke’s main defining feature in the play: his hypervision. In the film, the screen looks like an oversize CCTV monitor, enabling the Duke to encompass the confines of a whole city within a single look. His sitting room becomes a centre a panoptic power9. It is the equivalent of the central tower from which one person could watch dozens of prisoners in the ideal prison house imagined by Bentham, the panopticon. The display unit, however, also looks like a huge TV set. Besides, the fact the Duke is slouching on the sofa rather than intensely focusing on specific pictures on-screen suggests he engages in leisurely activity rather than in occupational obligations. The Duke watches the moving pictures lackadaisically, and the fact he never seems too keen on intervening, even when dramatic events appear on-screen, suggests he watches real events with the same distance as if he were watching television. The initial moments thus present the main reason for the Duke’s reconsideration of his rulership: that the control over the Viennese society he used to derive from hypervision has abated as watching gradually turned from a repressive technique to an everyday source of entertainment. The nature of the images on display, which noticeably include prostitutes, increases this feeling by indicating that voyeurism has taken over the dutiful observation of subordinates by a superior. As a result, the screen within the shot is not only perceived as an alienating device, but also creates an alienation effect. Whatever the appliance displays, it looks like a large-size TV set, and is used as one by its solitary spectator. This analogy likens its contents to fiction. The diegetic world reproduced on the screen within the screen thus appears to be no more real than the fiction the spectators are watching. Thacker creates a mise-en-abyme effect in the language of cinematic narrative, and cleverly translates the “play within the play” nature of act 5 by making the Duke watch a film within the film. The pictures he is watching build up a kind of documentary on the places he has neglected to go to. He soon corrects this negligence by leaving his seat to Angelo and mingling with the crowds. In a way, the “stranger than TV” quality of the CCTV images he is watching leads him to doubt they are real. This motivates his plan to disguise and see for himself what is on the other side of the screen. Besides, the focus placed on the Duke’s voyeuristic tendency and his self observation of his status as a flaccid spectator make him realise that his laws have become inefficient because the appropriate consequences do not follow from his surveillance practice. Vincentio now watches the control monitor as if it were a TV. He has forgotten about his duty of interfering with the reality displayed on-screen. The moment of epiphany and admission of his own mistakes in rulership constituted by the beginning of the play becomes the Duke’s realisation that nothing is closer to film fiction than the capture of real-life events. In Thacker’s film, Vincentio suddenly considers moving pictures from a distanced perspective. This causes him to place Angelo in his seat at the centre of the Viennese panoptic machine, and consequently to watch the panoptic surveillant as an avatar of himself10. In doing so, he tests his own procedure, and provides himself with the possibility of modifying it if need be. At the same time, he switches from mediated visual perception to direct perception, and proceeds to investigate the layers of his society he so far treated as mere pictures on-screen. As he does so during the film, the images of Thacker’s version become like those displayed on the Duke’s screen in the initial sequence.
Measure for Measure as experiment
16In the play, the Duke’s attitude to rulership diverges from Angelo’s. Thacker preserves this antithetic structure, but enhances it technologically, because contemporary instruments of control have altered the conditions for obtaining power. A slightly changed reading of the opposition between the Duke’s strategy and Angelo’s results from those new circumstances. This alteration is obvious in the scene in which Angelo, left alone in Vincentio’s study, discovers his new role as the Duke’s substitute. He does so by minutely inspecting the place from which Vincentio used to exert control over Vienna. He first focuses on the books scattered all over the room, which translate Vincentio’s preference for theory over practice. What he comes across next conjures up the cliché of the dissolute intellectual: an empty bottle is lying on the sofa. Angelo’s insistent gaze at the bottle carries reproach, and expresses his moralistic view of alcohol consumption. The crowning moment of Angelo’s examination of the room intervenes when he lingers before the big screen that sits enthroned in the room and spends a while scrutinising the remote controller. Displayed on-screen are images of a man in a thong riding a half-naked woman and slapping her buttocks. Next come pictures of people smoking grass and shots of burning cars. A reaction shot is then inserted, allowing the spectators to read Angelo’s amazement at such depravity on his face. The construction of the sequence loads Angelo’s response with ambiguity. While his features express his critical thoughts, their object could be either the bad morality of Viennese citizens indulging in degrading actions or the Duke’s voyeuristic pleasure in watching this all. Angelo stops the system, apparently taking exception to watching citizens thanks to CCTV devices. His action signifies that his way of preserving order will not involve such scopic aids. The film thus sets the initial conditions for a challenge between two ways of upholding the law. The first one relies on technology, while the other one prides itself on not resorting to visual prostheses. The final shot in the sequence further establishes that Angelo embodies the second method. The camera zooms out into a high-angle shot of the room, in which Angelo now opens the shutters, letting the daylight flood in. This action clearly suggests that Angelo, unlike Vincentio, will conceal nothing, not even the seat of power. It is a visual translation of the character’s constant proclamations that he has nothing to hide. Moreover, it announces the contents of his ruling method, in which unmediated observation will lead to exposure and punishment, rather than to the Duke’s passive voyeurism. The high-angle quality of the shot, however, hints that it is taken by a surveillance camera. This conveys the feeling that Angelo himself will be under watch during his whole time of command, and that the spectators will be invited to assess the efficiency of his methods. At the beginning of Thacker’s adaptation, an experiment in surveillance and power starts, in which the Duke’s strategies are tested and set against Angelo’s. Through this reference to surveillance, Thacker invites the audience to behold the character’s actions and to judge them.
17As he leaves a substitute in his place and assumes a false identity, Vincentio resorts to strategies for obtaining information that contribute to construct a wider perspective on the type of governance he represents. In his disguise as a friar as in his previous role as the Duke of Vienna, Vincentio resorts to panoptic forms of control. Consequently, the film assesses how efficient his implementation of a surveillance society based on CCTV machinery is. Thacker’s treatment of act 3 scene 1, for instance, shows Vincentio spying on the conversation between Claudio and Isabella, in which he tries to persuade her that she should accept the terms of Angelo’s deal. Vincentio watches the scene through the CCTV network of the prison where the exchange takes place (Figure 2). Vincentio is in a room equipped with numerous control monitors, most of which show the cells and corridors of the prison. He has his eyes focused on the larger screen, which displays the conversation he is eavesdropping on. The panoptic diagram being inspired from Bentham’s plan for an ideal prison house, the scene’s combination of the CCTV system and the prison location explicitly evokes panopticism. The central tower in the prison, from which someone could observe the prisoners inside the cells, in Bentham’s plan, has been replaced by the control room.
Figure 2

18In the film, this technological improvement conveys distance, because the screens look like television sets and remind the spectators they are watching a TV broadcast. This impression is strengthened by the fact the spectators can hear and see the conversation at the same time as the Duke. Vincentio’s position thus reflects their own as audience members. Consequently, this scene directly conveys the overinformed status he gains over the other characters to the spectators. This establishes the role of the Duke as a narrative entity, distilling information to the spectators as he obtains it, mostly by watching screens. The natural resemblance of the diegetic monitors to the extradiegetic TV set is further explored in one of the next shots. After a view of the Duke’s face, a close-up on Isabella appears, giving the impression that the characters are communicating through the CCTV system. Later in the sequence, the Duke leaves the control room to interfere with the conversation between Claudio and Isabella at the moment the tension between brother and sister reaches its acme. This suggests he has been waiting for his cue to intervene in the show displayed on his screen. Thacker translates the liminality of the Duke through references to a new kind of threshold between diegetic and extradiegetic spaces: the display surface. Because of its ambivalent nature as control monitor and TV set, the screen has become the natural interface between reality and fiction. Although Vincentio’s dark attire when dressed up as a friar allows him to merge with the shadow, this chameleon-like quality brings him little power compared to his use of surveillance appliances.
19While Thacker leaves no doubt about what the Duke owes to surveillance technology, however, he does not present his method for obtaining information as devoid of any flaws. The chosen angle on Vincentio’s surveillance presents the practice as a poor imitation of divine supervision, consistently with the ethical and religious dilemmas of Measure for Measure. The play raises such questions, for instance, in Angelo’s final remark that Vincentio has “looked upon [his] passes” “like power divine” (5.1.367-68). In the film, the judging presence of a divine observer is manifest in the numerous shots that include religious statues, towering over the characters as if they were watching them, or shafts of light descending on the set, as if cast from a heavenly location. The film’s treatment of act 1 scene 3, for instance, distinctly features a statue of baby Christ in the background, to establish a connection between the Duke’s disguise as a friar and the divine supervision that this stratagem leads him to imitate.
The Duke’s surveillance inclination and the scopic regime of the film
20In the play, the Duke in disguise gradually turns from unseen observer to embedded director of his final display of authority, which he organises in act 5. His surveillance tactics allow him to obtain knowledge that he later uses to manipulate the characters. With it, he organises the return of the Viennese society to his order, and the necessary demise of Angelo. A subtle combination of spying and directing strategies provokes this outcome. Thacker’s equivalent to this fine blend lies in the sustained indiscernibility of the surveillance regime with filmic narrative. As the Duke’s visual mode of control impacts the scopic regime of the film, Thacker effects the same transfer from intelligence practices to puppeteering techniques as in the play.
21The shift from diegetic surveillance to traditional cinematic syntax is announced early in the film, in its treatment of act 1 scene 2. The scene is set in a hooker bar, in which a huge screen displays sexually explicit movies. This links the notion of depravity to the availability of licentious images. Moreover, this acts as a reminder of the screen seen in the Duke’s study a few minutes before, to define the film’s perspective on pleasure as voyeuristic and mediated. In the sequence, however, the police barge into the room to make arrests on Angelo’s orders, which suggests they too have peeped into the places of illicit pleasure. During the assault, a mirror is broken, which causes the images on-screen to shatter. On this instant, the spectators can realise that they have been watching a reflection of the scene in a mirror, which the irruption of the police has caused to break. For this reason, the broken mirror is like a window the officers smashed through to enter the room. As they cross the threshold of the brothel, they force their way to the other side of a screen they had been watching for surveillance purposes.
22Thacker thus reminds the spectators of the mediating presence of the camera many times throughout the film. Such insistence elaborates the notion that it is a thin divide between keeping an eye on people and watching a movie. The director’s use of depth of field, for instance, enhances the artificial quality of making everything in the shot distinct, from foreground to background, and reveals the action of the camera as a visual aid. That the camera is a source of hypervision also surfaces in a few scenes that verge on “documentary voyeurism,” such as the one that shows half-naked men in the prison cloakroom, or through a shot inserted immediately after the bed-trick encounter between Angelo and Mariana has happened, which shows a bare-breasted Angelo revelling after satisfying his lust for Isabella. Finally, Thacker obtains the same effect through what may seem an unnecessary addition to the play. In one of the film’s sequences, the camera enters the labour room of a maternity hospital to show Julietta giving birth to her baby. This form of privacy invasion echoes the Duke’s tendency presented in the film’s initial moments. It also emphasises that the camera is endowed with sufficient ubiquity to enter places whose access is restricted to professionals and intimate family members. The camera’s ubiquity is also underlined when the Duke talks about Mariana and the film immediately shows her whereabouts, in a shot filmed through a window covered in raindrops to insist on the mediating presence of the screen. At other times, elements in the shots recall the split screen seen in the Duke’s study in the film’s opening sequence. Such is the case, for instance, for the openwork grille through which Lucio talks to Isabella in act 1 scene 4.
From surveillance to narrative intervention
23Consistently with his insistence on the resemblance between mediated surveillance and film narrative, Thacker treats the Duke’s switch from disguised watching to real-time stage production as a directing intervention of the cinematic type. One scene in the film makes it apparent that the Duke not only watches Angelo, but also takes advantage of his surveillant position to stage-manage him. When Vincentio describes his substitute in act 1 scene 3, the film shows us Angelo at his desk, as if the Duke’s line had prompted the change of locations. Such moments in the film present the Duke’s surveillance practice as the bedrock for narrative tricks. They show that his ubiquity endows him with the power to foresee the next move of the other characters. Thacker pushes the same trend further a little later in the sequence, through the insertion of a detail shot of a picture Angelo is holding in his hand, which shows a man and a woman. This probing of his intimacy by the camera is completed, a few seconds later, by the shot of a woman in the dark looking through a window. Neither the identity of the people in Angelo’s picture nor that of the woman watching him are specified yet. The woman is later revealed to be Mariana, which hints that the picture was one of Angelo and her. As a result, the sequence places its focus on the fact Angelo is being spied upon, by other characters but also by the camera. Simultaneously, it associates the surveillant gaze with the power to foresee, as Mariana’s appearance announces the part she will later play as an essential pawn in the Duke’s plan. As a result, Angelo is not only watched, but his fate is also under control. He appears more as a victim of the Duke’s scheming than as the culprit of blackmail and perversity. To strengthen this ambiguity, Thacker underlines the closeness between Angelo and the Duke by making the former wear clothes that evoke the religious garb. His attire expresses his Puritanism, and refers to the Duke’s disguise as a friar. While Thacker underlines that the two characters may share the same devious tendencies, however, he clearly contrasts their relationship to watching. Whereas Vincentio constantly plays with the camera to share his privileged information with the spectators or organise the final act as if it were a TV show, Angelo’s behaviour elicits his lack of awareness of the watching presence of cameras. A case in point is his soliloquy of act 2 scene 2, which he speaks looking offscreen instead of addressing his words directly to the audience to earn their sympathy.
Thacker’s adaptation as mirror for contemporary magistrates
24Thacker’s film emphasises one of the Duke’s crucial aspects in the play. This feature in the character comes from his trajectory from visibility to disguise, then to an altered form of visibility at the end of the play. The Duke disguises himself to spy on Angelo, but also to learn about the layers of his society with which he is not familiar. His scheme leads him to gather information about the characters that they wanted to keep secret, such as the confirmation Angelo is actually the devious person he suspected him of being at the beginning of the play. Collecting information, however, is not enough for the Duke to assert his superiority and come back to his original position with updated ways of ensuring his law will apply in Vienna. Vincentio must stage the demise of Angelo so he can be acclaimed as the best ruler. To ensure success, the Duke organises his return to power as a plebiscite. With the event, he displays his legitimacy to judge the citizens under him, but also shows that he has acquired practical understanding regarding the new instruments of control. At the beginning of the play, the Duke admits that his ruling strategy has become inefficient because he has merely based it on visual deterrents. To remediate this, Angelo uses a different technique, transferring the power to deter to what Foucault calls “the spectacle of the scaffold”: the staging of punishment that induces exemplarity11. At the end of the play, the Duke seems to have learnt from his observation of Angelo. To prevent the law from becoming a mere “scarecrow” (2.1.1), however, he neither reproduces Angelo’s strategy nor discards it completely. In the final act of the play, the Duke’s behaviour shows that he has understood, by watching his substitute, about the importance of staging himself to maintain his authority. He no longer expresses his dislike for being onstage, and even displays a mastery in showmanship and stage management that makes it hard to believe he ever hated being watched (1.1.67-68). Consequently, the Duke directs the final act from the inside as a play within the play. He both plays a part in his own production and supervises it from within.
25Thacker treats this final act consistently with his choice to recontextualise the Duke’s surveillance tendency by equipping him with CCTV monitors and cameras. In the play’s final act, the Duke gradually switches from spying to directing the characters as if they were his actors. The film, however, shows Vincentio using reality-capturing devices as creative tools after utilising them for surveillance purposes. This evolution in the character first emerges when the Duke, after explaining his plan to Mariana and Isabella, watches their conversation. As he cannot hear it, he spies on it through a window in front of which he is standing, lurking in the dark as is often the case in the film (Figure 3). This addition, in which the grille window recalls the split screen seen in the Duke’s study at the beginning of the film, elicits a change in his watching practices. From the other side of the window, he no longer eavesdrops on conversations to collect information about the characters, but merely checks that the plan he has started by convincing Mariana to substitute herself for Isabella in the bed-trick scene is unravelling smoothly. The character thus performs what Georges Banu has called “surveillance de parcours,” to describe a stage producer’s supervision of his show during the performance12. Once their conversation is over, the two female characters come join Vincentio outside. This shows that his surveillance, which used to be a secret practice, is now accepted by those it targets, as a way of helping them perform a plan from which all will benefit. Similarly, a few minutes later, the spectators can glimpse the beginning of the encounter between Angelo and Mariana, in which she carries out the Duke’s plot. The camera, in the absence of the Duke, takes over his supervision task, and simultaneously performs its narrative duty. As a result, it both controls and enacts a spectacle that Vincentio devised.
Figure 3

26In compliance with the events of the play, this evolution reaches a climax in the film’s treatment of act 5. The Duke’s public reappearance, staged at the city’s doors so all the citizens of Vienna can attend it, becomes a TV broadcast. Through this addition, the Duke’s demonstration of authority reaches an even higher number of citizens than in the play. The Duke’s panoptic power, which was so far was restricted to a few areas such as the prison, now extends its range to every single home thanks to television. To regain control, Vincentio not only exposes Angelo publicly, but also shows himself, to countless citizens in front of their screens, as a well-informed and hyper-sighted entity. Shots located in the backstage areas of the courtroom where Angelo is on trial underline that his use of TV follows from his previous surveillance practices. They show Mariana and Isabella waiting for their cue to enter the fray, and Friar Peter helping them choose the best moment to do so (Figure 4). His assistance does not consist of taking a peep at what is going on behind the massive doors of the stately room, but of following the events on TV sets. By watching the devices, he keeps an eye on the reunion ceremony, and is able to tell Isabella when to enter the room and thrust herself in front of the Duke. She then gives her plea under the eyes of the cameras, which reminds the spectators that the whole scene is being turned into a television programme.
Figure 4

27Broadcasting the scene of the Duke’s return live is in keeping with the final act of the play, in which the Duke unwinds the plot of his reappearance in real time and from the inside. Thacker’s television cameras, however, are also a subtle way of suggesting that, rather than explicitly giving a play for the other characters to perform, the Duke fictionalises the reality surrounding him. He does so by saying the right words at the right time and by anticipating the other characters’reactions. The room in which the scene takes place looks like a courtroom or a grand jury room (Figure 5). The TV cameras set up in it call to mind a genre that has been popular in the United Kingdom and in the United States for many years: the TV courtroom show. While originally created for supposed documentary purposes, those programmes were soon spectacularised13, and soon gave birth to TV series shot in the same style and called “courtroom drama series”. This evolution demonstrates that TV courtroom shows often blur the divide between genuine trials and fictional ones. In the film, the Duke similarly uses the style of news reports to make the fiction he has created pass as reality. Nevertheless, the “reality TV” look of the final act exposes him as he is intervening in the contents of what should be a fair trial. Throughout the sequence, Vincentio casts Angelo as the defendant, and the television camera helps him do so, by focusing regularly on Angelo’s face. The selection operated by the camera allows the spectators to read guilt or amazement on Angelo’s features, and induces them to find him guilty. To some extent, Angelo’s condition in the sequence is similar to the King’s in Hamlet’s mousetrap. The sequence turns Angelo into a spectator of a show that has got out of his hands. His reactions are under watch, and he is being judged. The television camera shooting him is indeed probing him, as if it had received a revelatory power. The aim of the TV broadcast, therefore, is to expose Angelo as he is, or, rather, as the Duke wants him to appear. The sequence ends with a final manipulative trick on the Duke’s behalf. Claudio is brought in with Barnardine, and they are both wearing a hood over their head in order not to be recognised. Barnardine is uncapped first. Then, when the provost solemnly uncovers the second prisoner’s face to reveal Claudio is alive, a reaction shot of Isabella’s face is inserted. The effect of this twist in the Duke’s plot shows on her features. The shot suggests Vincentio now appears as a saviour in Isabella’s eyes, and implies that she will give a favourable answer to his proposal of marriage.
Figure 5

28The film’s final shot symbolises Thacker’s adaptation strategy. It synthesises the role played by visual aids in recontextualising some of the main features in the play. The high-angle view that characterises the opening of the film returns, with a different meaning this time, to symbolise the evolution in the Duke’s use of reality-capturing instruments. In the initial sequence, the high-angle shot expressed the superior watching power of Thacker’s camera, encompassing the Duke’s diegetic surveillance apparatus. In the final shot, the apparatus featured in the courtroom is made of TV cameras. In watching this adaptation of the play, the spectators have attended an experiment in surveillance practices. During the test, the Duke went from the distanced watching of illegal behaviour from his sofa to a visual enactment the law, based on televisual displays of power rather than on actual forms of punishment. The film finally suggests that the power the Duke obtains, without shedding a drop of blood, is stronger than the one achieved by Angelo’s method. This power is mediatic. It is of the same nature as the one obtained by the Duke in the play, as it is based on public demonstrations of authority. The only difference is that modern technology now magnifies the Duke’s authority. By taking a technological leap in his treatment of the surveillance trends of Measure for Measure, therefore, Thacker does not just set the play within a contemporary context. He also elicits the importance of the surveillance vein that subtends the play. In so doing, Thacker proves not only that reading Measure for Measure as a text necessarily obliterates part of its meaning, but also that Shakespeare’s investigation of visual power demands to be treated in audiovisual form for its atemporal pertinence to appear. The director thus shows how permanent Shakespeare’s analyses of visual issues can seem to be, provided the right adaptations are made to include, in the productions or film versions of the play, the latest tools bringing power through vision. Thacker’s Shakespearean adaptation, although analysts often ignore it, is on an equal footing with films that use advanced visual technology to implement a similar perspective on Shakespeare’s analysis of the relationship between vision and power, such as Geoffrey Sax’s Othello (2001), Gregory Doran’s Hamlet (2000) or Michael Almereyda’s adaptation of the same play (2000).
Notes de bas de page
1See note to lines 68-69, on page 71 in the “Arden Shakespeare” edition of the play, edited by J. W. Lever.
2“Scope, skōpe, n. lit. that which one sees, space as far as one can see: room or opportunity for free outlook; space for action: the end before the mind; intention. [L. scopos, Gr. Skopos – skeptomai, to look, to view],” Donald J. and Chambers W., Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, London, W. & R. Chambers, 1871, p. 453.
3I conducted that study to prepare a paper given at the “Actualité de Mesure pour Mesure” conference in Paris on 12 October 2012.
4As Dallas G. Denery II recalls, “Christian Metz […] introduced the expression ‘scopic regime’ to name dominant and structuring relations between observer, image and object. The scopic regime of the cinema, for example, is defined by the absence of the seen object (which simply means when we see something on the silver screen, we really only see its projected image, not the thing itself),” Denery II D. G., Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 9. The reference is to Metz C., The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, C. Britton (trans.), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 61-63.
5Shakespeare W., Measure for Measure, N. W. Bawcutt (ed.), New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 41.
6At least, this used to be true until new versions of already adapted plays were made for the TV channel, in a more innovative way this time, as I will try to prove in my analysis of the Thacker version in this paper.
7Bawcutt N. W., loc. cit.
9The term “panopticon” refers to one of the present concepts of surveillance studies. In the glossary to his Overview of surveillance studies, David Lyon expounds the panoptic principle and synthesises how the structure has been used in the context of this nascent academic discipline: “Panopticon is the Greek-based neologism applied to Bentham’s 1793 diagram for a new penitentiary whose architecture ensured the visibility of inmates to an unseen observer. The term became the focus for theoretical debates concerning surveillance due both to Foucault’s focus on the Panopticon and the realization that electronic technologies apparently permit panoptic possibilities beyond Bentham’s dreams,” Lyon D., Surveillance Studies: an Overview, Cambridge, UK, Polity, 2007, glossary, p. 202-203.
10This is an interesting translation of the “play within the play” moments of Measure for Measure into a “you are being watched” atmosphere. This surveillance feeling has been prevalent in the United Kingdom since the beginning of the 1990s, and often features in present-day TV and film productions.
11“The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; […] of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘super-power’,” Foucault M., Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, A. Sheridan (trans.), New York, Vintage, 1979, p. 57.
12Banu G., La Scène Surveillée: Essai, Arles, Actes Sud, 2006, p. 144-151.
13“With the advent of courtroom TV, the image has entered the inner sanctum of the word – of law and justice as a story or text – and turned it into yet another public spectacle. And this spectacle threatens to become the transparent, the ideal, and indeed, the visible source of legal authority in a postmodern culture of performance,” Schneck P., Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in U.S. American Culture, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2011, p. 243.
Auteur
-
Sébastien Lefait
Maître de conférences en anglais à l’université de Corse. Il est l’auteur d’articles sur le cinéma, sur les pièces de Shakespeare, et sur les nouvelles formes de l’adaptation cinématographique. Il a récemment codirigé un ouvrage intitulé In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Par ailleurs, il vient de terminer une monographie intitulée Surveillance on Screen: Monitoring Contemporary Films and Television Programs (Lanham, Md: The Scarecrow Press, 2012). Ses travaux actuels concernent l’utilisation de la surveillance dans les séries télévisées, au théâtre, et dans les adaptations d’œuvres littéraires.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Lectures de Love's Labour's Lost
De William Shakespeare
Delphine Lemonnier-Texier et Guillaume Winter (dir.)
2014
Figures de l'instabilité dans l'œuvre de William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
Étude stylistique
Jacqueline Fromonot
2021
Le jardin et ses mythes aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne
Emmanuel Vernadakis, Jean-Michel Yvard et Gelareh Yvard-Djahansouz (dir.)
2017
