This Bleeding Country of Old Men: Scriptive Shakespeare and Howard Brenton’s Measure for Measure

Abstract:In 1972, Howard Brenton’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was threatened with legal action because it explicitly affiliated Angelo’s corruption with the racist British politician Enoch Powell and the Conservative party. Brenton’s play also cast Claudio and Isabella as Black British citizens from the West Indies “Windrush” generation of immigrants and rewrote the ending of the play so that Claudio is decapitated, the Duke committed to a senior hospital, and Isabella is deported on the S. S. Political Utopia. Brenton’s decision to write color-conscious casting into his adaptation suggests that there are limits to theater’s capacity to meaningfully comment on Shakespeare’s place in white cultural supremacy without textual intervention. This essay uses Robin Bernstein’s theory of scriptive things to suggest that Shakespeare is an object that performs its whiteness and activates a response that invites its participants to situate themselves in relation to it. Taking a new materialist approach, this essay suggests that performance alone is unable to adequately address the unmarked whiteness that Shakespeare scripts and examines how aesthetic interventions to challenge such scripts are variably conceived as either performance or appropriation. Brenton’s adaptation is a radical use of Shakespeare to comment on multicultural Britain during the 1970s that blurs these boundaries between performance and appropriation.