Making Meaning of Adapted Shakespeare: White Femininity in Re-Imaginings of Measure for Measure

“No work of art is ever ideologically neutral.” I share this phrase with my students in almost every class I teach. Even if, on the surface, a piece of art seems to be neutral—if it appears to fit within the status quo or focus simply on aesthetics—that in and of itself is an ideologically-informed artistic choice. I especially stress this fact when it comes to adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare. Everything from the genre or mode chosen to casting to musical selections to camera angles can matter, if we just pay attention. Students and even more advanced scholars might be forgiven for forgetting this fact, however, given that pedagogical discussions about adapted Shakespeare can frequently amount to no more than a heightened version of, “Did you like it?” or “What is different than the original? What remained the same?” Those can be helpful starting points for dialogue, but they do not necessarily invite an assessment of the way adaptive choices signify and why those significations matter. Even peer-reviewed scholarship on Shakespearean adaptations can struggle to create meaning from a particular work, perhaps landing on a beautiful, detailed description without fully explicating what the details mean and why that meaning matters.

Occasionally, however, a Shakespearean adaptation comes along with such a distinct, rich, unmissable point of view that one cannot help but consider how and why Shakespearean adaptations can be particularly impactful tools for helping audiences engage with unfamiliar perspectives, and perhaps in turn craft a new perspective of their own. When such an adaptation does come along, archival work that allows scholars to trace connections across eras, genres, and modes—to pursue rabbit holes, if you will—can help them develop unexpected yet vital frameworks for engaging those adaptions with analytical rigor.

Such has been the case with my own archival work as I have strived to discern productive avenues for examining Cuban director Henry Godinez’s stellar 2022 production of Measure for Measure for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which shifts Shakespeare’s problem play from Vienna to a 1950s Havana on the cusp of revolution. In this case, pursuing a research rabbit hole is quite necessary. What did Shakespeare think of Cuba? Probably very little, if at all, to be honest. Shakespeare never referenced Cuba in his works. Certainly, there is no obvious relationship between Measure for Measure and the island that Spain claimed in 1492 and began conquering by 1511. And yet, Godinez located resonances between Shakespeare and Cuba, making an adaptation in which, according to him, “The primary difference[…] between Shakespeare’s ‘Vienna’ and our ‘Havana’ is that religious piety rather than ideological piety fuels the events in Measure for Measure.”¹

My work on Godinez’s production is part of my in-progress second monograph, which examines Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, and performances created by Black Indigenous People of Color, interrogating their usage of the canon, a longstanding tool of harm, to confront and redress the legacies and painful impact of domination. Godinez both pays homage to and plays with the canon as he changes Measure for Measure’s setting and shortens its plot while by and large keeping Shakespeare’s language, mixing it with Spanish words and phrases, an artistic choice Carla Della Gatta calls “cross-temporal code-switching.”² Godinez’s Havana is populated by Cubans embodying a range of diverse identities—male, female, nonbinary, transgender, white, Black, and brown—as well as Caucasian Americans, most notably the Duke. The makeup of the Cuban community Godinez stages thus conveys the diverse array of people who lived in and shaped the complex socio-political context of 1950s Havana, thereby signaling Godinez’s desire to explore “racial tensions” as well as “the play’s themes of hypocrisy and self-righteousness” in relation to both the U.S. and Cuba.³ Godinez therefore takes what has now become a play that commonly explores the #MeToo movement and exposes how the abuses of power that fuel sexual assault against women are tied to and work alongside other violent forms of domination related to race and sexuality and thereby experienced by an array of minoritarian identities.⁴

To understand the gendered and racial implications of the adaptive choices Godinez makes, part of my fellowship research has focused on tracing Measure for Measure’s performance and adaptation history. This fellowship, in other words, has afforded me the time and resources to pursue the research rabbit holes that provide unexpected connections that help me fully analyze the significance of Godinez’s adaptation. Though relevant, I call this search into Measure for Measure’s history a rabbit hole because I’m not sure what (if any) of this material will end up in my chapter.

Yet already, this tracing has directed my attention to race’s role in the play’s reception and reimaginings. More specifically, examining visual depictions of Isabella reveals just how much her characterization has depended on associating her with whiteness. Perhaps this association should be unsurprising given that, as Dennis Britton argues, “Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure similarly embodies a divine whiteness, one that draws emotional import from a racial aesthetics within the tradition of affective piety and its translation into the descriptions of female virgin martyrs.”⁵ While likely unfamiliar with this particular history of female virgin martyrs, adaptors across genres and modes have nonetheless been able to identify the importance of Isabella’s whiteness. William Hamilton’s 1793 oil painting, for instance, shows Isabella on the left side of the frame pleading with Angelo while dressed in a bright white gown, made all the whiter in contrast with her dark veil. A print from the 1800s depicts Isabella denouncing Claudio, her white gown standing out against the chiaroscuro of the black and gray prison cell. And John Williams White’s character graphic, also from the 1800s, depicts an almost monochromatic Isabella whose porcelain skin is framed by her pristinely white nun’s robe and veil. A divine whiteness indeed.

Isabella’s whiteness is significant on its own, evidence of the longstanding relationship between white femininity and sympathy. But her whiteness stands out all the more for the moral coding it invokes, especially when contrasted with Angelo, who is frequently associated with the color black, as in drawings by Byam Shaw (1900) and Louise Rhead (for Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, 1917/1918).

This longstanding binary color-coding has even made its way into performance, as seen in a late 19^th/early 20^th century production starring Polish actress Helena Modjeska, whose Isabella was costumed entirely in white in contrast to a darker haired (and stockinged) Angelo, as well as in the Folger Theatre’s own 2006 production directed by Aaron Posner, with Karen Peakes’s Isabella again entirely in virginal white against both Ian Merrill Peakes’s Angelo and Mark Zeisler’s Duke in black. The visual moral coding of these various Isabellas and Angelos thus carry what Kim F. Hall identifies as “the binarism of black and white [which] might be called the originary language of racial difference in English culture” from the Renaissance, across eras, and into the modern day.⁶

As I consider the significance of Godinez’s adaptive choices, then, it is important to note how he both invokes yet challenges this tradition in his reconceptualized Isabella, now Isabel (played by Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel). This Isabel also wears white; the turtleneck under her blue dress is white, as is her veil.⁷ Furthermore, like the Isabellas before her, her costuming stands out in contrast to Adam Poss’s Angelo’s, for he is the only main character who dons military fatigues, which, considered alongside his build and beard, create a depiction of Angelo that invokes Fidel Castro. Yet Godinez offers something more complex than the black/white binary that has dominated the archival offerings I have found so far. Gonzalez-Cadel herself is not white, and neither is Poss. As such, both Isabel and Angelo are non-white Cubans who contrast with the white, American Duke (Kevin Gudahl), thereby gesturing toward the powerplays between America and Cuba prior to, during, and following the Cuban Revolution. This casting move in fact illustrates Godinez’s assertion that “the white actors who were cast are strategically placed in roles to represent certain types of power.”⁸ Audiences can therefore see how the power differentials within Godinez’s Measure for Measure move across bodies representing masculinity and femininity, whiteness and brownness, and perhaps most impactfully, representing the inextricable knot between America’s imperial striving, revolutionary failure, and the victimization inflicted by domination both foreign and homegrown.

My brief reading here cannot fully unpack the richness of Godinez’s adaptive choices. Nor can it fully expound upon all the implications of what I have found in the archives regarding Measure for Measure’s performance and adaptation history and what these findings mean for my analysis of Godinez’s production. Rather, I hope that my research musings convey the ways creative archival research (even rabbit holes) can help uncover how and why adaptive choices are never neutral—especially when it comes to representations of sexuality, gender, and race and the histories of domination they carry or contest.