The 2024 New Swan Season wrapped up on August 31, but Measure for Measure has stayed in my mind. Beth Lopes’s version does more than evoke #MeToo. She also calls attention to the culture of sex work and the real costs of pregnancy in a world with no safety net or public health system.
The caretaker of this world is Mistress Overdone, brilliantly played by Rachael Vanwormer. Absorbing smaller parts, Lopes’ Overdone is not just a madam. “Bawd-born” herself, Mistress Overdone expresses her kinship with the many women exposed to disease, abuse, and abandonment in Vienna.
Her business is everyone’s business. She is the one who knows that Claudio and Juliet have been arrested. And her testimony against Lucio brings this deadbeat dad to justice. (Meanwhile, Mistress Overdone has been taking care of Kate Keepdown and Lucio’s baby.)
New Swan’s production coordinator Jesús Lopez Vargas noted that Mistress Overdone’s Dolly Parton get-up evokes a drag mother taking care of her “house.”
The Overdone created by Lopes and Vanwormer made me think about another seachange in our legal ecosystem. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that the constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Lopes’s setting of Measure in a near-future dystopian Vienna resembles our post-Dobbs society.
Pregnancy is central to the conflict and resolution of Shakespeare’s play. Claudio and Juliet have “mutually committed” the sin of premarital fornication. “Groaning” Juliet’s sin, however, is of a “heavier kind,” since her visibly pregnant body is ocular proof of the crime. What if a future staging of the play pictures the common-law couple seeking an abortion? In this version, they are arrested not for fornication, but for terminating the pregnancy.
Such a staging gives new meaning to Angelo’s argument to Isabella, "It were as good/ To pardon him that hath from nature stolen / A man already made, as to remit/ Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image/ In stamps that are forbid."
In my post-Dobbs Measure, Overdone runs a community clinic where she treats STDs, oversees childbirth, and yes, provides abortions. When a woman comes to her “groaning” with an unwanted pregnancy, Overdone will help her steal from nature “a man already made.”
Mistress Overdone isn’t on the state’s payroll but she is certainly serving public welfare. It is one of the production’s tragic ironies that the state conscripts Overdone into assisting the hangman Abhorson with executions--another, arguably heavier theft from nature. Justice is served, however, by giving Overdone a rich storyline that can continue to accrue new meanings in productions to come.
--Saiham Sharif, New Swan Shakespeare Fellow, 2024. A PhD student in English, Saiham’s research focuses on adaptations of Shakespeare in contemporary contexts.