In the time and the place I am

To my great and exhausted displeasure, the cold has now moved into the stage where it is impossible to organize or think or sleep, meaning that all plans I had for today are no go. TCM is showing No Highway in the Sky (1951) at eight o'clock, so I suspect I will lie on the couch and stare vaguely at James Stewart. I have no idea what I'm going to do until then.

Have a photograph of me blowing a conch shell for New Year's. I came inside after my mother mildly suggested the neighbors were going to assassinate us.

Remember now my brother

What I did until then, apparently, was construct a post.

Browsing through back archives of Yuletide last night, I found it striking that what fandom there is for Measure for Measure seems to center around Angelo/Isabella, when the pairing that most interests me is the canonical one, Angelo and Mariana. In this I freely admit to being influenced by a production I saw at the Publick Theatre in high school, which played Angelo's prudery and stiff-backed repression as straight as his sudden and bewildering attraction to Isabella, so that when he came out with the famous proposition ("He shall not, Isabel, if you give me love"), he seemed to have shocked himself as much as Isabella or the audience—and then, half as if he had now forfeited any idea of himself as a moral being, half as if he were just free-falling without his unimpeachable cage of rules to hold him in place, kept on making the situation worse until brought up short against a stronger force, which in most productions I imagine is Isabella or the returning Duke of Vienna, but here was Mariana. He held himself together through the exposure of his crimes, his public disgrace, his shotgun marriage and even his sentence of death, but he collapsed on the steps with his head in his hands, utterly undone, when the woman he'd abandoned five years ago and fucked unknowingly "Tuesday night last in's garden-house" began to plead for his life. She wants him still, faithless and fucked-up as he is. She wanted him enough to take Isabella's place at the assignation, to have him even in another woman's skin. (I was left by this production with the sense that the bed trick was not all Duke Vincentio's invention. I have no idea how they worked that with the text. But even if the Duke does propose the substitution and Mariana only agrees, that is still a fascinating statement about her desire: a husband afterward is not guaranteed.) And not the fact of his sins, but the possibility of being forgiven them, is what he cannot get his head around. He knows about lust, not love. He would never have granted himself so much clemency.

So I am curious about what happens afterward between them; and I am curious about what happens between Act IV, Scenes 1 and 4, because of course all the sex is offstage in Shakespeare, but something as complicated as the bed trick feels like incredibly important sex. What is Angelo like, falling away from his self-conception as the ice-cold deputy, the model of marble rectitude? What does he expect from a self-sacrificing novice nun with a mind as precise and abstract as his own? Is Mariana playing his fantasy? Is she safe as herself, knowing she won't be recognized? (What do they do, though, that he doesn't even have cause to wonder? Maybe he does, and dismisses the thought. All cats are grey in the dark. Maybe his higher brain functions just short out.) Is it, after all, what he wanted? The set-up is Shakespeare; there are so many different ways it could be played. I wonder if anyone's tried, in performance.

I appear to be talking myself into writing Shakespeare slash, and I am not nearly feverish enough for that. No Highway in the Sky (1951) was quite good. I may try to post about it. I may also go to bed.