Ray Pentzell, head of the Hillsdale College theater department, attended university during the heyday of improvisational theater off-Broadway. When he could, Pentzell traveled down from Yale to New York dressed in the “straightest” outfit he could put together. His objective was to be picked by the improv players, who often selected hapless members of the audience as targets of theatrical abuse. Pentzell figured that he was as good an actor as any of them, so he’d do them one better when they coerced the “unwilling” gent onto the stage.

Pentzell’s rule-breaking tactics came to mind while watching Michael Bogdanov’s production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. As the patrons filed into the Festival Theatre, the stage was set up to resemble a cabaret-type bar, where an effeminate “host” presided in black leather. Two transvestites ushered what seemed to be ticket-holding customers onto the stage. These embarrassed patrons were seated at tables and offered drinks from the bar. The use of this sort of improv schtick (now some 20 years old) made it appear that Stratford was trying to take a step away from its typically conventional staging. As it turns out, however, all of the participants on the stage were Shakespearean actors—though not crafty ones like Pentzell. The audience slowly realizes that it was all a setup, intended, I suspect, to do nothing more than titillate.

Bogdanov costumes the players, who play roles both in the preliminary schtick and in Measure for Measure, in contemporary clothing, implying, apparently, that the Shakespearean message is timeless. But that is not so in the case of Measure for Measure, a play whose meaning particularly requires the audience to share Shakespeare’s own secure sense of a hierarchically ordered society. But the Elizabethan Great Chain of Being, from God to the lowest mote, has long disappeared from the popular imagination. The “mere anarchy” that Yeats saw loosed upon the world in “The Second Coming” has only intensified since. Shakespeare understandably dramatized the need for a humane laxity within a social matrix that itself remained firm. Today, the matrix is in pieces. As the moral focus of Measure for Measure, Angelo learns through a series of painful reversals to be less severe in judging transgression. The new costuming for the play only serves to obscure the tremendous shift in moral perspectives from Elizabethan times, when tolerance was a secondary virtue, to our own, when it is an excuse for having no others.