3. "Who will believe thee, Isabel?"

Going a little off the rails just very briefly is something I call having "an Isabella moment" because of a scene in Measure for Measure where the heroine comes onstage screaming for justice.

I went a little off the rails at the end of my second post here. It’s something that happens from time to time. It used to happen a lot in the years after I left The New Yorker. The first ten or fifteen years. It happened a lot during the fall of 2017 as well, after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, when everyone in the world was suddenly talking about something I’d been obsessed with decades before but hadn’t thought about in years.

That phenomenon, where you go a little off the rails, just very briefly, is something I call having “an Isabella moment.” I call it that because of a scene toward the end of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s play about sexual harassment, where the heroine comes onstage screaming for justice.

    O worthy prince dishonor not your eye
    By throwing it on any other object
    Till you have heard me in my true complaint
    And given me justice, justice, justice, justice.

Isabella is the young woman in Measure for Measure whose brother has been sentenced to death and who gets sent to plead for his life. The judge offers to issue a pardon if she will have sex with him.

See how she sounds a little unhinged in that speech I quoted above—just at the end there? She sort of is. She isn’t like Lear on the heath or Ophelia in the “mad scene.” But she’s gone on tilt for a second.

An “Isabella moment” is where you go off the rails just long enough to do or say something that will seem crazy—before you think better of it. Sometimes you start to think better of it before you’ve even finished saying or doing the crazy thing.

Measure for Measure is an amazing if problematic play. It’s actually considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” though that’s more because it’s hard to categorize than because of certain troubling aspects of the plot. It’s a play about consent that seems to have trouble understanding consent, a play in which one woman insists that her chastity is more important than her brother’s life and another is happy to be paired off at the end with a fairly rapey and murderous guy. It’s also a play that uses “the bed trick,” a plot device in which one woman is substituted for another in a dark trysting place, so it’s a play that relies on the premise that women are interchangeable. (Also that it would be possible to have sex with someone and not have any idea who they were.)

Measure for Measure is full of swell lines and swell scenes, but it intrigues me chiefly as a blueprint for what happens in a real-life sexual harassment scenario.

In real life, the harasser is in a position of greater authority than the woman being harassed, or else he has more standing, so the community they both inhabit has more of a stake in his life and career than in hers.

This is true in Measure for Measure too. The corrupt judge, Angelo, who will try to sell Isabella her brother’s life in exchange for sex, is the lawgiver. He’s the guy who has been left in charge by the Duke of Vienna, who has disappeared, telling everybody he’s off to travel in foreign lands.

Another thing that’s true of the real-life sexual harasser: he is usually cloaked in virtue—or the modern equivalent, which is domesticity. He is nearly always a happily married family man and as such is above reproach.

This is true in Measure for Measure too. Angelo isn’t married, but he has a reputation for uncommon asceticism. He is “a man of stricture and firm abstinence” who “scarce confesses that his blood flows or that his appetite is more to bread than stone.”

I wrote about these two aspects of sexual harassment in “A Likely Story,” that essay I wrote on Medium. I said that sexual harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about getting away with something.

It’s about seeming to be one sort of person, a “pillar of the community”— responsible, dignified, respectable, a family man, a liberal, a progressive, Presidential, whatever—while really being A Very Bad Boy. That’s exciting for some men. Not the being bad part. The getting-away-with-it part. It isn’t just about power over individuals, the women you victimize. It’s about power over society and the court of public opinion.… Deep down these guys know they can get away with what they do, and that’s what thrills them: it’s what gets them off.

This is essentially what Angelo says to Isabella when she threatens to unmask him.

    Who will believe thee, Isabel?
    My unsoil’d name, the austereness of my life,
    My vouch against you, and my place i’ the state,
    Will so your accusation overweigh,
    That you shall stifle in your own report
    And smell of calumny. …
    Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true.

Something else I wrote about in “A Likely Story”:  sexual harassers nearly always target single women, and there’s a reason for that.

The single or man-less woman is always vulnerable to whispers and innuendoes of instability and/or predatory motives. The assumption is that she wants a man or that the fact that she hasn’t got one is somehow suspect.

Think Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, the stereotypical addled unmarried female in a male screenwriter’s fantasy of sexual harassment.

Which brings us to the fourth way in which Measure for Measure is true to life: the harasser who needs to discredit a woman can always do so by saying that she is crazy. And he can do it in a single line of pentameter—as Angelo does in the climactic final scene: “My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm…”.

Because it’s a problem play and not a tragedy, nothing very bad happens in Measure for Measure. Isabella is not forced to sleep with Angelo (thanks to “the bed trick”), and her brother Claudio is not executed.

What keeps bad things from happening is the fact that the putatively absent Duke has not really disappeared. He’s been hanging around Vienna in disguise controlling everything, controlling everybody, staging scenes and proposing dialogue—like a show-runner. Or a playwright. He’s the one who proposes the “bed trick,” he’s the one who comes up with the ruse that allows Angelo to think that Claudio has been beheaded.

And in the last stretch of the play, the Duke contrives a scenario whereby Angelo will be exposed. He advises Isabella to make her accusation publicly. Something he keeps from her, though, is the fact that her brother is really still alive. He leads her to believe that Angelo had Claudio executed while thinking that Isabella kept her side of the bargain.

The sadism of this deception is often remarked upon. It’s unnecessary and inexplicable, and people love to point that out. The fact is, though, that it creates a reason for Isabella to be half out of her mind at the play’s climax.

This too seems to me true to life and brilliantly insightful about how sexual harassment works—the fact that by the time Angelo tries to discredit Isabella by saying that she’s crazy, she kind of is.

Of course, there’s an important way in which the play does not resemble a real-life sexual harassment scenario. In real life there is no benevolent authority figure like the Duke of Vienna overseeing and controlling everything.