Measure by Measure, or, The Coalition in Secret Session! (1871)

Author Unknown

Acadian school in Petit-Rocher, 1888

This adaptation, though it borrows its name from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure , is really a mish-mash of embellished quotes and scenes from Shakespeare's oeuvre interspersed within a political satire lampooning the personalities and political intrigue surrounding New Brunswick's Common Schools Act of 1871.

The historical context of the Common Schools Act is the passing of the British North America Act in 1867, which marked the confederation of Canada. At that time the Canadian nation included only New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario. England was in the process of unburdening itself of those of its colonies, like Canada, who it saw as already picked-clean of profitable resources and who were thus becoming financial and logistical burdens on an already over-extended British Empire. But if Britain was ready to give up financial control of Canada, it wasn't willing to forego its ideological influence over its newly "privatized" colony.

The British North America Act (BNA Act), which was signed by Queen Victoria, put renewed pressure on the newly independent British colony to assert its own identity, but still very much in relation to mother England. The New Brunswick Common Schools Act of 1871, which passed into law only four years after confederation and later became the Public Schools Act, was thus following a trend throughout the newly formed provinces of Canada towards a more unified, assimilated public school system that effectively outlawed French, Catholic, or any other "sectarian" influences in favour of assimilation into a non-sectarian (which really meant a British Anglophone) institutional model. Other essentially anti-French, anti-Catholic legislation of the period included PEI's Public School Act of 1877 that outlawed French schools, and Manitoba's outlawing of French in 1890 (http://www.ezresult.com/article/History_of_Quebec).

This anti-Francophone, British-Anglo-centric Common Schools Act was justified by the British ruling class who called it their duty as "the governing body to make provision for the education of every child" (William Crane, Speaker of the House of Assembly of New Brunswick in 1871, quoted in Smith 145; emphasis added). This meant, however, that every child, in order to get an education, had to be made into a British child. The French and French Acadian population of New Brunswick saw the Act as a thinly veiled attempt to assimilate their culture and all other non-British non-Anglophone cultures into the British hegemonic system under the BNA Act. This enraged the French Acadian population of New Brunswick who had already survived a Great Dispersion at the hands of the British ruling authority in 1755, which amounted to the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Acadian culture through the destruction of their homes, the splitting up and deportation of their families, and the confiscation of their land and property by the British government.

The Acadian population that survived the great dispersion saw the 1871 Common Schools Act, therefore, as a continuation of the "ethnic cleansing" of French culture from "British North America." The French Acadian population of Caraquet New Brunswick, for example, outnumbered their Anglophone neighbours 80% to 20%. And yet their virulent protests against the Common Schools Act, which started with a boycott of the imposed direct school tax and eventually led to the 1871 Caraquet Riots during which two Acadians were shot and killed by the police, did nothing to stop the bill's easy passage through parliament.

In the context of the Common School Act's underlying political agenda of British cultural assimilation, Measure by Measure's adaptation of Shakespeare to satirize the political intrigue surrounding the Act is particularly ironic given the (at the time) dominant traditional view of Shakespeare as "the ultimate guarantor of greatness and aesthetic [and linguistic] value, the backdrop against which 'English thought' is diffused through [this worldview's] intertextual influence on subsequent writers [and] as a sign of imperial culture" (Fischlin and Fortier, Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare, 10).

Measure by Measure was published in serial form in five parts between February 25 to April 8, 1871 in the New Dominion and True Humorist, a local New Brunswick newspaper. As Mary Elizabeth Smith explains in her introduction to the play in Canadian Drama, "the editorial stance of The New Dominion was consistent with the acerbic tone of the play it contained, like the play seeming to take offense with what it judged the duplicity of the supporters of the [Common Schools] Bill even more than with the issue itself: 'It is well known that Mr. King has been a long time talking buncombe regarding the question of Education, but the public are not aware of his deep cunning, and the modus operandi of his present object in effectually burking it'" (146).

In fact, the way in which the play satirizes the politicians George E. King and George Hathaway, the main proponents of the bill, seems to sidestep the very cultural and linguistic issues that made the 1871 Common Schools Act so historically controversial. This "containment" of the argument within a British, Anglophone worldview is evident in the way Measure by Measure adapts its language and poetic structure from Shakespeare's oeuvre, thus basing its humour and inter-textual/cultural references exclusively on British "high" cultural references. For example, the text is written in iambic pentameter verse and is split into five sections, roughly following the form of Shakespeare's plays. The opening speech, made by a member of the coalition that supported the Common Schools Act, is an adaptation of the opening speech of Richard III, and thus construes the political intrigue surrounding the passing of the Act as a kind of evil, violent power-play by ruthless and tyrannical political climbers:

KELEE: Now is the Winter of our discontent
Made glorious Summer by this son of York [(referring to George L. Hathaway, Provincial Secretary, from York County, and a member of the coalition)],
And all the clouds that lower'd upon our House [(House of Assembly)]
Scattered forever by this Coalition.
Now may Gough's [(referring to Jacob Carver Gough, leader of the Opposition and opponent of the school bill)] brow wrinkle with heavy frowns,
Georgell and Stephey stand as monuments
Of hateful treachery. What do we reck –
'Twas neck or nothing, and we chose the neck. (173)

The members of the coalition are satirically portrayed here as "monuments of hateful treachery" who would risk their political "necks" to climb the parliamentary ladder. They are also described throughout the text as avid card-players and perpetual drinkers. Later on in scene IV, the coalition is said to have secured The Telegraph, a rival local newspaper to the New Dominion that supported the school bill. In an adaptation of The Tempest, The Telegraph is described as being like a Caliban whom the coalition has captured and trained to act as their "mouth-piece" and help them in their political "magic arts" (181) to secure the passing of the Common Schools Act.

Not only does Measure by Measure exclusively use Shakespearean intertextual references, thus pitching its argument to a British bourgeois audience's concept of "cultural distinction," or cultural value, but it also "contains" its attack on the 1871 Common Schools Act neatly within the political and cultural architecture of the British parliamentary system. In other words, what the play critiques is not the Common Schools Act itself, but rather the character and morality – judged by British standards – of the actions of the "coalition" that was formed by King, who is painted as a conniving "Richard III" who tries to avoid a non-confidence vote against his government in order to ensure the bill's passage.

What is left un-critiqued, however, is the way in which the New Brunswick parliamentary system itself, modelled at that time after the British North America Act, effectively excluded the voices of non-Anglophone, non-British voters in determining the ideological shape of the New Brunswick school system. Measure by Measure 's adaptation of Shakespeare can therefore be read as an exemplary cultural narrative in the early discursive imagining of Canadian nationhood.

Don Moore

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Sources:

Benson, Eugene, and L.W. Conolly. English-Canadian Theatre. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987.