Design and Structure in Measure for Measure

Twentieth century Shakespearean scholarship has made its most serious and most damaging mistake, I think, in its very nearly successful attempt to reduce the meaning and significance of Measure for Measure either to that of a religious homily or to the special and local Jacobean emphases in the play. Some rather obvious contemporary (and atemporal) feelings and attitudes, religious and secular, both of Shakespeare and of his age, are undoubtedly discoverable in Measure for lieasure. Indeed, this play was almost certainly Shakespeare's first new comedy to be presented by the recently licensed King's men before the new monarch, James I, for his solace and pleasure, as James' patent of 1603 had phrased it. Presumably, therefore, Shakespeare, (no romantic in such things) considered both the intellectual content of his comedy and its dramatic structure with unusual care. One might even guess that part of his intention, in altering his principal source Prominos and Cassandra into Mieasure for Measure, was to force new meanings from Whetstone's old play as part of a private estimate of James' taste in comedy. Certainly Shakespeare's creation of a Duke of Vienna who exercised absolute power in affairs both civil and divine, and who also hated the Aves of the people, touched on wellknown Jamesian attitudes, political, theological, and personal. The turning of the play upon the twin obligations of an absolute monarch, justice and mercy, was also sufficiently orthodox and local, no doubt. At this late date, indeed, and after a halfcentury of bemused and contradictory criticism of the play, one might even wish Shakespeare well in his first Jacobean venture, and trust that neither playwright nor acting company

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• Lucio and the balanced structure of measure for measure

  Theodore A Stroud•English Studies•1993

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