Shakespeare

James could not have been wholly displeased by his players since, a week later, they performed before him Measure for Measure. In this play a ruler, Duke Vincentio, disliking crowds and noise of “applause, and Aues vehement,” pretends to absent himself from his land in order better to survey it. In his absence a rigidly puritanical deputy, Angelo, proves himself unworthy of his superior’s trust. There are enough contemporary allusions here to have occasioned volumes of commentary, not least the resemblance between the Duke and King James himself. The king was known to dislike crowds and “Aues” to the same degree as the imaginary ruler. The unflattering portrayal of the Puritan, Angelo, must be seen in reference to the current controversies involving those sectarians in the new kingdom. That, at least, is how contemporary playgoers would have viewed it. Earlier that year, for example, the king had been presented by the country’s foremost Puritans with a “Millenary Petition,” containing proposals on dogma and ritual that the king rebuffed. The conclusion of the play, in which the Duke redeems those who have been judged guilty, can also be said to reflect current controversies over the privileges of the king. James believed that Parliament depended upon royal grace, and the ending of Measure for Measure can be construed as maintaining the divine right of kings. The title of the play itself may be taken from a sentence from James’s own treatise on divine right, Basilikon Down, in which he writes: “And, above all, let the measure of your love to everyone be according to the measure of his virtue.” The King’s Men were precisely that, the sovereign’s servants, and part of their role was to advertise the virtues of their patron. Since the play is also set in Catholic Vienna, with a Catholic nun as the principal female and the Duke disguising himself as a Catholic friar, Shakespeare seems to be reflecting the increased level of tolerance for those who professed the old faith. It is pertinent, perhaps, that in this play as in Romeo and Juliet and in Much Ado About Nothing, the friar counsels deceit or concealment for the sake of a greater good. Shakespeare seems always to have been preternaturally alert to the prevailing atmosphere of his time. He was such a sensitive instrument in the world that he could not help but reflect everything.

Shakespeare derived some of the story of Measure for Measure from the same source as Othello. This suggests that he had riffled through Cinthio’s Hecatommithi in search of likely plots. An anthology of stories, such as this one, was a mine of gold. When he found this particular plot to be of interest, he looked up an earlier dramatisation of it – George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, written in 1578-to see if there were any extra scenes or characters he might borrow. There were more immediate models to hand, also, since the theme of the ruler in disguise was a popular one in the London playhouses. It is important to grasp the immediacy of Shakespeare’s inspiration. If there were two or three plays using a plot or character that had proved popular, the chances are that he would use them. Even though Measure for Measure is ostensibly set in Vienna, its real setting is early seventeenth-century London with its stews and suburbs, bawds and pandars. It is the world of Southwark and the Globe. Measure for Measure is in part a sketch for King Lear and The Tempest; here the Duke abandons the governance of his dukedom, but the space from this play to King Lear is measured in the shift from comedy to tragedy. It is also worth noticing that the first scenes of the play are also the most inventive. That is frequently the case in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, where he is often most spirited and emboldened at the beginning of each enterprise.

At court, the day after the performance of Measure for Measure, the Earl of Pembroke helped to assemble and present a masque with music entitled Juno and Hymenaeus. The text has not survived, but Pembroke may have obtained some assistance from the king’s leading dramatist. Then, on the next day, The Comedy of Errors was performed. This was followed on 7 January with Henry V. It was something of a Shakespeare festival, marked a day later by a special production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the London house of the Earl of Southampton. This was the play that seems to bear references to the Southampton coterie or “circle” which in previous years had included some of the king’s most fervent supporters. Sir Walter Cope, the Chamberlain of the Exchequer, wrote to Robert Cecil earlier in the month that