A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Shakespeare for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Shakespeare for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535828383

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Measure for Measure

William Shakespeare

1604

Introduction

The first record of performance indicates that Measure for Measure was acted before King James I on December 26, 1604, in the banqueting hall at Whitehall, by Shakespeare's acting company, the King's Men, referred to in the Revels Account as his Maiesties plaiers. In the account, authorship of the play is attributed to Shaxberd. The play was not published until 1623 when it was included in the First Folio, the commemorative volume of his collected plays issued by John Hemminges and Henry Conddell two fellow members of Shakespeare's acting company. The play was probably set from a copy of Shakespeare's own manuscript made by Ralph Crane, scrivener, or secretary-copyist for the King's Men.

The incidents in the story recounted in Measure for Measure are thought to be taken from what might have been an actual historical event. Joseph Macarius, a Hungarian student living in Vienna in the sixteenth century, tells in a letter written to an acquaintance, the story of a wife who submitted to the demands of an Italian magistrate in return for his promise to spare her husband, who was charged with murder. The magistrate, having failed to keep his promise and, having executed her husband nonetheless, the wife complained to the duke, Don Ferdinando de Gonzago. The duke ordered the magistrate to give the widow a dowry and to marry her. That being done, the magistrate was executed.

In 1556, using this incident, Claude Rouillet wrote a bloody, Senecan tragedy, in Latin, called Philanira, which was translated into French in 1563. Three years later, Giraldi Cinthio turned the play into a novella, which he included in his collection of tales called the Hecathommithi. Cinthio also used it as the basis for a play, Epitia, published posthumously in 1583. Cinthio's account was the basis for a play written in English by George Whetstone, in 1578, called Promos and Cassandra, which, along with Whetstone's prose version of this story which appeared in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), probably served as the chief source for Shakespeare in the composition of Measure for Measure.

Measure for Measure has often troubled critics either because of what seemed like its strange, hybrid structure or because of its often disturbing theme of the conflict between sexual license and sexual puritanism. Audiences, during the eighteenth century, apparently were not similarly put off by the play. Despite adaptations like Sir William Davenant's The Law against Lovers (1673), and Charles Gildon's 1700 adaptation, David Stevenson reports in The Achievement of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure that the play was staged forty-six times between 1720 and 1800. In the Victorian era, the play nearly vanished from the London stage, largely because of its content. In the twentieth-century, Measure for Measure became classified, along with All's Well That Ends Well, with which it shares the bed trick, the surreptitious substitution of one woman for another in a guilty assignation, and Troilus and Cressida as a dark comedy or problem play. By the end of the twentieth century, however, Measure for Measure had become a favorite among Shakespeare's plays and one that was frequently staged.

Plot Summary

Act 1, Scene 1

Measure for Measure opens with Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, announcing to Angelo and Escalus that he must leave the city and that in his place he is appointing Angelo his deputy and Escalus, Angelo's second. Escalus is the more learned in the law but Angelo is reputed for his virtue. Angelo protests that he ought to be put to a test before being given such great responsibility, but the