Measure for measure: original and actual place of setting
Thepresent project entails an investigation on the eventual change of setting of Shakespeare’splay Measure for Measure. The keys to resolve this task were found withinthe text itself and in some extra linguistic and historical facts surrounding theappearance of the First Folio, occurred not until 1623. Before taking into considerationevery single fact witnessing for the text review let’s think about what collocationShakespeare might have adopted for this particular play. Let’s remember that theplay’s main points are lechery, hypocrisy, hard bargain, violation of law, all whatwas associated with the Italy of that time. Now, here there is the list of textualdiscrepancies that were suggested by the two major Middleton’s scholars Gary Taylorand John Jowett:
Personaelist made of Italian names;
Dialogueof Lucio with a soldier about king of Hungary;
Thenews sheets talking about troops progression1;
Mrs.Overdone remark about political situation in the country and danger to have herbrothel demolished;
Structural discrepanciesinclude:
Actdivision characteristic for the later tradition;
Mariana’ssong seeming irrelevant to the play’s style and plot.
Theimportance of this investigation consists in revelation of original play’s circumstances.The time and place-bound circumstances are important if not essential markers in theatricaldiscourse. Gary Taylor 2 asserts that “spectators in the early seventeenthcentury, like their modern counterparts, could not have avoided reading the play’saction in terms of its setting”. Even without stage scenery, the play’s settingis a signifier. Setting is a part of what Keir Elam 3 identifiesas “the semiotics of theatre”, it is a part of a moral, symbolic, ideological, and“poetic geography”. For any early audience the setting has been part of visual experience.Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that inhabitants of different parts of Europedressed differently than Englishmen; and accordingly acting companies indicatedgeographical and cultural identity by characteristic peculiarities of costume.
Thereis little information as to what the King’s Men company used as the scenery andcostumes but the text itself suggests that the story is supposed to have happenedin Vienna. The word “Vienna” is spoken twice in the very first scene of Measureand is repeated again in the next scenes. But the name of this city for the originalaudience would have said little if anything at all. IfVienna meant anythingparticular in England in the period up to 1604, it was rather an “exposed outpostof Europe, the eastern bastion of Latin Christendom”1. The point isthat Vienna was constantly under the Turkish threat throughout the 16thcentury. Things became more complicated as Hungary and Bohemia were involved inthese wars. In John Spielman’s book there is a detailed description of the eventsconnected with the city of Vienna. It gives an account on the Turkish invasions:
Turkssmashed the Hungarian armies that had engaged without waiting for reinforcements.The Emperor [Ferdinand I] immediately pressed his claim to the thrones of Hungaryand Bohemia (1526-1564) as the husband of the dead [Hungarian] king’s sister, Anna.The inheritance brought with it the obligation to defend it all against the Turkishonslaught …Ottomans stopped before the city’s gates, in 1529…… 2.p.20
Thereare allusions to that famous siege in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great andJonson’s Every Man in his Humour. According to the chroniclesofthe city of Vienna, a further Ottoman attack on Vienna was repelled in 1533. In thatyear Ferdinand signed a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, splitting the Kingdomof Hungary into a Habsburg sector in the west and John Zápolya's domain inthe east, the latter practically a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. And “hostilities betweenthe Turks and the Holy Roman Empire have recommenced in 1591 and persisted tillthe very end of the seventeenth century” 3. Shakespeare could not havepossibly left this subject without attention as Islamic expansion was the subjectof real anxiety in Elizabethan England. Nevertheless, despite Shakespeare’s generalinterest in such matters (see the references to Turks or Moors in Othelloand other plays), and despite the specific reputation of Vienna, there is not asingle reference to Turks in Measure.
Fromthe previous analysis on the semiotics of the text we know that the setting hasthe pragmatic significance, especially for an early reader, so we must admit alsothat the place of action is to be of much importance in political, social and culturalterms at least to the moment of the first performance and be extremely relevantto general message of the play. Consequently, the setting was not a random choicefrom all possible world’s geographical points. However, it seems unlikely that Viennawas of great importance for British Isles by the time Shakespeare first staged it.
TheEnglish public had little access to news about central and eastern Europe untilthe beginning of the Thirty Years War, in 1618. This led to the creation of thefirst printed news serials. The “Early History of the English Newspaper” reports thatnot until the early 17th century did news begin to be printed more regularlywithin periodical publications in England.
Newsperiodicals were established in several countries in continental Europe soon after1600, but a Star Chamber decree of 1586 forbade the publication of news in England.The first news periodicals in English, called corantos, were printed in Amsterdam.The earliest surviving coranto, The New Tydings Out of Italie Are Not yet Come,dated 2 December 1620, is a single sheet printed on both sides with news ofthe Thirty Years War then raging in Europe. Less than a year later, the first corantoto be printed in England appeared. The first surviving issue, Corante, or Newesfrom Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France, dated 24 September 1621, containscontinental news translated from a German original 1.
Theeconomy of Vienna was in decline during the period of the wars2. Thecity’s intellectual life experienced a similar erosion. Enea Silvio, a noble youngTuscan and later Pope Pius II came to Vienna in 1437. In a famous letter about theViennese, he commented on their self-satisfaction, superstition, and crude manners3.Perhapsfor that reason, Vienna by the 1600s had not yet developed a distinctiveurban identity and therefore could not be considered the place worth setting theplay in. It merely provided any implicit information to the plot of a play. Itappears that no book of the period refers to the city of Vienna in other purposethan that concerning the Turks’ invasion4, mentioned earlier. As Marcus affirms, until the beginningof the seventeenth century Austria was associated with the war against Islam.
Thereis one sound reason for which Measure could have been originally setin Vienna. According to the editor of the Cambridge edition of Measure for Measure,Brian Gibbons5, Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor, was trying to turnProtestant Hungary into Catholicism, but failed to do this because of successfulrevolt. So, Catholic extremism of Vienna was devised as an allusion to Puritan extremismin England (English Puritans advocated death penalty for fornication). The Puritanlaw was still in vigour when the First Folio has been prepared for publication.The editor, whoever he might be, had to think carefully about the contents of theplay before its publication, because, according to the proclamation of May 1599,any open discussion of religious or political matters in the theatre was prohibited1.The play, then, would have not been allowed. Otherwise, the play had tobe set somewhere else, far from London. Gibbons’ hypothesis, however, is definitelynot enough to state that Shakespeare had actually chosen Vienna as the location,also because the capital of the Empire had been moved from Vienna to Prague in 1583,and it stayed in Prague until 1611.
Tounderstand why scholars have had the suspicions about the original setting of theplay we should examine the history of the text and theatre tradition of that time.Measure is supposed to have been written and performed in 1603-1604. On St.Stephen’s night, 26 December 1604, the King’s Men staged it as part of the Christmasfestivities at the Whitehall Banquet Hall. Measure first appeared in theShakespeare First Folio of 1623. And it is plausible that it was written by WilliamShakespeare. There are evidences that the oaths and similar expressions were cutoff the text after the 1606 Act of Parliament that “restrained abuses of playersand made blasphemy on stage illegal”2. Any metrical irregularity or discontinuityin sense might be result of cutting. Another curious fact is that Shakespeare wrotehis plays without dividing them in acts. The act division was introduced after about1609, when the King’s Men began to play at the Blackfriars. An attentive readermight notice the sudden change of tone of the play and its concentration on theplot’s general frame nearly in the middle of the play, after act III. Act IV openswith the one and only song in Measure, “Take, O take those lipsaway”. This song occurs in Fletcher’s tragedy Rollo, Duke of Normandy (1617-1620).The source text is supposed to be the Latin lyric “Ad Lydiam”. The song conformsthematically to this play. The Fletcher play’s issue dates are significant as theplay was written more than a decade later than the Measure is supposed tohave been written and coincide with the date of Measure’s probable revival.Supposedly, the editor of Measure has not used the primary source but readthe contemporary Rollo, Duke of Normandy and loaned the song there.
Thesong in Measure is a formal marker and affirms the new turning point. Scholarsalso believe that some passages were dislocated, some repartees of Lucio were attributedto Angelo and similar changes occurred in the text3. For example, theshort dialogue of Mariana and Isabella just after the song seems quite irrelevantto its immediate context. The song highlights the romantic spirit and can not beinserted so easily into the context of vice or corruption, justice or mercy, sexualcrime and its punishment. So, the song occurs in other texts, attributed to otherplaywrights. It was not Shakespeare’s habitude to employ entire passages belongingto other works, but his colleagues had actually used such techniques.
Alltogether this incoherence is due to the fact that seems obvious: the play was edited(according to modern critics and scholars) by Thomas Middleton 1 and issued in1623 “to make the play topical and appropriate to the style of the theatrein the early 1620’s” 2. The adaptation concerned the structure of theplay and introduced act intervals. Moreover, the revival also concerned the play’ssetting and adaptations of the text itself, provoked by such a significant change.
Let’srefer to the text. Lucio’s first speech occurs in a passage that might be writtenby Middleton, and not Shakespeare. Different independent surveys recognize thatthe first part of I.2 must be a later addition to the text. But how much later?Our only text of Measure was published in 1623. It had been set into typeand run through the press sometime in 1622. The manuscript from which it was printedwas prepared by the scribe Ralph Crane, who began working for the King’s Men in1619 3. It means it was published posthumously.Thus, Lucio’sremark about Hungary occurs in a text not printed until 1622, from a manuscriptnot in existence earlier than 1619.
Lucioand other gentleman say:
Lucio.If the Duke, with the other Dukes4, come not to composition with theKing of Hungary, why then all the dukes fall upon the King.
1 Gent.Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungary’s! I.2.1-5
Onthis speech Lucio assumes that the Duke is absent on a political mission which maydecide the question of peace and war. There were no peace negotiations under wayto “come to composition”5 with the “King of Hungary” in 1603-4. The passageseems to make sense only as a
referenceto something outside the play’s world. Some scholars tried to explain that the passagealludes to Corvinus King of Hungary in one of Shakespeare’s probable sources, butthe King of Hungary in that source is not engaged in negotiations with “the duke,and other dukes”, nor is there any threat of war.
In1986 the Oxford Shakespeare identified Middleton as the probable author of the addedmaterial. And the Oxford edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton1provides Middleton’sauthorship of that passage and three other passages.
1Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) — «our other Shakespeare» — is the onlyother Renaissance playwright who created lasting masterpieces of both comedy andtragedy; he also wrote the greatest box-office hit of early modern London (the uniquehistory play A Game at Chess). His range extends beyond these traditional genresto tragicomedies, masques, pageants, pamphlets, epigrams, and Biblical and politicalcommentaries, written alone or in collaboration with Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker,Ford, Heywood, Rowley, and others. Compared by critics to Aristophanes and Ibsen,Racine and Joe Orton, he has influenced writers as diverse as Aphra Behn and T.S. Eliot. Though repeatedly censored in his own time, he has since come to be particularlyadmired for his representations of the intertwined pursuits of sex, money, power,and God.
Atthe opening of I.2 of Measure Middleton emphasizes the significance of Viennato the moment of the revival, as the seat of the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II,and as a city in war. By 1621 Vienna was again the capital of the Holy Roman Empire.Ferdinand II was known to London audience as the leader of the Catholic campaignagainst Protestant countries of central Europe. The Emperor deposed the Protestantdaughter and son-in-law of King James. The King sent three diplomatic missions toVienna in 1619, in 1620 and in 1623. John Jowett has recently discovered an exactsource for Lucio’s remarks about dukes and the King of Hungary in a printed Englishnewsletter published on 6 October 1621. The printed news sheets reported that theKing of Hungary was near Vienna. This news and the possibility of war were debatedin the English Parliament. The war that took place – the Thirty Years War, involveda greater part of Europe and threatened England. It is commonly divided in periods:/>The Bohemian Phase, />The Palatinate Phase, The Danish Phase, The Swedish Phase and The French Phase of the ThirtyYears War and it officially ends on 24 October, 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.Thoughpre-eminently a German war, it was also of great importance for the history of thewhole of Europe, not only because nearly all the countries of Western Europe tookpart in it, but also on account of its connection with the other great Europeanwars of the same period and on account of its final results. The series of conflicts,military and political, which make up the Thirty Years War are highly complex.
TheCollected Works of Thomas Middleton and its companion volumeThomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture provide an essential guideto matters at the heart of the English literary world in the early seventeenth century,from authorship and collaboration to censorship, civic pageantry, and the Londonbook trade.-James Shapiro.
Backgroundto the Thirty Years War
Afterthe Peace of Augsburg in 1555 Lutheranism had been given official recognition inthe Holy Roman Empire. Lands of the Roman Church which had previously been takenby secular powers belonged again to the Church. German rulers could also imposetheir religion on their subjects. However, the Peace agreement did not help to settlethe conflict in Germany. A number of rulers became Calvinists and were, thus, outsidethe treaty. Protestants continued to take over Catholic properties, particularlyin North Germany. The Catholics commanded a majority in most of the organs of government;the Protestants came to distrust these bodies and the machinery of government beganto break down. The Catholics and Protestants formed armed alliances to preservetheir rights: the Catholic League under Maximilian I of Bavaria and the ProtestantUnion under Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate (James’s son-in- law).
Atthe beginning of the seventeenth century the regions ruled by the German Habsburgsincluded Upper and Lower Austria, Bohemia together with Moravia and Silesia, thelesser part of Hungary which had not been conquered by the Turks, Styria, Carinthia,Carniola, the Tyrol, and the provinces bordering on Germany. This territory, however,was divided among three branches of the family, the main line, the Styrian, andthat of Tyrol-Vorarlberg. Although the main line of the German Habsburgs held thelarger part of these landed possessions yet its territories did not form a compactwhole, but were only a number of loosely connected countries, each having its ownprovincial estates, which were largely composed of nobles. Having been constantlyin opposition to the dynasty, the nobles desired religious freedom, that is theright to become Protestant and to introduce Protestantism into their domains. Thestruggle of the nobility against the dynasty reached its height during the lastdecade of the reign of Rudolph II (1576-1612). Even at that time the nobility maintainedrelations with the active Protestant party in the empire. In 1604 the Hungariannobles revolted with the aid of the ruler of Transylvania, and in 1607 they rebelledagain and became the allies of the Turks. On 25 June, 1608, Rudolph was obligedto transfer the government of Hungary, Austria, and Moravia to his more compliantbrother Matthias; he did not, however, give up his rights as King of Bohemia, andin 1609 was able to pacify an outbreak of the Bohemian nobility only by grantingthe Imperial Charter (Majestätsbrief) which gave religious libertynot only to the nobles and their dependents in Bohemia but also to those livingon the crown lands. This concession greatly strengthened the power of the nobles.
TheBohemian Phase
TheBohemian Phase of the war is obviously more relevant to the present research asit involves the historical figures implicitly mentioned in the play. This phaseencompassed the years 1618 through 1621. Official cause of this conflict was theDefenestration act.
Thereligious situation in Bohemia was complex: the Habsburg rulers were staunch defendersof the Roman Church. The Bohemian population was divided among a Catholic minority(many of them associated with the Habsburg court) and various types of Protestants.The most radical leaders of the Protestant nobility and representatives of theiroverlord Matthias II, Holy Roman Emperor, leader of the Habsburg House of Austria,met on 22 May 1618. They determined to confront the regents on the following day.It was at that meeting that the regents (and a clerk in their employ) were flungfrom the window in the “Defenestration of Prague.”
Matthias,like Rudolph, had no son and the Royal Family chose as his successor Ferdinand,the head of the Styrian branch of the Habsburgs, who had restored Catholicism inStyria. In 1617 the dynasty persuaded the Bohemians to accept Ferdinand as theirfuture king, and in 1618 they prevailed upon the Hungarians to elect him king. Beforethis (May, 1618) the Bohemian nobles had revolted anew under the leadership of Countvon Thurn on account of the alleged infringement of the charter granted by Rudolph.The dynasty was not yet ready for war. When Matthias died (March, 1619) the Hungariansand the inhabitants of Moravia joined the revolt, and in June Thurn advanced onVienna with an army to persuade also the Austrians to join. However, Ferdinand preventedthe insurrection and Thurn withdrew. Ferdinand was now able to go to Frankfurt,where his election as Emperor (28 August) secured the imperial dignity for his family.Two days before this the Bohemians had elected the leader of the Protestants, Frederickof the Palatinate, as rival King of Bohemia.
Theinhabitants of Lower Austria now joined the revolt. Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania(an administrative district of Hungary), made an alliance with its leaders, andin “composition” with them once more threatened Vienna at the close of 1619.Since this moment, however, discipline steadily declined in the Bohemian army, andthe leaders disagreed. The expected aid was never received from the Protestant party,excepting that a few of the less important nobles of the empire joined the revoltingforces. On the other hand, in October 1619, Ferdinand obtained the help of Maximilianof Bavaria, who had the largest army in the Empire, and of the Protestant Electorof Saxony. Spain and Poland also sent troops. Maximilian so greatly terrified theProtestant party, which since 1608 had formed the Union, that it was broken up.He then advanced into Bohemia supported by Austrian troops and decisively defeatedthe Bohemians in the battle of the White Mountain, near Prague. The Elector Frederick,called the «Winter King» on account of the brief duration of his rule,fled. Ferdinand took possession of his provinces and restored order there.
TheNews from the Eastern Europe
Thewar with Transylvania, however, was carried on with interruptions until 1626. Asa gesture of defiance towards the Emperor’s title of King ofHungary, Bethlen was elected King in 1620. His troops made incursions against Austrianstrongholds in Bohemia, and into Austria itself, and by mid-September 1621 theylay within sight of the walls of Vienna.
Thecirculation of news-sheets of 1621 in London announcing the troops’ progress hadbeen obviously the real source for the Middleton’s adaptation. Anyhow, on 6 OctoberBethlen started the negotiation for a separate peace with the Emperor and by 13December the Treaty of Nikolsbourg was signed. So, if the news sheet was issuedon October 6, Middleton was writing at a time when the outcome was uncertain. KingJames and others in England were unquiet for the alliance between James’s son-in-lawFrederick and Bethlen, as the prince was supported by the Turks, and they were generallyanxious for peace.
Someother testimony for adaptation
Thetestimony that Measure had been creatively remade is reinforced by the referencesto piracy. The actual Vienna, unlike London, was not a maritime city. Accordingly,the possibility of pirates was excluded. Meanwhile trade routs to England passedthrough the Low Countries, washed by the sea. The opening lines refer to pirates:
LucioThou concludes’t like the sanctimonious pirate,
Thatwent to sea with the Ten Commandments, but
Scrap’done out of the table
I.ii.7-9
Onlyin 1609 did pirates become a regular menace to English shipping. In 1620, Sir RobertMansell was appointed General of the Fleet destined to chastise the Algerine pirates,who still continued their depredations on the shipping in the Channel1.Between 22 September and 21 October of 1621 Sir Robert Mansellwas at sea leadingan expedition against pirates in the Mediterranean. In October 57 British merchantships were captured by pirates. This ambiguity of messages proves that the authorwas trying to create a city that would refer a reader/spectator to both Vienna andLondon. The news from the war (associated with Vienna) and the allusion to piracy(associated with London) introduce the two cities simultaneously. One more evidencein favor of the text modification is found in the passage of Mistress Overdone whomentions the “poverty” in I.ii.78 which may refer to the economic depression of1619-1624, the severest England had experienced by that time.
Mistress.Overdone Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat,
Whatwith the gallows, and what with poverty, I am
Custom-shrunk.
I.ii.75-77
Wherethen did Shakespeare set in?
Shakespeare,writing Measure, was thinking of Italy, not Germany. Although throughoutthe play the duke is not attributed a proper name, the personae list calls the Duke”Vincentio”, a common Italian name Shakespeare used for an Italian character inhis Taming of the Shrew. “Lucio” is also an Italian name, used in Romeoand Juliet, and of course Juliet too. “Claudio”, “Isabella”, “Angelo”, “Marianna”and “Bernardine” are also names given elsewhere to specifically Italian characters.The prisoner with the unique non Italian name Ragozine is a pirate. Although Escalusis not typically Italian, it is a Latin name. Middleton presumably left all otherItalian names because changing them would have required profound correction of theplay.
Furthermore,vineyards are mentioned three times. Like other Renaissance Englishmen, Shakespeareassociated wine with Italy, not Austria. Italy was also notorious for lechery andprostitution. Prostitution and sexuality are the main vices associated with thecity portrayed in Measure. On the contrary, according to the stereotype thatwas current at the time, the Germans and northern Europeans were less lecherous.
Weknow for sure that Shakespeare read Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s popular bookEcatommiti1and used Tale 85 for Measure. Some scholarsare convinced he used some material from Tale 56 and was particularly influencedby the role in that story of a “Duke of Ferrara”. The book was written while Cinthiowas living in Ferrara. In the sixteenth century, under the patronage of the Estefamily, the independent city of Ferrara rivaled and in many ways surpassedFlorence as the centre of Italian literary culture. The Duke of Ferrara was a patronof both Tasso and Guarini, who together created a model of tragicomedy that beganto influence English drama, including, in particular, Measure, at the verybeginning of the seventeenth century. Obviously the city might be appreciated forsuch achievements in literature and art. Not only Shakespeare but Middleton himselfset his Phoenix, performed at Court in February 1604, in Ferrara. This playincludes a Duke of Ferrara as well. Marston’s character the Duke of Ferrara hasmuch in common with Vincentio. Ferrara is mentioned as well in Shakespeare and JohnFletcher All is True III.2. 324 (in the passage usually attributed to Shakespeare).
So,the evidence for Italian Ferrara is particularly strong. It grows even strongerin view of the fact that the word Ferrara is metrically similar to Vienna and thatit could have been substituted easily without changing the verse.
Conclusions
There are reasons to suppose that Shakespeare set the play in Italian Ferrara and that Middleton changed the setting in order to establish the Thirty Years War as a backdrop. So, the first part of the present research makes an attempt to reject the adopted (in the First Folio) setting in the German city of Vienna, while the second part aims to ascertain the original setting. Some direct or indirect evidences for the eventual adaptation include:
1. Shakespeare's 1603-04 audience would not have had any particular association with Vienna; indeed, Measure for Measure is the only English play written before 1660 that is set in Vienna. Vienna was known primarily as “the principall Bulwarke of all Christendome against the Turke,” yet Shakespeare makes no reference to Turks, Moors, or Ottomans in the play.
2. The play contains several obvious signs of revision including:
— systematic expurgation consistent with 1608 Act to Restrain Abuses by Players;
— act divisions;
— a stanza of a Fletcher’s song that was written between 1617 and 1620.
3. An October 1621 English newsletter describing the King of Hungary's advance on Vienna provides a basis for Lucio’s remark about the Dukes coming “not to composition with the King of Hungary...”, and the first gentleman’s rejoinder “Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungaries”.
4. The Italian names of the characters suggest that the play’s original setting was in Italy, and Shakespeare’s audience would have associated the city’s sexual licentiousness with Italy, not Germany.
5. The use of Ferrara was a common setting for other plays of the same period.
6. “Ferrara” has the same metrical structure as “Vienna”.
Universita’degli studi di roma “tor vergata” facolta’ di lettere efilosofia
Corsodi Laurea Magistrale in
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WilliamShakespeare
MEASUREFOR MEASURE: ORIGINAL AND ACTUAL PLACE OF SETTING
Curatore:Prof.ssa Daniela Guardamagna Studente: Usova Anna, LLEA LS 1 a. a 2008/2009