Measure for measure: original and actual place of setting
Measure for measure: original and actual place of setting
The
present project entails an investigation on the eventual change of setting of Shakespeare’s
play Measure for Measure. The keys to resolve this task were found within
the text itself and in some extra linguistic and historical facts surrounding the
appearance of the First Folio, occurred not until 1623. Before taking into consideration
every single fact witnessing for the text review let’s think about what collocation
Shakespeare might have adopted for this particular play. Let’s remember that the
play’s main points are lechery, hypocrisy, hard bargain, violation of law, all what
was associated with the Italy of that time. Now, here there is the list of textual
discrepancies that were suggested by the two major Middleton’s scholars Gary Taylor
and John Jowett:
Personae
list made of Italian names;
Dialogue
of Lucio with a soldier about king of Hungary;
The
news sheets talking about troops progression1;
Mrs.
Overdone remark about political situation in the country and danger to have her
brothel demolished;
Structural discrepancies
include:
Act
division characteristic for the later tradition;
Mariana’s
song seeming irrelevant to the play’s style and plot.
The
importance of this investigation consists in revelation of original play’s circumstances.
The time and place-bound circumstances are important if not essential markers in theatrical
discourse. Gary Taylor 2 asserts that “spectators in the early seventeenth
century, like their modern counterparts, could not have avoided reading the play’s
action in terms of its setting”. Even without stage scenery, the play’s setting
is a signifier. Setting is a part of what Keir Elam 3 identifies
as “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 Europe
dressed differently than Englishmen; and accordingly acting companies indicated
geographical and cultural identity by characteristic peculiarities of costume.
There
is little information as to what the King’s Men company used as the scenery and
costumes but the text itself suggests that the story is supposed to have happened
in Vienna. The word “Vienna” is spoken twice in the very first scene of Measure
and is repeated again in the next scenes. But the name of this city for the original
audience would have said little if anything at all. If Vienna meant anything
particular in England in the period up to 1604, it was rather an “exposed outpost
of Europe, the eastern bastion of Latin Christendom”1 . The point is
that Vienna was constantly under the Turkish threat throughout the 16th
century. Things became more complicated as Hungary and Bohemia were involved in
these wars. In John Spielman’s book there is a detailed description of the events
connected with the city of Vienna. It gives an account on the Turkish invasions:
Turks
smashed the Hungarian armies that had engaged without waiting for reinforcements.
The Emperor [Ferdinand I] immediately pressed his claim to the thrones of Hungary
and 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 Turkish
onslaught …Ottomans stopped before the city’s gates, in 1529….. 2.
p.20
There
are allusions to that famous siege in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great and
Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour. According to the chronicles of
the city of Vienna, a further Ottoman attack on Vienna was repelled in 1533. In that year
Ferdinand signed a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, splitting the
Kingdom of Hungary into a Habsburg sector in the west and John Zápolya's
domain in the east, the latter practically a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.
And “hostilities between the Turks and the Holy Roman Empire have recommenced
in 1591 and persisted till the very end of the seventeenth century” 3.
Shakespeare could not have possibly left this subject without attention as Islamic
expansion was the subject of real anxiety in Elizabethan England. Nevertheless,
despite Shakespeare’s general interest in such matters (see the references to Turks
or Moors in Othello and other plays), and despite the specific reputation
of Vienna, there is not a single reference to Turks in Measure.
From
the previous analysis on the semiotics of the text we know that the setting has
the pragmatic significance, especially for an early reader, so we must admit also
that the place of action is to be of much importance in political, social and cultural
terms at least to the moment of the first performance and be extremely relevant
to general message of the play. Consequently, the setting was not a random choice
from all possible world’s geographical points. However, it seems unlikely that Vienna
was of great importance for British Isles by the time Shakespeare first staged it.
The
English public had little access to news about central and eastern Europe until
the beginning of the Thirty Years War, in 1618. This led to the creation of the
first printed news serials. The “Early History of the English Newspaper” reports that
not until the early 17th century did news begin to be printed more regularly
within periodical publications in England.
News
periodicals were established in several countries in continental Europe soon after
1600, 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 of
the Thirty Years War then raging in Europe. Less than a year later, the first coranto
to be printed in England appeared. The first surviving issue, Corante, or Newes
from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France, dated 24 September 1621, contains
continental news translated from a German original 1.
The
economy of Vienna was in decline during the period of the wars2. The
city’s intellectual life experienced a similar erosion. Enea Silvio, a noble young
Tuscan and later Pope Pius II came to Vienna in 1437. In a famous letter about the
Viennese, he commented on their self-satisfaction, superstition, and crude manners3.
Perhaps
for that reason, Vienna by the 1600s had not yet developed a distinctive
urban identity and therefore could not be considered the place worth setting the
play in. It merely provided any implicit information to the plot of a play. It
appears that no book of the period refers to the city of Vienna in other purpose
than that concerning the Turks’ invasion4, mentioned earlier. As Marcus affirms, until the beginning
of the seventeenth century Austria was associated with the war against Islam.
There
is one sound reason for which Measure could have been originally set
in Vienna. According to the editor of the Cambridge edition of Measure for Measure,
Brian Gibbons5, Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor, was trying to turn
Protestant Hungary into Catholicism, but failed to do this because of successful
revolt. So, Catholic extremism of Vienna was devised as an allusion to Puritan extremism
in England (English Puritans advocated death penalty for fornication). The Puritan
law 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 the
play 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 to
be set somewhere else, far from London. Gibbons’ hypothesis, however, is definitely
not 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.
To
understand why scholars have had the suspicions about the original setting of the
play 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 Christmas
festivities at the Whitehall Banquet Hall. Measure first appeared in the
Shakespeare First Folio of 1623. And it is plausible that it was written by William
Shakespeare. There are evidences that the oaths and similar expressions were cut
off the text after the 1606 Act of Parliament that “restrained abuses of players
and made blasphemy on stage illegal”2. Any metrical irregularity or discontinuity
in sense might be result of cutting. Another curious fact is that Shakespeare wrote
his plays without dividing them in acts. The act division was introduced after about
1609, when the King’s Men began to play at the Blackfriars. An attentive reader
might notice the sudden change of tone of the play and its concentration on the
plot’s general frame nearly in the middle of the play, after act III. Act IV opens
with the one and only song in Measure, “Take, O take those lips
away”. 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 conforms
thematically to this play. The Fletcher play’s issue dates are significant as the
play was written more than a decade later than the Measure is supposed to
have been written and coincide with the date of Measure’s probable revival.
Supposedly, the editor of Measure has not used the primary source but read
the contemporary Rollo, Duke of Normandy and loaned the song there.
The
song in Measure is a formal marker and affirms the new turning point. Scholars
also believe that some passages were dislocated, some repartees of Lucio were attributed
to Angelo and similar changes occurred in the text3 . For example, the
short dialogue of Mariana and Isabella just after the song seems quite irrelevant
to its immediate context. The song highlights the romantic spirit and can not be
inserted so easily into the context of vice or corruption, justice or mercy, sexual
crime and its punishment. So, the song occurs in other texts, attributed to other
playwrights. It was not Shakespeare’s habitude to employ entire passages belonging
to other works, but his colleagues had actually used such techniques.
Let’s
refer to the text. Lucio’s first speech occurs in a passage that might be written
by Middleton, and not Shakespeare. Different independent surveys recognize that
the 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 type
and run through the press sometime in 1622. The manuscript from which it was printed
was prepared by the scribe Ralph Crane, who began working for the King’s Men in
1619 3. It means it was published posthumously. Thus, Lucio’s
remark about Hungary occurs in a text not printed until 1622, from a manuscript
not in existence earlier than 1619.
Lucio
and other gentleman say:
Lucio.
If the Duke, with the other Dukes4, come not to composition with the
King 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
On
this speech Lucio assumes that the Duke is absent on a political mission which may
decide the question of peace and war. There were no peace negotiations under way
to “come to composition”5 with the “King of Hungary” in 1603-4. The passage
seems to make sense only as a
reference
to something outside the play’s world. Some scholars tried to explain that the passage
alludes to Corvinus King of Hungary in one of Shakespeare’s probable sources, but
the King of Hungary in that source is not engaged in negotiations with “the duke,
and other dukes”, nor is there any threat of war.
In
1986 the Oxford Shakespeare identified Middleton as the probable author of the added
material. And the Oxford edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton1 provides Middleton’s
authorship of that passage and three other passages.
1
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) - "our other Shakespeare" - is the only
other Renaissance playwright who created lasting masterpieces of both comedy and
tragedy; he also wrote the greatest box-office hit of early modern London (the unique
history play A Game at Chess). His range extends beyond these traditional genres
to tragicomedies, masques, pageants, pamphlets, epigrams, and Biblical and political
commentaries, 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 particularly
admired for his representations of the intertwined pursuits of sex, money, power,
and God.
At
the opening of I.2 of Measure Middleton emphasizes the significance of Vienna
to 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 campaign
against Protestant countries of central Europe. The Emperor deposed the Protestant
daughter and son-in-law of King James. The King sent three diplomatic missions to
Vienna in 1619, in 1620 and in 1623. John Jowett has recently discovered an exact
source for Lucio’s remarks about dukes and the King of Hungary in a printed English
newsletter published on 6 October 1621. The printed news sheets reported that the
King of Hungary was near Vienna. This news and the possibility of war were debated
in the English Parliament. The war that took place – the Thirty Years War, involved
a 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 Thirty
Years War and it officially ends on 24 October, 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.
Though
pre-eminently a German war, it was also of
great importance for the history of the whole of Europe, not only because
nearly all the countries of Western Europe took part in it,
but also on account of its connection with the other great European wars 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.
The
Collected Works of Thomas Middleton and its companion volume
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture provide an essential guide
to matters at the heart of the English literary world in the early seventeenth century,
from authorship and collaboration to censorship, civic pageantry, and the London
book trade.-James Shapiro.
Background
to the Thirty Years War
After
the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 Lutheranism had been given official recognition in
the Holy Roman Empire. Lands of the Roman Church which had previously been taken
by secular powers belonged again to the Church. German rulers could also impose
their religion on their subjects. However, the Peace agreement did not help to settle
the conflict in Germany. A number of rulers became Calvinists and were, thus, outside
the treaty. Protestants continued to take over Catholic properties, particularly
in 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 began
to break down. The Catholics and Protestants formed armed alliances to preserve
their rights: the Catholic League under Maximilian I of Bavaria and the Protestant
Union under Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate (James’s son-in- law).
At
the beginning of the seventeenth century the regions ruled by the German Habsburgs
included Upper and Lower Austria, Bohemia together with Moravia and Silesia, the
lesser 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, and that of
Tyrol-Vorarlberg. Although the main line of the German Habsburgs held the larger
part of these landed possessions yet its territories did not form a compact whole,
but were only a number of loosely connected countries, each having its own provincial
estates, which were largely composed of nobles. Having been constantly in opposition
to the dynasty, the nobles desired religious freedom, that is the right to become Protestant and to introduce Protestantism into their domains. The struggle
of the nobility against the dynasty reached its height during the last decade of
the reign of Rudolph II (1576-1612). Even at that time the nobility maintained relations
with the active Protestant party in the empire.
In 1604 the Hungarian nobles revolted with the aid of the ruler of Transylvania, and in 1607 they rebelled again and
became the allies of the Turks. On 25 June, 1608, Rudolph
was obliged to transfer the government
of Hungary, Austria, and Moravia to his more compliant brother
Matthias; he did not, however, give up his rights as King of Bohemia, and in 1609 was able to pacify an outbreak
of the Bohemian nobility only by granting
the Imperial Charter (Majestätsbrief) which gave religious liberty
not only to the nobles and their dependents in Bohemia but also to those living on the crown lands.
This concession greatly strengthened the power of the nobles.
The
Bohemian Phase
The
Bohemian Phase of the war is obviously more relevant to the present research as
it involves the historical figures implicitly mentioned in the play. This phase
encompassed the years 1618 through 1621. Official cause of this conflict was the
Defenestration act.
The
religious situation in Bohemia was complex: the Habsburg rulers were staunch defenders
of 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 their
overlord 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 flung
from 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 in Styria. In 1617 the dynasty persuaded the Bohemians to accept Ferdinand as their future king,
and in 1618 they prevailed upon the Hungarians to elect him king. Before this (May,
1618) the Bohemian nobles had revolted
anew under the leadership of Count von 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 Hungarians
and the inhabitants of Moravia joined the revolt, and
in June Thurn advanced on Vienna with an army to persuade
also the Austrians to join. However, Ferdinand prevented the 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, Frederick of the Palatinate, as rival
King of Bohemia.
The
inhabitants of Lower Austria now joined the revolt.
Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania (an administrative
district of Hungary), made an alliance with its leaders, and in “composition”
with them once more threatened Vienna at the close of 1619. Since this moment,
however, discipline steadily declined in the Bohemian army, and the 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 revolting forces. On the other hand, in
October 1619, Ferdinand obtained the help of Maximilian of Bavaria, who had the largest army in the Empire,
and of the Protestant Elector of Saxony.
Spain and Poland also sent troops. Maximilian so greatly
terrified the Protestant party, which since
1608 had formed the Union, that it was broken up. He then advanced into Bohemia supported by Austrian troops and decisively
defeated the 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.
The
News from the Eastern Europe
The
war with Transylvania, however, was carried on with interruptions
until 1626. As a gesture of defiance towards the Emperor’s title of King of
Hungary, Bethlen was elected King in 1620. His troops made incursions against Austrian
strongholds in Bohemia, and into Austria itself, and by mid-September 1621 they
lay within sight of the walls of Vienna.
Some
other testimony for adaptation
The
testimony that Measure had been creatively remade is reinforced by the references
to piracy. The actual Vienna, unlike London, was not a maritime city. Accordingly,
the possibility of pirates was excluded. Meanwhile trade routs to England passed
through the Low Countries, washed by the sea. The opening lines refer to pirates:
Lucio
Thou concludes’t like the sanctimonious pirate,
That
went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but
Scrap’d
one out of the table
I.ii.7-9
Only
in 1609 did pirates become a regular menace to English shipping. In 1620, Sir Robert
Mansell 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 Mansell was at sea leading
an expedition against pirates in the Mediterranean. In October 57 British merchant
ships were captured by pirates. This ambiguity of messages proves that the author
was trying to create a city that would refer a reader/spectator to both Vienna and
London. The news from the war (associated with Vienna) and the allusion to piracy
(associated with London) introduce the two cities simultaneously. One more evidence
in favor of the text modification is found in the passage of Mistress Overdone who
mentions the “poverty” in I.ii.78 which may refer to the economic depression of
1619-1624, the severest England had experienced by that time.
Mistress.
Overdone Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat,
What
with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am
Custom-shrunk.
I.ii.
75-77
Where
then did Shakespeare set in?
Shakespeare,
writing Measure, was thinking of Italy, not Germany. Although throughout
the 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 in
his Taming of the Shrew. “Lucio” is also an Italian name, used in Romeo
and 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 Escalus
is not typically Italian, it is a Latin name. Middleton presumably left all other
Italian names because changing them would have required profound correction of the
play.
Furthermore,
vineyards are mentioned three times. Like other Renaissance Englishmen, Shakespeare
associated wine with Italy, not Austria. Italy was also notorious for lechery and
prostitution. Prostitution and sexuality are the main vices associated with the
city portrayed in Measure. On the contrary, according to the stereotype that
was current at the time, the Germans and northern Europeans were less lecherous.
We
know for sure that Shakespeare read Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s popular book
Ecatommiti1 and used Tale 85 for Measure. Some scholars
are convinced he used some material from Tale 56 and was particularly influenced
by the role in that story of a “Duke of Ferrara”. The book was written while Cinthio
was living in Ferrara. In the sixteenth century, under the patronage of the Este
family, the independent city of Ferrara rivaled and in many ways surpassed
Florence as the centre of Italian literary culture. The Duke of Ferrara was a patron
of both Tasso and Guarini, who together created a model of tragicomedy that began
to influence English drama, including, in particular, Measure, at the very
beginning of the seventeenth century. Obviously the city might be appreciated for
such achievements in literature and art. Not only Shakespeare but Middleton himself
set his Phoenix, performed at Court in February 1604, in Ferrara. This play
includes a Duke of Ferrara as well. Marston’s character the Duke of Ferrara has
much in common with Vincentio. Ferrara is mentioned as well in Shakespeare and John
Fletcher 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 stronger
in view of the fact that the word Ferrara is metrically similar to Vienna and that
it 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:
- 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 e
filosofia
Corso
di Laurea Magistrale in
Lingue
e Letterature Europee ed Americane
Progetto
Per il
corso di Letteratura Inglese
William
Shakespeare
MEASURE
FOR MEASURE: ORIGINAL AND ACTUAL PLACE OF SETTING
Curatore:
Prof.ssa Daniela Guardamagna Studente: Usova Anna, LLEA LS 1 a. a 2008/2009