About the Author

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote Measure for Measure around 1603–04, in his late thirties, at a moment in his career when he was visibly restless with comedy. He had finished the great romantic comedies — Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night — and was about to begin or had just begun the major tragedies (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth all date from 1603–1606). Measure for Measure sits in the gap, and its mood reflects the gap. By this point Shakespeare was a partner in the King's Men — the company had received its royal patent from the new King James I in May 1603 — and the play was almost certainly written for the new monarch. It was performed at court on 26 December 1604.

Detailed Analysis

The play is one of three works modern scholars group as Shakespeare's "problem plays," along with All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida. The grouping is informal but useful: in each of these works Shakespeare takes the structural premises of comedy — bed-tricks, disguises, marriages at the end — and treats them with a tonal seriousness that the genre's machinery cannot quite support. Read alongside All's Well, Measure for Measure looks like a writer testing how much weight a comedy can bear before it deforms; read alongside Othello, written in the same year, it looks like a writer working out, in a different register, the same questions about deception, sexual jealousy, and the gap between virtue claimed and virtue performed. Shakespeare borrowed his plot from George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1578), which was itself based on a story by Cinthio. What he added — the Duke's surveillance, Mariana's bed-trick substitution, the comic underworld of Pompey and Lucio, and Isabella's status as a novice nun rather than an ordinary citizen — transformed a moralistic source into something far stranger and more open-ended. The bed-trick device itself recurs in All's Well That Ends Well, suggesting Shakespeare was at this moment specifically interested in what a folktale rescue looks like when the story refuses to treat it as folk magic.

Historical Background

The play was written in the first year of King James I's reign and performed at his court the following Christmas. James, who had taken the English throne in 1603 after Elizabeth I's death, was known for his interest in disguised observation of his subjects, his deep theological convictions about kingship and mercy, and his own published treatises on government — Basilikon Doron (a manual for his son's rule) appeared in 1599 and was widely read in court circles. Many of the play's preoccupations — the proper exercise of mercy, the gap between public office and private virtue, the responsibilities of a Christian prince — track exactly the ideas James was promoting in his own writing. The Duke's repeated insistence on the prince's duty to know his subjects without being known by them is a position James himself articulated in print.

Detailed Analysis

The Vienna of the play would have been a thin disguise for any contemporary city its first audience cared to recognize. London at the turn of the seventeenth century was struggling with exactly the kinds of problems Measure for Measure stages: a periodic plague that emptied the theaters; recurrent disease outbreaks (Mistress Overdone laments "the sweat" alongside the gallows and poverty as causes that have shrunk her custom); ongoing official campaigns to demolish brothels in the suburbs (referenced almost word-for-word in Act I Scene II, where Pompey reports that "all houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down"); and a moral-reform movement that wanted exactly the kinds of revived sexual statutes that Angelo enforces. Shakespeare's audiences would have heard the contemporary echo immediately. Setting the play in Vienna, a Catholic city, allowed him to dramatize a debate that was politically explosive in Protestant England without quite naming it directly.

The play's reception history is unusually tangled. There is no record of how it was received at its 1604 court performance. By the eighteenth century, the title and the bed-trick had so embarrassed editors that the play was rarely staged in anything resembling its original form; Charles Gildon and Nahum Tate wrote adaptations that softened the moral edges. The Victorians mostly considered it unstageable: Coleridge famously called it "a hateful work" and the bed-trick a "disgusting" device. The play's modern rehabilitation began in the early twentieth century and accelerated dramatically after the Second World War, when the moral and political ambiguities that had alienated Coleridge began to look less like flaws and more like the play's actual subject. Postwar productions, particularly those of Peter Brook in 1950 and John Barton in 1970, treated the Duke's surveillance and Isabella's silence at the end as features rather than bugs. Late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century productions have tended to read the play as one of Shakespeare's most contemporary works, with the #MeToo era in particular bringing new attention to the Angelo–Isabella scenes and to the ambiguity of Isabella's final unanswered marriage proposal. What once made the play unstageable is now what makes it indispensable.