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. ............