Measure for Measure: A Text for Court Performance?

Abstract

ROFESSOR Josephine Bennett's Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment is the most recent and comprehensive of a series of scholarly studies which enable us say with confidence that Measure for Measure was acted before King James and that its chief purpose was to flatter, entertain, and please the King.' Scholars have not been able decide conclusively on the genuineness of the external evidence which tells us that for Mesur by Shaxberd was performed at court on 24 December i604. But Sir Edmund Chambers argued persuasively that even if the famous list of plays in the Revels Accounts is a forgery, corroborating evidence indicates that its contents are nevertheless likely be reasonably accurate.2 Whether or not one chooses regard this list as a forgery, verbal and metrical tests still point i604 as the most likely date for the composition of Measure for Measure. And since the King's Players performed at Court eleven times between All Saints' Day of i604 and Shrove Tuesday of i605, they would hardly have failed include in those eleven performances a new play by their leading playwright, especially when of the plays available it was the most likely be flattering their new patron. For, as numerous scholars have pointed out, many parallels between the Duke and King James seem clearly intended as compliments the King (his reluctance make a public spectacle of himself, for instance, or his insistence that prisoners either be punished or pardoned rather than left rot in jail). Further, George Chalmers, Charles Knight, and other more recent writers have shown that the political philosophy of the play is in large part a reflection of King James's own work, Basilikon Doron, which was widely read and discussed after its publication in England the preceding year.3 Ernest Schanzer has even shown (pp. I24-I25) that some of the play's plot difficulties result from Shakespeare's having followed too closely James's political views. Finally, as Josephine Bennett shows, the play contains numerous allusions recent political events and James's ancestors, allusions which would also be flattering the King.4 I am not so much interested in fixing the date of the court performance as 26 December i604-or even during the Christmas season of that year-as in establishing the extreme likelihood that King James did see Measure for