Measure for Measure, Montmorency, and Sardou’s La Tosca

Abstract

Measure for Measure, Montmorency, and Sardou’s La Tosca Mark Eccles Angelo in Measure for Measure is “criminal in double viola­ tion” (V.i.409): he tries to violate Isabel, and he breaks his promise to save her brother when he orders Claudio beheaded. Stories of such double criminals were surprisingly widespread in the sixteenth century, and most of them are mentioned in my recent New Variorum Shakespeare edition (New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1980). I can now add one more analogue that I found too late to mention there, and point out that Sardou claimed it as his source for La Tosca. In 1548, after a salt tax had been levied on the province of Guyenne, contrary to its ancient privileges, Bordeaux and its region rose in revolt. Bayle St. John gives a vivid account of the revolt in Montaigne the Essayist, A Biography (London, 1858), I, 73-93, an account mainly based on a contemporary pasquille or pamphlet which he finds “exact in all facts it states in common with other narratives.” The Constable of France, Anne de Montmorency (1493-1567), led an army from Tou­ louse which crushed the rebels so savagely that over a hundred and forty persons of note “were hung, beheaded, broken on the wheel, impaled, tom by four horses, or burned.” One of the chief, St. John writes (pp. 84-85), was Lestonnac, Chevalier du Guet, a jurat or alderman of Bordeaux, one of whose family married Montaigne’s sister Jeanne. Lestonnac, says St. John, “had a beautiful wife, who went to beg her husband’s life of Montmorency. He promised it on one infamous condition. The poor woman complied, and he then took her to a window just as her husband’s head was falling.” Instead of being punished, Montmorency was created due de Montmorency and a peer of France. 74 Mark Eccles 75 Luther, Hans Sachs, and most of those who tell similar stories of a double criminal go on to say that the criminal was himself beheaded and so received “measure for measure.” But this did not always happen. Thomas Danett in The Historié of Philip de Commines (London, 1596) adds a story, which he had probably heard when he was in Paris, that Oliver le Dain, a favorite of Louis XI, went unpunished for such a crime, though he was hanged in 1484 on other charges. According to Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote (Geneva, 1566), and Simon Goulart (Paris, 1601), the Provost la Voultel went scotfree after seducing a wife, then hanging her husband and showing her the body, saying, “I promised to give back your hus­ band; I am not keeping him, I am giving him back to you.” The villain’s claim that he is giving back her husband to the wife by sending her the body occurs again in Claude Rouillet’s Latin tragedy Philanira (Paris, 1556) and in G. B. Giraldi’s tale in Hecatommithi (Monreale, 1565), one of the versions Shakespeare read. The story that Montmorency took Lestonnac’s wife to a window and showed her her husband being beheaded adds a dramatic touch that may have influenced later versions. Belleforest in Histoires tragiques (Lyon, 1583) imagines a captain at Turin seducing a soldier’s wife and then showing her through a window the body of her husband, already hanged. In a very popular Italian ballad, taken down since 1834 from singers in Piedmont, Como, and many parts of Italy, Cecilia, with her husband’s consent, sleeps with a captain who promises to save the husband’s life; at midnight she dreams that he has been hanged, but the captain tells her to go back to sleep and she’ll see him in the morning; when she rises in the morning she goes to the window and sees him—hanged. For varying ver­ sions, see Costantino Nigra, Canti popolari del Piemonte (Torino, 1888), pp. 43-50, and Alessandro d’Ancona, La poesia popolare italiana (Livorno, 1878; 2nd ed., 1906), pp. 140-46, who compares Measure for Measure and many of its analogues, including the story of Montmorency as retold from St. John in Revue britannique for 1859. Ancona finds no such...