x~oa? HAKESPEARE'S treatment of two very different elements of style in Measure for Measure helps to explain the relationship of that play to his earlier comedies. Both the management of standard stock characters and his manipulation of the Stiltrennung move the playworld into discord-away from the formal and thematic harmonies of the romantic comedies into a world where the variety of social images is not resolved but left in friction at the play's close. The midpoint between social order and metaphysical harmonybetween As You Like It and The Tempest-occupied by Measure for Measure is reflected in its dramatic and rhetorical styles. This is made all the more clear by continuities discernable among the plays. Measwre for Measure is marked by no wholesale break with past means and ideas, but by a general shift of these and of the devices that express them. It can be seen in the dramatic use of the recurrent stock figure, the constable, aidd in his linguistic setting. Shakespeare used his first in Love's Labour's Lost, where so much of the later comic pattern was defined. All of Dull's attributes have precursors, but his treatment within the play is characteristically Shakespearean.' If we look for a moment at Shakespeare's most distinguished comic predecessor, we can see how. Lyly's Endymion makes use of a watch and constable solely for their humorous value. They are distinguished for their foolishness, ineffectuality, and drunkenness, fulfilling the standard picture. The song which closes their scene (IV. ii. I65-86)2 describes a group little differing in its essential character from Dogberry's entourage. But they remain extraneous to their play. They are worked into a niche in the plot: they serve as temporary blocks to keep the pages from seeing Endymion asleep. Any of a dozen other devices could have served the same end. Perhaps the most intriguing question they raise is why Lyly chose, from innumerable possibilities, to introduce this local and typically Elizabethan urban group into his fanciful playworld. They are barely characterized, take no part in the play's thematic development, and merely inject a moment of tavern flavor, immediately forgotten, into the proceedings. Yet they are interesting for they show Lyly's toying with a broader range of characters. His unwillingness to accommodate such a range becomes