"I fill a place, I know't."
These words could not have been written save by a mature man, who has seen impatient youth pressing forward to take his place, and who has felt the sting of its criticism. The disposition of mind which here betrays itself foretells that overpowering sense of the injustice of men and of things which is soon to take possession of Shakespeare's soul.
[XX]
MEASURE FOR MEASURE—ANGELO AND TARTUFFE
A covert polemical intention could be vaguely divined here and there in All's Well that Ends Well. It contained, as we have seen, some incidental mockery of the increasing Puritanism of the time, with its accompaniment of self-righteousness, moral intolerance, and unctuous hypocrisy. The bent of thought which gave birth to these sallies reappears still more clearly in the choice of the theme treated in Measure for Measure.
The plot of All's Well that Ends Well turns on the incident, familiar in every literature, of one woman passing herself off for another at a nocturnal rendezvous, without the substitution being detected by the man—an incident so fruitful in dramatic situations, that even its gross improbability has never deterred poets from making use of it.
A standing variation of this theme, also to be found in the most diverse literatures, is as follows:—A man is condemned to death. His mistress, his wife, or his sister implores the judge to pardon him. The judge promises, on condition that she shall pass a night with him, to let the prisoner go free, but afterwards has him executed all the same.
This subject has been treated over and over again from mediæval times down to our own days, its latest appearances, probably, being in Paul Heyse's novel, Der Kinder Sünde der Väter Fluch, and in Victorien Sardou's play La Tosca. In Shakespeare's time it appeared in the form of an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi (1565), on which an English dramatist, George Whetstone, founded his play, The Right Excellent and Famous History of Promos and Cassandra (1578), and also a prose story in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, published in 1582. Whetstone's utterly lifeless and characterless comedy is the immediate source from which Shakespeare derived the outlines of the story. He is indebted to Whetstone for nothing else.