The accession of King James to the English throne was in March, 1603. So that the forecited arguments would conclude the writing of the play to have been nearly synchronous with the revisal of All's Well that Ends Well, and with the production of King Lear, perhaps also of Macbeth; at least, within the same period of four or five years. The characteristics of style and temper draw to the same conclusion as regards the date of the writing.
There is no doubt that for some particulars in the plot and story of Measure for Measure the Poet was ultimately indebted to Cinthio, an Italian novelist of the sixteenth century. The original story makes the eighty-fifth in his Hundred Tales. A youth named Ludovico is there overtaken in the crime of seduction: Juriste, a magistrate highly reputed for wisdom and justice, passes sentence of death upon him; and Ludovico's sister, a virgin of rare gifts and graces, goes to pleading for his life. Her beauty and eloquence have the same effect on Juriste as Isabella's on Angelo. His proposals are rejected with scorn and horror; but the lady, overcome by the pathetic entreaties of her brother, at last yields to them under a solemn promise of marriage. His object being gained, the wicked man then commits a double vow-breach, neither marrying the sister nor sparing the brother. She appeals to the Emperor, by whom Juriste is forced to marry her, and then sentenced to death; but is finally pardoned at the lady's suit, who is now as earnest and eloquent for her husband as she had been for her brother. Her conduct touches him with remorse, and at length proves as effective in reforming his character as it was in redeeming his life.
As early as 1578, this tale was dramatized after a sort by George Whetstone, and was published as The History of Promos and Cassandra. Whetstone was a writer of learning and talent, but not such that even the instructions of a Shakespeare could have made him capable of dramatic excellence; and, as he had no such benefit, his performance is insipid and worthless enough. The drama is in Two Parts, and is written in verse, with alternate rhymes. In his conduct of the story Whetstone varies somewhat from the original; as the following abstract will show:
In the city of Julio, then under the rule of Corvinus, King of Hungary, there was a law that for incontinence the man should suffer death, and the woman be marked out for infamy by her dress. Through the indulgence of magistrates, this law came to be little regarded. The government falling at length into the hands of Lord Promos, he revived the statute, and, a youth named Andrugio being convicted of the fault in question, resolved to visit the penalties in their utmost rigour upon both the parties. Andrugio had a sister of great virtue and accomplishment, named Cassandra, who undertook to sue for his life. Her good behaviour, great beauty, and "the sweet order of her talk" wrought so far with the governor as to induce a short reprieve. Being inflamed soon after with a criminal passion, he set down the spoil of her honour as the ransom. She spurned his suit with abhorrence. Unable, however, to resist the pleadings of her brother, she at last yielded to the man's proposal, on condition of his pardoning her brother and then marrying her. This he vowed to do; but, his end once gained, instead of keeping his vow, he ordered the jailer to present Cassandra with her brother's head. As the jailer knew what the governor had done, he took the head of a felon just executed, and set Andrugio at liberty. Cassandra, supposing the head to be her brother's, was at the point to kill herself for grief, but spared that stroke, to be avenged on the traitor. She devised to make her case known to the King; who forthwith hastened to do justice on Promos, ordering that, to repair the lady's honour, he should marry her, and then, for his crime against the State, lose his head. No sooner was Cassandra a wife than all her rhetoric of eye, tongue, and action was tasked to procure the pardon of her husband; but the King, tendering the public good more than hers, denied her suit. At length, Andrugio, overcome by his sister's grief, made himself known; for he had all the while been about the place in disguise; whereupon the King, to honour the virtues of Cassandra, pardoned both him and Promos.
In 1592, Whetstone published his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, containing a prose version of the same tale. It is observable that he deviates from Cinthio in bringing Andrugio off alive; and as Shakespeare does the same with Claudio, we may well conclude that he drew directly from Whetstone, not from the original author. Beyond the mere outline of the story, it does not appear that the Poet borrowed any thing more than a few slight hints and casual expressions. And a comparison of the two pieces would nowise reduce his claims; it being not less creditable to have lifted the story out of the mire into such a region of art and poetry than to have invented it. Then too, even as regards the story, Shakespeare varies from Whetstone much more materially than the latter does from Cinthio: representing the illicit meeting of Claudio and Juliet as taking place under the shield of a solemn betrothment; which very much lessens their fault, as marriage bonds were already upon them; and proportionably heightens Angelo's wickedness, as it brings on him the guilt of making the law responsible for his own arbitrary rigour. But the main original feature in the plot of Measure for Measure is the part of Mariana, which puts a new life into the whole, and purifies it almost into another nature; as it prevents the soiling of Isabella's womanhood, supplies an apt reason for the Duke's mysterious conduct, and yields a pregnant motive for Angelo's pardon, in that his life is thereby bound up with that of a wronged and innocent woman, whom his crimes are made the occasion of restoring to her rights and happiness; so that her virtue may be justly allowed to reprieve him from death.
In the comic parts of Whetstone's drama there is all the grossness of Measure for Measure, without any thing that the utmost courtesy of language can call wit or humour. So that, if the Poet here received no help, neither can he have any excuse, from the workmanship of his predecessor. But he probably saw that some such matter was required by the scheme of the play and the laws of dramatic proportion. And as in these parts the truth and character are all his own, so he can hardly be blamed for not anticipating the delicacy or squeamishness of later times, there being none such in the most refined audiences of his day; while, again, his choice of a subject so ugly in itself is amply screened from censure by the lessons of virtue and wisdom which he used it as an opportunity for delivering. To have trained and taught a barbarous tale of cruelty and lust into such a fruitage of poetry and humanity, may well offset whatever of offence there may be in the play to modern taste.
I have already referred to certain characteristics of style and temper which this play shares with several others probably written about the same time, and which, as before observed, have been thought to mark some crisis in the Poet's life. It cannot well be denied that the plays in question have something of a peculiar spirit, which might aptly suggest that some passage of bitter experience must have turned the milk of his genius for a time into gall, and put him upon a course of harsh and indignant thought. The point is well stated by Hallam: "There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare's life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience: the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen associates peculiarly teaches,—these, as they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind."[21] And Verplanck speaks in a similar strain of "that portion of the author's life which was memorable for the production of the additions to the original Hamlet, with their melancholy wisdom; probably of Timon, with its indignant and hearty scorn, and rebukes of the baseness of civilized society; and above all of Lear, with its dark pictures of unmixed, unmitigated guilt, and its terrible and prophet-like denunciations."
These words certainly carry much weight, and may go far to warrant the belief of the writers, that the Poet was smitten with some rude shock of fortune which untuned the melody of his soul, and wrenched his mind from its once smooth and happy course, causing it to recoil upon itself and brood over its own thoughts. Yet there are considerable difficulties besetting a theory of this kind. For, in some other plays referred by these critics to the same period, there is so much of the Poet's gayest and happiest workmanship as must greatly embarrass if not quite upset such a theory. But, whatever may have caused the peculiar tone and the cast of thought in the forenamed plays, it is pretty certain that the darkness was not permanent; the clear azure, soft sunshine, and serene sweetness of The Tempest and The Winter's Tale being unquestionably of a later date. And, surely, in the life of so earnest and thoughtful a man as Shakespeare, there might well be, nay, there must have been, times when, without any special woundings or bruisings of fortune, his mind got fascinated by the appalling mystery of evil that haunts our fallen nature.