‘Othello’ and ‘Measure for Measure.’
Under the incentive of such exalted patronage, Shakespeare’s activity redoubled, but his work shows none of the conventional marks of literature that is produced in the blaze of Court favour. The first six years of the new reign saw him absorbed in the highest themes of tragedy, and an unparalleled intensity and energy, which bore few traces of the trammels of a Court, thenceforth illumined every scene that he contrived. To 1604 the composition of two plays can be confidently assigned, one of which—‘Othello’—ranks with Shakespeare’s greatest achievements; while the other—‘Measure for Measure’—although as a whole far inferior to ‘Othello,’ contains one of the finest scenes (between Angelo and Isabella, II. ii. 43 sq.) and one of the greatest speeches (Claudio on the fear of death, III. i. 116-30) in the range of Shakespearean drama. ‘Othello’ was doubtless the first new piece by Shakespeare that was acted before James. It was produced at Whitehall on November 1. ‘Measure for Measure’ followed on December 26. [235] Neither was printed in Shakespeare’s
lifetime. The plots of both ultimately come from the same Italian collection of novels—Giraldi Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi,’ which was first published in 1565.
Cinthio’s painful story of ‘Othello’ (decad. iii. nov. 3) is not known to have been translated into English before Shakespeare dramatised it. He followed its main drift with fidelity, but he introduced the new characters of Roderigo and Emilia, and he invested the catastrophe with new and fearful intensity by making Iago’s cruel treachery known to Othello at the last, after Iago’s perfidy has impelled the noble-hearted Moor in his groundless jealousy to murder his gentle and innocent wife Desdemona. Iago became in Shakespeare’s hands the subtlest of all studies of intellectual villainy and hypocrisy. The whole tragedy displays to magnificent advantage the dramatist’s fully matured powers. An unfaltering
equilibrium is maintained in the treatment of plot and characters alike.
Cinthio made the perilous story of ‘Measure for Measure’ the subject not only of a romance, but of a tragedy called ‘Epitia.’ Before Shakespeare wrote his play, Cinthio’s romance had been twice rendered into English by George Whetstone. Whetstone had not only given a somewhat altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy play of ‘Promos and Cassandra’ (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he had also freely translated it in his collection of prose tales, ‘Heptameron of Civil Discources’ (1582). Yet there is every likelihood that Shakespeare also knew Cinthio’s play, which, unlike his romance, was untranslated; the leading character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was known by another name to Cinthio in his story, but Cinthio in his play (and not in his novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which doubtless suggested Shakespeare’s designation. [237] In the hands of Shakespeare’s predecessors the tale is a sordid record of lust and cruelty. But Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother’s life. The central fact of Shakespeare’s play is Isabella’s inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare’s
alterations, like the Duke’s abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily conceived. But his creation of the pathetic character of Mariana ‘of the moated grange’—the legally affianced bride of Angelo, Isabella’s would-be seducer—skilfully excludes the possibility of a settlement (as in the old stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of marriage. Shakespeare’s argument is throughout philosophically subtle. The poetic eloquence in which Isabella and the Duke pay homage to the virtue of chastity, and the many expositions of the corruption with which unchecked sexual passion threatens society, alternate with coarsely comic interludes which suggest the vanity of seeking to efface natural instincts by the coercion of law. There is little in the play that seems designed to recommend it to the Court before which it was first performed. But the two emphatic references to a ruler’s dislike of mobs, despite his love of his people, were perhaps penned in deferential allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was notorious. In act i. sc. i. 67-72 the Duke remarks:
I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement.
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it.
Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act ii. sc. iv. 27-30):
The general [i.e. the public], subject to a well-wish’d king, . . .
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love
Must needs appear offence.