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  • Measure for Measure and the (Anti-)Theatricality of Gascoigne's The Glasse of Government
  • Richard Hillman (bio)

This modest essay can be even more so because I cannot claim originality in arguing that George Gascoigne's "tragicall Comedie" (pub. 1575)—a Puritanical morality play on the theme of the Prodigal Son—is one of the texts underlying the most notoriously problematic of Shakespeare's comedies (1604). That territory was staked out in 1964 by Charles T. Prouty, who, moreover, delineated the two routes of influence that I take for granted here.1 In addition to proposing, seemingly for the first time, a direct knowledge of Gascoigne's play on Shakespeare's part, Prouty reinforced and extended the long-perceived and much closer relationship between Measure for Measure and George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (pub. 1578); as part of the latter argument, he showed that Whetstone drew substantially on the work of his late friend (whose death in 1577 he commemorated with a generous literary obituary).2 Prouty's description of [End Page 391] "almost slavish imitation" seems an overstatement,3 but there is no doubt that Whetstone appropriated Gascoigne's lowlife characters both broadly and in some details to furnish an immoral underworld for his main plot of the corrupt deputy, which does not trail such baggage elsewhere. (Whetstone's Rosko and Lamia, most notably, derive from Gascoigne's Eccho and Lamia, although it may also be noted that the latter's "Aunt" Pandarina has a counterpart in Mistress Overdone but none in Promos and Cassandra.) These are elements that Whetstone himself left by the wayside when he recast the story in succinct and decorous prose for An heptameron of ciuill discourses (1582)4 but that Shakespeare seems to have found integral to his purposes. Whatever, precisely, those may have been, they certainly depended on theatrical appeal.

So what more is there to say? There is, to start with, the fact that Prouty's claims for The Glasse of Government in relation to Measure for Measure do not appear to have entered the critical or editorial mainstream. I would like to encourage their recognition, but I also believe that the neglect itself makes a useful point about critical assumptions and methodology, given Shakespeare's compositional practices as we are increasingly coming to understand them. The issue relates most basically to traditional source study but also to the New Critical climate of the 1960s. Telling on both counts is the approach to sources announced by J. W. Lever in his Arden edition of Measure for Measure, which appeared in the year following Prouty's article:

[I]n a work of such complex artistic integration as Measure for Measure no clear line can be drawn between distinct fictional sources and a wide, alluvial tract of literary and historical influences in which the play was orientated.5

There are indeed a number of overlapping elements among the several texts that may be taken as "sources" of Measure for Measure, and the latter part of this statement might seem to invite exploration of the intertextual play-within-the-play. But Lever was no postmodernist avant la lettre, and in the presumption of authorial "integration" we may recognize the forbidding shadow of the nom du père.

Prouty's approach is similarly self-inhibiting. With respect to indirect influence, his very introduction of the question blocks the argument, insofar as Promos and Cassandra eclipses The Glasse of Government: "it seems [End Page 392] to me both pertinent and valuable to consider The Glasse of Government when one approaches Measure for Measure through its immediate source, Promos and Cassandra."6 The vagueness of the "consideration" possible in such circumstances is reflected in the lack of corroborative detail. But even regarding direct influence, which might be supposed more readily traceable, Prouty draws back, this time into thematic deductiveness. Instead of looking at dramatic or verbal features specific to The Glasse of Government and Measure for Measure, he pronounces downward from assumptions about the coherent messages that the three plays supposedly transmit. Whetstone stands out, in his view, for mitigating justice with mercy, in keeping with the king's final injunction to Promos ("Justice joyne with mercie...

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