This essay argues that Measure for Measure’s pervasively strange, even contorted style is cultivated to negotiate the novel condition of publicity that had come to define urban life in turn-of-the-century London. This novel condition prompted city comedies like Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour to extol plain, colloquial styles of theatrical dialogue for their ability to resolve this uncomfortable condition of publicity by projecting the private self into public--thus making oneself familiar to strangers and inviting strangers to present themselves in correspondingly familiarizing styles. Like other city comedies, Measure for Measure orients its style to the publicity of urban life, but it does so strangely, making its style more convoluted rather than less in order to stage the protective withholding of the private self from the public always encroaching upon it. In so doing, Measure for Measure exposes how style, instead of projecting a private self into public, throws back into the public an image of the self it has already created.
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