, so we must admit also that the place of action is to be of much importance in political, social and cultural terms at least to the moment of the first performance and be extremely relevant to general message of the play. Consequently, the setting was not a random choice from all possible world's geographical points. However, it seems unlikely that Vienna was of great importance for British Isles by the time Shakespeare first staged it.
The English public had little access to news about central and eastern Europe until the beginning of the Thirty Years War, in 1618. This led to the creation of the first printed news serials. The "Early History of the English Newspaper" reports that not until the early 17 th century did news begin to be printed more regularly within periodical publications in England.
News periodicals were established in several countries in continental Europe soon after 1600, but a Star Chamber decree of 1586 forbade the publication of news in England. The first news periodicals in English, called corantos, were printed in Amsterdam. The earliest surviving coranto, The New Tydings Out of Italie Are Not yet Come , dated 2 December 1620, is a single sheet printed on both sides with news of the Thirty Years War then raging in Europe. Less than a year later, the first coranto to be printed in England appeared. The first surviving issue, Corante, or Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France , dated 24 September 1621, contains continental news translated from a German original 1 .
The economy of Vienna was in decline during the period of the wars 2 . The city's intellectual life experienced a similar erosion. Enea Silvio, a noble young Tuscan and later Pope Pius II came to Vienna in 1437. In a famous letter about the Viennese, he commented on their self-satisfaction, superstition, and crude manners 3 . Perhaps for that reason, Vienna by the 1600s had not yet developed a distinctive urban identity and therefore could not be considered the place worth setting the play in. It merely provided any implicit information to the plot of a play. It appears that no book of the period refers to the city of Vienna in other purpose than that concerning the Turks 'invasion 4 , mentioned earlier. As Marcus affirms, until the beginning of the seventeenth century Austria was associated with the war against Islam.
There is one sound reason for which Measure could have been originally set in Vienna. According to the editor of the Cambridge edition of Measure for Measure, Brian Gibbons 5 , Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor, was trying to turn Protestant Hungary into Catholicism, but failed to do this because of successful revolt. So, Catholic extremism of Vienna was devised as an allusion to Puritan extremism in England (English Puritans advocated death penalty for fornication). The Puritan law was still in vigour when the First Folio has been prepared for publication. The editor, whoever he might be, had to think carefully about the contents of the play before its publication, because, according to the proclamation of May 1599, any open discussion of religious or political matters in the theatre was prohibited 1 . The play, then, would have not been allowed. Otherwise, the play had to be set somewhere else, far from London. Gibbons 'hypothesis, however, is definitely not enough to state that Shakespeare had actually chosen Vienna as the location, also because the capital of the Empire had been moved from Vienna to Prague in 1583, and it stayed in Prague until 1611.
To understand why scholars have had the suspicions about the original setting of the play we should examine the history of the text and theatre tradition of that time. Measure is supposed to have been written and performed in 1603-1604. On St. Stephen's night, 26 December 1604, the King's Men staged it as part of the Christmas festivities at the Whitehall Banquet Hall. Measure first appeared in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623. And it is plausible that it was written by William Shakespeare. There are evidences that the oaths and similar expressions were cut off the text after the 1606 Act of Parliament that "restrained abuses of players and made blasphemy on stage illegal " 2 . Any metrical irregularity or discontinuity in sense might be result of cutting. Another curious fact is that Shakespeare wrote his plays without dividing them in acts. The act division was introduced after about 1609, when the King's Men began to play at the Blackfriars. An attentive reader might notice the sudden change of tone of the play and its concentration on the plot's general frame nearly in the middle of the play, after act III. Act IV opens with the one and only song in Measure , "<...
