i> Take, O take those lips away ". This song occurs in Fletcher's tragedy Rollo, Duke of Normandy (1617-1620). The source text is supposed to be the Latin lyric "Ad Lydiam". The song conforms thematically to this play. The Fletcher play's issue dates are significant as the play was written more than a decade later than the Measure is supposed to have been written and coincide with the date of Measure's probable revival. Supposedly, the editor of Measure has not used the primary source but read the contemporary Rollo, Duke of Normandy and loaned the song there.
The song in Measure is a formal marker and affirms the new turning point. Scholars also believe that some passages were dislocated, some repartees of Lucio were attributed to Angelo and similar changes occurred in the text 3 . For example, the short dialogue of Mariana and Isabella just after the song seems quite irrelevant to its immediate context. The song highlights the romantic spirit and can not be inserted so easily into the context of vice or corruption, justice or mercy, sexual crime and its punishment. So, the song occurs in other texts, attributed to other playwrights. It was not Shakespeare's habitude to employ entire passages belonging to other works, but his colleagues had actually used such techniques.
All together this incoherence is due to the fact that seems obvious: the play was edited (According to modern critics and scholars) by Thomas Middleton 1 and issued in 1623 "to make the play topical and appropriate to the style of the theatre in the early 1620's " 2 . The adaptation concerned the structure of the play and introduced act intervals. Moreover, the revival also concerned the play's setting and adaptations of the text itself, provoked by such a significant change.
Let's refer to the text. Lucio's first speech occurs in a passage that might be written by Middleton, and not Shakespeare. Different independent surveys recognize that the first part of I.2 must be a later addition to the text. But how much later? Our only text of Measure was published in 1623. It had been set into type and run through the press sometime in 1622. The manuscript from which it was printed was prepared by the scribe Ralph Crane, who began working for the King's Men in 1619 3 . It means it was published posthumously. Thus, Lucio's remark about Hungary occurs in a text not printed until 1622, from a manuscript not in existence earlier than 1619.
Lucio and other gentleman say:
Lucio. If the Duke, with the other Dukes 4 , come not to composition with the King of Hungary, why then all the dukes fall upon the King.
1 Gent. Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungary's! I.2.1-5
On this speech Lucio assumes that the Duke is absent on a political mission which may decide the question of peace and war. There were no peace negotiations under way to "come to composition" 5 with the "King of Hungary" in 1603-4. The passage seems to make sense only as a
reference to something outside the play's world. Some scholars tried to explain that the passage alludes to Corvinus King of Hungary in one of Shakespeare's probable sources, but the King of Hungary in that source is not engaged in negotiations with "the duke, and other dukes ", nor is there any threat of war.
In 1986 the Oxford Shakespeare identified Middleton as the probable author of the added material. And the Oxford edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton 1 provides Middleton's authorship of that passage and three other passages.
1 Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) - "our other Shakespeare" - is the only other Renaissance playwright who created lasting masterpieces of both comedy and tragedy; he also wrote the greatest box-office hit of early modern London (the unique history play A Game at Chess). His range extends beyond these traditional genres to tragicomedies, masques, pageants, pamphlets, epigrams, and Biblical and political commentaries, written alone or in collaboration with Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker, Ford, Heywood, Rowley, and others. Compared by critics to Aristophanes and Ibsen, Racine and Joe Orton, he has influenced writers as diverse as Aphra Behn and T. S. Eliot. Though repeatedly censored in his own time, he has since come to be particularly admired for his representations of the intertwined pursuits of sex, money, power, and God.
At the opening of I.2 of Measure Middleton emphasizes the significance of Vienna to the moment of the revival, as the seat of the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II, and as a city in war. By 1621 Vienna was again the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Ferdinand II was known to London ...
