Measure for Measure: ‘A Little Brief Authority’ PDF Free Download
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Measure
for
Measure:
'A
Litde
Brief
Authority'
On
26
December
1604, in the banqueting hall at Whitehall, King
James
and
his court watched a performance
of
Measurefor
Measure.
It
followed, by some months, the play's debut
at
the Globe, which
had
reopened on 9 April after being closed for nearly a
year
by
an
outbreak
of
the plague
so
severe
that
the general public was
banned
from the new king's cornonation
(25
July
1603)
and
his first
royal progress through
London
was postponed until
March
of
1604. Performances
at
the Globe were
part
of
the still relatively new
and
highly controversial practice
of
playgoing
centred
upon
the
stages
of
London's public playhouses -structures unknown in
England before 1576 -
and
involving companies
of
adult actors who
earned
their livings by performing there before paying audiences as
often as six afternoons a week for as long as ten months
of
the year.
During the reigns
of
Elizabeth
and
James,
the crown
and
civic
officials (particularly in London) jostled to assert their control over
playhouses, players,
and
those who made up their audiences.
That
manoeuvring was one manifestation
of
a fundamental struggle
under
way in early
modern
Engand
regarding the nature, the location,
and
the scope
of
ultimate authority -political, religious, economic,
cultural.
Did
it
or
did it not reside in the person
of
the monarch?
If
so,
what
limits,
if
any, was the sovereign subject to in exercising that
authority,
and
in what style -by
what
means
and
in
what
manner
-
should it be exercised?
Censorship, exercised primarily through the office
of
the Master
of
Revels, was one tactic by which the crown sought to assert
its control over theatrical activity. Another was to make each act-
ing company's licence to perform dependent
upon
the patronage
39
P. C. McGuire, Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays
© Philip C. McGuire 1994
40
The
Jacobean
Plays
provided
by
a great
man
of
the realm, sometimes a member
of
her
Privy Council. By a royal
warrant
dated
17
May 1603, within three
weeks
of
arriving in London after Elizabeth's death on 23
March
1603,
James
changed
that
system.
He
decreed that only members
of
the royal family could be patrons
of
an acting company,
and
he
himself became the
patron
of
that company, previously known as the
Lord
Chamberlain's
Men
and
now renamed the King's Men,
of
which Shakespeare was a founding member
and
for which he
had
been writing plays exclusively since 1594.
By
redefining the relation-
ship between the crown
and
the acting companies, James's modifica-
tion
of
the patronage system altered the conditions under which the
plays they performed were produced
and
received. In the case
of
the
King's Men, the changes
James
instituted made them
and
their
playwright subject in a new, less indirect way to England's sovereign
authority. A strong consensus regards Measurefor
Measure
as the first
play Shakespeare wrote during James's reign.
If
that consensus
is
correct, it
is
the first he wrote after
James
altered the system
of
patronage by which the crown
had
previously sought to exercise its
authority over the only three adult acting companies licensed to
perform in London's public theatres
at
the time
of
his accession.
The
players
and
London playhouses were elements
not
only
of
a
new cultural practice
but
also
of
a new form
of
mass communication,
one made all the more potent by its location in England's population
centre.
By
changing the patronage arrangements within which the
acting companies operated so as to assert more directly the author-
ity
of
the crown over the newest mass medium in English culture,
the new king signalled -in effect,
if
not by design -
that
his style
of
exercising authority would be different from Elizabeth's. During the
days immediately after Elizabeth's death
and
before his arrival in
London,
James
used another relatively new form
of
mass commun-
ication to make himself
and
his ideas about the use
of
kingly authority
better known to his new subjects. Between 24
March
and
13 April
1603, London printing presses produced 10,000 copies (eight edi-
tions)
of
Basilikon
Doron,
a book on the theory
and
practice
of
kingship
that
James
had
written in 1599 in the form
of
advice to his eldest
son, Prince Henry.
A
number
of
issues
that
James
addresses in
Basilikon
Doron
are also
taken
up
in
Measure
for
Measure,
most notably the
proper
relationship
between justice
and
mercy,
and
the play offers evidence
of
the
recently
renamed
King's
Men
altering their theatrical practices in
