might seem to have been written with the authorship question in mind. In this chapter I present a reading of
Measure for Measure which argues that not only Isabella’s speech, but the entire play, was in fact written
with the authorship question in mind. My argument is organized into five acts, corresponding to the five acts
of Measure for Measure¹.
To understand Measure for Measure as a play about authorship we may first wish to consider the
narrative proposed by the Oxford theory in its broadest scope. A powerful and eloquent nobleman, gifted
with the rhetorical skill and training of a Cicero, the historical sensibility of a Tacitus, and the dangerous wit
of an Aristophanes, takes refuge behind a pseudonym and a front man rather than risk the public scandal and
political instability which would inevitably ensue from the exposure of his identity and dramatic treatment of
his conflicted relations with the power elite of newly Protestant England. Writes John Thomas Looney:
“Our theory presupposes a man who had deliberately planned his self-concealment” (173). During the final
years of his life de Vere was “hard at work, seriously, but in a measure secretly, engaged in the activities that
have produced at once the greatest drama and the finest literature England boasts” (179). Justice Stevens, in
his "Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction,” confirms that the theory invokes an “imaginative
conspiracy,” requiring both the coercion of the Tudor state and, in some measure, the willing abdication of
the real – hidden – writer from his public role as legal author (Stevens 1993)².
Now, it is impossible to imagine this circumstance taking place without it arousing the most
profound ambivalence on the writer’s part – and indeed testimony of his ambivalence over some “vulgar
scandal” which has caused his name to be erased from the body of his work is well documented in Shake-
Speare’s Sonnets.
In Sonnet 72 we read the admonition
My name be buried where my body is….
In Sonnet 71, the instruction
1
A version of this chapter was presented at the 1997 Annual Conference of the Shakespeare Oxford Society in SeattleWashington,
in Oct. 1997.
2
For analysis of the role of "William Shakspere" of Stratford-On-Avon (1564-1616), see the final chapter of the dissertation.
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