Shakespeare’s mingled yarn and Measure for Measure

Abstract

This will not be a lecture for purists. I propose to examine a trend that troubled Sir Philip Sidney when he lamented the fashion for ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’ — a shift in literary taste that owed much to the genius of William Shakespeare. It started, perhaps, with the mixing of comic and more serious matter in medieval drama; Kyd and Marlowe gave it a new impetus; and it had certainly arrived by the time of Measure for Measure Shakespeare’s darkest comedy. But I have in mind something more far-reaching than the hybridisation of kinds, or the doctrine of purity of genre. As Elizabethan drama moved towards realism, and simultaneously lurched in several other directions as well, many kinds of ‘mixing’ were developed — prose and verse; natural and stylised language, and stage behaviour, and acting; Elizabethan and ’historical’ costume, as in the Peacham sketch of Titus Andronicus; plot and sub-plot — to name just a few ‘mixings’ that must have been in general use by the 1580s. Then Shakespeare appeared on the scene, pressed a button, and the mixer-speed accelerated remarkably, much to the disgust of purists (such as Ben Jonson). Shakespeare delighted in mixed metaphor; Jonson reputedly said of some of the grandest speeches in Macbeth which ‘are not to be understood’, that ‘it was horror’.