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‘Measure beyond Measure’ and The Gamester

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Richard Levin
Richard Levin*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Stony Brook
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Extract

Six years ago in this journal, John Cutts published a very amusing tale from Uranus and Psyche (British Museum Ad. MS. 40145, foll. 140r-141v) that involved a kind of doubling of the standard ‘bed-trick,’ in which not only did the wife, in the usual manner, secretly take the place of the woman with whom her husband had an assignation, but the husband also secretly yielded his place to a friend, and so unwittingly arranged his own cuckolding. Mr. Cutts merely intended to present an interesting development of the theme that Shakespeare had used in All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, but I think in doing this he has uncovered for us the source of the main plot of James Shirley's comedy, The Gamester.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Spring 1965 , pp. 1 - 3
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1965

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References

1 ‘All's Well that's not Well, or Measure beyond Measure,’ RN, RN (1959), 12-14.

2 An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 479.

3 See Robert Forsythe, The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1914), pp. 357-358; Stephen Ronay's edition of the play (unpub. diss., Chicago, 1948), pp. vii-xiii; and Gerald Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, v (Oxford, WSfyt m i . Forsythe notes two more versions of the bed-trick as possible sources–Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, ix, and the Decameron, vm.iv; but the first is of the same general type as Malespini's and Queen Marguerite's, and the second only involves a substitution of women. For other analogues, see D. P. Rotunda, Motif-Index of the Italian Novella in Prose (Bloomington, 1942), K1223.2.1, K1544, K1843.2.3; and R. H. Robbins’ translation of Lei Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (New York, 1960), p. 381.

4 F. S. Boas, An Introduction to Stuart Drama (London, 1946), p. 363.

5 See the entry in the British Museum Catalogue of Additions for 1921-25. Mr. Cutts, who has edited the entire manuscript for publication, informs me that he has reason to believe the work was written over a considerable period of time, from around 1615 to 1630.

6 See the entry in Sir Henry Herbert's record book reprinted in Malone's Variorum edition of Shakespeare (London, 1821), III, 236. Herbert does not specify which of the three plots of The Gamester he is referring to, but it is probably the main one.