ABSTRACT
Any discussion of topical allusions in Measure for Measure seems inevitably to touch upon the idea that the Duke in Shakespeare’s dramatic fi ction is somehow, however tangentially, connected to the fi gure of King James I and his accession in 1603, the year of the play’s composition. Critics, editors, and literary historians have repeatedly qualifi ed strictly occasionalist readings of Measure for Measure as overly reductive-the kind of readings that Richard Levin, issuing a caveat in 1979 against the growing historicist trends in Shakespeare criticism, called the “King James Version” of the play.1 Levin’s careful argument effectively dismissed as inconclusive the echoes of Basilikon Doron that twentieth-century critics had begun to fi nd in Measure for Measure, and he rejected the notion that the play had been written as a politically savvy act of fl attery for the new king. Such simplistic intertextual readings of the play as a dramatic exploration of James’s political theory or-even more unlikely-as a political treatise directed at the king, are indeed tiresome, and I have no wish to repeat them here. Rather than dismissing out of hand any connection between James’s accession and Shakespeare’s play, however, I would argue that we can benefi t from a reexamination of the coincidence of two cultural phenomena during the course of what Thomas Dekker called the “Wonderful Year” of 1603: the visitation of plague and the accession of James. In the popular consciousness, the reception of Elizabeth I’s successor by his new English subjects was thoroughly colored by, if not swallowed up in, the experience of a virulent outbreak of the bubonic plague. It was during this period of public trauma, the perfect storm of perceived societal upheaval created by the arrival of an unknown foreign king during a devastating pestilence, that Shakespeare composed his comedy.
