2 - The Scene Vienna

Summary

Some of Shakespeare's plays advertise their location in their title: The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Measure for Measure bears a label that identifies its location explicitly in a different way. In the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, the closing lines of the play are, unusually, followed by a terse designation of its setting: ‘The Scene Vienna’. There is only one other reference to Vienna in all of Shakespeare's works - perhaps ominously, Hamlet's play within a play, ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, is set there. Measure for Measure is one of just two plays in the Folio whose location is pinned down by such a label (the other is The Tempest, located on ‘an uninhabited island’), and scholars have suggested that these uncharacteristically precise locations were contributed not by Shakespeare but by Ralph Crane, the man who prepared transcripts of these plays for publication. But this need not imply that the Folio's insistence on the Viennese setting of the play is irrelevant or insignificant. There is much within the playtext that reminds us that the location is Vienna: characters mention the name of the city repeatedly, especially in the first few scenes, and references to Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, and Russia would also have encouraged Shakespeare's London audience to feel that the action of this play occurs at the farther edge of Europe, in a country both like and unlike their own.

Shakespeare's stage did not represent particular places or evoke their atmosphere through the use of scenery; but this does not mean that a sense of place was unimportant. Instead of the visual clues provided by scenery and costume, it is through language that the audience is given information about where the play is set, and what meanings this choice of location brings with it: most obviously the title, but also the dialogue (Viola's haunting query, ‘What country, friends, is this?’, drawing the response ‘This is Illyria, lady’ (Twelfth Night, 1.2.1-2)), and the implied stage directions embedded within it (Ulysses’ remark that ‘Achilles stands i'th’ entrance of his tent’, (Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.38)).