Shakespeare's Use of Examinations in Measure for Measure

Abstract

Throughout his career as a playwright, Shakespeare used a particular scene-building device in which a character is called to account before an authority figure and questioned about beliefs or actions that may incur serious sanctions, including a death sentence. I propose calling scenes which employ this device “examinations,” a term that Shakespeare used only infrequently but which was common in the titles of accounts describing the heresy trials of Lollards and other English Protestant martyrs in the fifteenth sixteenth centuries. I will try to show that there are conventions and tropes that are common to the scenes in Shakespeare and to the examination accounts of the martyrs, and assay the significance of the similarities and their impact on possible interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.¹ In this essay I will be paying particular attention to Measure for Measure.