The Origins of Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure wasn't very comfortably a comedy when Shakespeare got hold of this story, and nor has it really been a comedy since it left its hands. It's somehow like one of those pop-up tents that's always resting out of its packed-up shape. Only Shakespeare, it seems, has the knack to jam it into the comedy bag. There are two kinds of sources for Measure for Measure. The first is a kind of general folkloric one, which can give us what the formal analysis of myth calls a myth-eam or a plot function. The second is some kind of version of an Italian story by Chinthio, the same source as for Othello