HAT CAN MEASURE FOR MEASURE TELL US about the Shakespearean theater of 1604? One way to try to answer this question is to consider the theater in terms of mirth, since mirth is the cultural figure most appropriate to the genre of comedy. Further, we can historicize the theater's representation of itself as the place of mirth by reading Measure for Measure metadramatically in terms of Jacobean transformations of Elizabethan theatrical mirth. In this essay, accordingly, I will develop-in conformity with new historicist procedure-an historicized metadramatic reading of Measure for Measure.' However, in contrast to the new-historicist practice of collapsing into one the two categories of power and play, I want to emphasize both the Renaissance's production of an unstable but important division between the fields of the political and the literary, and also the differences