Moretti's Method & Measure for Measure

I found Franco Moretti's "Style, Inc." a particularly rewarding read, and I wish to emulate it in this week's blog post. In lieu of his "Seven Thousand Titles," I will look at a meager 35: the titles which appear in the First Folio's table of contents. Hopefully, looking at Measure for Measure in this context will tell me something about why the play may have ended up with the title it did and what it means. Here they are, in the Folio's tripartite organizational scheme:

COMEDIES.

The Tempest.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Measure for Measure.
The Comedy of Errours.
Much adoo about Nothing
Loves Labour lost.
Midsommer Nights Dreame.
The Merchant of Venice.
As you Like it.
The Taming of the Shrew.
All is well, that Ends well.
Twelfe-Night, or what you will.
The Winters Tale.

HISTORIES.

The Life and Death of King John.
The Life & death of Richard the second.
The First part of King Henry the fourth.
The Second part of K. Henry the fourth.
The Life of King Henry the Fift.
The First part of King Henry the Sixt.
The Second part of King Hen. the Sixt.
The Third part of King Henry the Sixt.
The Life and Death of Richard the Third
The Life of King Henry the Eight.

TRAGEDIES.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus.
Titus Andronicus.
Romeo and Juliet.
Timon of Athens.
The Life and death of Julius Caesar.
The Tragedy of Macbeth.
The Tragedy of Hamlet.
King Lear.
Othello, the Moore of Venice.
Anthony and Cleopater.
Cymbeline King of Britaine.

     14 comedies, 10 English history plays, 11 tragedies. Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen are absent, and since the precise title used in this first collected edition of Shakespeare's work is at issue, I will leave them out of the account. About half of these plays had previously been published in quarto, sometimes with much-expanded titles. The Merchant of Venice, for instance, appeared as The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. VVith the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his fleshe and the obtayning of Portia by the choyce of three chests. As it hathe been diuers times acted by the Lord Chaimberlaine his Servants. Written by William Shakespeare.

     Measure for Measure was not one of these plays, but this long title, with its inaccurate plot summary focusing on the most sensational aspects of the play, clearly indicates that titles of plays could function as marketing devices in precisely the way Moretti sees novel titles working. It is easy to see, also, how unwieldy such titles might seem in the context of a collection of a writer's complete plays: if such a project is being attempted, it is because a market already exists (or is thought to exist) for whom the author's name has become a reliable brand of quality.

     But why the particular short-form titles we see in the Folio? Clearly, genre has a lot to do with it: all the English history play titles are restricted to the name of the reigning king, even (as in the Henry IV plays) when he is not the protagonist. Likewise, the tragic titles all contain the tragic hero's name (or, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, heroes' names). Indeed, one is tempted to speculate that it is Cymbeline's proper noun-centric title which led the editors to place it in this category, despite its happy ending (modern scholars usually consider it a "romance"). The prominence of names in the tragedies might be read as a marker of the greater focus on character development and introspection we find in these plays.

     On the other hand, the plays grouped as comedies all share an absence of proper names in their titles. Only the earliest, The Comedy of Errors, explicitly declares itself as a comedy. Most of the rest take their titles from proverbial phrases, either appearing in the play's dialogue (The Merry Wives of Windsor; Measure for Measure; The Taming of the Shrew; All's Well That Ends Well; and Twelfth Night, or What You Will) or not (Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It). These titles seem most analogous to Moretti's "abstractions": "Generosity, Indiscretion, Independence, Delusion", and so on. But where, for Moretti's 19th century novels, "abstractions here really mean--ethics" (150), they self-evidently perform a different significatory function for Shakespeare's plays. Rather than a code of morals, for the most part they seem to indicate a mood: playful frivolity. Measure for Measure, then, stands out like a sore thumb. If the other titles announce their plays as securely as The Comedy of Errors' workmanlike title did as comedies, Measure for Measure's title (though, like theirs, adapted from a catchy saying embedded in the text) announces its play as something else.