the rising of the style.

The interest of Measure for Measure, therefore, is partly that of an
old story told over again. We measure with curiosity that variety of
resources which has enabled Shakespeare to refashion the original
material with a higher motive; adding to the intricacy of the piece,
yet so modifying its structure as to give the whole almost the unity of
a single scene; lending, by the light of a philosophy which dwells much
on what is complex and subtle in our nature, a true human propriety to
its strange and unexpected turns of feeling and character, to incidents
so [172] difficult as the fall of Angelo, and the subsequent
reconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleads successfully for his
life. It was from Whetstone, a contemporary English writer, that
Shakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio's "rare history" of Promos
and Cassandra, one of that numerous class of Italian stories, like
Boccaccio's Tancred of Salerno, in which the mere energy of southern
passion has everything its own way, and which, though they may repel
many a northern reader by a certain crudity in their colouring, seem to
have been full of fascination for the Elizabethan age. This story, as
it appears in Whetstone's endless comedy, is almost as rough as the
roughest episode of actual criminal life. But the play seems never to
have been acted, and some time after its publication Whetstone himself
turned the thing into a tale, included in his Heptameron of Civil
Discourses, where it still figures as a genuine piece, with touches of
undesigned poetry, a quaint field-flower here and there of diction or
sentiment, the whole strung up to an effective brevity, and with the
fragrance of that admirable age of literature all about it. Here,
then, there is something of the original Italian colour: in this
narrative Shakespeare may well have caught the first glimpse of a
composition with nobler proportions; and some artless sketch from his
own hand, perhaps, putting together his first impressions, insinuated
itself between Whetstone's work and the play as we actually read it.
Out [173] of these insignificant sources Shakespeare's play rises, full
of solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty, the new
body of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry,
escaping from the imperfect relics of the old story, yet not wholly
transformed, and even as it stands but the preparation only, we might
think, of a still more imp