| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系 === 95 === The divine right of kingship, the king’s two bodies, and Machiavelli’s theories are three major streams of political conceptions in Renaissance England. In terms of the writing of Shakespeare’s play, there were three crucial incidents between 1602 to 1604, and all of them had a theme in common: kingship. The first incident was the publication of an English version of “Anti-Machiavel” in 1602; the second was “The Golden Speech of Queen Elizabeth”; the last was the two editions of King James VI of Scotland’s (later James I of England) Basilikon Doron. Measure for Measure is the first Jacobean play by Shakespeare, and this study is an attempt to set this play back into the context of its own time, the transitional period between the final days and the death of Queen Elizabeth and the coronation of King James in order to understand the conceptions of kingship and the connection to Machiavelli’s political theories in his writing The Prince, which is the foremost reference in this paper, to discuss the dynamics of the co-existence and contradictions of binary perceptions in Measure for Measure. This disguised-duke play explores that the indefinite environments shift viewpoints constituting the inequity between the ruling class and the ruled class, the conflict between personal interests and public interests, the discrepancy between the intention and the fact, the ambiguity between truth and deception, the inconsistency between the public performance and private ambition, the interdependence between cause and effect, and the paradox between justice and injustice.
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