This document presents biographical information about Juan de Mariana that seems generally pertinent to the Measure for Measure argument. There are already short biographies of Mariana available on the internet, including one at http://www.mises.org/content/juandemariana.asp and one at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09659b.htm.
Mariana was born around 1536, and thus was over 65 by the time Measure for Measure was published, and, one would think, at the height of his fame. Up until the age of 38 (1574), he had traveled widely, becoming ordained to the priesthood in Rome in 1561, and teaching at colleges in Italy and France for the next thirteen years (Rome, Loreto, Sicily, Messina and Palermo from 1561-1569; Paris from 1569-1574). In Rome, one of his pupils was Roberto Bellarmine, later the cardinal who persecuted Galileo and whose writings (e.g. “In a commonwealth, all men are born naturally free and equal” (De Clericis, Ch. VII) are echoed in Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (“All men are by nature equally free and independent”) and the Declaration of Independence (“All men are created equal”). In Paris, it is said, his lectures on Thomas Aquinas attracted such crowds that people hung out of the windows to hear them.
He returned to Spain in 1574. Per G. Kasten Tallmadge, “Juan de Mariana,” in Gerald Smith, ed., Jesuit Thinkers of the Renaissance (Marquette U.P. 1939), at 159:
“During this time [the 1570s] he was appointed synodal examiner and counsel for the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition. His fame waxed greatly, and by 1580, when he was forty four years old, he was recognised everywhere as one of the highest authorities in matters of theology.” Returning to Spain in 1574, he devoted the rest of his long life to literary endeavors, and served as counselor to the Spanish Inquisition.”
The remainder of his long life seems to have been devoted primarily to literary endeavors. He published the first 20 books of his Latin History of the Matters of Spain in 1592, with the idea of making Spain’s glorious history known to the world at large, and published an expanded version of that work in 1595. Spanish versions of the History came out in 1601 and 1606.
In 1598-99, he published “On the King and His Education” (“De Rege et Regis Institutione”) which he claimed he wrote at the behest of Philip II – who had just died – although it is doubtful that Philip II was would have endorsed the chapter in which Mariana justified tyrannicide, much less his contention that the defeat of the Spanish Armada was attributable to Divine rage at the “vile lusts of a certain prince” (i.e. Philip II). This work also contains Mariana’s suggestion that the Spanish crown authorize and reward privateers for harassing shipping in the English channel.
De Rege might have attracted the attention of Shakespeare as well as King James, both of whom had thoughts on the divine right of kings as well as tyrannicide:
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered . . . .”
(Richard II, 3.2.155-60)
There is a disagreement among Mariana’s biographers as to whether Mariana’s later treatise on debasement appeared as a chapter in the 1599 De Rege. The only English translation, by G.A. Moore, does not contain the debasement chapter, and neither does the 1854 Spanish translation of the work, but this is as far as I have pursued the question.
In 1599, Mariana published De Ponderibus et Mensuris (and indeed, it was bound with some volumes of De Rege), which detailed the history of the very important topic of weights and measures from ancient times to the Spain of his day. De Ponderibus has not been translated into English, and I have seen no summaries beyond a paragraph or two. My paper suggests that this work might contain some of Mariana’s thoughts on debasement – in fact, it has been confused with his treatise on debasement:
“A flurry of anti-Mariana publications followed in the same year. This included calls from the Sorbonne to imprison Mariana, which were printed in London in 1610 under the title Copy of a late Decree of the Sorbone at Paris, for the condemning of that impious, and hereticall opinion, touching the murthering of Princes, generally mantayned by the Jesuits. With unfortunate timing, Mariana’s unrelated treatise on the depreciation of Spanish currency, De ponderibus et mensuris (Toledo, 1599) noted as one of the finest analyses of political economy– was also attracting domestic and foreign criticisms and he was subsequently condemned to home imprisonment for treason the same year L’antimariana was published.).”
From a summary of Roussel, Michel, L’Antimariana ou refutation des propositions de Mariana (Rouen, Jean Petit, 1610), available at
The above paragraph refers to the attention that Mariana’s writings on tyrannicide attracted after the assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610, and how Mariana was imprisoned for the views on debasement expressed in De Mutatione Monetae (1609).
The “antimariana” by Roussel was not the first book to take Mariana to task for his writings, however. In 1603, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable of Castile (who held about a dozen other titles, and who was to be the leading Spanish Ambassador at the 1604 peace conference between Spain and England) directed his secretary, Pedro Mantuan(o), to write a critique of Mariana’s History of Spain. I have been unable to ascertain whether Mantuan (who was about 27 years old at the time, and who went on to become a historian of some repute) attended the Peace Conference with his employer, but it is widely believed that Shakespeare himself was there for eighteen days, along with the other King’s Men.
In 1605, Mariana published, in Mainz, a second edition of De Rege, which contained some minor changes that might have been intended to mollify the Jesuits. The scholars who do not believe that the 1599 version of De Rege included the chapter on debasement say that the 1605 version did. For purposes of my Measure for Measure argument, I assume that these latter scholars are correct.
In 1609, he published Seven Treatises in a single volume. The volume included De Mutatione Monetae, which, as above, got him imprisoned at the age of 74.
Mariana died in 1624, aged 87 or 88.
Update 2021:
One of admitted gaps in my paper was the fact that I could not prove that Mariana had published his views on debasement before Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure. The earliest publication date for Mariana I could find was 1605, and Measure for Measure was first performed in 1604. If you read through the Shaksper discussion on the website (http://www.wmshakespeare.com/shaksperthreads.htm), you saw that my critics found this fact to be dispositive against me.
My response was (and still is) that the strength of the circumstantial case that Shakespeare was in fact referring to Mariana was itself “evidence” in support of the fact that Shakespeare knew of Mariana’s views before he wrote Measure for Measure. I used the analogy of the OJ Simpson murder – if all the circumstantial evidence points to OJ as the murderer, and there is also evidence that the murderer was left-handed, I don’t have to prove the OJ was left-handed – the evidence that he is the murderer is also evidence that he is left-handed. Of course, there were other points as well, including that Measure for Measure was first published in 1623, so who knows what revisions might have been made – and by whom – between 1604 and 1623 (there are theories that Thomas Middleton made some revisions).
Eric C. Graf’s “Juan de Mariana and the Modern American Politics of Money: Salamanca, Cervantes, Jefferson, and the Austrian School” (https://mises.org/library/juan-de-mariana-and-modern-american-politics-money-salamanca-cervantes-jefferson-and) provides the missing link:
For his part, Mariana’s interest in things monetary dates at least from his investigations for his epic Historia general de España (Latin, 1592; Spanish, 1601), a text in which he also mentions, and in fact condemns, Alfonso X’s recourse to debasement ([1592] 1854, 13.9.382–383). A few chapters on he declares that Alfonso’s policy lent enormous support to his son Sancho’s rebellion (14.5.407). Later, he pauses to qualify the triumph of Enrique II (1366–1367, 1369–1379), the first of the great Trastámara line that begat the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, by indicating that this king too had to turn to debasement to finance his wars against Pedro I (1350–1366, 1367–1369). Mariana even says that Enrique only got away with it because he was so handsome, and because he was generally regarded as the embodiment of gentlemanliness (“por excelencia le llamaban el Caballero”), whereas his rival was utterly cruel (17.14.520). From then on Mariana displayed ever-increasing urgency in regard to this theme, with each book granting more attention to monetary matters, allowing them to emerge as the primary focus of his life’s work. In 1599, he published a study of weights and measures, De ponderibus et mensuris (On Weights and Measures), topics that relate to debasement because authorities manipulate currencies by changing precisely these parameters. After seeing to the Spanish translation of History of Spain, with its clear critiques of Alfonso X and Enrique II, he then focused on adding “De moneta” to the 1605 edition of De rege.
So as far as I’m concerned, that “problem” with the paper is solved. Mariana’s views were out there as early as 1592.
Graf’s article also reminded me of another loose end in my paper. Graf argues that one of Mariana’s two most important readers was Miguel Cervantes, and that debasement is a theme in Don Quixote:
If Mariana’s genius lies in his discovery of the politics of money and his subsequent radical opposition to monetary adulteration as one of the most nefarious examples of monarchical tyranny, in a curious twist, the most immediate consequence of his work was its influence on the history of the novel.11 Readers of Cervantes’s Don Quijote (part one, 1605; part two, 1615)—first published the same year as Mariana’s second edition of De rege, with its added “De moneta” chapter—will be familiar with the protagonist’s difficulties regarding which heroes he should emulate. Substantial passages involve the knight’s perplexing decisions to fashion himself after a shifting series of fictional and quasi-historical champions: Palmerín de Inglaterra, Amadís de Gaula, Bernardo del Carpio, “El Cid” Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, Reinaldos de Montalbán, Abindarráez, the Marqués de Mantua, the Caballero del Febo, etc. One scholar describes Don Quijote’s neurotic indecision as reflecting his society’s “crisis of exemplarity,” the end result of a process by which classical models of humanist virtue lost their persuasiveness over the course of the sixteenth century (Hampton). Readers of Mariana, however, can see how specifically this crisis coincides with the Jesuit’s own scientific demolitions of the myths of Spanish history. With Alfonso X “the Wise,” Enrique II of Trastámara, and now both Philip II and Philip III all unveiled as adulterating tyrants, is it any wonder that Don Quijote turns to fiction before wandering out on an impoverished Castilian landscape in an elusive quest for justice?
Beyond Don Quijote’s identity crisis, we also find Mariana’s thoughts on money and politics insinuating themselves into the most intricate ironies of Cervantes’s novel. From the outset, as the aging hidalgo proceeds to sell off his estate to finance his consumption of militant fantasy literature, his household management might be said to resemble that of the Spanish Empire. The fact that a full three quarters of his income goes to food suggests that price inflation is now chipping away at any benefit he enjoys via his tax-exempt status (1.1). Leaving home, he remains in utter denial of economic reality. The first innkeeper actually has to inform him that adventures require money (1.3). In his first act as a “caballero,” he intervenes in a labor dispute that has all the markings of an allegory about the effect of the Habsburg’s new monetary policy upon future generations (1.4). Don Quijote finds Juan Haldudo brutally whipping Andrés, and when he orders him to fork over the youth’s back pay, the farmer sarcastically says that he will happily do so, with interest even. The mad knight responds that he will waive the interest so long as he pays the salary he owes him in reales—i.e., good silver coins instead of adulterated copper ones. A few chapters later, the second narrator’s determined haggling with Moriscos over the lost manuscript, which he finds in a heap of papers destined to feed silkworms, twice highlights the subjective theory of value, with the added irony that Spain’s silk industry is about to be destroyed by the government’s expulsion of these same people (1.9). Later still, Don Quijote’s dismissals, or dissembling postponements, of Sancho’s repeated requests for a salary again make manifest an elitist disregard for the rules of the modern market economy (1.18, 1.20, 1.46, 2.7, etc.).12
Even more intriguing, Don Quijote contains numerous ironic allusions to Gresham’s Law. The novel’s first explicit pun involves just such an allusion. The description of Rocinante—“he had more quarters than a piece of eight”—refers to cracks in a horse’s hoof owing to poor care, improper shoeing, injury, or any number of diseases; but it also plays off the decay of the Spanish money supply, which is taking place from the ground up, so to speak, via the Habsburgs’ devaluations of the vellón cuarto coin (1.1). Despite the official exchange rate of sixty-eight cuartos per real, it now took more quarters to buy a piece of eight as people responded to the new policy by spending copper and saving silver. Toward the heart of the novel, Sancho’s fortuitous discovery of one hundred gold pieces hidden inside a suitcase in the Sierra Morena hints at the same practice—i.e., good money is being secreted away in response to the Habsburgs’ adulterations and mandated exchange rates (1.23). Indeed, throughout the Sierra Morena episodes, Cervantes appears to riff off the two senses of “adultery,” the one having to do with sexual infidelity, the other with falsifying coinage. Again, when the squire fantasizes about getting rich by importing black slaves from the Kingdom of Micomicón to Spain, his racialist metaphor, “as black as they be, I will turn them back into white or yellow,” overtly references the darker, oxidized copper coins that are now pushing out silver and gold (1.29). The phrase also wryly acknowledges the counterfeit billon industry that sprang up on Spain’s borders in response to the artificial rise in the price of copper caused by the Habsburg policy (Lea, 1906, pp. 560–566). And in part two, when Ricote offers to pay Sancho two hundred gold pieces to assist him in recovering his treasure, we can read Cervantes drawing an astonishingly complex and critical parallel between the exile of the Moriscos and the outflow of good money from Spain: mutually reinforcing socially immoral and economically unwise policies (2.54).13
With Sancho’s and Ricote’s monetary evasions and Mariana’s denunciations of the Habsburg policy in mind, it is difficult to avoid a deeper, truly bourgeois understanding of gold permeating Cervantes’s masterpiece. As ambassador Warren Randolph Burgess once explained, gold puts natural limits on the powers of government, making it “historically one of the best protections of the value of money against the inroads of political spending.” And as Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, this is precisely “why it was so popular in the bourgeois era. It imposes restrictions upon governments or bureaucracies that are much more powerful than is parliamentary criticism. It is both the badge and the guarantee of bourgeois freedom—of freedom not simply of the bourgeoisinterest, but of freedom in the bourgeois sense” (quoted by Woods, 2009, pp. 114–116). The ironies of Don Quijote’s attitudes toward gold accentuate his romantic, tragicomic status: early on, he can be a meddling, oppressive bully; other times, especially in the second part, he rises to the role of defender of justice. In his famous “Golden Age” speech the knight clearly understands that the difficulty of mining gold makes it a store of value, but his nostalgia for some sort of prehistoric Platonic communism that would obviate private property leaves much to be desired (1.11).14 In the lion episode, however, which elicits the Morisco narrator Cide Hamete’s most effusive praise, the hero symbolically defies not just a royal beast but also what fellow hidalgo Diego de Miranda at first thinks must be a wagon bearing “the King’s money” (2.17). Sancho’s tip of two gold pieces to the driver and the lion keeper, followed by the latter’s promise to relate the knight’s challenge to “the very King himself when he appears at Court,” conclude the episode with flippant gestures in the direction of Philip III. Later, it is hard not to see a related slap at the same monarch when Governor Sancho, who reigns according to Don Quijote’s princely advice, metaphorically contravenes the policy of inflation by finding ten gold pieces hidden in a cane, thereby exposing a debtor’s illicit attempt to avoid paying his creditor (2.45). Viewed this way, the novel contains a whole slew of loaded phrases that bring Mariana’s protests to mind, such as Don Quijote’s quip at the beginning of part two that “historians who avail themselves of lies ought to be burned like those who counterfeit money” (2.3), or the subtly misallocated Latin phrase in the first prologue, “Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro” ‘There is not sufficient gold to buy back the loss of liberty.’
If politicized allusions to money are not enough to indicate Mariana’s importance for Cervantes, Don Quijote also contains, particularly in part two, a consistent critique of the decadence of the courtly governing classes, and even insinuations of the Jesuit’s constitutional nostalgia for Aragon. Critics often marvel at the burst of Solomonic and Platonic wisdom that Sancho displays when he finally gets his island. His perceptive ruling in favor of the creditor strikes me as a case in point. But some of the final decrees in “The Constitutions of the Great Governor Sancho Panza” are ironically flawed from both Salamancan and Austrian perspectives. When he fixes the price of shoes, we know that this gesture obviates much of what was good about his reign, for he has effectively lowered the quality and the quantity of footwear available to the fictional citizens of Barataria (2.51). Similarly, his prohibition against hoarding is bound to have disastrous effects. And what are we to make of the fact that Governor Sancho accepts two hundred gold pieces from the malicious Duke while refusing to take the same sum from Ricote to assist him in the recovery of his fortune? After retiring from Barataria, Sancho repeatedly claims to have governed beyond reproach—“I have governed like an angel”—but the bias he subsequently displays against his Morisco neighbor suggests that a more sinister chain of command has taken hold in the real world (2.53-54).15
The other dreadful irony at the heart of the novel’s second part is the fact that Zaragoza, the constantly named objective that remains just out of Don Quijote’s reach, was also the site of an Aragonese Cortes tradition in which, unlike the tripartite Castilian tradition, hidalgos actually had political representation as a fourth estate. All remnants of said tradition were put to the sword by Philip II when he invaded Aragon in 1591, and just like Mariana, Cervantes appears chagrined by that outcome. Scholar Quentin Skinner once noted that the collapse of late medieval republicanism in Western Europe, which coincided with the rise of the early modern authoritarian super states, was marked by an intellectual return of the tradition of educating princes by guiding them toward the light of reason via utopian curriculums (“Political Philosophy” 441–452). But libraries have been burned, allegorical caves remain dark dreamscapes, and no Platonic island paradise awaits us at the end of Don Quijote. Another of Cervantes’s recourses to Latin, which is found in Don Quijote’s last letter to Governor Sancho, “Plato amicus, sed magis amica veritas” ‘Plato is a friend, but a greater friend is the truth,” harmonizes perfectly with the anti-monarchical neo-Aristotelian melancholy of late Scholastics like Mariana. Which is to say that there is something not just “curiously impertinent” about Don Quijote, but that, as per so many of its aspects, such as the lion episode, the aborted nostalgia for Aragon, and the consistent pro-Morisco theme, there is in fact something downright tyrannicidal about the novel. I submit that Cervantes announced his angry political sentiment as early as the first prologue of 1605 when he made recourse to an old Spanish proverb: “debajo de mi manto, al rey mato” ‘beneath my cloak, I kill the king.’16
Don Quijote is massive and complex, on the order of the entirety of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but if I had to pick one coetaneous writer who sheds the most light on the novel, it would be Mariana, who not only articulated the intellectual thrust of Cervantes’s bitter bourgeois irony but who directly confronted the same Habsburg tyrants against whom the novelist consistently tilts. In my view, like Mariana, Cervantes defends liberty in a materialist sense, i.e.—Don Quijote is not just about the abstract right to “dream the impossible dream” but, rather, the tangible right to live free of the monetary, legal, religious and even military oppressions directed by an imperious State hell bent on the daily mugging, enslaving, exiling, and killing of its citizens.
The “loose end” that this reminded me of was the underexplored connection between Shakespeare and Cervantes. Obviously, people know there is a connection – everyone will tell you that Shakespeare’s lost play “Cardenio” is based on a novella that appears in Don Quixote. But I don’t think the connection has been sufficiently explored.
As you might recall from the paper (a paragraph on pp. 77-78), one of my possible connections between Shakespeare and Mariana was the fact that Shakespeare had served as a “Groom of the Chamber” during the 1604 Somerset House Peace Conference, where he might have met Pedro Mantuan, the Secretary to Spanish Ambassador Juan Velasco. Mantuan had written a book – on Velasco’s orders – critical of Mariana’s history of Spain, which had apparently disparaged some of Velasco’s ancestors. Given that Shakespeare and Mantuan were likely social equals with similar interests, it seems possible that they ran into each other in the course of the 18-day conference, and during the course of that, might have talked about Mariana and debasement (which was a problem in Spain at that time).
That led me to wonder whether the Spanish account of the Peace Conference (attached) was written by Mantuan, and where the poems at the end of it might have come from. I couldn’t find a complete translation of the account, but I’ve found at least a partial translation in William Brenchley Rye’s “England as Seen by Foreigners” (1865) (findable on Google Books). Here’s an interesting passage:
The Constable rose a second time, and drank to the Queen the health of the King from a very beautiful dragon-shaped cup of crystal garnished with gold, drinking from the cover, and the Queen standing up gave the pledge from the cup itself, Don Blasco de Aragon performing on this occasion the office of cupbearer as also interpreter to what was spoken by the Constable and the Queen, on whose [z. e. the Queen’s] buffet he ordered that the cup should remain. After this, the King drank to the President Richardot and the Audiencier the health of their Highnesses [the Archdukes] saying in French how much he esteemed them, and how desirous he was to live on terms of the strictest amity with them. Soon afterwards the King sent to the Constable an important message (un gran recaudo) by the Earl of Northampton, telling him that this was a happy day for him, since he had made peace on it, and it was the anniversary of his children’s birthdays, the Princess Elizabeth (Isabella) being four years’ old, and therefore he hoped from her name that she might be the means of preserving the kingdoms of Spain and England in friendship and union, unlike that other hostile Elizabeth (otra Isabella enemiga) who had caused so much mischief: hence he gave the Constable permission to drink the health of his children. His Excellency drank the toast accordingly, and in reply aptly quoted those lines of Sannazaro on the birth of the Virgin, in which, describing how our Lady had repaired the evil which Eve brought upon the world, he says : —
” Cumque caput fuerit tantorumque una malorum Foemina principium, lacrimasque et funera terris Intulerit, nunc auxilium ferat ipsa, modumque Qua licet afflictis imponat fcemina rebus.”
I did a bit more digging on Mantuan (including ordering and trying to read [in Spanish] a handwritten manuscript of his from a library in Kent about an English-Spanish match, which seemed to resonate with the above passage, which to me resonated a bit with the final lines of Measure for Measure where the Duke “proposes” to Isabella), but couldn’t find much else of significant use.
But a little digging in Google Books (which was not available when I wrote the paper) established a nice connection between Mantuan and Cervantes: Cervantes mentions Mantuan twice in his “Journey to Parnassas”:
I turn me round and MANTUANO see,
Whose patron is VELASCO the renowned,
No worthier Maecenas could there be ;
The names of these two worthies yet shall sound
Throughout their own, and foreign lands to boot,
Phoebus hath willed it, so it shall be found.
…
And as the difference begins to show
Betwixt the boastful champions and the brave,
The pleasure grows with each descending blow ;
O PEDRO MANTUANO, wise and grave,
‘Twas thou who, out of these conflicting views,
Didst separate the true man from the knave!
Howard Mancing’s Cervantes Encyclopedia describes Mantuan as a “priest, historian, and secretary to important noblemen,” and says that his original name was Pedro Castro (he changed it to Mantuan, which is a reference to the city of Madrid).
Anyway, I’m putting this here in the hopes that an appropriate scholar of Spanish history sees it, and thinks of other sources on Mantuan that might provide additional insight. If there really is a connection between Shakespeare and Mantuan (and/or Cervantes), then perhaps there is a document in some dusty archive somewhere in Spain that actually mentions Shakespeare. It would be amazing if such a thing were to turn up.