Measure for Measure critics
- Created by: eleanorfarnold
- Created on: 10-05-15 13:25
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- Measure for Measure Critics
- Isabella
- G. Wilson Knight:"Isabella stands for sainted purity"
- Irene McGarrity: "holding a hollow sculpture of virtue to hide inside of"
- Marion Woodman: sleeping with Angelo would have led to "differentiation from her own deluded omnipotence"
- "her ego is not strong enough to differentiate itself from her sexual purity"
- Northrop Frye: "promoted more by an adolescent girl's fear of the world than by a genuine volition"
- GWK: Isabella has no real affection for Claudio
- Edward Dowden (Victorian puritanica): "life runs strongly and gladly through her veins"
- "to preside over this polluted and feculent Vienna is the office and charge of Isabella"
- Robert N. Watson: "the sister faces genetic extinction...the brother faces execution"
- F.R. Leavis: "Isabella can exhibit a contempt of death because of the exaltation of her faith"
- all characters
- Irene McGarrity: "all the major characters...[struggle] toward an ideal virtual while acting on mythical vice's terms, forgetting about humanity"
- Angelo
- G. Wilson Knight: "Pharisiacal righteousness"
- GWK: "Angelo is not a conscious hypocrite: rather a man whose chief faults are self-deception and pride in his own righteousness"
- William Empson: "Her coldeness, even her rationality, is what has excited him"
- L.C.Knights: "His lust, just like his forced chastity, is felt as something excessive, urgent and disproportionate to its demands"
- L.C.Knights: "Angelo's temptations and fall finely enforces the need for self-knowledge and sympathy which seems to be the central moral of the play"
- Stacy Magdenz: "Angelo, clinging to the letter of the law, is penitent but still prefers death to redemption."
- F.R Leavis: "He was placed in a position calculated to actualise his worst potentialities"
- sex
- GWK: "no other subject provides so clear a contrast between...thefoully bestial and ideally divine in humanity"
- Robert N. Watson: the Duke's allowance of "sexual licence to corrupt his city [would be seen as] understandable"
- Robert N. Watson: "marriage becomes...a way of maintaining the substance and order of the social fabric"
- The Duke
- W.W. Lawrence: "a stage Duke, not a real person" - "He is essentially a puppet"
- William Empson: "The whole business of public justice is fatuous and hideous"
- William Empsom: "Nothing less than the fantastical nature of the the Duke could have kept the play from being a tragedy"
- William Empsom: The Duke is testing Isabella's capacity for forgiveness when she forgives Angelo
- GWK: "The Duke's original leniency is shown to be right"
- Wilbur Dunkel: Edward coke had to remind James I "the king of England ruled under God's law"
- Wilbur Dunkel: "his disguise must not be taken too seriously"
- The Duke and Isabella
- W.W. Lawrence: I do not think there is any doubt that Isabella turns to him with a heavenly and yielding smile"
- "it is to be a marriage of understanding with purity"
- Wilbur Dunkel: she gives into the Duke's immoral bed trick plan because "a holy man advises her to do so"
- Robert N.Watson: "marriage as [a] instrument for controlling desire"
- Context
- William Empson: "There was a strand of loathing for sexuality in any form"
- L.C.Knights: "social forms were being undermined by new forces"
- Article 6 of the Confession: "the rule of government is according to the flesh, that of the Christians according to the spirit"
- Ending/The Play as a whole
- Clifford Leech: wrote it as he went along
- Stacy Magdenz: "marriage is the public and measured answer to a private and immoderate sin."
- Robert N. Watson:"Her supposed yielding only replicates Claudio's crime and therefore can only accelerate his punishment"
- comedic characters
- L.C.Knights: Lucio etc. "follow their impulses without scruple or restraint" - "Shakespeare's sympathy for scoundrels"
- Robert N. Watson: ("Marrying a a punk i my lords pressing to death") "the executioner has been made by the fornicator"
- Wilbur Dunkel: "the function of Lucio is to keep us informed and unite the characters"
- Isabella
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