Duke Critic Quotations

Question 1

Pennington - The Duke “comes to learn something about true government, about justice, about the entire system by which he has governed and lived. He now has to question all that”

Question 2

J. W. Lever - “the need to hold on firmly to a middle way in the church, the state [….]” (about King James I reign)

Question 3

Hampton-Reeves - “on one level [it is a play about] succession management” / “Shakespeare was part of the spectacle” where James I made his “formal entry into London through its city gates”

Question 4

H. R. Coursen - The Duke is vain, and is “image mongering”

Question 5

F. R. Leavis - He is a “kind of Providence, directing the action from above”

Question 6

Wilson-Knight - “The Duke’s ethical attitude is exactly correspondent with Jesus’” / he “moves among men suffering grief at their sins”

Question 7

Hazlitt - The Duke is “more absorbed in his own plots than anxious for the welfare of the state”

Question 8

Brockbank - after act 3 scene 1 we move to the “easy lies and evasions of the Duke’s ‘crafty’ talk”

Question 9

David Lloyd Stevenson - the play was “written partly to flatter James I as the Duke is based on many of his attributes”

Question 10

T. L Tebbetts - “the play is based on James but intended to be a sly, subversive attack on the monarch”

Question 11

Rosalind Miles - “ultimate benevolent authority figure, “kindly father”, “deep moral seriousness of his role”

Question 12

N. W. Bawcutt - he “remains a collection of attributes which fail to coalesce” [come together]

Question 13

Waters Bennett = the duke embodies “James’s love of stratagems” and “fondness for dramatics”