Isabella Critic Quotations Flashcards
Waters Bennett - “Isabella’s flaws arise from her inexperience”
Gless - Isabella’s preoccupation with chastity shows “spiritual arrogance”
F. R. Leavis - “Isabella can exhibit a contempt of death because of the exaltation of her faith”
McGarrity - Isabella is “holding a hollow sculpture of virtue to hide inside of”
Frye - her desire to enter the convent is “prompted more by an adolescent girl’s fear of the world than by a genuine volition”
Woodman - sleeping w/ Angelo would have led to “differentiation from her own deluded omnipotence”
Wilson-Knight - “Isabella has no real affection for Claudio”
W. W Lawrence - “I do not think there is any doubt that Isabella turns to him with a heavenly and yielding smile”
Dunkel - Isabella agrees to the bed trick as “a holy man advises her to do so”
Dionisotti - “Isabella craves simplicity and order and certainty - her belief, but is faced with confusion and contradiction - humanity”
Stevenson - she “recognises her own sensuality and the need to apply strict control over it. I don’t think she’s frightened or surprised by it; she wants to dominate it”
Emma Smith - “more than our brother is our chastity” is a “formal statement of belief, rather than an inner revelation of feeling”
Emma Smith - “has this awkward, self-assured character been assimilated into a romantic conclusion or does she remain resolved to follow her own path?”
Lasnoski - “Isabella wanted Angelo dead, and justly so. However, if she ever desires mercy upon her brother, she must experience a conversion to mercy in her own heart, a conversion that extends mercy to her enemies”
Penelope Wilton - “Her vilification of her brother… shows her as an hysteric, as a neurotic and it shows her as a religious maniac”
