Measure for Measure Flashcards
critics - general (25 cards)
Julliet stevenson
‘the language in this scene (act2.2) is erotic. Isabelle and Angelo have been copulating across the verse ever since they met’
A.W.Schlegel
‘The true significance of the whole is the triumph of mercy over strict justice’
Walter Patter
‘The play deals with mere human nature and brings before us a group of persons attractive full of desire vessels of the seed-bearing powers of nature … a gaudy existence’
John Saunders
‘Measure for Measure is a play of extremes’
Kenneth Muir
‘The Duke appears to have a supreme indifference to human feelings, like a scientist performing a controlled experiment on human nature’
Jonathon Dollimore
‘Through the transgressors in Measure for Measure, the spectre of unregulated desire legitimates an exercise in authoritarian repression
Richard Wilson and Jonathon Goldberg
‘The Dukes aim is not to teach people a moral lesson, but to re-legitimate his rule’
Paul Hollindale
‘Moral certainty seems everywhere to be accompanied by human inadequacy’
Cedric Watts
‘The Duke may be Benevolent, but his tone often lacks considerate sensitivity’
G Wilson Knight
‘The Duke is a prophet of an enlightened ethic … which is really the gospel ethic’
Richard David
‘There is a danger that to a modern audience, Isabelle may appear unbearably self-centered and priggish’
Richard Wilson
‘the duke is a Machiavellian power monger who moves unseen and all seeing among his people in order to better dominate them’
Declan Donellan
‘We hate eachother because we hate ourselves’
Samuel Johnson
‘Every reader feels some indignation when he finds Angelo spared’
Hazlitt
The Duke is ‘more absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state’
Diana Devlin
‘Isabelle’s brave challenge to authority is immediately followed by a sexual approach from the authority’
Harold Bloom
‘Everyone is in an abyss of inwardness’
Coleridge
‘A hateful work’
Paul Cheetham
‘The Duke seems to take on more and more the role of agent provocateur’
Sandra Clarke
‘Isabella allows herself to be used as a commodity by the Duke’
Brian Gibbons
‘they live in a gross world of commodified sexuality
Suzann Mclean
‘you could conclude that her character is better suited to the contemplative world of the nunnery than to the fluctuating influence of the city outside’
Paul Hollindale
terms the play an ‘anti-comedy’
Harold Bloom
‘a comedy that destroys comedy’