Measure For Measure A05

Question 1

Wylie Sypher 1950

Answer 1

‘Shakespeare’s characters are stereotyped in order to present the moral problem. The audience is then required to reflect on the moral choices of the characters as Shakespeare, through the Duke, makes the punitive decisions for them’

Question 2

Alex Aronson 1972

Answer 2

• ‘What Shakespeare portrays is man’s inability to live up to the mask he has assumed before the world’
• ‘Both Angelo and Isabella hide their incomplete, crippled personalities behind a pose of chastity and self control’

Question 3

Marcia Riefer

Answer 3

• ‘Isabella has been labelled either angel or vixen’
• ‘What Isabella is afraid of, synonymous with her loss of virginity, is her loss of respect, both her own self-respect and the respect of the community’

Question 4

Rosalind Miles, 1976

Answer 4

‘There are no real hypocrites in Measure for Measure but all the main characters are to some degree ignorant of the extent of their nature’

Question 5

Kate Chedgzoy, 2000

Answer 5

‘Lucio will not submit himself to the Duke’s dramatic manipulations. Indeed, his response to his sentence undermines the whole notion that in comedy marriage is a happy ending’

Question 6

Michael Pennington, 1983

Answer 6

‘[Angelo] knows nothing about himself sexually and is very much out of touch with that side of his personality’

Question 7

Kent Lasonski

Answer 7

Lucio is a ‘Biblical Satan Figure’

Question 8

H.R. Coursen, 1984

Answer 8

‘The “comic” ending is “coerced”’

Question 9

Nicholas Marsh

Answer 9

‘Lucio views lechery as an inevitable attribute of nature and life’

Question 10

Daryl Gless

Answer 10

Isabella has ‘spiritual arrogance’

Question 11

McCandless

Answer 11

‘Isabella tries to resist femininity’ yet performs it ‘to serve male interests’

Question 12

William Empson

Answer 12

Duke treats ‘subjects as puppets for the fun of making them twitch’

Question 13

David L. Stevenson

Answer 13

The Duke is ‘an outsider in the play itself’