Measure For Measure Critical Quotes Flashcards
Mistress Overdone represents “professional immorality”
G. Wilson Knight
Lucios “very existence is a condemnation of the society which makes him a possibility”
G. Wilson Knight
Angelo is a “very extraordinary hypocrite”
Charlotte Lennox
Shakespeare’s use of dark elements in the play “tortures it into a comedy”
Charlotte Lennox
“The Duke’s lies are white lies meant to save the situation for the time being”
Philip Brockbank
“Comedy was the dramatic form that dealt with the commoners”
R. W. Maslen
“Humour lies almost entirely in the low-life sub-plot”
Brendon Jackson
The Duke is “absorbed in his own plot”
Hazlitt
The “conclusion of marriage seems, then, as a matter of control and punishment”
Tony Martin
“Every supposedly moral choice made by a character is, in fact, a relative and compromised position, rather than an absolute ethical truth”
Nigel Wheale
“‘Measure for measure’ was a commonplace saying that implied a proportionate punishment, or more rarely, a reward”
Nigel Wheale
“A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned”
John Fletcher
“Angelo’s crimes were such as must sufficiently justify punishment … and I believe every reader feels some indignation when he finds him spared”
Samuel Johnson
The contrasting elements make it a “mingled drama” so the play is “exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature”
Samuel Johnson
“Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded by Angelo’s escape. Isabella herself contrives to be amiable and Claudio is detestable”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Demonstrates the “tyranny of nature and circumstance over human action”
Walter Pater
The Duke is “a kind of Providence directing the action from above. His attitude is meant to be ours - his total attitude, which is the attitude of the play”
F. R. Leavis
Isabella’s character is drawn from a range of stereotypes of female behaviour; “while Isabella may seem to resist such stereotypes her punishment is to be disliked by the play and its audience”
Lisa Jardine
The play “dramatises ‘an exercise in authoritarian repression’ in which the Duke’s undercover surveillance of his people and a prevalent Christian morality that stigmatises sex as guilt combine to keep the populace under a sinister form of ideological control”
Johnathon Dollimore
“Angelo is sexually aroused by prohibition… Isabella is ostentatiously pristine and her nun’s habit marks her as taboo: he finds her irresistible… if he rationalised his behaviour or blamed it on Isabella, he would lose the nearly sensual luxury of self-hatred”
Katherine Eisaman Maus
“Channelling sexual desire into the socially acceptable institution of marriage”
Richard Lees
“Shakespeare’s original audience in 1604 would also have found the play’s conclusion very reminiscent of another kind of ending … the Last Judgement where God judges the living and the dead”
Sean McEvoy
Marriage is deployed “as a reward and, it seems, as a punishment”
Sean McEvoy
“To read the plays ending as cynical is to impose a modern reading which is not supported in the text”
Sean McEvoy
