Measure Quotes Act 3 Flashcards
3.1 Summary:
In prison, the Duke speaks to Claudio - asking him if he wants to be pardoned by Angelo, trying to convince him that death is better than life. Isabella appears, speaks to Claudio about Angelo, constantly evades the question until being asked outright.
Claudio has a monologue about death - and asks her to give up her virginity. She reproaches him and tells him to die. The Duke then asks to speak to Isabella, and tells her about Mariana and proposes a plan that is beneficial to them both. Isabella agrees to meet Mariana.
3.2 Summary:
The Duke meets the bawds, asks them what their crime is - Duke condemns them and tells them to go to jail. Lucio asks what’s happening; mocks Pompey; doesn’t pay his bail, an “informant”?
Lucio tells the Duke about his own misdeeds, not knowing (or knowing) that he’s the Duke. Mistress Overdone is arrested, tells a story about Lucio’s own fornication, and Escalus calls for Lucio’s arrest.
Duke and Escalus talk about Claudio; ends with a soliloquy - “Craft against vice I must apply”.
“Pay with falsehood false extracting / And perform an old contracting” (3.2)
“Craft against vice I must apply” (3.2)
“Should be as holy as severe” (3.2)
“More nor less to others paying / Than by self-offences weighing” (3.2)
“If his own life answer the straitness of his proceeding, it shall become him well” (3.2)
“there is so great a fever on goodness that the dissolution of it must cure it” (3.3)
“The Duke yet would have dark deeds darkly answered” (3.2)
“Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love” (chiasmus, 3.2) / “it is much darkened in your malice”
“A little more fertility to lechery” / “It is too general a vice, and severity must cure it” (3.2)
“but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down” (3.2)
“For being a bawd, for being a bawd” - mirrors Claudio’s “too much liberty” (3.2) / “bawd born”
Lucio’s mocking questioning of Pompey: “art going to prison, Pompey?”, “art thou led in triumph?”, etc (3.2)
“as some would seem to be / free from our faults, as faults from seeming free!” (3.2)
“A wicked bawd! / The evil that thou causest to be done / that is thy means to live” (3.2 - monologue)
“buy and sell men and women like beasts, we shall have all the world drink brown and white bastard” (3.2)
“I thank you for this comfort” - morally ambiguous, would she trust the Duke if not for his disguise? (3.1)
“the corrupt deputy scaled” / “the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof” (3.1)
“this well-seeming Angelo!” (3.1)
“What merit were it in death to take this poor maid from the world!” (3.1)
“swallowed his vows whole” / “he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them but relents not” (3.1)
“but that frailty hath examples for his falling” / “the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in complexion, but grace being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair” (3.1)
“I had rather my brother die than my son should be unlawfully born” (3.1)
“I will open my lips in vain, or discover his government” (3.1)
“Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd, ‘Tis best that thou diest quickly.” (3.1)
“Die, perish!” / “O faithless coward, O dishonest wretch!” / “Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?” (3.1)
“I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death / no word to save thee” (3.1)
“Sweet sister, let me live” / “the age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death” (3.1)
“Death is a fearful thing” / “and shamed life a hateful” (3.1)
“Or of the deadly seven it is the least” / “to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot” / “to bathe in fiery floods or to reside in thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice” (3.1)
“I’d throw it down for your deliverance / as frankly as a pin” (3.1)
“The prenzie Angelo?” / “this outward-sainted deputy!” (3.1)
“and the poor beetle that we tread upon / finds a pang as great / as when a giant dies” (3.1)
“six or seven winters more respect than a perpetual honour” (3.1)
“There is a devilish mercy in the judge” (3.1)
“To sue to live, I find I seek to die / And seeing death find life.” (3.1, chiasmus)
“yet in this life / lie hid mo thousand deaths / “yet death we fear, That makes these odds all even” / “the best of rest is sleep” / “for him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun And yet run towards him still” (3.1)
“If thou art rich, thou’rt poor” / “and death unloads thee” (3.1)
“The miserable have no other medicine / But only hope” (3.1) / “I’ve hope to live, but am prepared to die”
