MforM critics Flashcards
H N Hudson (19th cent) on Isabella
“a saintly anchoress”
C. Marowitz (modern) on Isabella
“A helpless pawn of the law”
C. Marowitz (modern) on Isabella and Angelo
“She is put in the moral predicament of pleading to save the life of the man who tried to ravish her.”
G Wilson Knight (19th cent) on the Duke 1
“Christ-like”
G Wilson Knight (19th cent) on the Duke 2
“The duke is lit with divine suggestion, controlling the play from start to finish”
R. Parks on the Duke
He “contrives how to elude those very laws he has been so desirous of having executed”
T. Bowdler on Angelo (19th cent)
Angelo is a ‘monster of inequity’
K. McLuskie (modern) on Angelo
“Powerful men often expect sexual favours from those who are socially inferior”
E. Smith on Angelo
“Upright and cold”
W. Hazlitt (19th cent) on Barnadine
“A moral antithesis of the morality and hypocrisy of the other characters in the play”
C. Lennox (18th cent) on Claudio
Has sympathy for Claudio describing his “desire for life” - “a natural frailty”
Charles Marowitz (modern) on law
“Law breeds desire as well as blocks it”
G Wilson Knight (19th cent) about M for M’s message
- sexual ethics
- contrast between human consciousness and human instinct
G Wilson Knight on M for M as a play (20th cent)
Idea that M for M is an allegory for “man’s moral nature”
F.S Boas on M for M as a play (20th cent)
M for M is a ‘problem play’
Dominic Jean Goule Globe production 2015
Isabella is clad in blue and white clothing, symbolic of the Virgin Mary.
Harold Bloom on Isabella
Isabella “clings to her virginity as a badge of superiority.”
