Religion Critic Quotations Flashcards
Mark Lilly - “in refusing to save Claudio’s life, Isabella is engaging in gross selfishness and exaggerated religiosity”
Raber and Kremps - “The Law that condemns Claudio is Puritan in nature”
Gutlerrez - “[the play] is set in the Catholic city of Vienna, while simultaneously presenting the social issues and symbolic portrayals of power that much more accurately resemble Protestant London”
Mustschmann - “It was an age in which religion mattered supremely, to the individual and to the nation” / “There can be no serious doubt that Shakespeare was a Christian ride up to the end”
John A Green - The Duke’s disguise as a Friar is “perhaps an implication that Catholicism is inherently corrupt and is merely a show with no real substance”
John A Green - “The Duke cannot rightly be said to occupy the moral high ground throughout the play”
John A Green - “The very idea that a Catholic holy man would encourage a woman to have intercourse outside of marriage paints a rather unflattering picture of Catholicism”
Maus - “Angelo’s disastrous career suggests one possible effect of strict sexual self-denial: that the habits of self-restraint can themselves provoke sexual excitement”
Emma Smith - Isabella shows that she is “able to play the grubby game of blackmail with Angelo”
Emma Smith - “many readers have found [Isabella] unsympathetic” / “But […] life itself seemed a short and insignificant matter in the light of eternal judgement”
Wilson-Knight - “The Duke’s ethical attitude is exactly correspondent with Jesus”
Wilson-Knight - “The Duke’s sense of human responsibility is delightful throughout: he is likely a kindly father, and all the rest are his children”
Wilson-Knight - “Isabella, like Angelo, has progressed far during the play’s action: from sanctity to humanity”
Wilson-Knight - “It is always her own, and only her own, chastity, that assumes, in her heart, universal importance”
Wilson-Knight - “Isabella has no real affection for Claudio; she has stifled all human love in the pursuit of sanctity”
Mark Lilly - “Far from being a god-like figure, Vincentio is just like the characters whom he has been submitting to tests. He is human, fallible”.
Mark Lilly - “[Angelo] is not an intrinsically evil person who is ‘found out’ in the play and exposed; rather, he is someone who has built up a reputation for virtue and […] his weakness is similar to Isabella’s: a childlike, naivety about the world of human passions, which in turn leads to a stern Puritanical outlook”.
Mark Lilly - “The whole story of Claudio’s ‘offence’, and Isabella’s intolerance of it, is intended to show how religion makes otherwise decent people strict, undiscriminating and even ruthless”
