Thought on Titus

After reading through Titus Andronicus and watching the presentation in class I couldn't help but to draw from it what I've come to understand about Roman History. Being presently enrolled in Dr. Cherry's History of Rome, the one clear fact that Rome had immensely difficult times in controlling bloodshed with regards to their government. A quick review of Late Republican Rome (prior to the rise of Augustus) and post Claudius Rome are clear examples of this violence. Now, there does exist an interesting paradox here. Often held up as one of the bastions of the civilized world, how could such repugnent and horrendous violence be so wide spread. Using Frye's examination of the different natures of the early modern world, could Shakespeare, in fact being using Titus to explore this idea? Are we in constant freefall from the grace that we once enjoyed with our gods? Does the mythologic idea of fall from grace captivate the Bard's mind? Or is this simply a very Dark comedy about Roman follies?

Some Notes On King Lear

Northrop Frye on King Lear

Part of a series of plays on the histories of British kings
Now seen as legends, but in days of bard they were seen as truth
Based upon Welch priest named Geoffrey of Monmouth (12th century)
Concocted a fictional history of Britain modeled on Virgil
Britain was colonized by Trojan refugees led by one Brutus
Lear is one the many kings chronicled in those writings
Lear was supposed to have lived somewhere around the 7th or 8th century before Christ
The place is thus the earliest chronological staged of Shakespeare’s works
With a setting that is so far back in time, sense of historical blurs into the sense of mythical and legendary times
Main characters expand into a gigantic, even titanic, dimension that simply wouldn’t be possible in a historical context (i.e. Henry VI)
Tensions arise from tensions between tragic structure and a framework of assumptions derived from Christianity.
Christianity is based on a myth which is comic in shape, its theme being the
salvation and redemption of man
look towards Dante and his commedia which follows this central christian myth;
story ends happily for all those who matter
Tragedy needs a hero of outsize dimensions:
Easy to get in Greek tragedy (men can descend from gods, history and
legend blend)
In Christianity there is no hero other than Christ who has a divine dimension.
Tragedy also raises some rather disturbing questions as to what type of god lies
At the centre of the universe ----> think the Gnostic gods.
Opening scene presents Gloucester and then Lear as a couple of incredibly foolish and gullible dodderers
Gloucester’s boast of how he begot Edmund makes us feel that there is credibility
to his later treachery.
It is a genuine humiliation for Goneril and Regan to make speeches of love to their father.
Lear doesn’t at any time in the play express any real affection or tenderness for
either of them.
Seems to be all about how much he’s given them, and what they ought to feel for
Him ---> a sort of bondage?
It is obvious (as speech in scene following Cordellia’s removal) that they are not
Grateful, and why should they be?
During first two acts, Lear’s collisions with his daughters steadily diminish his dignity and leave them with the dramatic honours.
Regan and Goneril never lose their cool: they are certainly harsh and unattractive women, but they have a kind of brusque common sense that bears [Lear] down every time.
Not until scene at end of second act (“shut up your doors”) that our sympathies clearly shift to Lear.
Obvious decrease from the one hundred knights that he used to have employed.
Desperate train now includes only the fool.
It is during and after the storm that the characters of the play begin to show their real nature.
This is unique in the Shakespearean world in that the characters are like chess
pieces ---> obviously black or white
three most apparent and important words in Lear are: 1) nature
2) nothing
3) fool

Nature
To understand this term it is important to examine kind of world view held by Shakespeare’s audience:
Two different types of Goddess of Nature invoked in Edmund’s first soliloquy and Lear’s curse on Goneril ---> illustrate two different concepts of this nature
People assumed that the universe was a hierarchy in which good was “up” and the bad was “down”. ---> simple metaphors, but didn’t affect their force or usefulness
At top of cosmos was the God of Christianity, whose abode was heaven
The lower heaven or sky is not heaven, but it’s the clearest visible symbol of it
The stars were made of a purer substance than this world, kept reminding us in
their circling of the planning and intelligence that went into the Creator’s
original construction
Garden of Eden was made of this same sort of stuff, except that man was meant to inhabit it.
Man fell out of this into a “lower” world, a third level into which man is now born but feels alienated from
Below this the fourth level, the demonic world.
The heaven of God is above nature, the hell of Satan below it.
The two middle levels however form this idea of nature, and thus nature has two levels. ---> the higher level we were intended to live in, and lower that we do.
Man can either attempt to rise above this level, or fall below it.
Their is no way to return to the Garden of Eden (its is gone), nor any physical return to the higher level, but their is hope to mentally get back to another level.
When we speak of nature it is important to note whether we speak of the upper human level of nature, or the environment around us.
Many things are natural to man, but not to things on the lower level
These differences illustrate the point that we are alien to this level
Edmond is commiting himself only to the lower, physical level of nature --- predators (aristocracy) and prey
Lear is cursing to the nature that includes what is natural to man (existence in which love, obedience, authority, and loyality are genuinely human.
Goneril is being cursed because her treatment of her father is “unnatural”
It should not be assumed that either of them actually are aware of the levels of nature, as this place actually predates the Christian god.
King Lear is the spookiest of the tragedies, and yet nothing explicitly supernatural or superhuman occurs. ----> We really don’t believe in Poor Toms five fiends
To Shakespeare’s audience the world of Lear would look like this:
1.World of impotent or nonexistent gods, which tend to collapse into deified
personifications of Nature or Fortune.
2. Social or human world with the elements the more enlightened can see to be essential to a human world, such as love, loyalty and authority. In particular, the world represented by Cordelia’s and Edgar’s love, Kent’s loyalty, Albany’s conscience, etc.
3. World of physical nature in which ,am os born an animal and has to follow the animal pattern of existence. (i.e. join the lions and eat well, or the sheep and get eaten)
4. A hell-world glimpsed in moments of madness or horror
Great example of this Edmund’s rejection of astrology; there’s no need for it in his nature
Storm plays a key role in that such natural disasters were thought to come from God at crucial times in human life
What it comes to symbolize in pre-Christian God times, is that Lear is moving into an order of nature that’s indifferent to human affairs.
His madness brings him insight into this new existence
With his abdication, whatever links there may be between the civilized human
world and the one above it have been severed.
Question lies now, what is a “natural man”?
Own proper human level it is natural to be clothed, sociable, and reasonable
Response to Goneril and Regan’s questions about need for all the knights, “Oh,
reason not the need” indicates that civilized life is not based simply on needs
The storm world descends him past this civilized level into the base world of
earthly nature.
Speech from Act III, iv about Poor Tom creates imagery of world worse than that
of Hamlet.
Poor Tom is a kind of ghastly parody of a free man, because he owes nothing to the amenities of civilization.
Lear starts at one end of nature and descends to the lower, with the removal of his clothes lying at the terminus.

Nothing
Harkens also to Richard II (see upcoming notes on this)
In both plays “nothing” seems to have the meaning of being deprived of one’s social function, and so of one’s identity.
A king who dies is still something, namely a dead king;
A king deprived of his kingship is nothing, even if he goes on living.
The train of knights to Lear represents his on-going kingship; he wants both to have and not have his royal powers.
Daughters at first don’t want to kill him, they’d prefer to let him live without power
To kill him would be murder; to let him survive without his identity is a kind of
annihilation.
Key question here, what is the cause of any of the essential human virtues (love, loyalty, etc.)?
Nothing: There is no “why” about them; they just are.
Lear is obsessed by the formula of something for something
Love and loyaty don’t have motives or expectations or cause, nor can they be quantified.
Cordelia’s answer to Lear in IV, vii “No cause, no cause” is one moment of supreme drama.
By saying this she also indicates she will have nothing to do with “these silly games”

Fool
Term is in time applied to practically every decent character in the play
Those who are not fools are people like Goneril, Regan, and Edmund who live according to the conditions of the lower or savage nature.
Albany called a “moral fool” by Goneril because he doesn’t accept this nature
Fool himself is natural ---> as a “natural” in this world, he is deficient enough, mentally, to be put in a licensed position to say what he likes.
In his kind of “natural” quality there is a reminiscence of a still coherent and divinely designed order of nature, a world in which the truth is “natural”
There is nothing funnier than sudden outspoken declaration of the truth
“Fool” here also applies itself to a victim, the kind of person to whom disaster happens
everyone who is on the wrong side of the wheel of fortune is a “fool” in this sense
Lear calls himself “the natural fool of fortune”
Gloucester is no atheist; he postulates gods, divine personalities, and if he replaced them with a mechanism of fate or destiny he couldn’t ascribe malice to it.
He feels horror of whats happened to him, and that goes beyond all human causes
Edgar and Albany are moralists
They look for human causes and assume that there are powers above who are
reacting to events as they should.
Albany is decent man, but in Goneril’s world he is weak and ineffectual
After the deaths of Goneril and Edmund he tries to postulate the workings of
providence. ---> this fails badly, as Lear launches the bombshell of Cordelia’s
death.
The Gloucester tragedy can be explained in moral terms (went into a whorehouse to beget Edmond), but the Lear cannot.
Both Edgar and Albany are fools in the sense that they are victims.
They utter the cries of bewildered men who can’t see what’s tormenting them, and
their explainations are at best random guesses.
In this dark, meaningless world, everyone is as spiritually blind (as Gloucester is physically) ---> blindness appears often throughout play.
There appears two versions of time in the play:
1) the events in the foreground summarizing slower and bigger events
2) the background events that take longer to work due to their size
An idea that seems to harken back to Richard II and Henry V: “a second fall of cursed man”
This second fall refers to the movement of man to the lower of the two states of
Nature
Storm in Act III is an image of nature dissolving into its primordial elements, losing its distinction of hierarchies in chaos. ---> a reverse crossing of the Red Sea
Central image of this descent is that of the antagonism of a younger and older generation.
Shakespeare is also playing here with the important “natural” virtue of honouring one’s parents, which in key to hereditary succession
Ambiguity in all tragedies: death is both punishment of the evil and reward for the virtuous, besides being the same end for everybody.
Edgar and Albany, the moralists, are survivors of the play and speak as though the length of human life has been shortened. (V. iii 323-26)
Language appears to the last remainants of the upper level of nature
Lear has entered a world in which the most genuine language is prophetic language: language inspired by a vision of life springing from the higher level of nature.

More Displaced Shakespeare

For all of those who have yet to see it, the new movie release V for Vendetta has a shocking amount of displacement of the Bards works. Don't wish to ruin it for those yet to see it, but the quotes of Twelvth Night and Macbeth are in the movie for a reason. This was an incredible trip into the literature for me. Little Dr.Faustus, and yes ...... even the Tempest can be seen in this place.

Some thoughts on Cymbeline

Just finished reading Cymbeline, and there is a good chance this is my new favourite Shakespearean Play. The complexity of its plot alone leads me to salivate. There is no clear single catalyst character that drives the plot. Though it could argued that the role is taken by the rather Medea-esque Queen, I would argue that a large portion also comes to lie on Iachimo. There is just such beauty in the complexity of this piece. The Green world as the cave. You really are seeing this balancing the evils of the court life that we see in both England and Rome. This play really builds on the momentum started is Alls Well That Ends Well. Just received Bloom's book, so I'll be doing a little note posting on that bad boy.

Comedy of Errors

Just finished making some bagels and reading these hilarous piece of work by the bard. Outside of the rather evident slapstick comedy that runs through this play I was taken back by the speed with which it flows. The piece flows brilliantly on the page, and as is clear from the presentation in class, it flows quite nicely on stage. I think back to Mardock's presentation on Twelth night and can see how much Shakespeare really understood the flow and timing involved in the creation of his works. More than anything its the structure of Comedy of Errors that tells the tale with the play. I'm looking into some secondary sources for this, and should be posting it in the next few days.

Nuk-Nuk.

All's Well That Ends Well

Recently picked up a collection of material on the Bard's Comedies. Read an essay of interest on AWTEW. Figured the notes may be of interest to someone out there.

Notes on M.C Bradbook’s Virtue is True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All’s Well That Ends Well

The juxtaposition of the social problem of high birth versus native merit and the human problem of unrequited love recalls the story of the sonnets.
Speeches by Helena contain echoes of the Sonnets
Story to which her speeches are loosely tied does not suit their dramatic
Expression
Illustrates the nature of social distinctions, of which the personal situation
Only serves as example
Helena’s speech to the countess is the poetic centre of the play
King’s judgment on virtue and nobility are the structural centre
For once in Shakespeare, the poet and the dramatist were pulling different ways
AWTEW expresses in its title a hope that is not fulfilled; all did not end well, and it is not a successful play.
This was an attempt to write a moral play, and because there was no use of allegorically designed characters it fails.
All of the characters have symbolic and extra-personal significance
When compared to Measure for Measure this play appears more confused in purpose, more drab and depressing, if less squalid
Both plays are concerned with what Bacon called Great Place; the one with
The nature and use of power, the other with the nature and grounds of true
Nobility.
King becomes Vox Dei ----> he is merely a voice
At times though, we see deep personal feelings break
Through
This play has its roots in Painter’s translation of Boccaccio.
Great plot description of this play in the article
The Elizabethan code of honor supposed a gentleman to be absolutely incapable of a lie
In law his word without an oath was in some places held to be sufficient
To give the lie was the deadliest of all insults and could not be wiped out except ‘ in blood.
Honor was irretrievably lost only by lies and cowardice ---> more disgraceful than
any crime of violence.
This is not the case with Bertram ---> he is the only hero guilty of the lie
Parolles (or Wordy) is perceived in the end by Bertram himself to be a lie incarnate
The Countess as seen him from the beginning as such: III, ii. 90-92
Even Helena refers to him as “a notorious liar”
Bertram is gulled by Parolles by pure flattery
Shakespeare seems to stand out from Chapman, Jonson, and Middleton in the use
Of the flatterer as a character
The flatterer in Elizabethan times was a figure to be feared and looked down upon
Flatter thrives on detraction, and Parolles’ evil speaking, which finally exposes him, has been anticipated by his double-dealing with Helena and LaFeu.
The perfect courtier was required to be witty, full of counsel and of jests, skilled in music and poetry, a horseman, and a patron of all noble science.
Should also be ambitious of honor, truthful and loyal, kindly and modest.
His life was devoted to glory, and his reward was good fame
As the king was the fount of honor, the young noble’s place was at court; but vanity and corruption of court life were especially dangerous for the young.
The scramble for the preferment of the king was a dangerous game where one
may lose everything
Looking at Spenser’s Colin Clout’s Come Home Again one can see the glories
And miseries of the court
A sick or aging ruler left the courtiers exposed to all the natural dangers of the
place without restraint.
This is the situation depicted in the beginning of AWTEW
When court is reached in play, all the virtuous characters turn out to be elderly
King describes the perfect courtier as Bertram’s father (I, ii, 18-21)
The speech by King in I, ii. 26 illustrates the embodiment of true nobility
Parolles claims to be courtier and soldier, but his courtliness is entirely speech, as his soldier ship is entirely dress.
Helena is of gentle, though not of noble blood, and all the other young nobles who have been offered to her have been ready to accept her.
Aristotle had said that Nobility consisted in virtue and ancient riches.
Lord Burghley lopped down the phrase to “Nobility is nothing but ancient riches”
King could confer nobility upon anyone, gentility was sometimes held to be
Conferred only by descent ---> “The King cannot make a gentleman”
The idea of nobility could cover, for a period of time, the lack of gentility
Education and example of his ancestors would help the nobleman, but a bad
Education might corrupt him entirely.
Desert for virtue is Helena’s claim to Bertram.
In Helena and Bertram true and false nobility are in contest.
Helena seeks recognition; Bertram denies it
King, Countess, and LaFeu are judges of this
These two are compared and judged throughout the play by these three
Shakespeare removes a good deal of the sting out of the situation by making his social climber a woman.
Helena’s virtues were derived from her father and from heaven
Almost driven off by her first rejection by the King, she responds with a warning to the King that it is presumption to think Heaven cannot work through the weak.
By Bertram’s refusal to notice the divine behind Helena only highlights his follies
His refusal to consummate the marriage plays further more into this.
Bertram rejects Helena not because he naturally dislikes her, but because he knows her as his mother’s servant.
No honor won by the sword could hide his shame in rejecting Helena
Bertram’s “folly” though excused as the fault of Parolle’s ill counsel remains in the eyes of LaFeu a blot upon his honor.
However much Bertram wronged his King, his mother, and his wife it is himself that he has hurt the most.
Like the rings of Bassanio and Portia, the jewels which are bandied about in the last scene are symbolic of a contract and an estate life.
The ring symbolizes all that Bertram has thrown away
Medieval tradition recognized three classes of nobility: 1) Christian
2) Natural
3) Civil
The necessary outcome or effect of Nobility is Virtue: where Virtue exists, Nobility must therefore exist as its cause.
Nobility descends upon an individual by the grace of God and is “the seed of blessedness dropped by God into a rightly placed soul”.
Helena is a jewel which Bertram throws away ---> his rejection of her must no been seen isolation but as linked with his choice of Parolles.
The first dialogue between him, Helena and Parolles must be seen as the good angel/bad angel we see common in Early modern and Medieval Literature.
If this was a morality play they would contend in open for his soul
The finale with a royal judgment, and a distribution of rewards and punishments was a well-established comic convention.
Bertram’s conversion must be marked as one of Helena’s miracles
It is not important that she is happy with Bertrand, the importance seems to stem from the King’s recognition of her nobility.

Romances as the Bard's Greatest

Thinking back to class on Friday, I completely agree with the comment on Shakespeare's greatest artistical achievement being those final four plays. After a quick glance through them, them seems to be a much greater depth to the plot and the characters. Good ole Will, appears to be pulling down greater and greater amounts of memories from the Jungian collection consciousness. There almost appears to be a stronger cross generational and cultural link with theese works. Simply put, the richness of words, characters, and actions seems to sky rocket with these pieces. To individuals isolated from the understanding of the collective oversoul, it may appear that these plays are half-assed attempts by Shakespeare. Upon deeper evaluation (and perhaps a little more reading into Jung, and even Emerson's works) it becomes apparent of the depth of linkages here.

Northrup Frye on Measure for Measure

I recently read Frye's take on Measure for Measure. Figure it might add to someone's understanding of this awesome play:

Frye on Measure for Measure:

-story used in play has many variants, but the kernel of it is a situation in which a women comes to a judge to plead for the life of a man close to her (husband or brother), who has been condemned to death.
judge tells her that he’ll spare the man’s life at the price of her sexual surrender to him
In some versions she agrees and the judge double crosses her, having the man executed anyway. She then appeals to a higher power who (in stories where it is the husband) orders the judge to marry her and then has him executed.
Play called Promos and Cassandra by George Whetstone (1578) is closest to Measure for Measure.
A story in a collection by an Italian writer named Cinthio, that also contains basis for Othello. ---> Shakespeare used these collections often as they were the formed on basis of folktales.
Three very common aspects of folktales: 1) The disguised ruler
2) The corrupt judge
3) The bed trick

Look in detail at these three:

Disguised Ruler:
Duke of Vienna is coward to enforce his own laws against adultery in his town, worried it will affect his nice guy image.
Places inept Angelo is charge, despite having complete very competitent (conscientious and humane) underling in Escalus.
Duke also appears as sneaky and underhanded by returning in disguise.
What we think of him is irrelevant.
What happens as a result of the Duke’s leaving the scene is that we’re plunged into a lower level of law and social organization.
Angelo is simply out to administer the law (or a law against fornication) according to legalistic rules
Idea of “transcendental” authority depends on the ruler’s understanding of equity.
If a ruler hasn’t enough of such understanding, authority becomes a repressive legalism.
Legalism of this sort descends from what in the bible is called the knowledge of
good and evil
this was forbidden knowledge because it is not genuine knowledge at all: it really
can’t tell us about good and evil
this kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of self-
conscious sex.
The thing that repressive legalism has been obsessed with ever since is the sexual
Impulse. ---> this why the it is the only law of interest to the abdicating Duke
Shakespeare time assumption was the law given in Old Testament was primarily a symbol of the spiritual life.
The law itself can’t make people virtuous or even better: it can only define the lawbreaker
By internalizing that law as part of nature rather than a set of objective rules to be obeyed, one is free what Paul called “the bondage of law”
Under the “law” man is already a criminal, condemned by his disobedience to God.
If God weren’t inclined to mercy, charity, and equity than no one gets to heaven
Angelo’s breakdown illustrates the fact that no one can observe the law perfectly
Isabella mirrors Portia in MOV when she says to Angelo: “Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once” (Act II. ii. 73)
No culture is made up from an ideology: “I think people first of all make up all the stories, and then extract ideas and assumptions from them.” (pg.143)
Christian ideology was a derivation from Christian mythology
Our word myth comes Greek word mythos meaning plot, story, narrative.
The Christian myth is structurally closet to comedy
Rather than a play attempting to discuss prostitution and political theory, the Bard reflects this priority of mythology to ideology.
Because of this his plays become more primitive as the begin to reflect more and more the
Underlying mythologies.
They don’t depend on logic, they don’t explain things and don’t give you room to react
You have to listen or read through to the end.


Crooked Judge:
Often comedy begins with a irrational law - irrational in the sense that it blocks up the main thrust of the story, which somehow manages to evade or ignore it.
Usually such law is set up to block the sexual desires of the hero and heroine, and often it
Is simply the will of the parent
Sometimes it also appears in the form of deep gloom or melancholy (twelfth night for
example: Duke and Olivia)
These are elements associated with the corrupt judge aspect.
Angelo does express strong doubts about his fitness for the post
Lucio is horrified by the enforcement of the law on Claudio and Julietta because he sees that the enforcement could interfere with his own sex life (spends free time in brothels)
The scene with Elbow bringing Pompey to the magistrates court establishes three points:
1)Angelo leaving the court and placing Escalus in charge pointing towards the following
idea: “If you despise other people for their moral inferiority to yourself, your own superiority
won’t last long”
2)Escalus can hardly figure out who did what to whom. Calls into question the ability of the
law ever to get hold of the right people, or understand what is really going on about
anything
3)Claudio who is a decent man, is about to be beheaded while Pompey, a pimp, is let off
with a warning.
No real mention of syphilis that is emerging at time of play: Would play too much rational behind the law ---> “He’s no more out to justify the law than to attack it; he merely presents the king of hold that such a law has on society, in all its fumbling uncertainty and lack of direction.” (pg.145)
Frye points out the humor of the scene between Isabella and Angelo (both very ridiculous characters to be having this conversation) ---> They are very tightly placed within their characters
The humors in this case are two forms of predictable virtue, in people paralyzed by moral
rigidity.
Isabella gets increasingly interested in her role, another meeting without Lucio is arranged,
And the serpent of Eden thrusts itself up between Justice in his black robes and purity in
Her white robes, and tells them both that they’re naked.
Isabella tells her brother that now he must die not because of the law, but defend her honor
Claudio is very unwilling to die, and this demoralizes Isabella very much so
This awakens her from her dreamlike state, and she sees a prison: “A real prison,
Not the dream prison she’d like her convent to be.” (pg.147)
Duke appears as a friar who is most likely the prison chaplain. ---> tells Claudio he should welcome death because if he lives he will likely get a lot of uncomfortable diseases.
Duke/friar remains untouched despite Angelo has betrayed his trust, Claudio is about to die, and Isabella’s dreams of a contemplative spiritual life, free from the corruptions of the world, are shattered.
As we go on we feel less and less like condemning people because of the “steady increase of a sense of irony.”
This sense of a dramatic irony replaces the impulse to make moral judgments again points to limitations of this kind of law.
Angelo is certainly not more likeable as a hypocritical fraud than he was is his days of incorruptibility, but he seems somehow more accessible, even more understandable.
When the Duke finally steps forward the rhythm abruptly switches from blank verse to prose (III i 150) ---> this is break point in the play, when it goes from dismal ironic tragedy to a different kind of play
“The Duke in disguise is producing and directing it, working out the plot, casting the characters, and arranging even such details as positioning and lighting.” (pg.148-149)
This is play within a play, a half play that swallows and digests the other half.
Second half of play begins with tale of Marianna, providing a close parallel to the Claudio position.
This leads to the implementation of the bed trick

The Bed Trick
“It sounds like a very dubious scheme for a pious friar to talk a pious novice into, but something in Isabella seems to have accepted the fact that she’s in a new ball game, and that the convent has vanished from her horizon.” (pg.149)
This can be seen in bible with Jacob and Leah (he expected Rachel) --->Polygamous society he got both anyhow
Shakespeare’s bed trick is used to hook a man to woman he ought to be married to anyhow
Its a device for the middle part of a comedy (a period of confused identity where characters run around in the dark)
It represents the illusory nature of lust, in contrast to genuine love.
For Angelo the bed trick is agent both of redemption and condemnation
Marianna is the final spark plug of the play ---> without her there is no redemption for Angelo
Nearly always in Shakespeare’s comedies one of the women is responsible for the final resolution.
Isabella’s speech corresponds dramatically to Portia’s speech on mercy in MOV
Her speech is short, thoughtful, painfully improvised, and full of obvious fallacies as a legal
argument
Important fact here is that she is now pleading for the life of the man who she believes has
killed her brother.
Lucio is sparkplug of first half of play ---> without his intervention there would have been no Isabella in the play (Claudio would have died)
Only one Duke’s characters that his benevolent trickery has had no effect upon
Because of this the Duke passes a strong initial sentence upon
Lucio actually utters the phrase: “the old fantastical Duke of dark corners.” (IV iii 156)



Duke as Trickster
The trickster may be simply mischievous or malicious, and may be associated with certain tricky animals.
In some religions the trickster figure is sublimated into a hidden force for good whose workings are mysterious but eventually reveal a deep benevolence.
There are traces of this conception in Christianity, where a “providence” is spoken of that
Brings events about in unlikely and unexpected ways.
Duke in this play is a trickster figure who is trying to turn a tragic situation into a comedic one.
This operation requires the regenerating of his society (and hence, his characters)
He opens up, by leaving his place in society, a train of events headed for the bleakest tragedy
By his actions in disguise he brings the main characters together in a new kind of social order, based on trust instead of threats.
Trickster elements come out in fact that his schemes involve a quite bewildering amount of lying.
Tells Isabella that there’s no real deception in what he does
Tells Claudio in prison that Angelo is only making trial of Isabella’s virtue.
Isabella is told lie that Claudio has been executed after all
Gives contradictory orders to Angelo and Escalus
When he “remembers” to talk like a friar he sounds sanctimonious rather than saintly
In this play most of the major male characters are threatened with death, the two young women are threatened with the death of others. ----> Yet, no one dies. (Even Barnardine is freed)
Ancient doctrine in comedic theory is that one of the standard features of comedy is the Greek term basanos: both ordeal and touchstone; the unpleasant experience that’s a test of character.
This what the Duke illustrates in his conversation with Claudio in prison
“Forgiveness and reconciliation come at the end of a comedy because they belong at the end of a comedy, not because Shakespeare “believed” in them.” (pg. 153)