Edexcel A Level English Literature - Measure for Measure - critics

Katherine Maus - sexual morals

Angelo is aroused by prohibition

Katherine Maus - sexual morals - quotes

• “Angelo’s disastrous career suggests one possible effect of strict sexual self-denial”

• “habits of restraint can themselves provoke sexual excitement”

• “Angelo is sexually aroused by prohibition”

• “Some modern critics have found her defiance heroic, others chilling or selfish”

• “For Isabella, by contrast, virginity is a principled choice not an accident of youth”

• “If chastity is a state of mind, then the fate of Isabella’s body is possibly independent of, and irrelevant to, the fate of her soul”

• “On the other hand, female “virtue” has traditionally been defined in physical as well as mental terms, so that chastity, the spiritual attitude, is hard to separate from virginity, the bodily condition”

Lisa Hopkins

Marriage is the main justification for the play being classed as a comedy

Charlotte Lennox

Troubled about the crime and wholly regardless of the consequence

Smith

Highlights callous abuse of power and sexual domination.

Brockbank - The Duke’s manipulation of events

What the Duke does is not a display of omnipotence.

He appears as a manipulator

Brockbank - The Duke’s manipulation of events - quotes

• “The Duke’s apparently facile reassurances…”

• “The Duke’s lies are white lies, meant to save the situation for the time being”

• “he may by said, like Shakespeare, to be finding a theatrical solution to an otherwise insoluble human problem”

• “The craft is as much the playwright’s as his character’s”

• “The tricks are played to a saving purpose”

St Augustines teachings (followed by Isabella)

No one is obliged to put him or herself in eternal peril merely in order to save the life of another.

Hampton-Reeves - politics of the time

Interpretation is based on the audience (kings court would see it as an appraisal of authority, the people of London would see it as a comment on tyranny)

Hampton Reeves - politics of the time - quotes

• “In both worlds, we see characters fretting about the nature of authority and suffering when authority is misapplied.”

• “Measure for Measure is, one one level, a play about succession management.”

• “a country still stalked by the spectre of religious radicalism”

R.W. Malden - The resilience of comic drama as an evolving form - quote

“The notion of comedy as a uniquely flexible medium, adapting itself with chameleon promptness to every innovation”

Walton Kerr - The features of comedy - quotes

• “Man is in fact bounded in a nutshell”

• “We laugh because there is no other thing we can do about it”

• “Comedy occurs when there is no way out”

• “Tragedy speaks always of freedom. Comedy will speak of nothing but limitation.”

C H I A

Critic, Historical, Intertextuality , Authorial

(Everything to include in Essay)