I love Shakespeare, I do, but this play was just boring. It was simply not interesting. I had to present on it and I had nothing to say.

One of my favorite Shakespeare tragedies of all time.

Dark Comedy never failed me :)

The songs I hear in my mind when reading this play are Scott Walker's covers of Jacques Brel: 'Next', "My Death' and 'Amsterdam'.

A complete mess of a subplot that periodically hinges on Shakespeare's favorite thing: people misusing words to an antonymic degree, yet I ate this up. The crucial scene between Isabella and Angelo made me audibly gasp. The Duke is literally insane (THAT ENDING????), and has a wonderfully hypocritical God complex. Elbow made me laugh. The fact that Barnardine kind of just outright declines execution, and he, in fact, doesn't get executed? I live. Lucio roasting the Duke within an inch of his life? Lovely. I also just feel like this problem-play is so current. Let's talk about a broken judicial system (or government as a whole) and the ways in which women's narratives are discounted with ease unless a man performs a whole spiel to have her be heard. Let's talk about men who do work against misogyny but have a white knight complex that perpetuates the misogyny they supposedly critique. The whole court scene is lunacy. It's not a funny comedy, and it seems to break down the tropes of a standard Shakesepearean comedy metatextually. The ending is happy in that no one dies, and the conflict is resolved, and there are marriages to be had. But the marriages are punishments. Shakespeare doesn't even allow what is normally his comedies' alleviating force to do what it tends to do, rather it reinforces the broken social mores, codes, and de jure realities that inflict suffering upon us all every day.

I actually really enjoyed this one. Isabella struck me as one of the strongest heroines that I’ve read from Shakespeare so far. She’s smart, passionate, and loving, with faults all her own that only strengthen her character. Angelo makes for a awfully good villain, and Lucio for a phenomenal comic relief.

I wish it had a stronger ending though. I was anticipating a far better AHA moment from the disguised Duke’s unmasking. Though the way he is unmasked is funny, what he chooses to do once everyone knows that he’s both the friar and the duke, fell short of what I was hoping for.

Finding out after reading all of this, that this play was a jab at the queen that he made legal by setting it in Vienna is too good. That’s what really did it for me.

Would have been 5 stars with a slightly stronger end, but I did enjoy my time with this one very much.

A couple quotes that I noted down:

Isabella?: Go to your bosom; knock there; and ask your heart what it doth know

Angelo: Dost thou desire her foully for those things that make her good?

Lucio: No,—pardon;—‘it’s a secret must be locked within the teeth and the lips

none of the characters behave with any underlying motivation or common sense. enjoyed