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.