Measure for Measure: Notes (2)

Remember The Merchant of Venice, Venice/Belmont

Prostitution: Lucio, Mistress Overdone, Kate Keepdown and the subplot (Middleton and "Ferrara"?)
Dowries: Claudio and Julietta, Angelo and Mariana
The reductio ad absurdum: Pompey, Abhorson, and the bawd as hangman

Isabella: "A prone and speechless dialect" (1.2.186)
Angelo:
...scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone.
(1.3.50-3)
First encounter: a debate by two intellectuals and idealists (2.2)
- Isabella's arguments (prompted by Lucio) [video]
- Angelo's counter-arguments
- Angelo's "fall" (compare Claudio in Much Ado)
Second encounter (2.4.)
- Angelo's opening soliloquy
- The interplay of innuendo and naïveté that follows [video]
- Angelo's proposition
- Isabella's rejection: "More than our brother is our chastity" (2.4.184) [video]
  - A Seventeenth Century adaptation

Folk motif: the ruler mixes anonymously with his subjects
The ambigous disguise as Friar
- His advice to Claudio on facing death (3.1.5-41)
- Claudio's actual response to Angelo's proposition (3.1.117-31)
- Isabella's fury [video]
His abrupt intervention
- Is he like "power divine" (5.1.372) as Angelo feels?
  - His unerestimation of Angelo's duplicity
  - His discomfort with Lucio's slander
  - His cheerful managing of the "bed trick" [video]
  - "Heavenly comforts of despair" (4.3.111): Isabella tormented?