Isabella

• My sister should the cloister enter

  Rigid chastity

  Hazlitt (1817)
• For in her youth /The is a prone and speechless dialect /Such as move men;

  Isabella is undoubtedly one of the most cerebral women in Shakespeare’s works

  Raysor (1936)
• I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted

  Female counterpart to Angelo

  Beckerman (1970)
• a very virtuous maid

  Fair maid

  Virginity exemplified

  Empson (1951)

  In Isabella … a fair exterior reflects a pure interior

  Geckle (1971)
• I had a brother then. Heaven keep your honour

  The sainted Isabella, wrapt in her selfish chastity

  Wilson (1920)
• You are too cold

  Isabella was too analytical and too unfeeling

  Coleridge (1830)
• Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies... ere I’d yield /My body up to shame

  Angelo is ‘tempted by the virgin charms’

  Schlegel (1846)
• Then Isabel live chaste, and brother die: /More than our brother is our chastity

  That she is somehow cold or priggish in placing her own bodily autonomy over that of her brother

  Smith (2015)
• Be ready, Claudio, for your death tomorrow

  For Isabella, chastity and the reputation for chastity are … one and the same

  Widmayer (2007)
• Oh, you beast! /Oh faithless coward, oh dishonest wretch! … /Ne’er issued from his [father’s] blood … /Die, perish … /I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death, /No word to save thee.

  But her indignation cannot be though violent when we consider her not only as a virgin, but as a nun

  Johnson (1753)

  Isabella berates Claudio for his human frailty

  Geckle (1971)
• This image gives me content already

  She taints herself by her participation in the bed-trick

  Lewis (1983)
• I am directed by you

  Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable

  Coleridge (1830)
• Isabel’s chastity is rancid and she is not by any means such a saint as she looks

  Coleridge (1836)
• That’s somewhat madly spoken

  Isabella loses dramatic agency… having been articulate and outspoken, she is increasingly silenced by the Duke’s hectic plotting

  Smith (2015)
• As I, thus wrong’d, hence unbelieved go.

  Isabella is not silenced but chooses silence 

  Baines (1990)
• PRODUCTION:

  spoke the line “in an agonised whisper, as if appalled that the truth should be so hard

  Judi Dench played Isabella, Stratford 1962

  -N.W. Bawcutt 1991
• his scheme may stain Isabella both morally and sexually (Levin 1982)
• Isabella refuses to conform to the archetype of self-sacrificing female and for this critics have punished her for years (Stevenson 1983)
• Isabella is a mere vixen in her virtue (Lennox 1753)
• chastity is not a sin (Fermor 1936)
• a pitiless, unimaginative, self-absorbed virtue (Fermor 1936)
• virginal strength (Downtown 1875)
• she makes a passionate plea for mercy to override condemnation (Williams 2012)
• inadvertently imitates erotic interest (Burkhardt 1995)
• she is not a hypocrite, nor is there anything ugly about her puritanism (Schanzer 1963)