Customer Reviews

A Readable Edition of a Complex Play - By: A. Turner, 04 Oct 2008
This was the first play that, when I was required to read it for A-level English, really got me excited about Shakespeare. It has genuinely laugh out loud moments (no, I wouldn't have believed it either), then some of the most terrifying, moving speechesin the whole canon.

Every character is interesting, from the repressed & cruel manipulator Angelo, to Isabella, a kind of anti-heroine, who discovers powerin a patriarchal society through an exaggerated (and sometimes eroticised) purity. After Isabella's brother Claudio is unfairly sentanced to death for impregnating a woman before marriage, Angelo tries to use his power over her brother's fate to convince Isabella to have sex with him. But both he & Claudio have underestimated the novice nun's seemingly inhuman zealousness. As Claudio begs for his lifein prison, Isabella rebuffs him with the famous line: "more than our brother is our chastity".

It is also a good introduction if you have previously struggled with the bard - not as confusing as some of the comedies, or as unremittingly hard-going as the tragedies can seem when one is not used to translating the language.

And just a last note on this (Cambridge) edition - it's excellent. The introduction & notes are thorough & enlightening - but at the same time, not every variation of langaugein the different quartos is analysedin depth. While this must be vital for scholors at a higher level, to the everyday reader it can have a somewhat swamping effect.