ABSTRACT
As in Promos and Cassandra and Epitia, the heroine's brother is saved from death, and by substitution, but whereas Cinthio substituted a hardened criminal, a fratricide, to be executed in his stead, and Whetstone substituted 'A dead man's head, that suffered the other day', Shakespeare uses both of these devices. I t may be that Shakespeare got interested in the careless Barnardine and did not want to kill him off, as Sir Walter Raleigh suggested, but his function is not simply to make us laugh, nor is his reprieve merely a means of fulfilling the idea of tragicomedy expressed later by John Fletcher as bringing none to death but some near it. Barnardine is worked into one of those patterns of ethical interest by which Shakespeare so often transcends his sources. Claudio's plight raises the question of preparedness for death, and this is discussed at some length with the Duke and Isabella ( I I I . i ) . Shakespeare portrays vividly the fear of death which overcomes Claudio's first acceptance once he thinks there may be even a dishonourable way of escape. The dramatist need not have brought Barnardine on the stage at all; he could have used Whetstone's device. Instead he invents the rascal who after nine years in prison is Claudio's antithesis, 'A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep (IV.2.i42ff). Barnardine is introduced to show a different attitude to death, the brutish opposite to Claudio's refined shrinking. He is reprieved because he is not fit to die (IV.3.69,70). Here is some of that horror at sending out a soul to meet its Maker 'unhousel'd, disappointed, unanneal 'd ' , which Hamlet felt at his father's murder, and if Barnardine is reprieved partly for his gusto, he is also handed over to Friar Peter to be worked on. For Shakespeare already
'ripeness is all'. In the treatment of Barnadine we see the mingling of the humane and the religious which marks the tone of this play.
