ABSTRACT
For instance, the low-life scenes might be performed, as Kathleen McLuskie points out, so as to ‘deny the lively energy of the pimps and the bawds, foregrounding their exploitation of female sexuality’:1 so much for the licence of carnival. Isabella may represent a figure of female redemptive power-but if she wears a full nun’s habit she begins to look more like a pornographic fantasy in this carnival context. Though she has (or is forced to discover in herself) the verbal facility of the Shakespearean comic heroine, her words cannot direct the course of the play’s plot: her eloquence only serves to inflame Angelo, and it is the Duke, not she, who finesses the play’s ‘comic’ resolution. As for that resolution, here the happy parade of ‘eight that must take hands’ of As You Like It is a glum procession of the forced marriages of Angelo and Mariana, Lucio and his punk; even Claudio and his Juliet, parents of a new child, are, one assumes, marked for life by the traumatic events of the play. And, famously, Isabella makes no reply to the Duke’s repeated offer of marriage. The last scene of the play is an extended demonstration of the Duke’s absolute power, now visibly resumed, but never in fact abrogated. As he has done throughout the play, he teases to the point of agony the other major characters, including Isabella. When he obliges her to confirm her ‘feminine’ status (saint, mistress, servant) by kneeling to ask pardon for Angelo, it seems unequivocally sadistic behaviour from one human being to another.2
