Author Archives: glenda

A woman’s modesty can be questioned when  she  falls in love with a man while engaged to a different one. In a period where divorce was non-existent, this notion of separation from your fiance was not acceptable. In order to keep her honor and reputation in good terms she decides to pay De Flores, her father’s servant, to kill her fiance to have the opportunity to be with the man she currently loves. Of course De Flores, as his name suggests, doesn’t want to be repaid in money but with Beatrice’s “honor” or virginity. In Act 3.4 De Flores questions Beatrice’s defense of denying him her virginity.

Towards the end of this scene where De Flores makes clear his recompense for his “service,” he argues that a woman that is willing to kill cannot use the excuse of wanting to keep her modesty as a reason to not want to repay him. He states in line 27, ” A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty?” He also negates her excuse of wanting to keep her reputation in a good standing because “though thou writ’st maid, thou whore in thy affection!” The  reason he considers her a whore is because she “changed from thy first love, and that’s a kind of whoredom in thy heart, and he’s changed now, to bring thy second on.” In  other words, her love and devotion was first with one man, then she loves another, her affection is unreliable and lacks any sense of modesty.

As De Flores criticizes Beatrice for her immodest behavior  the reader is left to question whether De Flores has any right to question it. This is mainly due to the fact that it is also immodest for a man to murder another simply for a reward, then blackmail the person paying for set service. What he was really looking after, as discussed in class, was a way to achieving an equal if not higher hierarchy than his “master.” Even though both of these characters show signs of immodesty as the saying goes, “it takes one to know one” and De Flores, displaying all these characteristics of a immodest man definitely can pin point and criticize Beatrice’s modesty because he is also an immodest character, even though Beatrice is the worst out of the two.