First, a brief aside concerning nuns and their restraints and liberties. I recalled Otto Dix’s The Nun and Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa when we were on the discussion of Isabella last class.

Otto Dix, The Nun (1914)

In Dix’s painting, we see a nun’s internal struggle between longing for eventual eternal salvation and desire for immediate earthly pleasures. There’s an abstraction of Christ on the Cross on the left along with a vulva-shape. On the right is a nude figure who appears pregnant and possibly represents motherhood, an experience nuns must renounce for their faith.

Shakespeare is not just taking creative liberties when he writes sexual imagery into Isabella’s lines. Saint Teresa has described in her autobiography an encounter she had with an angel:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it…

Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-52)

Bernini attempts to capture this moment in marble but of course, must subdue the fervor of this experience to make it acceptable for display in church. The figures are clothed, but portrayal of excessive fabric only emphasizes the face of St. Teresa, eyes closed, head drawn back, lips parted, in a state of ecstasy. The angel almost looks mischievous (sorta like Lucio) and of course the arrow alludes to some phallic symbolism.

Act 3 is where Angelo is absent and all the plotting is being done behind his back to be set into motion in Act 4. This was a thought that was playing in my head as I was reading Act 3, Scene 1 when the Duke impersonating a friar was eavesdropping on the two siblings and then talks to each of them separately to plot against Angelo. If Isabella is lovely enough to steal the prude Angelo’s heart, what might the Duke be thinking of Isabella that he is willing to assist her?

The Duke seems to be everywhere because then in Act 3, Scene 2, he encounters all the other characters such as Elbow, Pompey, Lucio, Escalus, Miss Mistress Overdone and the Provost. In disguise, he makes his own judgments about people like Pompey, finding what people thought of him through Lucio and seems to be testing Escalus.

Some interesting things are being said in the conversation between Lucio and the Duke which brings a lot of comic relief. Lucio is so brash as to spread rumors about Angelo being spawned by a mermaid and that he urinates ice and that he’s impotent and the Duke seems to be humored by this but then Lucio starts talking trash about the Duke to. The Duke says something curious: “I never heard the absent duke much detected for women; he was not inclined that way.” Is the Duke coming out of the closet?