Day 5: Your Favorite Villain
Jul. 26th, 2010 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainI feel spoiled for choice on this one, because Shakespeare has so many awesome villains. I was tempted to pick Shylock, but I have a long Merchant post coming up next week; I was also very tempted by Edmund in King Lear (you may be starting to notice a pattern here). But I figured I'd go with someone who doesn't get much love.
Angelo is not one of the fun villains. He's not engaging or charismatic, and he doesn't get the audience on his side with snarky asides or soliloquies. (On the one occasion when he does show a glimmer of humor -- "This will last out a night in Russia, when nights are longest there!" -- it's quite unexpected, and of course he immediately spoils it by telling Escalus he hopes he'll find good cause to whip everyone present.) And he is well and truly slimy in his dealings with Isabella, perhaps even more so because he doesn't lay a hand on her; he doesn't have to, when he holds all the power. The "Who would believe thee, Isabel?" speech is one of the nastiest pieces of blackmail in literature.
If all we had to go on were Angelo's own tortured soliloquies, it would be tempting to read him as a virtuous man who falls once, and falls spectacularly, faced with the first real temptation of his life. But then, late in the play, his backstory with Mariana comes out and the audience learns he's even worse than he appears; hypocrisy and self-preservation are rooted deep in his character.
And yet. I'm drawn to him, in part because he's so much the Duke's pawn, set up to absorb the anger of the people and perhaps deliberately placed in the way of temptation -- and in part because he's so very aware of the gravity of his sins, and privately expresses so much anguish and self-loathing, and yet he's too weak to come clean and do the right thing. (I think his own uncompromising sense of morality may be to blame -- since he believes that anyone who slips even a little is irredeemably damned, it follows that once he has slipped, he may as well be as bad as possible. And so he loses the will even to try to do the right thing, and the best he can manage is a sort of impotent after-the-fact regret: "Alack, when once our grace we have forgot, / Nothing goes right; we would, and we would not.") And I find myself hoping that he can learn a little charity from Mariana (who really is one of the most generous characters in Shakespeare), and learn to accept human frailty for what it is.
Day #1: Your favorite play
Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you've never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line
Angelo is not one of the fun villains. He's not engaging or charismatic, and he doesn't get the audience on his side with snarky asides or soliloquies. (On the one occasion when he does show a glimmer of humor -- "This will last out a night in Russia, when nights are longest there!" -- it's quite unexpected, and of course he immediately spoils it by telling Escalus he hopes he'll find good cause to whip everyone present.) And he is well and truly slimy in his dealings with Isabella, perhaps even more so because he doesn't lay a hand on her; he doesn't have to, when he holds all the power. The "Who would believe thee, Isabel?" speech is one of the nastiest pieces of blackmail in literature.
If all we had to go on were Angelo's own tortured soliloquies, it would be tempting to read him as a virtuous man who falls once, and falls spectacularly, faced with the first real temptation of his life. But then, late in the play, his backstory with Mariana comes out and the audience learns he's even worse than he appears; hypocrisy and self-preservation are rooted deep in his character.
And yet. I'm drawn to him, in part because he's so much the Duke's pawn, set up to absorb the anger of the people and perhaps deliberately placed in the way of temptation -- and in part because he's so very aware of the gravity of his sins, and privately expresses so much anguish and self-loathing, and yet he's too weak to come clean and do the right thing. (I think his own uncompromising sense of morality may be to blame -- since he believes that anyone who slips even a little is irredeemably damned, it follows that once he has slipped, he may as well be as bad as possible. And so he loses the will even to try to do the right thing, and the best he can manage is a sort of impotent after-the-fact regret: "Alack, when once our grace we have forgot, / Nothing goes right; we would, and we would not.") And I find myself hoping that he can learn a little charity from Mariana (who really is one of the most generous characters in Shakespeare), and learn to accept human frailty for what it is.
Day #1: Your favorite play
Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you've never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line
