rivendellrose | "pull ze strings! pull ze strings!"

We were talking about Measure for Measure today in Shakespeare, and the subject came up that Duke Vincentio seems to spend the whole play running the other characters through these insane little head-games for his amusement, while pretending to be all holy and moral. He's like a puppet-master, someone said. Prof made some comment about him pulling everyone's strings. Immediately, I imagine Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi in "Ed Wood," doing his whole "Pull ze strings!" schtick... and now that's my permanent mental image of Duke Vincentio.

Now, as

zinjadu know all too well after dinner last night, I am not turning out to be a fan of this play. I realized today that this is because, somewhere along the line, I forgot to think of it as a dark comedy, which it supposedly is. I just... I find all the characters repugnant - there isn't a single person in this play that I like or respect. I hate them all. Vincentio is a hypocritical asshole who plays with people's lives as though they were toys, Angelo is an arrogant bastard, Isabella has taken religious devotion to the point of idiocy and seems to have a desperate wish to be a martyr, Claudio is a spineless git, and Mariana is so pathetic that she still worships the man who spurned her years ago.

The worst part is knowing that, if I thought about each of them, I could twist them into likeable characters... that's just not how it's come out while I read the play. I don't know why, but I've hated this thing from the get-go. I'm dreading the performance aspect of this play, honestly... I hope I can find a way to like my character, or at least appreciate and understand them, whoever they end up being. I'm also torn as to how it should be played... the whole thing could be staged with an overly-tragic attitude, which would be bitterly funny. Or it could be elevated to ludicrous parody. Or various possibilities in between.

Hopefully I'll develop an appreciation for the play... at least I know it stirs emotions. On the whole, though, I'd rather if our main work for the quarter was going to be The Tempest.