Isabella

*I know this is late, but I have been having problems with power outages at my house for the past couple of days and this was as early as I could submit the whole thing. I'm really, really sorry*

Isabella's role in Measure for Measure is one that is tremendously complicated. I somewhat wonder what people in Shakespeare's England, which would have been almost entirely Protestant, would have thought of someone like Isabella, a devout Catholic and a nun, no less. Yet she's a lot more sympathetic than Angelo, the puritanical leader. The situation she is put in is not only unreasonable, but it's rather cruel.

Yet the play's ending disturbs me a lot more. Sure, the Duke saves her brother's life, but whether or not we, in modern time, agree with it, she clearly comes from a world view that values chastity tremendously, and she is expected to give this up because the Duke wants to marry her. This is a woman who went through such effort to maintain her chastity for the entire play, but doesn't seem to put up any fight when the Duke decides to take it away from her. She doesn't really answer him, which I suppose can leave the ending open ended. Yet, I can't help but be somewhat conflicted as to what it means. It doesn't seem to fit Isabella's personality that she'd be willing to give up her nunhood just to gain money and power, because she spent the whole play trying to maintain it even as her brother faces the death penalty. So perhaps she doesn't answer because she's displeased.

Yet, I can't help but have the striking theory that this is a side effect to the Protestant society that Shakespeare lives in. It's almost as if Shakespeare understands the fact that Isabella values chastity, but not why she values it. Her chastity isn't important to her merely because she's not married, but because, as a nun, she's devoted herself to her religion fully, more specifically, to God. It seems as if, with that in mind, she would have the same dilemma, sans the death penalty concern. Or perhaps Shakespeare understands this perfectly, and it is the Duke who doesn't understand. I wonder if Shakespeare's audience would have, or if this ending was seen as a happy ending?

I just can't envision this a happy life for Isabella. I mean, if she wanted to get married, she wouldn't have become a nun in the first place. Especially since, at the time, nuns took a vow of poverty, so clearly money was not the issue with her. And unless her robe is hiding some horrific deformity, which I wouldn't put passed Shakespeare, it seems to me that that the nunhood was a choice, and not something she was forced into. I wonder if the marriage proposal would be the same situation? It seems to me that it would not.