Shakespeare Measure for Measure Total Study Edition Coles Notes

by Coles Notes, William Shakespeare

Paperback

Published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Reading Reindeer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of Shakespeare's best, that's for sure. Quite short, even with the notes from Cole's alongside. Doesn't really have the brilliance of his more famous works. It almost feels like a pretty good attempt by someone else to write a Shakespeare play. A man is sentenced to death for sleeping with someone he's not yet married to, and the play is the effort to circumvent his execution. The way this is attempted is by having the sentenced man's sister, a nun, plead with the man responsible for his sentence - a man put in temporary power by the absent Duke. The Duke's replacement shows his hypocrisy by promising to free her brother if she forsakes her vows and sleeps with him. In the end, the Duke returns and everything is resolved. If that sounds pretty anticlimactic and predictable, it was.