A Man Worth Loving

BEATRICE. Already! How rare is that man's speed!

How heartily he serves me! His face loathes one,

But look upon his care, who would not love him?

The east is not more beauteous than his service (5.1.71-4).

No matter what she does, I cannot help but continue to feel sorry for Beatrice throughout this play. When I was reading, I was startled by this passage and had to read it a couple of times to fully understand what was going on. It seems to me though, not terribly out of left field that she would come to feel this way about De Flores. For all that he has put her through, out of all of the men in Beatrice's life, he is the only one to actually look out for her, however potentially nefarious his intentions. Her former fiancee was so removed from her experience that he was completely unaware of the fact that she no longer loved him when it was apparently very obvious to his brother, who was not planning to spend the rest of his life with her. Beatrice's father never seemed to listen to her when she complained about De Flores, and Alsemero seems completely useless and tested Beatrice to make sure she was still a virgin as opposed to trusting her. De Flores is the only man in Beatrice's life who does what she asks, and in this instance who comes to her rescue when she doesn't know how to fix all of the messes that she has made. Even though it may be off-putting then, I don't think that it is so ridiculous that when everything in her life is falling apart that Beatrice would start to look favorably on the one person who it seems is invested in helping her not drown in the weight of it all.

Underestimated

ALSEMERO. My Joanna!

Chaste as the breath of heaven, or morning's womb

That brings the day forth: thus my love encloses thee (4.2.149-151).

As if I did not already feel bad enough for Beatrice, the first two scenes in the fourth act made me view her all the more pitifully. She goes on and on in the beginning of the act about how intelligent Alsemero is, and how he would never be able to be fooled in regards to her virginity. Beatrice then, with a few fairly simple maneuvers, is able to pull the wool over Alsemero's eyes, even after he has just been told about her tryst with De Flores by Jasperino. I think that Beatrice greatly underestimates her own intelligence when she worries about this. I also think that Alsemero's blind acceptance of her charade could either be seen as idolatry or a disbelief on his part that Beatrice could every possibly come up with the brilliantly intricate plan of faking the symptoms necessary to prove her chastity. The thing that makes me the saddest about this situation is that it seems the only person who does not underestimate what Beatrice is capable of is De Flores. The only person who seems able to match her wit for wit is essentially her rapist. I also found it very interesting that as soon as Beatrice and Alsemero were married he started calling her "Joanna". It seems to me that she has changed in his mind and is now a completely different person. Before she was "Beatrice" - the woman who came up with the brilliant and bloody plan to get her fiancee out of the way. Now she is "Joanna", the silly, dutiful, chaste wife.

No Innocent

DE FLORES. Do you place me in the rank of verminous fellows

To destroy things for wages? Offer gold?

The lifebood of man! Is anything

Valued too precious for my recompense? (3.4.64-7)

No matter how many people may disagree with me, I will never be able to feel sorry for De Flores. I think that this passage in particular (aside from the entire rest of the scene) from him in scene 4 proves that he was no poor, manipulated party when it came to Alonzo's murder. Before, when Beatrice was "fooling" him into doing her bidding, she mentioned a time or two that his reward for the murder would be money. While De Flores never exactly agreed to such a payment, he could not have had any confusion as to what Beatrice was set to give him for killing her fiancee. De Flores' "bewildered" "outrage" here I therefore find disgusting. It was not De Flores who was manipulated, it was Beatrice. De Flores knew what he wanted from the beginning, and, whether Beatrice knew or not, she seemed to believe that she could get away with giving him money instead of sexual favors. Regardless of the fact that Beatrice has a higher social standing than De Flores, regardless of the fact that she has more money than he does, and regardless of the fact that De Flores "loves" her, De Flores has always had the upper hand in their relationship. No matter what Beatrice does she cannot get De Flores to leave her alone. It is no wonder then that she is rude to him. She has no power to get him kicked out of her household because her father presumably pays her no mind, and De Flores knows this. At the end of the third act, De Flores is able to further manipulate her because as a noble woman in love with a noble man, she much to lose if she does not do what De Flores asks. Though he may be her father's servant, Beatrice is truly at the mercy of De Flores. I totally hate him.

Intellectual Eyesight

BEATRICE. Methinks I love now with the eyes of judgement,

And see the way to merit, clearly see it.

A true deserver like a diamond sparkles;

In darkness you may see him, that's in absence, 

Which is the greatest darkness falls on love,

Yet he is best discerned then

With intellectual eyesight (2.1.13-9).

I really liked this moment in the first scene of the second act from Beatrice. She no longer seems like the somewhat foolhardy young girl that she did in the first act, one who would fall in love with whomever happened to be in her line of sight at the time. Now, she seems to actually be in love with Alsemero. What's more I think, in this moment she acknowledges that now she is in love with him. Now that she has had time to look at him from a place outside of the rush and thrill of immediate attraction, she actually is in love with him for who he is. I liked the fact that Beatrice is a character who is able to look at her own actions in a removed way. I think that it goes to reinforcing her role as a strong, fully-developed female character. This mature speech however, unfortunately does not indicate a kind of lasting effect of Beatrice's introspection. As, in the very next scene, after she has extolled the virtues of seeing things for how they truly are, she immediately entangles herself in a web of lies with what appears to be a very dangerous man. For all of her belief in only looking with "intellectual eyesight" she allows herself to get caught up with intrigue in a way in which I can only assume will end tragically.

Both Loved and Loathed

ALSEMERO. Indeed this fault (if it be so) is general;

There's scarce a thing but is both loved and loathed (1.1.124-5).

These lines from Alsemero more than anything else really made me fear for Beatrice. In what I thought was a fairly insightful passage, Alsemero explains a common duality he has observed in nature: namely that all things are both loved and hated by people at the same time, and that such a phenomenon is almost impossible not to find in an object. For me, I jumped immediately to the question of if Alsemero is the one who loves Beatrice, then by the laws of nature there must be at least one person in the world of the play who hates her. After thinking about that, I am unfortunately convinced that that person in De Flores. I think that this is actually pretty obvious, given the way that he couches his relationship with Beatrice, resolving to "spite her anger" and to haunt her forever to get his "will". He very clearly harbors few, if any, gentle feelings towards her, and just wants to consume her. While the notion that De Flores hates Beatrice more than he loves her is not exactly groundbreaking, I think that it is interesting that before we as the audience get real proof of this, the play presents the existence of a character who will hate Beatrice and Alsemero loves her as a natural rule.

Naught but her sword

BOSOLA. Slain by my hand unwittingly.

Pray, and be sudden. When thou killed'st thy sister,

Thou took'st from Justice her most equal balance,

And left her naught but her sword (5.5.47-50).

We have gone over time and time again about how in most of the plays that we have read the quest for vengeance has been couched in terms of necessity. Revenge is almost always presented as an avenue of agency for the characters as a last resort. It is therefore interesting I think to look at how this play, one with a decidedly darker world view, deals with the idea of violent revenge. Here, Bosloa outlines the way that he sees the taking of revenge. Even though it was a literal last resort for him, as he does nothing remotely avenging before the last act of the play, Bosola does not seem to see revenge in and of itself strictly as something to turn to when nothing else has worked. The way he describes revenge in terms of Justice makes it clear that he believes sometimes certain actions in and of themselves demand revenge. In this case, Bosola believes that when the Cardinal ordered the death of his sister he himself paved the way for revenge to eventually be taken upon him. Bosola certainly does not seem to endorse violence for violence's sake. However, in the dark world of the play, revenge is sometimes the only recourse. Not as a last resort, but as what Justice, and Nature, demands.

Unnatural

BOSOLA. Do you not weep?

Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.

The element of water moistens the earth,

But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens (4.2.258-62)

When I read this passage, I thought a lot about how we in class keep coming back to the idea of "unnaturalness". This idea I think is certainly prevalent in this play, and in this instance linked with murder. Bosola gives I think a very good metaphor to do so, contrasting blood spilt in murder with the natural tendencies of one of the elements. I was especially drawn to this passage because of the way we had talked in class about how water kept coming up in the play. I see it as one of the ways in which the characters are able to frame the world. And, since it is such a common thing water, it is an easy way for the characters to communicate their ideas about the world to one another, in a way they would understand, like Bosola and Antonio's debate about the qualities of the water constituting a metaphor for the nobility.