As to the Duke’s pardoning of Angelo, though Justice seems to cry out against the act, yet in the premises it were still more unjust in him to do otherwise; the deception he has practised on Angelo in substituting Mariana having plainly bound him to the course he finally takes in that matter.  For the same power whereby he works through this deception might easily have prevented Angelo’s crime; and to punish the offence after thus withholding the means of prevention were clearly wrong:  not to mention how his proceedings here involve an innocent person; so that he ought to spare Angelo for her sake, if not for his own.  Coleridge indeed strongly reprehends this act, on the ground that “cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of.”  But it seems to me hardly prudent, or becoming thus to set bounds to the grace of repentance, or to say what amount of sin must necessarily render a man incapable of being reformed.  All which may in some measure explain the Duke’s severity to the smaller crime of Lucio, after his clemency to the greater one of Angelo.

I must not leave the gentle Duke without remarking how, especially in the earlier portions of the play, his tongue drops the very manna of moral and meditative wisdom.  His discourse in reconciling Claudio to the quick approach of death condenses the marrow of all that philosophy and divinity can urge, to wean us mortals from the “many deceiving promises of life.”

* * * * *

Lucio is one of those mixed characters, such as are often generated amidst the refinements and pollutions of urban society, in whom low and disgusting vices, and a frivolity still more offensive, are blended with engaging manners and some manly sentiments.  Thus he appears a gentleman and a blackguard by turns; and, which is more, he does really unite something of these seemingly-incompatible qualities.  With a true eye and a just respect for virtue in others, yet, so far as we can see, he cares not a jot to have it in himself.  And while his wanton, waggish levity seems too much for any generous sentiment to consist with, still he shows a strong and steady friendship for Claudio, and a heart-felt reverence for Isabella; as if on purpose to teach us that “the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”  And perhaps the seeming “snow-broth blood” of Angelo puts him upon affecting a more frisky circulation than he really has.  For an overacted austerity is not the right way to win others out of a too rollicking levity.

* * * * *

Dr. Johnson rather oddly remarks that “the comic scenes are natural and pleasing”:  not that the remark is not true enough, but that it appears something out of character in him.  And if these scenes please, it is not so much from any fund of mirthful exhilaration, or any genial gushings of wit and humour, as for the remorseless, unsparing freedom, not unmingled with touches of scorn, with which the deformities of mankind are anatomized.  The contrast between the right-hearted, well-meaning Claudio, a generous spirit walled in with overmuch infirmity, and Barnardine, a frightful petrification of humanity, “careless, reckless and fearless of what is past, present, or to come,” is in the Poet’s boldest manner.