rereading act 5 of measure for measure to see how i could hypothetically make it a tragedy and i completely forgot isabella cries "And given me justice, justice, justice, justice!" I can literally not recall any other time in a shakespeare work where a single word has been successively repeated four times like that god wow. The escalation the desperation.. to me there is no way to do that line without turning out to the audience and screaming/begging THEM for justice, a call to action from a heartbroken woman grieving a brother who betrayed her
This!
feeling bonkers about measure for measure again. obsessed with the way angelo and isabella are such blatant foils of each other. angelo's introduced instigating the crackdown on vienna's sexual immorality while isabella's someone who's just become a nun and wants /more/ restrictions on her activities. (if you want a similar literary character from a different century, think dorothea from middlemarch.) devotion weaponized into self-restriction. they're both dangerously devout in their own way, though tellingly angelo's the only one who tries to push his beliefs onto other people and thus the one revealed to be a hypocrite in the end.
by contrast, the duke's a figure of total amorality. he spends most of the play in a friar's robes without performing the rites or following the strictures dictated by said robes. the duke has no faith the way angelo and isabella do. he's vaguely worried about ~corruption~ but why take a stand when he can get his overzealous second-in-command to do it and take the fall for him? dude could have revealed himself so much earlier but. he doesn't. the duke pretends to be in a comedy, but he's just a psychopathic puppeteer. he lets everyone think claudio's dead and for what. fucking deranged!!
the end of the play has the duke proposing marriage to isabella: her most important religious values mean nothing to him. angelo and isabella have their own beliefs, however self-flagellating. the duke only believes in himself.