good: the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes
beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of
your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair."
This Duke plays philosopher, too, in and out of season as Hamlet did: he
says to Isabella:
"Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful,"
generalizing his praise even to a woman.
Again, when Pompey is arrested, he passes from the individual to the
general, exclaiming:
"That we were all as some would seem to be,
Free from our faults, as from faults seeming free."
Then follows the interesting talk with Lucio, who awakens the slightly
pompous Duke to natural life with his contempt. When Lucio tells the
Duke, who is disguised as a friar, that he (the Duke) was a notorious
loose-liver--"he had some feeling of the sport; he knew the
service"--the Duke merely denies the soft impeachment; but when Lucio
tells him that the Duke is not wise, but "a very superficial, ignorant,
unweighing fellow," the Duke bursts out, "either this is envy in you,
folly, or mistaking: ... Let him but be testimonied in his own
bringings-forth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a
statesman, and a soldier," which recalls Hamlet's "Friends, scholars,
and soldiers," and Ophelia's praise of Hamlet as "courtier, soldier,
scholar." Lucio goes off, and the Duke "moralizes" the incident in
Hamlet's very accent:
"No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure 'scape; backwounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?"
Hamlet says to Ophelia:
"Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall
not escape calumny."
And Laertes says that "virtue itself" cannot escape calumny.
The reflection is manifestly Shakespeare's own, and here the form, too,
is characteristic. It may be as well to recall now that Shakespeare
himself was calumniated in his lifetime; the fact is admitted in Sonnet
36, where he fears his "guilt" will "shame" his friend.
In his talk with Escalus the Duke's speech becomes almost obscure from
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