Page 88 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Making a detailed case 87
sentences but then fail to say anything about nine of them will
be suspected of wasting time.
Nurture your commentary so that it grows out of what you
have discovered the quotation to actually contain and imply. Do
not impose a view based on no more than an assumption about
what the extract is likely to offer.
Here is an example of a student merely guessing from a
broad knowledge of the text what the relationship between two
quotations is likely to be. The essay is about Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure, a text which elsewhere does indeed draw
a strong contrast between the two situations to which the
quotations refer:
Claudio and Juliet’s liaison is described positively. It is a
truthful, fruitful, enduring relationship based on genuine
love. Lucio remarks:
Your brother and his lover have embrac’d;
As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.
(I. iv. 40–4, Arden edn, London, 1965)
This illustrates the delight in the beloved. Intercourse is not
just a bodily function but an expression of binding love. By
contrast, the libidinous Angelo gloats:

I have begun,
And now I give my sensual race the rein:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite…
By yielding up thy body to my will.
(II. iv. 158ff., ibid.)
The language here is entirely different. Angelo reveals his
violent, destructive surrender to overwhelming lust. He feels
compelled to violate Isobel, to enjoy a bestially savage
triumph over her.
In fact, however surprising to those who remember the overall
pattern of Measure for Measure, the ways in which these
particular passages describe human relationships may not be so
tidily opposed.