The love song with which Scene 1 opens is much admired as one of Shakespeare's greatest. Mariana, however, is somewhat embarrassed to be found listening to music and explains to the duke that it appeals to her grief rather than her gaiety. One of the inconsistencies of the play is the apparent familiarity of Mariana and the disguised duke. Although he has only been masquerading for a few days as a friar, she addresses him as though he had been her spiritual counselor for some time. Sending away the boy who has been singing for her, she says, "Here comes a man of comfort, whose advice / Hath often still'd my brawling discontent" (8-9). When the duke asks Mariana to allow him a private discussion with Isabella, she replies, "I am always bound to you" (25), as though speaking to an old friend. And again, when the duke tells her he respects her, she answers that she knows it and has found it to be true, suggesting a long-term relationship. The reader is left to speculate that the play was rewritten hastily with resulting inconsistencies.
Another indication of some confusion of the original is the duke's brief soliloquy, spoken while Isabella is persuading Mariana to lend herself to the scheme for Angelo's deceit. While the duke speaks only six lines, Isabella convinces a young woman whom she has just met to have sexual relations under bizarre circumstances with a man who has spurned her. The plan is a strange one, yet the woman gives her consent in a period so short that it would hardly be possible for Isabella to relate even a sketch of the reasons behind the deceit. The duke's lines themselves are strange since they have no bearing upon the current scene, alluding to the deceitful gossip to which persons in great places are subject. The lines in fact seem more appropriate to the duke's reactions in the previous scene to Lucio's falsehoods. It appears that some mix-up has occurred to confuse the scene.
