Barnardine
Who is Barnardine?
Barnardine has been imprisoned for nine years on a murder charge, his case repeatedly delayed by procedural irregularities, and by the time the play requires his cooperation he has settled into a life so detached from consequence that he refuses outright to be executed in Claudio's place, declaring simply that he will not die today and cannot be reasoned, threatened, or persuaded into changing his mind.
A long-imprisoned, unrepentant murderer whose flat refusal to be executed derails the plot to substitute his head for Claudio's and who is ultimately pardoned outright.
Appears In
Biography
His refusal derails the Duke's plan to use his head as Claudio's substitute, forcing the disguised Duke to improvise - a solution arrives conveniently in the form of the pirate Ragozine, who has died of a fever in the prison that same morning and whose head resembles Claudio's closely enough to serve the deception. Barnardine himself is spared the moral question of whether an unrepentant man should be executed for someone else's sentence.
In the play's final scene, Barnardine is brought before the Duke along with the other prisoners and, remarkably, pardoned outright - the Duke commends him to a friar's spiritual care rather than pursuing further punishment, an act of mercy extended to a character who has shown no particular interest in earning it, and one of the play's more startling demonstrations of grace given without merit.
Motivation
Barnardine is motivated by nothing more complicated than a settled, almost philosophical indifference to his own scheduled death, refusing execution simply because he does not wish to die that particular day.
Personality
Barnardine's total refusal to cooperate with his own execution, offered without fear, defiance, or negotiation, makes him one of the play's strangest figures - a man so detached from the machinery of justice around him that even a scheduled death cannot move him, and his eventual pardon is granted with the same unbothered indifference he brings to everything else.