Votarist

But as Duke Vincentio's instruction regarding Mariana--"First, let her show her face, and after, speak" (5.1.170)--suggests, her veiled entrance also echoes the scene in the cloister in Act 1, where Isabella was told that as a sworn votarist, "if you speak, you must not show your face; / Or if you show your face, you must not speak" (1.4.12-13).

But it also helps to explain the many moments in Shakespeare's plays when characters we thought we had drawn a bead on--the vain egotistical Richard II, the withdrawn Isabella who defensively claims to seek "a more strict restraint" on "the votarists of Saint Clare" (1.4.4-5)--deliver themselves of words of the rarest grace, feeling, and moral authority, as if they have come from nowhere imaginable in the roles they have drawn.

And what culture teaches its votarists to be anti-egalitarian?