Lucio: The Gossip Who Cannot Stop Talking

Lucio is Claudio's friend and the play's most entertaining character. He is also someone who cannot encounter silence without filling it. When he goes to recruit Isabella in Act 1 Scene 4, he tells her that 'our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt,' one of the most quoted lines in the play, said by a man known primarily for recklessness.

He shadows the disguised Duke throughout Acts 3 and 4, telling Friar Lodowick what a terrible ruler Duke Vincentio is: too fond of pleasure, not strict enough, incapable of proper governance. He does this at length and with relish, to the Duke's face, not knowing who he is talking to. Each new slander lands on the list the Duke is keeping.

His punishment in Act 5 (being forced to marry the woman he got pregnant and then abandoned, rather than the death he claims to prefer) is the play's most darkly comic resolution. He says marriage is worse than death. He says it to a man who has just proposed to Isabella. The Duke does not let him off.