The Duchess of Malfi

Antonio's accusation of betrayal toward Cariola can be found in act 3, scene 2 of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi when the duchess is getting ready for bed. Her love, Antonio, who has a sense...

In act 1, scene 3 of John Webster's Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, the widowed Duchess defies her unstable twin brother, Ferdinand, the Duke of Calabria—who threatens her with their...

Julia is presented by Webster as very much the foil to the Duchess. Whereas the Duchess is given to us as a respectable aristocratic lady of the utmost refinement and constancy, Julia is portrayed...

Ferdinand says this is act 4, scene 2. Bosola, on Ferdinand's orders, has the duchess killed. He then takes Ferdinand in to see his sister's corpse. Ferdinand has been unmoved by the corpses of the...

In act 4, scene 2, imprisoned by Ferdinand, the Duchess of Malfi is first forced to watch madmen who are sent to her to howl and perform. Then Bosola comes and states that death is not such a...

Class and patriarchal privilege: Both Ferdinand and the cardinal are angered and affronted that anyone but high-born, highly privileged white males like themselves should have anything at all. They...

The word decadence tends to denote a sense of decline or decay, specifically in regard to moral standards. Critics of The Duchess of Malfi often characterize it as a decadent play due to the...

In Aristotle's definition of the tragic hero, such a person must be highborn, have a fatal flaw, and engage the "pity," or sympathy, of audience members, who side with her and feel sorrow in her...

Julia is the aging courtier Castruccio's wife and the Cardinal's mistress. Her character is more or less one-dimensional. It is summed up at the end when Bosola calls her the "lustful" Julia. Julia...

Madness can be a useful device in literature: by abandoning the constraints of sanity and rationality, a character can explore grey areas which are not available to the sane. Elizabethan and...

This is during Act 5, Scene 5 of the play. At the beginning of the scene, the Cardinal is pondering the nature of hell when Bosola enters, along with a servant carrying Antonio's body. Bosola tells...

Bosola has the Duchess eat the apricots to confirm his suspicions that she is pregnant. Her pregnancy is confirmed when she throws up and goes into labor. It's suggested that they should say the...

The play ends with the death of the Duchess's brothers, who had vied to take her fortune for themselves throughout the entire play. The brothers, having killed the Duchess and her daughters, get...

Bosola is a hired killer and spy, a man who did prison time for murder before being hired as an "intelligencer" (spy) by Ferdinand to infiltrate the duchess's household. What tempts him to take the...

One of the things that separates Ferdinand from his equally wicked brother, the Cardinal, is his inconsolable grief at the Duchess's death. Whereas the Cardinal expresses not the slightest...

A revenge tragedy, made popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain, typically tells the story of a protagonist seeking revenge against the murderous actions of an antagonist. Shakespeare's Hamlet...

The Duchess of Malfi, a play written by John Webster, was first performed around 1613 and first printed in 1623. To briefly summarize, the Duchess of Malfi is a young widow who falls in love with...

After seeing his dead sister, Ferdinand is filled with grief and blames Bosola for her death, although he is the one who ordered Bosola to murder her. Bosola wants a reward; Ferdinand offers him...

The nature of power in men like Cardinal and Ferdinand is physical, coercive, and assertive with all the manifest derivatives of control, manipulation, pressure, and authority. In The Duchess of...

The Duchess of Malfi is set in Italy for several reasons. First, Webster based it on real events in Italian history. He would have been familiar with William Painter's compilation of French and...

The Duchess of Malfi is set in early 16th century Italy and demonstrates the particularly challenging societal structures which limited the voice of women during this era. Within this historical...

In John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola is a somewhat ambiguous character who has no problem committing great evil with an extreme ruthlessness yet is also strangely drawn toward good by the...

As you’re likely aware from having read or seen the play yourself, the Duchess of Malfi faces many hardships. Her sufferings don’t end until she is strangled to death by executioners in her own...

The basic plot and characters of these two plays, The Duchess of Malfi and Othello, are quite dissimilar. If I had to pick one play of Shakespeare closest in technique and theme to Webster's...

The difference between blank verse and prose lies in the rhythm, but it can certainly be more difficult to identify the difference between the two in the works of early modern writers other than...

Bosola begins to suspect that the Duchess is pregnant when he notices that she is wearing loose dresses (which are not the fashion of the time). She has also been rather ill, which suggests morning...

Webster's The Duchess of Malfi is a pretty accurate reflection of the society in which it was written. It presents us with a rigidly patriarchal society in which women are under the firm control of...

The main similarity between The Duchess of Malfi and Macbeth is that they are both very bloody plays that deal with the catastrophic consequences of ambition. Macbeth comes to grief due to his...

The Jacobean era lasted the duration of the reign of King James I from 1603 until 1625. Like the Elizabethan period before it, this era produced great drama, especially tragedies. Greater amounts...

Most of the play is written in blank verse and doesn't rhyme; but at times of heightened intensity, both the duchess and Bosola speak in rhyming verse. The duchess speaks in rhyming verse at the...

All three of these works portray individuals victimized by social injustices and prejudices, though it must be noted that Othello and The Duchess of Malfi, being tragedies, do this quite...

Bosola is a spy and so used to playing a part. When he comes to arrest the Duchess, with a troop of masked horsemen, that's effectively what he's doing. Earlier in the scene, when he brought...

The Duchess of Malfi portrays its titular heroine as a strong-willed, dignified, and courageous woman. Compared to her brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal, she is an authority figure with integrity...

Webster, like Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists, uses Italy as a dramatic setting as it allows him to explore sensitive domestic political themes. In that sense, The Duchess of Malfi can...

In the first case, when Bosola tries to capture the Duchess, he's wearing a mask. This is a sign that he's simply carrying out Ferdinand's orders. He personally has come to admire the Duchess for...

In The Duchess of Malfi, the audience has no misconceptions about Bosola, the malcontent, released from prison despite his part in a vicious murder. Bosola is not happy with his status in life and...

The cardinal, a cold-blooded person, wants to be rid of Julia, his mistress and the wife of another man, because he has grown tired of her. He says would be "quit," or rid, of her "by any means."...

The Duchess of Malfi contains elements of the revenge drama, a popular form in 17th century because audiences enjoyed the onstage violence and bloodshed. However, it also veers from the classical...

This Renaissance play paints the aristocracy is a mostly negative light. The brothers of the Duchess are jealous, hypocritical and vindicative. The Cardinal, supposedly a man of God, not only has...

In act I, scene 1, the Cardinal describes Antonio as very honest. The Cardinal tells Ferdinand that Antonio is "too honest." The Cardinal, the duchess's brother, is an evil and ruthless person, but...

An important example of the intersection between the personal and the political occurs at the conclusion of the play. Antonio, the Cardinal, the Duke and Bosola lie in "this great ruin," with...

Revenge tragedies were a popular theatrical genre in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. These plays focus on a character who experiences a great wrong, such as the murder of a family...

Act 3, scene 2 of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi shows the duchess being inconveniently visited by her brother and nemesis Ferdinand. Ferdinand is angry because rumors have reached him that...

Webster's source for The Duchess of Malfi is the real-life story of the Duchess of Amalfi, a woman named Giovanna. This real duchess was the daughter of the King of Naples's half-brother and was...

One might argue that in John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess defeats her brothers in the end; but one might also argue that no one really wins. Let's look at both perspectives. The...

The claim that there is no poet morally nobler than John Webster is impossible to prove, for that would require the person making the claim to analyze the morality of every other poet and then show...