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The Duchess of Malfi
John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and William Shakespeare's Othello both are considered revenge tragedies. This genre, influenced by the Roman playwright Seneca, was extremely common in the...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The wooing scene of John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (Act 1, scene 3) is written in blank verse, as can be seen by consulting, for instance, the edition of the play in the Norton Anthology...
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The Duchess of Malfi
While The Duchess of Malfi uses a somewhat looser form of blank verse (some shorter or longer lines), Webster's play largely stays in verse. Like other Early Modern dramatists, he follows the...
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The Duchess of Malfi
Ferdinand and his brother the Cardinal are very much two peas in a pod. Each one is as vile, grasping, and immoral as the other, and both contribute in no small way to their sister's tragic demise....
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
As John Webster's early-1600s revenge play The Duchess of Malfi opens, the Duchess is recently widowed and childless, which places her in a particularly vulnerable position. Without the protection...
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The Duchess of Malfi
There's really not much to distinguish Ferdinand from this brother, the Cardinal. They're both devious, greedy, and immoral schemers who deliberately set out to murder their sister out of greed and...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The wicked Ferdinand has spent the entire play scheming and plotting to have his sister, the Duchess, brutally tortured and murdered for daring to defy his wishes. There's also a psychosexual...
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The Duchess of Malfi
In the play The Duchess of Malfi by Joh Webster, the author touches upon many themes, including reality versus unreality, identity, appearances, deception, and insanity. The Duchess is subjected to...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
During the English Renaissance, Italy was often imagined and presented as a place of moral and even spiritual corruption, and certainly this is true in John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi. The...
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The Duchess of Malfi
Some might argue that Webster is creating a dichotomy with the two women as the Duchess is noble, keeps her feelings to herself, and plays the roles that a woman should by being proper and...
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The Duchess of Malfi
John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi is historically significant for a number of different reasons, including the following: It exemplifies the emergence of Webster as an important successor to...
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The Duchess of Malfi
Critically speaking, The Duchess of Malfi is considered to be a Jacobean era (1603-1625) revenge play, or revenge tragedy. In writing The Duchess of Malfi, Webster borrowed elements form other...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
In a purely literal sense Bosola's role is that of the hired assassin. More fundamentally, he represents the repentant sinner by the end of the play; he moves from performing cold-blooded acts of...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
Act Four in The Duchess of Malfi is full of captivity-themed language and imagery. In Scene 1 we are told that, "She seems to welcome the end of misery more than shun it." Her treatment in the...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The main character, the Duchess, is shown to contravene gender roles in this play. She is shown to be a strong and wilful woman who acts independently of societal and familial expectations. Women...
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The Duchess of Malfi
First, we should think about the definition of a "revenge tragedy." The term was first used by the American Shakespeare scholar Ashley H. Thorndike (1871–1933) in a 1902 article "The Relations of...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The line "Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness" is spoken by Antonio in act I, scene iii. It shows Antonio's ambivalence at the prospect of marrying the Duchess. Antonio is merely a humble...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The play’s full title, The Tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi, presents an interesting conundrum as to what type of tragedy befalls and to whom. Though based upon an actual historical figure and...
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The Duchess of Malfi
Many important themes found in John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi are evident or implied right from the very beginning of the work. Delio's opening speech, for instance, alludes to the...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The Duchess stands out in this play as a contrast to practically all the other characters. She is the only true strong, independent personality. She remains true to her own ideals and dies with her...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The revenge tragedy is a genre that was common in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It was modelled primarily on Seneca's tragedies, especially the Medea. The earliest work of the genre is usually...
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The Duchess of Malfi
The significance of this story lies in what has just happened to the Duchess. She has just been arrested by Bosola in disguise and is going to be taken to her palace by guards. The story she tells...
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The Duchess of Malfi
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...
