What are the major themes in The Duchess of Malfi?

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 take the unfair privileges already inherent into their society out to an astonishing degree, allowing Webster to explore and highlight the cruelties and injustices of a Renaissance social system based on aristocracy and male power.

Although they have a very high degree of power, wealth, and privilege as a duke and cardinal, these two men can't bear the idea that their sister has any power, wealth, and autonomy of her own. That she can in any way escape their control irks them no end: they can not be content until they have her lands and titles, because their assumption of male privilege is so acute that ceding some power even to their sister offends their sense of pathological sense of privilege.

This same sense of privilege applies to class. When Bosola, not surprisingly, expects some reward for doing their murderous dirty work, Ferdinand turns on him with an astonishing sense of arrogance and tells him his award is to not be arrested. The idea that the servant would have any expectations of the master is an insult to the two privileged men. People are tools to be used in the eyes of Ferdinand and the cardinal, not humans to be respected as created in the image of God.

Appearance and reality: It emerges from the first theme that such an assumption of privilege on the part of the men in power distorts human relationships and makes the world a corrupt place of lies and disguises. People, even those as high born and inherently honorable as the duchess and Antonio, are forced to live by stratagems, lies, and concealments and in constant stress and alertness if they hope to survive. In such a world, nobody can be trusted, everyone is isolated, and a bloodbath is the result of a mindset in which power and control is more important that human life itself.

What is the theme of madness in The Duchess of Malfi?

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 Jacobean drama made full use of this device to create dramatic spaces which plumbed the heights and depths of human experience. Madness in the works of playwrights such as Thomas Kyd and John Webster also served as a tool of divine justice: the punishment the sane laws of man could not mete out, the laws of madness exacted. As we'll see, madness operates in all these different ways in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623).

The Duchess is a young widow who now wishes to marry the man she loves: her steward Antonio. However, her two brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal, object to the union on the grounds of propriety. They believe that the marriage will sully the reputation of their noble house, so they declare the relationship null. Refusing to toe the family line, the Duchess marries Antonio in secret. In time, she bears three children, but she refuses to name the father. When Bosola, a spy, coaxes her secret out of her and reveals it to her brothers, the Duchess tries to escape Malfi with her family. While Antonio and her oldest son manage to flee, the Duchess and her two younger children are captured. To punish her, Ferdinand imprisons her with the city’s madmen, hoping to drive her out of her mind.

And, 'cause she 'll needs be mad, I am resolv'd
To move forth the common hospital
All the mad-folk, and place them near her lodging;
There let them practise together, sing and dance,
And act their gambols to the full o' th' moon…

Driving and declaring a woman “mad” is, of course, an old patriarchal device of control. By proving the Duchess unsound of mind, Ferdinand can justify his own actions. Yet the Duchess bears her suffering with poise, retaining her sanity among madmen. When Ferdinand finally orders her execution, she bravely accepts her fate.

BOSOLA. Doth not death fright you?

DUCHESS. Who would be afraid on 't,
Knowing to meet such excellent company
In th' other world?

The Duchess and her two children are strangled. The strangling represents the quieting of a woman’s voice by force. Though Webster’s play does create space for the Duchess to express her individuality, it cannot yet grant her the space to live with her independent views. This uncertainty in the text is represented through the actual madness of her twin, Ferdinand. As the plot advances, we see Ferdinand grow more and more unstable and violent. His reactions to his sister’s love for Antonio are apoplectic and unhealthy; he seems to be obsessed with the carnal aspect of their relationship, suggesting an incestuous interest in his own sister. He is uneasy with his sister’s sexuality and independence and punishes her for her bodily autonomy by destroying that body. Close to her murder, his madness bursts out fully; he suffers from lycanthropy, or a belief that he is a wolf.

I'll go hunt the badger by owl-light:
'Tis a deed of darkness.

Later, he starts to hallucinate that his own shadow is menacingly following him. In the end, as the plot grows increasingly nihilistic, Ferdinand and Bosola kill each other. Thus, Ferdinand’s madness serves two very important functions. First, it is a way to resolve the text’s anxiety about the independence of the Duchess of Malfi. Webster created a woman with a mind of her own, but she couldn’t be shown to exist while defying the world of men; therefore, the mad brutality of Ferdinand is used to deal with the problem of the Duchess. Second, the madness also serves as the punishment of Ferdinand’s crimes. It allows the text to avenge the Duchess in as macabre a fashion as she was killed. Therefore, madness plays an extremely important part in the play.

What are important themes in John Webster's play 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 differences between France and Italy.  One important theme of the play will be corruption at an Italian court. Italy was often associated with evil in Renaissance English plays.

Three lines into his own first speech, Antonia refers to the "judicious king" of France.  He thus foreshadows another important theme of the play: the importance of having persons of virtue in positions of power. Some of the powerful people in Webster's play are deeply evil.

Antioni's reference to the "judicious" French king implies the importance of reason and rational behavior, which (unless corrupted) were associated with moral virtue in Renaissance literature.

Antonio next describes how the French king has rid

. . . his royal palace
Of flattering sycophants, of dissolute
And infamous persons . . .

These lines introduce several more themes important to the play: flattery, sycophancy (or absolutely unquestioning loyalty, usually to an unworthy person), and immoral behavior. By implication, the play will be endorsing the opposites of these: truth-telling, virtuous independence, and virtuous conduct.

Thus many of the key themes of the play are present, either explicitly or implicitly, in the first twenty lines of the work.