Study guide
The Duchess of Malfi
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Overview
- Author
- John Webster (about 1580 to about 1634), London playwright, son of a coach-maker and a freeman of the Merchant Taylors' Company
- Genre
- Jacobean tragedy, with elements of revenge tragedy, in blank verse and prose
- Written
- About 1612 to 1614, after The White Devil (1612); first acted by the King's Men before December 1614
- First printed
- The 1623 quarto, which names the actors of the King's Men and claims to print 'the perfect and exact copy', including passages too long for performance
- Source
- William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1567), which translates François de Belleforest's French version of a novella by Matteo Bandello (1554); the story is based on real events of the early sixteenth century
- Setting
- Italy in the early sixteenth century: Amalfi ('Malfi'), Rome, Ancona, the shrine of Loreto and Milan
- Main characters
- The Duchess; her steward and secret husband Antonio; her brothers Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, and the Cardinal; their spy Bosola; Cariola; Delio; Julia
- Key scenes
- The secret marriage (Act I), the apricocks (2.1), Ferdinand in the bedchamber (3.2), the dead man's hand (4.1), the madmen and the death of the Duchess (4.2), the echo (5.3), the final killings (5.5)
- Famous lines
- 'I am Duchess of Malfi still' and 'Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young' (both 4.2)
- Quote text
- Project Gutenberg's reprint of the 1623 quarto text, with modernised spelling. It divides Act I into three scenes; modern editions divide Act I differently, so references to Act I here follow this text, and other references follow the usual act and scene numbering
Context
John Webster was a Londoner, the son of a prosperous coach-maker, and he spent his life in and around the city's theatres. He often wrote in collaboration, but his reputation rests on two tragedies set in Italy, The White Devil (printed 1612) and The Duchess of Malfi. The second was written about 1612 to 1614 for the King's Men, Shakespeare's company, and acted both at the indoor Blackfriars theatre and at the Globe. It must have been staged before December 1614, when William Ostler, who played Antonio, died (Bradbrook 1980) (Brown 1964).
The story was true. Giovanna d'Aragona, the widowed Duchess of Amalfi, secretly married her steward, Antonio Bologna, in the early sixteenth century; she and some of her children disappeared, and Antonio was later killed in Milan. Matteo Bandello told the story in his Novelle (1554); François de Belleforest retold it in French in his Histoires tragiques, and William Painter translated Belleforest in The Palace of Pleasure (1567). Painter's version moralises strongly against the Duchess's lust and her marriage beneath her rank. Webster keeps the outline but makes her sympathetic, and much of the play's most memorable material is his own: the enlarged part of Bosola, Julia, the dead man's hand and the wax figures, the madmen, Ferdinand's lycanthropy and the echo (Painter 1890) (Brown 1964) (Marcus 2009).
The play was printed in 1623, the year of Shakespeare's First Folio, in a quarto that is the basis of all modern editions. Its title page claims to give 'the perfect and exact copy', with passages that the length of the play would not bear in performance, and it lists the actors of the King's Men: Richard Burbage and Joseph Taylor as Ferdinand, Henry Condell as the Cardinal, John Lowin as Bosola, Ostler as Antonio, and the boy Richard Sharpe as the Duchess. Ferdinand is assigned first to Burbage and then to Taylor, which shows that the play was revived after Burbage's death in 1619. Commendatory verses by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley and John Ford were printed with it (Gunby 1995) (Marcus 2009).
The Duchess of Malfi belongs to the dark world of Jacobean tragedy, written in the reign of James I (1603 to 1625). Such plays often set corrupt courts in Italy, a country English audiences associated with Machiavellian policy, poison and Catholic worldliness; they feature malcontents, spies, lavish and ingenious deaths, and a sceptical or anxious view of providence (Dollimore 1984) (Ornstein 1960). Webster's play is unusual in placing a woman's choice of husband at its centre, and in killing its heroine at the end of Act IV. Its subject touched a live issue: moralists disapproved of widows who remarried, especially across rank, though many did (Wadsworth 1956) (Jardine 1983).
Webster's reputation has risen and fallen. Charles Lamb praised the death scene in 1808; Victorian and early twentieth-century critics, such as William Archer, condemned the play as a chamber of horrors without coherent design (Moore 1981). T. S. Eliot's poem 'Whispers of Immortality' (1920) gave him a lasting image: Webster, Eliot wrote, was 'much possessed by death' and saw 'the skull beneath the skin' (Eliot 1963). Modern criticism has defended the play's mixed, self-conscious art and found in the Duchess one of the most powerful women of the English stage (Forker 1986) (Luckyj 2011).
Plot overview
The young widowed Duchess of Malfi is forbidden by her two brothers, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, and the Cardinal, to marry again. Ferdinand places Bosola, a discontented former galley-slave, in her household as a spy. Defying them, the Duchess secretly marries her steward, Antonio, with only her maid Cariola as witness.
Over several years the Duchess bears three children. Bosola discovers the first birth by a trick with apricots and reports it, but cannot find out who the father is. Ferdinand enters her bedroom at night and confronts her; she sends Antonio away to Ancona under a pretended charge of fraud, and then, trusting Bosola, tells him that Antonio is her husband. Bosola betrays her. The brothers have the family banished; Antonio flees towards Milan with their eldest son, and the Duchess is taken prisoner.
Ferdinand torments his sister with a dead man's hand, wax images of her family apparently dead, and a crowd of madmen. Bosola, disguised, prepares her for death, and she is strangled with two of her children and Cariola. Ferdinand at once regrets the murder, refuses Bosola his reward and goes mad, believing himself a wolf.
In Milan, Bosola, now repentant, plans to save Antonio. The Cardinal poisons his mistress Julia when she learns his secret. Antonio goes by night to seek reconciliation with the Cardinal, hears an echo that seems to warn him, and is killed in the dark by Bosola, who mistakes him for an enemy. Bosola kills the Cardinal; the mad Ferdinand and Bosola wound each other mortally. Delio brings in Antonio's son to be established in his mother's right.
Scene by scene
Scene 1: Act I, Scene I: Antonio's return and Bosola's grievance
Act I, Scene I (the whole scene)
Summary
Antonio Bologna, steward of the Duchess's household, has come back to Malfi from France. He praises the French king for clearing his court of flatterers, because a prince's court is like a fountain: if it is poisoned at the source, sickness spreads through the whole land. Bosola then confronts the Cardinal, demanding a reward for service that cost him years in the galleys, and is brushed aside. Left with Antonio and Delio, Bosola mocks the brothers as crooked fruit trees on which only crows and caterpillars feed. Delio explains that Bosola was in the galleys for a murder that the Cardinal is thought to have ordered.
Analysis
The short opening scene lays down the play's moral map. Antonio's image of the court as a fountain is the standard by which the Aragonian brothers will be judged, and Antonio is introduced as a man of judgement and honesty. Bosola enters as the type of the malcontent familiar from Jacobean satire and tragedy: a neglected, educated soldier who rails at the great because he cannot share their rewards. Antonio sees both the danger and the waste in him: unused talent, he says, turns to melancholy as cloth left unworn breeds moths (Bogard 1955) (Berry 1972).
Some curs'd example poison 't near the head, Death and diseases through the whole land spread.
Antonio's fountain image: corruption at the top of a court infects the state. The brothers will prove the point.
He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing-pools
Bosola's first portrait of the Cardinal and Ferdinand: rich and fruitful, but feeding only scavengers.
This foul melancholy Will poison all his goodness
Antonio diagnoses Bosola as a malcontent, whose wasted talent sours into melancholy.
Scene 2: Act I, Scene II: The court, the brothers and Bosola's hiring
Act I, Scene II (the whole scene)
Summary
The court gathers. Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, presides over a tilting game won by Antonio and bullies his courtiers into laughing only when he laughs. Antonio describes the great figures to Delio: the Cardinal is a melancholy churchman who tried to buy the papacy, and Ferdinand a perverse, turbulent man who uses the law as a spider uses its web. Their sister the Duchess, by contrast, is all virtue and grace: 'She stains the time past, lights the time to come.'
The Cardinal tells Ferdinand to employ Bosola as a spy, while keeping his own hands clean. Ferdinand gives Bosola gold and the post of provisor of the Duchess's horse, and orders him to watch her: she is a young widow, and he will not have her marry again. Bosola sees exactly what he is being made into, a 'familiar' or 'intelligencer', and curses the gift, but accepts it.
Analysis
Antonio's character sketches work like a prologue, telling the audience how to see the three siblings, 'three fair medals / Cast in one figure, of so different temper'. Webster keeps the brothers' motive deliberately thin: Ferdinand refuses to give a reason for forbidding the marriage, and the question of why he cares so violently runs through the whole play (Whigham 1985).
Bosola's hiring shows the economics of the court. He knows that taking the post makes him a corrupter's tool, and says so; he takes it anyway, and his closing couplet, 'Sometimes the devil doth preach', points at his own double nature. He is the most self-aware character in the play and, for much of it, one of the most compromised (Bogard 1955) (Luckyj 1989).
She stains the time past, lights the time to come.
Antonio's praise of the Duchess: she outshines all past women and gives light to the future.
Is like a foul, black cobweb to a spider
Delio's image for Ferdinand's use of the law, as a trap for those he feeds on.
She 's a young widow: I would not have her marry again.
Ferdinand's command to Bosola. He refuses, here and later, to explain it.
Say, then, my corruption Grew out of horse-dung: I am your creature.
Bosola accepts the post of provisor of the horse, and with it the role of spy.
Scene 3: Act I, Scene III: The warning and the secret marriage
Act I, Scene III (the whole scene)
Summary
The brothers warn the Duchess, in what she calls a speech 'studied' between them, against marrying again: widows who remarry are lustful, secret weddings are executions, and the marriage bed is a prison. Ferdinand shows her their father's poniard. Once they have gone, the Duchess resolves to defy them. With Cariola hidden behind the arras as a witness, she summons Antonio on the pretext of dictating her will, gives him her wedding ring, raises him from his knees and proposes to him. They exchange vows of marriage on the spot, before Cariola, which by the law of the time made a binding contract. Cariola, alone, wonders whether greatness or womanhood rules her mistress, and calls it 'a fearful madness'.
Analysis
This is one of the great wooing scenes of the period, and it turns the conventions of courtship upside down: the woman of higher rank must woo, because 'none dare woo us'. The Duchess plays with the language of wills and stewardship, and of heaven and the grave, so that love and death are entwined from the start. Her claim, 'This is flesh and blood, sir', asserts a living, desiring woman against the stone image of the widow on her husband's tomb that her brothers would make of her (Belsey 1985) (Rose 1988).
The marriage itself is a contract 'per verba de presenti', vows exchanged in the present tense, which church law recognised as valid even without a priest, though it was irregular and disapproved of. Whether a Jacobean audience saw the Duchess's choice as admirable, reckless or sinful is one of the play's central debates (Wadsworth 1956) (Jardine 1983). Cariola's closing lines leave the question open.
Your darkest actions, nay, your privat'st thoughts, Will come to light.
Ferdinand's warning: he will make good on it through his spy.
For I am going into a wilderness, Where I shall find nor path nor friendly clue To be my guide.
The Duchess knows the danger of the choice she is about to make.
This is flesh and blood, sir; 'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster Kneels at my husband's tomb.
She rejects the role of the perpetual widow, frozen in stone.
The misery of us that are born great! We are forc'd to woo, because none dare woo us;
Rank reverses the order of courtship and forces the Duchess into riddles.
Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman Reign most in her, I know not; but it shows A fearful madness.
Cariola's judgement, admiring and fearful at once.
Scene 4: Act II, Scene I: The apricocks
Act II, Scene I (the whole scene)
Summary
Some months have passed. Bosola mocks the old courtier Castruccio and an Old Lady who paints her face, and turns his satire into a meditation on the rotten body that human beings hide in rich clothes. He has noticed that the Duchess is sick, swollen and wearing a loose gown, and he has a trick to test her: the first apricots of the spring. Delio, in conversation with Antonio, has just learned of the marriage. The Duchess enters, short of breath, and eats the apricots greedily; Bosola tells her they were ripened in horse-dung. She is taken ill and goes into labour. Delio suggests they give out that Bosola has poisoned her.
Analysis
Bosola's 'meditation' shows the mind that Eliot later admired in Webster: he sees the decaying body under every fine surface, and his satire on cosmetics becomes a sermon on mortality. The apricot test brings that disgust to bear on the Duchess's pregnancy. The scene's comedy is cruel: pregnancy, grafting and dung are linked in Bosola's asides, and his jokes about grafting a pippin on a crab glance at the match of a duchess with her steward (Forker 1986).
The Duchess's public game with Antonio's hat, offering to let her courtiers stay covered in her presence, plays with ceremony and rank in front of a court that does not know they are married.
What thing is in this outward form of man To be belov'd?
Bosola's meditation on the body's corruption, the 'skull beneath the skin' of Webster's imagination.
I have bought some apricocks, The first our spring yields.
Bosola's trap: the craving of a pregnant woman will betray her.
How greedily she eats them!
The aside in which Bosola watches the trick work.
Scene 5: Act II, Scene II: The night of the birth
Act II, Scene II (the whole scene)
Summary
Bosola presses the Old Lady about the Duchess's 'breeding' with more crude jokes about women. Antonio orders the gates shut and the officers of the household locked in their rooms, using the story of an armed Swiss intruder and of stolen jewels to cover the birth. Delio, about to ride to Rome, calms Antonio's superstitious fears. Cariola brings the news that Antonio is the father of a son, and he goes to cast the child's horoscope.
Analysis
The scene is a short exercise in managed confusion. The servants' gossip about the 'Switzer' is comic, but it shows how far the lovers must go to keep a natural event secret. Delio's list of omens, spilled salt, a hare crossing the path, a nosebleed, prepares for the nosebleed that Antonio suffers in the next scene, and for the play's uneasy interest in signs and fate.
How superstitiously we mind our evils!
Delio dismisses omens; the play itself is less sure.
Old friends, like old swords, still are trusted best.
One of Webster's many moral couplets, here confirming Delio as Antonio's true friend.
Sir, you are the happy father of a son:
Cariola's news: the first child of the secret marriage.
Scene 6: Act II, Scene III: The horoscope
Act II, Scene III (the whole scene)
Summary
Late at night Bosola, with a dark lantern, hears a woman shriek. He meets Antonio, sword drawn, and the two quarrel: Antonio accuses Bosola of poisoning the Duchess and stealing the jewels, and Bosola calls him a false steward. Antonio's nose bleeds onto his handkerchief, staining his initials. He drops a paper, and Bosola finds it: the horoscope of the Duchess's son, born that night, which predicts a short life and a violent death. Bosola resolves to send word to the brothers by Castruccio, though he still does not know who the father is.
Analysis
Darkness, a single light and fear make this the first of the play's night scenes, well suited to the candle-lit indoor theatre of the Blackfriars. The horoscope is a typical Websterian device: a piece of paper that betrays a secret by accident, and a prophecy of violent death that the play will fulfil, though not for this child. Bosola's couplet on lust that is 'witty, but is never wise' shows him interpreting what he has found in the harshest terms.
This mole does undermine me.
Antonio's aside: Bosola as the burrowing spy.
Two letters, that are wrought here for my name, Are drown'd in blood!
The nosebleed on Antonio's initials, an omen he tries to dismiss.
Though lust do mask in ne'er so strange disguise, She 's oft found witty, but is never wise.
Bosola's sententious verdict on the Duchess's cleverness.
Scene 7: Act II, Scene IV: The Cardinal and Julia
Act II, Scene IV (the whole scene)
Summary
In Rome the Cardinal entertains his mistress Julia, the wife of old Castruccio, whom she has deceived with a story about visiting a hermit. He taunts her with women's inconstancy, joking that one would need Galileo's telescope to find a constant woman in the moon, and boasts of how he has trained her like a hawk. Delio, an old suitor of Julia, arrives and offers her money to be his mistress. News comes that Castruccio has delivered a letter that has driven Ferdinand nearly out of his wits. Delio fears Antonio is betrayed.
Analysis
Julia, who is not in Webster's source, gives the Cardinal a private life and the play a sub-plot in which sexual freedom is treated cynically, without consequence until Act V. The contrast is pointed: the Cardinal, who condemns his sister's lawful marriage, keeps another man's wife. His reference to Galileo, whose telescope observations were published in 1610, is one of the play's few topical details.
We had need go borrow that fantastic glass Invented by Galileo the Florentine
The Cardinal's sneer about women's constancy, with a reference to the new telescope.
I do fear Antonio is betray'd.
Delio guesses what the letter means.
Scene 8: Act II, Scene V: Ferdinand's fury
Act II, Scene V (the whole scene)
Summary
In Rome Ferdinand shows the Cardinal Bosola's letter. He raves that his sister is a strumpet, imagines her in the act with some strong-limbed labourer, and wishes he could hew her to pieces, burn her and her lover in a sealed coal-pit, and boil their child. The Cardinal is angry too, at the stain on 'the royal blood of Arragon and Castile', but he rebukes his brother's lack of control. Ferdinand promises to wait until he knows who the father is.
Analysis
Ferdinand's speeches are the clearest evidence for the view that his obsession with his sister is sexual. He cannot stop picturing her in bed, and his rage is out of all proportion to the offence, a fact the Cardinal himself remarks on (Leech 1951). The scene also sets up the difference between the brothers: Ferdinand burns, the Cardinal calculates. Ferdinand's lines about seeming 'the thing I am not' and about a sin 'in us' that heaven revenges by her hint at guilt in himself.
I have this night digg'd up a mandrake.
The mandrake was said to drive mad those who pulled it up: Ferdinand's madness begins here.
Shall our blood, The royal blood of Arragon and Castile, Be thus attainted?
The Cardinal's concern is the family's blood and rank.
It is some sin in us heaven doth revenge By her.
Ferdinand half admits that the fault may lie in the brothers.
Scene 9: Act III, Scene I: Years later
Act III, Scene I (the whole scene)
Summary
Delio returns to Malfi and learns that the Duchess has had two more children. Ferdinand has come to court and is ominously quiet; the people call the Duchess a strumpet, and wiser heads suspect Antonio of growing rich at her expense. Ferdinand proposes Count Malatesti as a husband and dismisses the scandal with a show of love. Alone with Bosola, who suggests the Duchess has been bewitched, he scorns the idea of love potions: 'The witch-craft lies in her rank blood.' Bosola has a false key to her bedroom, and Ferdinand will use it that night.
Analysis
Webster leaps over several years between Acts II and III, and draws attention to it through Delio's remark that the time seems like half an hour. The scene shows the marriage hidden in plain sight: the court sees Antonio's prosperity and invents a story of corruption rather than imagine a marriage across rank. Bosola, for once, speaks frankly to his master and is thanked for it.
She hath had two children more, a son and daughter.
Antonio's news marks the passing of years between the acts.
Those houses that are haunted are most still Till the devil be up.
Antonio reads danger in Ferdinand's silence.
The witch-craft lies in her rank blood.
Ferdinand locates the 'sorcery' in his sister's sexuality.
Scene 10: Act III, Scene II: Ferdinand in the bedchamber
Act III, Scene II (the whole scene)
Summary
In her bedchamber the Duchess, Antonio and Cariola tease one another affectionately; Antonio and Cariola slip out as a joke, and the Duchess, brushing her hair, goes on talking to a husband who is no longer there. Ferdinand steps forward in his place and hands her a poniard. She tells him she is married; he refuses to learn the husband's name, condemns her to hide him from the sun, tells a fable of Reputation, Love and Death, and leaves, vowing never to see her again.
The Duchess, to cover Antonio's flight, publicly accuses him of false accounting and dismisses him to Ancona. The officers pour scorn on the fallen steward, but Bosola praises him so warmly that the Duchess confides that Antonio is her husband. Bosola promises secrecy, suggests she pretend a pilgrimage to Loreto to join Antonio, and then, alone, prepares to report everything to Ferdinand.
Analysis
The scene moves from the play's most intimate domestic comedy to its first great confrontation. The joke that leaves the Duchess speaking to an empty room is turned into horror when the brother takes the husband's place, an effect that many critics read as part of the evidence for Ferdinand's incestuous jealousy (Leech 1951) (Whigham 1985). Her defence is plain and modern-sounding: 'Why might not I marry?' She claims for herself the ordinary rights of youth and love against the demand that she be 'cas'd up, like a holy relic' (Jankowski 1992).
Bosola's eulogy of Antonio, which voices the play's case for merit over birth, is also the means of his betrayal. Whether he means it is impossible to settle; Webster lets the speech be true and treacherous at once. His closing image of the 'politician' as 'the devil's quilted anvil' describes himself (Luckyj 1989).
For know, whether I am doom'd to live or die, I can do both like a prince.
Spoken to a husband she thinks is still in the room, and heard by Ferdinand: her sense of her own rank and courage.
Why might not I marry? I have not gone about in this to create Any new world or custom.
Her defence: she has done nothing new or unnatural.
Why should only I, Of all the other princes of the world, Be cas'd up, like a holy relic? I have youth And a little beauty.
The widow refuses to be treated as a sacred object.
Will you make yourself a mercenary herald, Rather to examine men's pedigrees than virtues?
Bosola's defence of Antonio's merit against his low birth.
A politician is the devil's quilted anvil;
Bosola's self-portrait as the silent instrument of evil.
Scene 11: Act III, Scene III: The brothers hear the news
Act III, Scene III (the whole scene)
Summary
In Rome the Cardinal is given a military command. Delio and Silvio mock the cowardly Count Malatesti. Bosola arrives with his news, and the onlookers watch the brothers' faces as they read it: Ferdinand laughs 'like a deadly cannon'. Ferdinand learns that the husband is Antonio, 'a slave that only smell'd of ink and counters', and rides out with a troop of horse; the Cardinal will have the family banished from Ancona.
Analysis
Webster shows the reaction largely through the commentary of bystanders, which makes the brothers seem more dangerous for their silence. Ferdinand's insistence on Antonio's low birth shows how far rank governs his outrage. His order to write to the Duchess's son by her first husband, the young Duke of Malfi, introduces a child who is never seen again, a loose end that bears on the ending.
A very salamander lives in 's eye, To mock the eager violence of fire.
Pescara on Ferdinand: the salamander was believed to live in fire.
Methinks her fault and beauty, Blended together, show like leprosy, The whiter, the fouler.
Ferdinand's disgust fuses his sister's beauty with disease.
A slave that only smell'd of ink and counters,
Ferdinand's contempt for the steward's trade.
Scene 12: Act III, Scene IV: The shrine at Loreto
Act III, Scene IV (the whole scene)
Summary
Two pilgrims at the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto watch a dumb show: the Cardinal exchanges his hat, robes and ring for sword, helmet and shield, and then, with the state of Ancona, banishes the Duchess, Antonio and their children. A song in praise of the Cardinal is sung by churchmen. The pilgrims note that the Cardinal tore the wedding ring from his sister's finger, and question the justice of the banishment.
Analysis
This brief ceremonial scene puts the corruption of church and state on stage in mime. The Cardinal's transformation into a soldier exposes the worldliness of his office, and the false pilgrimage of the Duchess, which Cariola criticised as 'jesting with religion', ends at a real shrine in real disgrace. The pilgrims act as a chorus of ordinary judgement. In the 1623 quarto a marginal note says that the author disclaims the song as his.
Arms and honours deck thy story, To thy fame's eternal glory!
The opening of the song that accompanies the Cardinal's investiture.
'Twas her wedding-ring;
The Cardinal takes back the ring that sealed the marriage.
Fortune makes this conclusion general, All things do help th' unhappy man to fall.
The pilgrim's closing couplet on the fall of the unfortunate.
Scene 13: Act III, Scene V: The parting and the capture
Act III, Scene V (the whole scene)
Summary
Banished, with only a few servants left, the Duchess tells Antonio of a dream in which the diamonds of her coronet turned to pearls, signs of tears. Bosola brings a letter from Ferdinand asking for Antonio's 'head in a business', which she reads as a threat. Fearing an ambush, she sends Antonio with their eldest son towards Milan; their farewell is full of foreboding. Bosola, masked, returns with a guard and takes her prisoner, insulting Antonio's birth. She answers with a fable of a salmon and a dog-fish and goes calmly to captivity.
Analysis
The Duchess grows in stature as she loses everything. The parting has the formality of a last farewell, and Antonio's comparison of their separation to a clockmaker taking apart a watch to mend it expresses a hope in providence that the play does not obviously confirm. The salmon fable states a theme of the whole tragedy: true value is known only in disaster, 'nearest to the cook and fire' (Bliss 1983). Bosola's mask is a sign of his shame as well as his disguise.
Methought I wore my coronet of state, And on a sudden all the diamonds Were chang'd to pearls.
The Duchess's dream; Antonio reads the pearls as tears.
Heaven fashion'd us of nothing; and we strive To bring ourselves to nothing.
Antonio's farewell meditation on human nothingness.
Our value never can be truly known, Till in the fisher's basket we be shown:
The moral of the salmon's fable: worth is revealed in ruin.
There 's no deep valley but near some great hill.
The Duchess's last words in the scene, a proverb on the fall of the great.
Scene 14: Act IV, Scene I: The dead man's hand
Act IV, Scene I (the whole scene)
Summary
Bosola tells Ferdinand that the Duchess bears her imprisonment nobly. Ferdinand, having vowed never to see her, visits her in darkness, pretends reconciliation, and gives her a dead man's hand with her wedding ring on it. When lights are brought, Bosola reveals figures of Antonio and the children apparently dead. The Duchess wishes to die and curses the stars and her brothers. Ferdinand explains that the figures are only wax, made to drive her to despair, and plans to send madmen to her lodging. Bosola begs him to stop and refuses to see her again in his own shape.
Analysis
Ferdinand's tortures are theatrical: he stages darkness, a token, a 'discovery' behind a curtain, and a show of corpses. His aim, he says, is 'to bring her to despair', the sin by which a Christian soul could be lost, and his claim that her body was worth more than her soul shows how the play's horror is spiritual as well as physical (Forker 1986). The Duchess's line that she plays a part in a tedious theatre against her will is one of the play's many moments of self-conscious theatre. Bosola begins to pity her, and his refusal to appear in his own shape leads to the disguises of the next scene.
a behaviour so noble As gives a majesty to adversity:
Bosola's report of the Duchess in prison.
What witchcraft doth he practise, that he hath left A dead man's hand here?
The Duchess discovers the meaning of Ferdinand's 'love-token'.
I account this world a tedious theatre, For I do play a part in 't 'gainst my will.
Life as an unwanted role in a play.
While that my blood run pure in 't, was more worth Than that which thou wouldst comfort, call'd a soul.
Ferdinand values his sister's body, and the family blood in it, above her soul.
Scene 15: Act IV, Scene II: The madmen and the death of the Duchess
Act IV, Scene II (the whole scene)
Summary
The madmen Ferdinand has sent howl around the Duchess's lodging; she says their noise keeps her sane. A servant presents them as a cure for melancholy, and they sing, rave and dance. Bosola enters disguised as an old man, a tomb-maker, and tells her that her flesh is 'a box of worm-seed'. She replies, 'I am Duchess of Malfi still.' Executioners bring a coffin, cords and a bell; Bosola, now the bellman, sings her dirge. She gives Cariola her last instructions for the children, kneels, and is strangled. Cariola fights for her life and is killed; the children are strangled too.
Ferdinand looks on the body: 'Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.' He reveals that they were twins, confesses that he hoped to inherit her wealth, and turns on Bosola, refusing him any reward and denying that he ever ordered the murder. Ferdinand leaves, already distracted. The Duchess stirs; Bosola tells her that Antonio lives and is reconciled with her brothers, and she dies with the word 'Mercy!' Bosola weeps for her, and resolves to give her body to good women and go to Milan.
Analysis
This is the heart of the play. The masque of madmen, a grotesque parody of a wedding entertainment, has been read as a 'charivari', the rough music with which communities mocked a widow's remarriage (Ekeblad 1958). Bosola's speeches are a formal preparation for death in the tradition of the art of dying well: he strips away her rank and her body, and she answers by holding on to both, calmly. Her death on her knees, with heaven's gates lower than princes' palaces, gives her the dignity of a martyr (Forker 1986) (Luckyj 2011).
'Cover her face' is one of the most quoted lines in English drama: three short clauses in which Ferdinand's horror breaks through. The revelation that he and his sister were twins comes only now, and with it his first confession of motive, money, which does not seem to account for his frenzy (Whigham 1985). Bosola's turn begins here. He describes himself waking from a 'sweet and golden dream', and his grief over the body is the beginning of the revenge that takes up Act V.
I am Duchess of Malfi still.
Her answer to Bosola's reduction of her to flesh: identity and rank survive suffering.
Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy.
Bosola as tomb-maker reminds her that the body is food for worms.
heaven-gates are not so highly arch'd As princes' palaces; they that enter there Must go upon their knees
The Duchess kneels to die, humble before heaven.
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
Ferdinand's first sight of what he has done.
I stand like one That long hath ta'en a sweet and golden dream: I am angry with myself, now that I wake.
Bosola, unrewarded, wakes to his own guilt.
Scene 16: Act V, Scene I: Antonio in Milan
Act V, Scene I (the whole scene)
Summary
In Milan Antonio hopes for a reconciliation with the brothers. Delio doubts it: Antonio's lands are being seized. Delio tests this by asking the Marquis of Pescara for part of them, and is refused, while Julia, with a letter from the Cardinal, is given the same land at once. Pescara explains that he would not give a friend property taken by injustice; it is fit only for a strumpet. News comes that Ferdinand is in Milan, sick. Antonio resolves to visit the Cardinal at midnight in his own person, hoping to soften him, 'for better fall once than be ever falling'.
Analysis
Pescara is the one great man in the play who behaves nobly, a reminder that the corruption of the brothers is not inevitable in their class. Antonio's plan echoes the night visit of Ferdinand to the Duchess, and his passivity, hoping that love and duty will draw out the Cardinal's poison, has led some critics to find him too weak for a tragic hero. He does not yet know that his wife is dead, which gives the whole act its dramatic irony (Luckyj 1989).
not forfeited By course of law, but ravish'd from his throat By the cardinal's entreaty.
Pescara exposes the Cardinal's injustice to Antonio.
For better fall once than be ever falling.
Antonio's resolution to risk everything.
Scene 17: Act V, Scene II: Ferdinand's madness and Julia's death
Act V, Scene II (the whole scene)
Summary
A doctor explains that Ferdinand suffers from lycanthropy: he believes himself a wolf, and was found in a churchyard at midnight with a man's leg on his shoulder. Ferdinand enters, tries to throttle his own shadow, and beats the doctor. The Cardinal, who has kept his part in the murder from Bosola, invents a story of a family ghost to explain the madness, and hires Bosola to find and kill Antonio.
Julia, who desires Bosola, holds him at pistol-point and woos him. He agrees to be her lover if she will learn the cause of the Cardinal's melancholy. With Bosola hidden, she presses the Cardinal, who confesses that the Duchess and two of her children were strangled at his appointment; he then makes her swear secrecy on a poisoned book, which kills her. Bosola reveals himself, and the Cardinal enlists him as a 'fellow-murderer', promising rewards. Alone, Bosola resolves to save Antonio and perhaps join him in revenge, and fancies the Duchess haunts him.
Analysis
Ferdinand's lycanthropy turns the wolf imagery he used of his sister's children ('young wolves') back on himself: he now digs up graves, as he said the wolf would to reveal the murder. The scene's mixture of grotesque comedy, seduction and poisoning shows Webster's 'impure' art at its most daring (Ekeblad 1958). The Cardinal's murder of Julia on a Bible is the perfect emblem of his religion. Bosola, who once served great men for reward, now speaks of the 'sword of justice' and of penitence (Bogard 1955).
a wolf's skin was hairy on the outside, His on the inside
The doctor's account of Ferdinand's lycanthropy: the beast is within.
thou 'rt poison'd with that book.
The Cardinal silences Julia with a poisoned Bible.
Security some men call the suburbs of hell, Only a dead wall between.
Bosola on the Cardinal's false sense of safety.
O Penitence, let me truly taste thy cup, That throws men down only to raise them up!
Bosola's closing prayer: the turn towards repentance.
Scene 18: Act V, Scene III: The echo from the grave
Act V, Scene III (the whole scene)
Summary
Antonio and Delio approach the Cardinal's lodging, built on the ruins of an ancient abbey. A wall gives back an echo, and it seems to answer Antonio: 'Like death that we have', 'Do not', 'Be mindful of thy safety', 'Never see her more'. The voice is like his wife's, and he briefly sees a face 'folded in sorrow'. He dismisses it as a dead thing and goes on; Delio goes to fetch Antonio's eldest son.
Analysis
The echo scene is Webster's most delicate use of the supernatural. The stage direction says the echo comes from the Duchess's grave, but Antonio does not know she is dead, and the echo only repeats the ends of his and Delio's lines. It is at once a warning from the dead and a natural effect, and the scene leaves the audience to decide (Bliss 1983). Antonio's meditation on ruins, which 'have diseases like to men', places his own end within the decay of all human things.
I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history;
Antonio's meditation among the ruins of the abbey.
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have.
The echo takes up the last words: 'Like death that we have.'
Never see her more.
The echo's last answer, the one Antonio cannot ignore.
Scene 19: Act V, Scene IV: The death of Antonio
Act V, Scene IV (the whole scene)
Summary
The Cardinal makes his courtiers promise not to come to Ferdinand's chamber that night, whatever cries they hear; he wants privacy to move Julia's body and means to kill Bosola once he has served his turn. Bosola overhears. In the dark he stabs a man he takes for an enemy: it is Antonio, come to seek reconciliation. Bosola tells the dying Antonio that his wife and two children are murdered, and Antonio dies asking that his son should shun the courts of princes. Bosola resolves on revenge.
Analysis
The death of Antonio is the cruellest of the play's ironies: the one man Bosola wished to save is killed by his hand, by mistake, in the dark. Bosola's line about men as 'the stars' tennis-balls' gives the bleakest version of the play's view of fortune. Antonio's last speech, on 'bubbles blown in th' air', is a quiet answer to a world of ambition. The Cardinal's precaution against rescue will destroy him in the next scene.
We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded Which way please them.
Bosola's despairing view of human freedom.
In all our quest of greatness, Like wanton boys whose pastime is their care, We follow after bubbles blown in th' air.
Antonio's dying words on the vanity of ambition.
O direful misprision!
Bosola's cry at his mistake ('misprision', a mistaking).
Scene 20: Act V, Scene V: The deaths of the brothers and Bosola
Act V, Scene V (the whole scene)
Summary
The Cardinal reads about hell and sees a figure with a rake in his fish-ponds. Bosola enters with Antonio's body and tells him he has come to kill him. The Cardinal cries for help, but the courtiers above think he is testing their promise and stay away, until Pescara decides to break in. Bosola kills the servant, then stabs the Cardinal. Ferdinand rushes in, imagining a battle, wounds his brother and gives Bosola a fatal wound; Bosola kills him. Ferdinand dies naming his sister as the cause, the Cardinal asks to be forgotten, and Bosola, explaining the revenge, dies. Delio enters with Antonio's son and proposes to establish him in his mother's right.
Analysis
The ending fulfils the pattern of revenge tragedy, but with deliberate anticlimax. The Cardinal is caught by his own trick and dies 'like a leveret'; the great men end, in Bosola's image, like a pyramid that narrows to 'a kind of nothing'. Ferdinand's last couplet, on being cut 'with our own dust', is the closest the brothers come to self-knowledge. Bosola, dying, calls Antonio's death 'such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play', a line that turns the tragedy's chaos into self-conscious theatre (Luckyj 1989) (Bliss 1983).
Delio's final speech offers a moral, that integrity of life is fame's best friend, and an heir. Critics have asked whether this restores order or merely papers over the ruin, especially since the Duchess's son by her first husband, the Duke of Malfi mentioned in Act III, would have a prior claim, and since Antonio had wished his son to fly the courts of princes (Marcus 2009).
Methinks I see a thing arm'd with a rake, That seems to strike at me.
The Cardinal's guilty conscience takes visible shape.
My sister, O my sister! there 's the cause on 't. Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.
Ferdinand's dying recognition.
Such a mistake as I have often seen In a play.
Bosola on Antonio's death: the tragedy's self-awareness.
Integrity of life is fame's best friend, Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.
Delio's closing couplet, the play's last word.
Characters
The Duchess's household
- The Duchess
- The young widowed ruler of Malfi (Amalfi), sister of Ferdinand and the Cardinal. She is never given a personal name. Witty, warm and brave, she chooses her own husband against her brothers' orders and woos him herself. Under imprisonment and torture she grows in dignity, and she meets death on her knees, still asserting 'I am Duchess of Malfi still'. Critics have seen her both as a heroine of private love against tyranny and as a ruler who neglects her public duty.
- Antonio Bologna
- Steward of the Duchess's household and her secret husband. He is honest, capable and a fine horseman, but of lower birth than she, and in a crisis he tends to be passive and to fear omens. He survives her by one act, unaware of her death, and is killed in the dark by Bosola as he seeks a reconciliation with the Cardinal.
- Cariola
- The Duchess's waiting-woman and the only witness of the secret marriage. Loyal but sceptical, she calls the marriage 'a fearful madness' and objects to the feigned pilgrimage. Her desperate struggle against death in 4.2 contrasts sharply with her mistress's calm.
- The children
- The Duchess and Antonio have three children, two sons and a daughter. The two youngest are strangled in 4.2; the eldest son escapes with Antonio and is brought in by Delio at the end. The Duchess also has a son by her first husband, the young Duke of Malfi, who is mentioned once (3.3) and never appears.
The Aragonian brothers
- Ferdinand
- Duke of Calabria, the Duchess's twin brother. Violent, mocking and given to extremes, he forbids her to remarry without giving a reason, rages obscenely when he learns of her children, and devises the tortures of Act IV. After her death he collapses into remorse and madness, believing himself a wolf. His motive, whether family pride, greed for her estate or a suppressed incestuous desire, is one of the play's open questions.
- The Cardinal
- The Duchess's other brother, a worldly prince of the church who once tried to buy the papacy. Cold and calculating where Ferdinand is passionate, he keeps a mistress, Julia, and later poisons her. He exchanges his cardinal's robes for a soldier's armour at Loreto, and dies trapped by his own precautions, asking to be forgotten.
The brothers' agent
- Daniel de Bosola
- A scholar and soldier who served seven years in the galleys for a murder done, it is thought, for the Cardinal. Hired by Ferdinand as the Duchess's provisor of the horse and spy, he is a malcontent who sees through everyone, himself included. He betrays the Duchess, prepares her for death and carries out her murder, then turns in remorse to revenge, killing Antonio by mistake and both brothers on purpose. His is the largest part in the play.
Antonio's friend
- Delio
- Antonio's faithful friend, who acts as a confidant and commentator. He tries to seduce Julia in Rome, warns Antonio against trusting the brothers, and speaks the play's final lines, presenting Antonio's son as heir.
The Cardinal's circle
- Julia
- Wife of old Castruccio and mistress of the Cardinal; she is Webster's addition to the story. Frank about her desires, she woos Bosola at pistol-point and draws the Cardinal's secret from him, and he kills her with a poisoned book.
The court
- Castruccio
- An old courtier and Julia's husband, a figure of fun who wants to be thought an eminent courtier. He carries Bosola's letter to Rome.
- The Marquis of Pescara
- A noble soldier who refuses to give Delio land taken unjustly from Antonio. He represents the honour that the brothers lack, and leads the courtiers who break in at the end.
- Count Malatesti
- A cowardly nobleman whom Ferdinand proposes as a husband for the Duchess; she calls him 'a mere stick of sugar-candy'. He is mocked as a carpet soldier.
- Silvio, Roderigo and Grisolan
- Courtiers who comment on events and, in the last scene, stay away from the Cardinal's cries because of the promise he has made them give.
Minor figures
- The Old Lady and the Doctor
- The Old Lady is the target of Bosola's satire on painted faces and women's frailty. The Doctor tries to cure Ferdinand's lycanthropy by out-madding him, and is beaten for it.
- The madmen
- A lawyer, a priest, a doctor, an astrologer, a tailor, a gentleman-usher, a farmer and a broker, sent by Ferdinand to howl, sing and dance at the Duchess's lodging before her death.
Themes
The widow's remarriage and a woman's choice
The play turns on a widow's right to marry again and to choose her husband. Moralists of the period, and the Duchess's brothers, treated remarriage as a sign of lust and a betrayal of the first husband; in practice, widows often remarried, and a rich widow had unusual freedom to choose. The brothers' language reduces their sister to her body and her 'blood'; she answers with ordinary human claims, youth, love, 'a little beauty' (Wadsworth 1956) (Jardine 1983).
Because she is a ruler, her private choice is also a political act, made in secret against the wishes of her family. Critics have argued about whether Webster asks us to admire her courage, to pity her imprudence, or both. The play gives her the most eloquent voice and the most dignified death, and makes her persecutors monstrous (Jankowski 1992) (Rose 1988).
Rank, birth and merit
Antonio is honest, able and of 'mean' birth, and the marriage crosses a line of rank. Ferdinand calls him a slave who smells of ink and counters; Bosola, in his eulogy, asks whether a prince should examine 'men's pedigrees' rather than virtues. The play keeps returning to the question whether worth comes from blood or from action, and the Duchess's answer is clear: a man is happiest when his own actions prove his virtue.
Frank Whigham argued that the brothers' horror is a reaction of an aristocracy that feels threatened by social mobility, and that Ferdinand's obsession with keeping his sister's blood pure shows a caste turning in upon itself (Whigham 1985).
The corrupt court
Antonio's opening image of the court as a fountain poisoned at its head governs the play. The brothers rule through spies, bribes and fear; reward goes to flatterers, and men like Bosola are kept in dependence. Satire of court life runs through Bosola's railing and the courtiers' gossip, and the play's sententious couplets repeatedly draw general morals about 'great men' (Bogard 1955).
Webster sets the play in Catholic Italy, and the Cardinal's worldliness, his mistress and his armour suited an English Protestant audience's suspicions. But the satire is general, and much of it would apply to any court, including the court of James I (Bradbrook 1980).
Death and mortality
Eliot's phrase 'the skull beneath the skin' fits the play's constant awareness of the corpse within the living body. Bosola's meditations on flesh as 'a box of worm-seed', the tomb-maker's talk of fashionable monuments, the coffin, cord and bell, and the ruins of the echo scene all belong to the tradition of the memento mori and of the art of dying well (Eliot 1963) (Forker 1986).
Against this, the Duchess's death is not only horror. She meets it with wit and calm, and treats it as a release, 'Best gift is they can give or I can take'; the play makes her death a test of character, which she passes and her brothers fail.
Fortune, providence and the stars
Characters argue constantly about what governs their lives. Antonio sees heaven's hand mending them like a watch; Bosola calls men 'the stars' tennis-balls'; horoscopes, omens and dreams predict disaster; and the Cardinal, reading about hell, sees his guilt in the fish-ponds. The play offers both a Christian frame, of conscience, penitence and judgement, and a sceptical one, in which deaths happen 'in a mist' (Ornstein 1960) (Dollimore 1984).
Critics remain divided about which frame prevails. The play's moral couplets often sound conventional, while its events seem random and cruel; this tension is part of its power (Bliss 1983).
Integrity and identity
'I am Duchess of Malfi still' sums up a theme the play shares with other tragedies of the period: the self that survives the loss of everything external. The Duchess is stripped of husband, children, liberty and rank, and her answer is to hold to who she is. Catherine Belsey reads her as a figure in whom a new idea of the private, autonomous self is emerging, at a cost (Belsey 1985).
Delio's last couplet, 'Integrity of life is fame's best friend', offers integrity as the play's final value; but most of the play's characters lack it, and Bosola, the most divided of them, finds it only in dying.
Motifs
Darkness and light
Many key scenes happen at night or in darkness: the birth, the horoscope, Ferdinand's visit with the dead hand, Antonio's death. Light reveals horror: 'Let her have lights enough.' The indoor Blackfriars theatre, lit by candles, made such effects possible.
Animals and beasts
Wolves, birds, snakes, moles and dogs run through the imagery. Ferdinand calls the children 'cubs' and 'young wolves' and becomes a wolf himself; the Duchess compares herself to caged birds; Bosola is a mole, a snake and a dog-fish.
Sickness and physic
The court is diseased; Ferdinand wants 'rhubarb' to purge his choler and calls for 'desperate physic'; the Duchess's pregnancy is passed off as poisoning; and a doctor tries to cure Ferdinand's madness. Medicine in the play rarely heals.
Spying and intelligence
Bosola is an 'intelligencer'; characters hide behind the arras, overhear from closets and read lost papers. Secrecy protects the lovers and destroys them.
Madness
The madmen, Ferdinand's lycanthropy, Cariola's 'fearful madness' and the Duchess's fear of losing her wits link love, cruelty and guilt to disordered minds.
Symbols
The apricocks
The fruit with which Bosola tests the Duchess. Their greedy eating betrays her pregnancy, and the jokes about grafting and dung link fruitfulness with corruption and the crossing of rank.
The ring
The Duchess gives her first wedding ring to Antonio as she proposes; the Cardinal tears a ring from her finger at Loreto; and Ferdinand brings a ring on a dead man's hand. The marriage's token becomes an instrument of torture.
The poniard
Ferdinand shows his sister their father's poniard in Act I and gives it to her in the bedchamber, as if inviting her to kill herself. It stands for the family's honour and its violence.
The dead man's hand and the wax figures
Ferdinand's tokens of false death, made to bring the Duchess to despair. They make art an instrument of cruelty, and anticipate the real deaths to come.
The coffin, cord and bell
The executioners' properties turn the Duchess's death into a ritual. The bell belongs to the bellman who warned the condemned on the night before execution.
The echo
A voice from the Duchess's grave, or a natural echo from a ruin: it stands for the dead woman's continued presence and for the warnings Antonio cannot heed.
Critical debates
Is the Duchess to blame?
Some critics have judged the Duchess by the moral standards they believed Webster's audience held: a widow who remarried, secretly, beneath her rank and against her family, and who used a false pilgrimage as cover, would have been seen as wilful and imprudent, even sinful. Painter's version of the story invites that judgement, and Clifford Leech found the play's own attitude to her more divided than her modern admirers allow (Painter 1890) (Leech 1951).
Frank Wadsworth showed that contemporary opinion on remarriage was mixed, and later critics have argued that the play overwhelmingly directs sympathy towards her. Lisa Jardine and Theodora Jankowski connected her fate to the position of women who held property and power, and to the difficulty of being both a ruler and a wife (Wadsworth 1956) (Jardine 1983) (Jankowski 1992).
What drives Ferdinand?
Ferdinand never explains his ban on the marriage, and the motive he finally gives, his hope of her wealth, seems too small for his frenzy. Clifford Leech and others argued that his obsessive imagining of her sexual life and his collapse after her death point to a suppressed incestuous passion for his twin (Leech 1951).
Frank Whigham proposed instead that Ferdinand's fear of contamination expresses an aristocracy's anxiety about its own purity in a world of social mobility, so that incestuous feeling and class pride are versions of the same impulse (Whigham 1985). Productions often stress one reading or the other.
Bosola: villain, satirist or tragic hero?
Bosola has the largest part, and the play's most complex inner life: he is the brothers' tool, a moralist who despises his own work, a torturer who pities his victim, and finally an avenger. Travis Bogard saw him as the voice of Webster's 'tragic satire', combining the satirist's railing with tragedy (Bogard 1955).
Others have seen his conversion as the moral core of the play, or as too late to matter: he kills the man he meant to save. Ralph Berry and Christina Luckyj have traced how Webster's structure makes Bosola the play's centre after the Duchess's death (Berry 1972) (Luckyj 1989).
Does the fifth act fail?
Because the Duchess dies at the end of Act IV, critics from the nineteenth century onwards complained that the fifth act is an anticlimax, a confusion of mistakes and killings. William Archer's attack in the 1920s was the most famous (Moore 1981).
Modern critics have defended the act. Lee Bliss and Christina Luckyj argue that its repetitions and mistakes are deliberate: the Duchess's absence is felt everywhere, in the echo, in Bosola's visions and in the brothers' deaths, and the chaos shows a world that has lost its one centre of value (Bliss 1983) (Luckyj 1989).
The madmen and Webster's 'impure art'
The masque of madmen in 4.2 can seem a grotesque interruption. Inga-Stina Ekeblad showed that it follows the pattern of a court wedding masque, and relates it to the charivari, the noisy mockery with which communities greeted a widow's remarriage. On this reading the scene is a savage parody of the Duchess's wedding, and a key to Webster's 'impure' mixture of conventions (Ekeblad 1958).
Others have stressed its links to contemporary treatment of madness, and its function in bringing the Duchess, by contrast, to clear-sighted calm before her death (Forker 1986) (Brown 1964).
A Christian or a sceptical tragedy?
The play is full of religious language: the Duchess dies kneeling, Bosola speaks of conscience and penitence, and the Cardinal sees hell in his fish-ponds. Some critics read it as a Christian tragedy in which the guilty are punished and the innocent die well (Ornstein 1960) (Forker 1986).
Others have stressed its scepticism: the Church is corrupt, providence seems absent, and Bosola's dying words describe mankind living 'in a mist'. Jonathan Dollimore placed Jacobean tragedy in a broader crisis of belief in providential order (Dollimore 1984) (Bliss 1983).
The Duchess's selfhood and the stage
The Duchess's wooing of Antonio and her assertion of identity in prison have been read as moments in which a woman claims an inner self and a private life against public roles. Catherine Belsey reads her as a figure torn between the older order and the emerging idea of the autonomous, liberal subject (Belsey 1985).
Mary Beth Rose places the play among tragedies that treat marriage as heroic, while noting that it ends by destroying the heroine. The essays on performance in Christina Luckyj's critical guide show how differently actresses have played her, as a saintly victim or as a passionate, defiant woman (Rose 1988) (Luckyj 2011).
Key passages
The misery of us that are born great! We are forc'd to woo, because none dare woo us;
As she proposes to Antonio, the Duchess explains why rank forces her to reverse the normal order of courtship. The marriage begins in secrecy and indirection.
This is flesh and blood, sir; 'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster Kneels at my husband's tomb.
She refuses the role of the perpetual widow carved in stone, and asserts herself as a living woman with desires.
Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman Reign most in her, I know not; but it shows A fearful madness.
The only witness to the marriage judges it both great and dangerous, posing the question of blame that critics still debate.
Why might not I marry? I have not gone about in this to create Any new world or custom.
Her answer to Ferdinand claims nothing more than the ordinary right to marry. The plainness of the question exposes his rage.
Our value never can be truly known, Till in the fisher's basket we be shown:
From her fable of the salmon and the dog-fish, spoken when she is arrested: true worth is shown in ruin, an idea her death confirms.
I account this world a tedious theatre, For I do play a part in 't 'gainst my will.
After seeing the wax figures of her family, she sees life itself as a play in which she is forced to act, one of Webster's many reflections on theatre.
I am Duchess of Malfi still.
Her reply to Bosola, who tells her she is mere flesh. Stripped of everything, she holds on to her identity and her rank.
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
Ferdinand's first words over his sister's body, three broken clauses in which horror and grief break through. The next lines reveal that they were twins.
We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded Which way please them.
Bosola, having killed Antonio by mistake, sees human beings as playthings of fate.
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.
Ferdinand's dying couplet: as diamonds are cut with diamond dust, people are destroyed by what is in themselves.
Questions for study
How does Antonio's description of the three siblings in Act I prepare us for the rest of the play?
Look at the 'three fair medals' image and at what Antonio says of each, and test it against their actions.
In the wooing scene, how does the Duchess use the language of wills, stewardship and death? What does this suggest about the marriage?
Consider her pretext for summoning Antonio, the ring, and the tomb image.
Is the Duchess to blame for what happens to her? Use the play's own evidence for and against.
Cariola's judgement, the false pilgrimage, her defence to Ferdinand in 3.2, and the way the play presents her death.
What are the possible motives for Ferdinand's hatred of his sister's marriage, and which does the play best support?
Pride of blood, greed, incestuous desire; look at 2.5, 3.2 and 4.2.
Trace Bosola's development from Act I to Act V. Is his repentance convincing?
His acceptance of the post, his eulogy of Antonio, his pity in Act IV, his mistake in 5.4.
How do Ferdinand's tortures in Act IV use theatrical devices, and why?
Darkness and light, the 'discovery' of the wax figures, the masque of madmen, disguise.
What does 'I am Duchess of Malfi still' mean in its context?
What has Bosola just said she is, and what has she lost?
Does the fifth act work without the Duchess? How is she still present?
The echo, Bosola's visions, the brothers' dying words.
What role do omens, horoscopes and dreams play, and does the play endorse belief in them?
Delio's list of omens, Antonio's nosebleed, the horoscope, the coronet dream, the stars' tennis-balls.
How far does Eliot's phrase 'the skull beneath the skin' describe the play's imagination?
Bosola's meditations on the body, the tomb-maker, the ruins; and set against them the Duchess's warmth and wit.
Further reading
- Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985.
- Berry, Ralph. The Art of John Webster. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
- Bliss, Lee. The World's Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983.
- Bogard, Travis. The Tragic Satire of John Webster. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955.
- Bradbrook, M. C. John Webster: Citizen and Dramatist. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.
- Brown, John Russell, ed. The Duchess of Malfi. By John Webster. The Revels Plays. London: Methuen, 1964.
- Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984.
- Ekeblad, Inga-Stina. "The 'Impure Art' of John Webster." Review of English Studies, n.s., 9 (1958): 253–67.
- Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.
- Forker, Charles R. Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.
- Gunby, David, David Carnegie, and Antony Hammond, eds. The Works of John Webster: An Old-Spelling Critical Edition. Vol. 1: The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- Jankowski, Theodora A. Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
- Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983.
- Leech, Clifford. John Webster: A Critical Study. London: Hogarth Press, 1951.
- Luckyj, Christina. A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
- Luckyj, Christina, ed. The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide. London: Continuum, 2011.
- Marcus, Leah S., ed. The Duchess of Malfi. By John Webster. Arden Early Modern Drama. London: Methuen Drama, 2009.
- Moore, Don D., ed. Webster: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
- Ornstein, Robert. The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960.
- Painter, William. The Palace of Pleasure. Edited by Joseph Jacobs. 3 vols. London: David Nutt, 1890.
- Rose, Mary Beth. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
- Wadsworth, Frank W. "Webster's Duchess of Malfi in the Light of Some Contemporary Ideas on Marriage and Remarriage." Philological Quarterly 35 (1956): 394–407.
- Whigham, Frank. "Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi." PMLA 100 (1985): 167–86.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.