’s is in many ways a remarkable forerunner to the adulterous and tragic heroines found in landmark 19th century novels (think Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878)). However, unlike these later heroines, Webster’s Duchess exercises transgressive, independent sexual agency in defiance of social conventions not through infidelity but through, or more accurately, remarriage. While, given the prevailing ideas about female behaviour in the 19th century, the sexual choices of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina necessarily bring them to tragic ends, remarriage in the 17th century was not inevitably a recipe for tragedy. In fact, it was a popular topic for city comedy. Webster’s Duchess defies social and sexual orthodoxies in ways that are not dissimilar to those of comic widows. What lends itself to tragedy in the Duchess’s situation is that, unlike her comic counterparts who are the widows of merchants and citizens, she is the head of state.

1. Shmoop Duchess Of Malfi
2. Duchess Of Malfi Full Text

Gender and the genre of tragedyThe Duchess of Malfi raises questions about the nature and gendering of political authority, as well as expectations about. The figure of the Duchess combines the roles of tragic protagonist and tragic victim, and occupies a dramatic centrality that is conventionally only accorded to male characters, such as Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes:,. However, up until the, the overwhelming weight of (male) critical opinion on the play held that The Duchess of Malfi lacked a centre and focus for its action because critics tended to equate tragic centrality with masculinity. The Duchess dies at the end of Act 4, rather than in a grand finale of Act 5 as in the typical structure of ‘great man tragedy’ – but this is arguably not because the Duchess fails to command our attention as the mainstay of the action.

Indeed, her echo is literally to be heard in Act 5, Scene 3, and this whole last act is permeated with a powerful sense of her afterlife and continuing moral centrality in the play. In the context of a culture that understood power and virtuous femininity to be mutually exclusive, the Duchess’s character questions what it means to be ‘great’ in tragedy. Furthermore, by means of Act 5, which treats the aftermath of her death, we are asked to confront the consequences of violence. Patriarchal order and the Duchess’s transgression through remarriageThe Duchess is a young widow with children who decides she will remarry.

This is profoundly troubling to the patriarchal order in which she lives, and specifically to her brothers – one of whom is a corrupt, fornicating cardinal, while the other is her demented twin who believes he is a wolf:he howled fearfullySaid he was a wolf, only the differenceWas, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside,His on the inside. Attitudes towards female rulers, widows and sexualityThe Duchess’s brothers are the primary mouthpieces for the misogynist discourse of the era, which held that women are immoral, over-sexed, weak minded and so on. Such assumptions about female inferiority had faltered in Europe when there had been a veritable rash of female rulers: Mary of Guise had ruled as regent in Scotland, and her daughter was Mary Queen of Scots; Catherine de Medici was regent of France; and not least of all, in quick succession, there were two female queens in England, ‘Bloody Mary’. Yet the reality of women in government was too much for the Scottish Protestant reformer, who notoriously denounced ‘the monstrous regiment’ (government) of women as a contravention of divine law.

In contrast to Mary and Elizabeth, who ascended the English throne only because their half-brother, Edward VI, had produced no male heir, the system of succession represented in the play places the Duchess in power rather than her brothers. The Duchess has already had a son by her first husband, so her reasons for remarriage are not dynastic but erotic.

Unlike the ‘Virgin Queen’, the Duchess seeks marital intimacy rather than renouncing it. Possessed of a healthy sexual appetite, her desires are presented as completely natural. The Duchess protests that she is not a statue:This is flesh and blood, sir:‘Tis not the figure cut in alabasterKneels at my husband’s tomb.

(1.1.443–45)While the celibacy of priests, nuns and monks had been regarded as the highest state of life in pre-, Catholic England, Protestantism brought with it the elevation of marriage as the ideal way of living. This is reflected in the play when the Duchess asks why she, ‘Of all the other princes of the world, / Be cased up, like a holy relic?’ (3.2.139–40). She is, then, neither Catholic fetish object, nor Protestant funeral monument. In this, despite the exotic Italian setting complete with its ostensibly, the play comes closer than we might at first imagine to representing the lived realities of early modern English widows and the constraints upon their sexual choices. Widowed women potentially achieved autonomy from men upon the death of their husbands, and thus were in theory free to remain single or choose another spouse to their own liking. In practice, however, women sometimes suffered harassment from male relatives or neighbours, so that their best option was to seek protection from a new husband.

It was not unusual for this. Despite the arrival of Protestantism, widows who did remarry to their own liking were not held in particularly high esteem. These attitudes are reflected in the literature of the period. The moral ‘frailty’ (1.2.333) of a character like Gertrude in Hamlet, for example, is attributed to the fact that she ‘speeded’ to a second husband, with whom Hamlet believes she enjoys a vigorous sex life in ‘the rank sweat of an enseamed bed’, (3.4.92) that he feels her ‘matron’s bones’ (3.4.83) should be too old for. Unlike Gertrude, who is faulted for the speed with which she has married her dead husband’s brother, Webster tell us nothing about the Duchess’s first husband, or how long he has been dead. Ferdinand warns the Duchess ‘They are most luxurious / Will wed twice’ (1.1.288–89). Coerced by her brothers into vowing ‘I’ll never marry’ (1.1.293), the young Duchess’s aside is very much in the vein of Jacobean city comedies where typically older widows successfully seek sexual satisfaction by marrying younger men: ‘Let old wives report / I winked and chose a husband’ (1.1.332–40).

What Webster emphasises here, however, is the Duchess’s capacity to take action and initiative when her capacity to do so is severely restricted by her wider society and culture.Her wicked brothers are typical of the period in condemning remarriage. They echo a cultural commonplace, recorded in Thomas Overbury’s Characters (1615). There, the ‘Ordinary Widow’ remarries because she never loved her dead husband in the first place, and she seeks sexual and material pleasure. In contrast, the ‘Virtuous Widow’ is described as ‘the palm tree, that thrives not after the supplanting of her husband. She is like the purest gold, only employed for princes’ medals, she receives but one man’s impression’. The image here is telling – that a wife, ‘pressed’ by her husband in sexual intercourse, has his identity imprinted upon her, and thus erases her own. ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’: The Duchess as a complex heroineThat the Duchess is eventually murdered for her defiance of her brothers provides ample evidence of why her marriage was unavoidably covert.

Yet male disapproval of the Duchess as a character has persisted to the point that even 21st-century editors of Webster have criticised her entirely legitimate per verba de presenti matrimonial contract (verbal and witnessed), as rash rather than heroic. In fact, Webster develops the Duchess’s character while simultaneously utilising and resisting the polarised discourses around women at the time, which presented women as either chaste paragons of virtue or lascivious whores. The Duchess’s brothers clearly place her in the latter category as a ‘lusty widow’ (1.1.331) who can be seduced by a ‘neat knave’ with a ‘smooth tale’ (1.1.330), the tale being not only verbal seduction, but also the knave’s sexual appendage, his ‘tail’/penis. But Webster takes on the challenge of representing a woman who is both virtuous and sensual, and who embodies the virtues of a sexually fulfilling married life. He does this in part by articulating what is, for the 17th century, the structural contradiction of having a woman on top:The misery of us that are born great–We are forced to woo, because none dare woo us (1.1.431–32). Importantly, too, the Duchess’s motherhood is a key aspect of her character.

She expresses touching maternal concern for her offspring at her death. Her clandestine pregnancies provoked rumours: ‘The common rabble do directly say / She is a strumpet’ (3.1.25–26). In order to confirm such suspicions, the, Bosola, tricks the pregnant Duchess into eating apricots, which cause her to go into labour. While Bosola is the instrument of her tragedy, after her brave and stoic death his remorse is evidence of the Duchess’s moral strength. Nowhere is this clearer than at her death, when the Duchess insists not on her chastity or on the conventional list of female virtues to which she might rightly lay claim, but on her political status: ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (4.2.134).

In this assertion, the Duchess shows herself to be a more radical figure than her 19th-century successors. Written by Dympna Callaghan.Dympna Callaghan is William L.

Safire Professor of Modern Letters at Syracuse University where teaches early modern literature. Her publications include ‘Woman’ and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of Othello, King Lear, the Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil; The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies; John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: Contemporary Critical Essays, and ‘ The Duchess of Malfi and Widows’ in Patrick Cheney and Garrett Sullivan, eds., Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. She is currently completing a book on Shakespeare’s poetry.

SYNOPSISA summary of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi – a gory tale of revenge and dark humour.Warning, spoilers ahead!The Duchess falls in love with her steward, Antonio. Her brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal tell her not to remarry (she was recently widowed). She agrees and they leave for Rome. But they don’t trust their sister and hire a servant, Bosola, to spy on her.Once they’ve gone, the Duchess meets Antonio. They confess their love for each other, she proposes and they are married in secret.

APRICOTSNine months later, Bosola suspects the Duchess is pregnant. He hatches a plan to present her with apricots (believed to induce labour).

She eats them and immediately becomes ill.The Duchess gives birth to a son. His father, Antonio, writes his newborn a horoscope, but then loses it. Bosola finds the horoscope – proof that the Duchess had a child. He tells her brothers, who are furious with her (they don't know she is married). TWO YEARS LATERThe Duchess and Antonio have two more children.Ferdinand returns from Rome and hides in his sister’s bedroom. When Antonio leaves he reveals himself, gives the Duchess a dagger and tells her to kill herself. She tells him she’s married, making him even more angry.

He leaves saying he will never see her again. ESCAPE FROM MALFIThe Duchess persuades Antonio to flee to Ancona. Bosola tricks the Duchess into telling him who the father of her children is, and where he is. Bosola takes this information straight to her brothers.The Duchess and her children meet Antonio in Ancona. The Cardinal finds them, takes their wedding rings and banishes them. The Duchess forces Antonio to flee to Milan with their eldest son.

IMPRISONMENT AND executionBosola imprisons the Duchess and her two younger children. In prison, a furious Ferdinand tricks the Duchess into believing that Antonio and her eldest son are both dead.Bosola pleads for her life, but the Duchess and her two children are strangled. Ferdinand is overwhelmed with remorse and blames Bosola for the murders. A BLOODY ENDFerdinand joins the Cardinal in his palace in Milan, but has now lost his mind and believes he is a wolf.The Cardinal offers Bosola a reward for murdering Antonio. Bosola accepts but plots to kill the two brothers instead.

Shmoop Duchess Of Malfi

He conceals himself in the Cardinal's room, but accidentally attacks and kills Antonio instead.Bosola confronts the Cardinal, and in the ensuing fight, Ferdinand is woken from his madness and joins in. Bosola stabs the Cardinal, while Ferdinand and Bosola strike each other – all three die.

Duchess Of Malfi Full Text

Antonio’s friend, Delio, arrives too late to save anyone, but promises to raise Antonio’s eldest son in the image of his parents.